Seventeen years is a long time.

 November 8th, 2022, Columbia, Missouri.

        My first-born will turn seventeen next week. He is a boy who looks just like his father, indigenous features kept untouched by my whiteness except for his hair, which falls soft and brown on his brow these days, to be brushed aside and don’t you mind it in your eyes, Dylan? Not his father’s deep-black hair, the Inca ancestors, more like the hazel hair of my youth, but his brown eyes, yes, and skin so dark in the summer, up to the rim of his lifeguard work shorts and shirt which hide a paleness that feels incongruous. 

One day when he and his younger brother by one year were tweens we went to a lake outside of town with friends, and I took pictures of Dylan in the spring waters, by himself; he looked like he was one with the waters. He has worked as a lifeguard since he could legally work, and if he has lost the boyishness in that photograph it does not feel like it to me.

It is fall in Missouri. Oscillating between summer and winter in the span of a day, the weather carries a light that caresses instead of vanquish. I live for light, the way it sculpts the image of the world on the retina, and the pictures we take of the world. It is fall and I have been looking for a job and I have not not found one, the season a mocking mirror of the trajectory of my still-borne career. The leaves crack and I see the decomposition needed for a successful compost, I see the beauty of their veins and patterns and colors and it staggers me, and makes me stop. I stop. I should stop longer and take the time to meditate. It was lifesaving during the years of heartbreak and self-inflicted darkness, the discipline of breathing consciously, of circling back to what it takes to take a picture, that stillness when all is ever changing. 

The waste of joy in those lost years feels like an insult now, looking back at the kids, the gift of them there then gone, the time with them I didn’t always savor, because I didn’t know how to. But now. Dylan turns seventeen next week and his being is still a wonder.

I am writing this at a cafe downtown, looking out the window onto the busy main street, and as I typed “wonder” and looked up, a beautiful woman with long white hair worn in a loose, wide ponytail, dressed in neutral-tone clothes flowing around her (or was it?) walked slid by and barely turned to look at me as she did and she was gone.

Vagabond.

March 10, Columbia (Missouri.)

Thanks to answering a query from the director of a poetry reading/performance I have been happily dragged into, against all reasonable facts, I have arrived to a definition of who I am on this day of continuum. Here goes:
I am a photographer, a mother, fighter.
Je suis une vagabonde, des pieds à l'âme.
(I am a wanderer, from the tip of my feet to the bottom of my heart.)
Struggle/la lucha is everywhere, and so is beauty. It is my responsibility to answer to both.

I have no fear.

February 28, 2018, Columbia (Missouri.)

Frank Bruni, the New York Times columnist, may be going blind.
I have been partially deaf since the age of twenty-three.
It has stopped me from applying for jobs, over the years, thinking I could not do good enough work because of my disability, although nobody ever told me so.
What great writing can do. Bruni's column on his disorder, a rare neurological degeneration caused by an "eye stroke," brought me to tears, and after all these years, to the realization that the only disability that prevented me from working at those editing jobs I never applied to was my own fear.
The obstacles and upsets that all people are faced with, as Bruni writes, do not stop them from doing what they do and pursuing their dreams, nor should they. The acknowledgment of our weaknesses only serves to remind us time and again of the beauty of the present moment.
There is no other.
After a year of waking up to the work of activism, the joy and the feeling of liberation of working toward a greater good, thanks to the new political (dis)order of the land that I now call home, after years waking up to myself stronger through the river of a journey of pain and discovery, on January 1st of this year I wrote "I have no fear" in big capital letters on the slate blackboard that hangs in the kitchen. It included a disclaimer: "Other than the big Ds: disease and death."
Thanks to Bruni's column, his description of what some people do living with a handicap much greater than mine, the strength and wonder in who they are and what they do, I can see now that even those fears are like the clouds of this grey winter day in the Midwestern plains, soft and part of the cosmos but without substance of their own.
I have no fear.
Only gratitude, for my disability is also your opportunity to embrace what is best in our humanity.

