Into the light.

December 30, 2015, Caddo Mills (Texas.)

Mostly I worry about money, like an undercurrent I can’t fight.
Yet the deep river of my worries is tinged with light.
Isn’t it the light you see first, out of the shadows in the image drawing your gaze, making you want to smile?
I had to add up the sum of what I earned this year to reapply for health insurance, and it was a sobering and depressing endeavor, topped only by looking at the list of my photography clients.
Building a business takes time, my friends tell me, especially a photo business. Ideally it is done with the backing of a spouse who provides the earnings and the support, moral as well as material, while the investments, the bills and the worries pile up. Here I am, and there may not be a worse way to start a business than the one I went about this year, emotionally bankrupt, financially strained, physically drained. Not surprisingly it’s not working, at least not yet, by far.
So I worry about money. I worry about ever earning enough again to be independent, to raise my kids solo and not have to ask anybody anything, to walk proud, to walk light and beautiful. Then come the holidays and the holidays are hard, there is nothing worse than the holidays, and trying to make the memories sweet and happy for the kids, trying to be a presence of joy and lightheartedness, and his presence/absence in our lives so difficult to bear, and that it’s all ending soon and it’s a relief and it’s so scary.
But I will be strong and I will be joy and with each with one of my breath I will bring my kids light and beauty and laughter no matter what scorching winds the fear rides, and I will defeat it with each act of creation and each act of love and they are the same and it is on the wings of their winds that the world is born into its perfection every moment everywhere.

Gratitude.

December 13, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

It is raining and warm outside, and the house is full of colors, the walls red, turquoise blue, bright yellow, the boys’ eyes.
The past week has brought me recognition beyond my expectations and again the love of friends and family pouring in from all over the world, keeping all those colors screaming.
Daily living is still a stressful race against the clock with two kids’ lives I strive to keep as alive and joyful and full of soul-opening opportunities as I can, and three jobs I try to juggle, but I am finally making friends, thanks to a part-time job started this summer at a French-Spanish immersion school, French friends, Puerto Rican friends, American friends, the way I like it, my rainbow of life, the screaming colors, wide open and crazy my life and our friends and the door to my house. Even when it is cold outside I can’t bear to close the front door, leave it open I say, I need the light, the door to the motor home when we were a circus family wide open and my spouse complaining about the cold or the wind or the heat but I would reopen it the instant he was gone, and at the house here it is open wide, because I want to see outside and bring in the light, because I want to see outside and bring in the world.
But I’m lost in my words again and all I wanted to say was that in the maelstrom of our lives I am so happy, and I got to shoot a senior portrait yesterday, too, and giving tribute to that almost grown man’s face was a fitting culmination of my week’s gratitude.

Images in my head.

November 29, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

Through our shooting star and into the light we fly, grateful for all the joy in our lives.
It’s been a trying two weeks. Walking through hell and back on the wings of a few words, yes but pausing to give thanks, too, and that act of will redeeming.
And there was my birthday, and the pearl of messages from friends around the country and around the world on social media was a sweet reminder of my wandering life. It was a reminder of the power of the word. Words against the flow of images from all these years that have become unbearable to see for they remind me a little too much of death. Against the flow my friends’ thoughts dissolving the images away, images that I made and that made me, all those images now no more than a fool’s folly, not my truth, not anybody’s truth, just images willed out of what is now my history.
It has been a strange two weeks.
Dylan turned ten.
I remember turning ten, one of very few childhood memories, and the cake on the table in the large living room of that sixties-styled house in the South of France my father designed, the large living room my father wanted painted bright orange-red, the fireplace in the far corner, all concrete and consuming wood, the table with the cake my mother made and my family there and Paul and Hélène, my parents’ artist friends who lived down the street and were my grandparents growing up because my real grandparents were either dead or nonexistent, a cake and a present and two close friends, and it is all I needed, and that is all I need. I remember thinking getting two digits for sure meant the world belonged to me, I had finally attained the right to step onto the springboard to real life.
Remembering is all I seem to do these days, my circus life long gone but my present full of its trails, bits of nails left on the floor, the dust there.
It has been a long two weeks, a presence an absence an unflinching reality, and my history in pictures dancing in front of my eyes in his eyes.
It has been a strange two weeks, and I am exhausted but at peace in my world of mirrors.

My country bleeds.