Red apple.

December 8, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)
It’s Christmas coming already. Somebody told me one day that life was like a roll of toilet paper: the closer you are to the end the faster it goes. Yesterday was summer and tomorrow is Christmas, France is a long way behind, and the circus, it closed then reopened, and the leaves are brittle now and we are together again but we were never apart.
The furnace rumbles in the basement, underneath the living room sofas. It rattles like an animal waking up, full of discontent. It has turned cold in this warm autumn. We put the tree in the front yard as I had dreamed. It is a tree made out of metal rods and plastic thread that you assemble from the bottom up, like a giant legged puzzle. Marcos found it on the curb at a house he worked on and picked it up and he gave it to us because he has no use for Christmas trees. The last and only other time we put it up it was in front of our motor home on the parking lot of the circus in Hugo, Oklahoma. We didn’t turn on the lights much because electricity was not on us. Here it is surrounded by the fruit trees I planted in a semi circle without wanting to when we moved to Columbia. The wind keeps toppling it down. It is beautiful, if a little smaller than I had imagined it would look in this perfect semi circle of life.
There is tiny red apple on one of the bare fruit trees, right next to the fake Christmas tree. It calls to the round shiny Christmas ornaments. If it’s still there after Christmas I will give it a name, for good measure.

Clamors.

July 3, 2017, Saint-Ismier (France.)

It is a summer of wide traveling, and I revel in my good fortune, and dwell in my silent wounds, that stubborn gift.
The landscape changes. The thoughts come and go, incessant, and the joy is there too. I am in the country I grew up in, France, visiting my aging mother, and I feel like a stranger, and the thoughts follow me, with the wild breath of the horizon on their tail.
The boys like the food here, and it is good, and we revel in it, and laugh. The bread, hard crust, the infinity of cheeses, raw milk at its best, the yoghurt aisles that stretch on and on, that sort of hard salami that you can only find here and that my mother sent me once in a package only to have it confiscated at customs and a stern note slipped in admonishing me that it is illegal to ship meat and I will be prosecuted (but I didn’t do anything! I protested silently, while also silently bemoaning the waste of such good food.)
I find the voices judging, they open old thoughts. It is all in my head.
The sights are wonders, majestic mountains here, the multifaceted beauty of Paris - but for its trail of memories, even the careful arrangement of macaroons in the window of a bakery. The art of eating for the sake of its pleasure has to please the eyes too. It is all an elegant feast.
I feel like a stranger, in my longing for the clamors of the New World plundered. My thoughts yank me there, the wounds whispering.

There.

April 20, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

There, laid bare.
They do that, now - sometimes.
I photograph them, if they’ll let me.
There, that’s it.

Hard velvet.

April 7, 2017, Mountain Home (Arkansas.)

Nothing beats the beauty of the southern Missouri hills in the late afternoon light of an early spring. The velvet of the view glistening on the palm of my eye.
But the beauty, it has strange fruits: in the hamlet of Hartville, the sign welcoming into town with an American flag and a Confederate flag, like sisters.
We made it back to the circus and life on the road for a few days, and back again, and I made it back into my candy store of photography. There is something about the circus that won’t let go of my imagination. It is nothing exotic; for us it was daily life for years and its routine still is. It may be the heart at the bottom of it, like a twin to mine.

It's crazy like that.

March 29, 2017, Hope (Arkansas.)

Photography is crazy like that.
The trees did not look like that. The light was interesting, but it came to life through the lens, or rather took a life of its own entirely, unfurling a view only my eye could envision.
Photography is crazy like that, and that’s why I’m in love with its song.

The sand castle.

March 28, 2017, Ashdown (Arkansas.)