November 15, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

My country bleeds, and in the small closed kingdom of my heart I bleed, and all I can write about today is a world of hurt.
My country bleeds, my family is well but all know of someone who is not, who was there, the daughter of a friend of my mother, in the restaurant where one of the attacks happened, she is safe but the friend next to her is dead, my country bleeds and we all bleed, the daughter of another friend in the Bataclan that night, and I bleed and I want to cry Why? but I know why, and there is hard part, scores of disenfranchised second-generation immigrant youth left in the ditch of French society for decades and ready for the brainwashing of groups like the Islamic State, an immense collective mess-up turned international tragedy, and I try but can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, nor at the end of my own inconsequential intimate world of pain.
My country bleeds.
I bleed.
It is a reflection of the beauty of my life so far that I have no pictures to express that, but this one taken from a dance production.
I think of James Nachtwey’s picture of a child crying in a Romanian orphanage, the one that reminds me of the famous painting called The Cry by Edvard Munch.

Roaring at life, we are.

November 8, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

I feel like roaring.
One of those days. One of these weeks.
As my friend and newspaper photographer extraordinaire Denny Simmons said, I “got some love” this week and it felt so good. Excerpts from my very personal and now painfully personal project, The Mudshow Diaries, were featured in a major publication and the thanks I need to extend are endless, even as the bitter-sweet reality of this part of my life being closed are still slowly sipping through my psyche trailing their infinite thread of loss pearls.
But there I go again, waxing sad and melancholy when what this week brought me was sheer raucous joy and not just from my peers and the photo industry but from my two little grains of life, new haircuts and same old ways, just as hard and just as great it is raising them, roaring with laughter and dancing loudly one day and grinding teeth the next, and professional success or not this won’t change a bit, my friends.
But today I do feel like roaring still and it does feel good, simply.

Much ado and no photography.

October 30, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

Big eyes. Brown. My child’s eyes. Yes this child I wanted and he is here, and he is all. The days are his and all I can do is stare back in awe and silly happiness and go on with the days’ labors.
A week of big eyes staring at me in love and anger and frustration, in love and glee, Nicolas in the dentist’s chair with sunglasses on the size of his whole face, saying I’m flying! as the chair goes up and up, and I just joy. Dylan smoothing the lines on my forehead tonight as I kissed him good night and saying, Mom, I can tell you laughed a lot in your life. Yes and it’s all thanks to you my love.
Big brown eyes my brown-eyed boys, honey-dew skin that turns deep dark chestnut in the long summer days, skinny legs and long long fingers, the first thing I noticed when Nicolas was born were his fingers, how incredibly long, and Dylan will be ten years old in two weeks and I remember the impression of his feet the midwives that helped him into the world made and I want to make new ones, out of glee and joy and silly happiness.
So there were the joys and there was gymnastics, and it was my turn to carpool but the car keeps draining coolant and heating up exactly on Thursdays, the days we alternate carpooling, and there was swimming and I couldn’t join the boys in the water as I’ve started to do this fall to build up my dismal endurance, a lifetime of no exercise catching up with me, a lifetime and ten years of child rearing almost solo and no time to shower much less go to the gym all catching up with me, and there was a slew of doctor’s appointments, mine and the kids’, and cold weather finally settling down on us and there are the winter clothes to dig up and the summer’s memories to tuck away, and the week is over and I haven’t as much as taken one picture, not even with my phone, of the big brown eyes looking back at me and oh, how I’m flying high.

Illusions.

October 24, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

Today I am taking pictures of a friend’s family. It is one of the hardest things to do for me, to take pictures of a child, someone, anyone who is life itself for someone else and translate that love in an image. Sometimes those images are going to be all we have left of a loved one.
It is a false pretense, that defiance of death through photography. What hubris! My brother looking at the camera with a thin air of defiance on his lips, and the cigarette between his fingers. He’s been dead more than twenty years and the image is all I have and nothing like what he was. An image will never be more than a shadow, pure creation.
After taking family pictures, or pictures of children, I always feel that I failed, failed dismally, in that creative endeavor. The problem is there is always something else I could have done, something I could have done differently; as in any art form the variations are maddeningly infinite by nature.
Infinite too, the mistakes you feel you make when raising a child by yourself, infinite the headaches and the worrying. My youngest a tangle of nerves and pent-up emotions these days, draining me in the wake of his exuberant rebellions, sweet as can be and determined but fragile, like thin crystal, and that thin membrane I see like a reflection of myself in him and I want to spare him the mistakes, emotions rolling in and out like destructive waves, it’s ok, my love my life, and later it will all be forgotten like finger drawings in the sand.
Images like finger drawings in the sand.
That picture of you an illusion we have become so eager to think as reality.