We’re going to make a sand castle, he said.
I was walking to town when I saw them. An older man and a little girl, playing in a sandy area off the street in Ashdown, Arkansas, a small town off highway 67 in the southwestern corner of Arkansas, by Texarkana. I asked if I could take their picture and he said yes, this is my grand-daughter, she’s two, we’re going to make a sand castle, she lives right there behind the trees. They had a red plastic wagon and two five-gallon buckets they were filling with sand they scooped off the ground.
His name was Michael, and she was Sophie. He worked at the lumber and paper mills in the area, and was taking care of her until he had to leave for work.
There was sand in her red rain boot, he shook it off.
The morning was getting warm.
I remember Ashdown from the first year we worked with this circus, in 2008, there was a tornado coming and the lot flooded, and the thought of it is all dark and eerie.
This morning I went walking from the lot into town, a long slow walk, flat, past houses crumbling down and others well tended, closed shops, two men working on a car in their driveway, talking loudly, their bodies protruding from the hood, suit-stained grey, a guy in a pickup truck with a cowboy hat that disappeared into the truck’s ceiling, another with a long white beard driving an oversized farm tractor, passing me by, the shadow of someone saluting me with two fingers raised from behind the wheel of a grey Mustang down a deserted side street.
There are train tracks slicing along the town, and highway 67, and a river museum, a few fast food restaurants and a farm supplies store, and not much else.
As always we’ll be gone tomorrow.

My sister's house.

March 26, 2017, Caddo Mills (Texas.)

I’m on the road again. A milestone birthday with family, Nicolas turns ten this week; the two digits, the eternity of his being ten, if not quite, the memories, the memories in the making of the instant, the joy of being together, counting my blessings, there are too many.
Dylan kept trying to light his brother’s candles and failed over and over again, drowned by laughter. We sang in Spanish and in French and last in English so Nicolas got to blow his candles three times, and Dylan got to fail to light them many more, and try again, and the laughter engulfed us all.
We are staying at my sister’s house; my sister is not my sister but she is the only one, bursting with life and she makes me stronger. We are strong women in our own different ways, and family has nothing to do with our bond.
Her house in the plains of east Texas I make my canvas. Mobile homes are all around, pickup trucks, white men revving them up and down the potholed road, next to Latino families, like my sister’s, some circus families, like hers, and there are new developments over on the main Farm to Market road leading up to interstate 30 pushing the real estate prices up. It’s a landscape of desolation for me, and of wonder, in its foreignness. I know I should get to know the people who live here and shape the landscape to better understand how we got to where we are as a nation. It is one more line on the list of things I have to do to not die an idiot, as the French like to say.
My sister makes her brother’s circus suits, when she has time, and she didn’t get to clean the house before we arrived yesterday, so I made this picture.

Bring it on.

March 17, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

There are so many fires to put out, day after day, that is is hard to find time to do anything else. Call that rep, sign that petition, organize that meeting, work on that project, I forgot the milk, that’s what I went to the store for, manage freelance work, did I forget that appointment?, write letters to city officials because this is urgent, lives are at stake!, work, work, work to grow that business, feed the hens, sit down to eat, out out that next fire, breathe, enjoy the moment, love.
The boys are fine, they are getting a crash course in civics, like me, and activism, like me, last weekend we went to see the Met’s La Traviata at the movie theater and we had to leave early because people would be arriving soon for the meeting, and I had to get the house ready for twenty-five people to find space to sit in my living room, and I didn’t, they sat on the floor and stood in the back, and we had champagne because stepping up the fight doesn’t have to be boring, and the boys were happy anyhow, La Traviata was getting old by the last act for a nine-year-old, Minecraft awaited, and we were tired of popcorn.
Twenty years ago I photographed African seeking asylum in France and refuge in a Catholic church in Paris. The times haven’t changed much. Bearing witness through photography is as essential as ever, maybe more, because this time around the very notion of truth is on the line.
Photography is my truth, and my weapon of choice.
Bring it on.

In my backyard.

February 24, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

I find writing comforting, difficult, necessary.
I write in my mind, every day.
My backyard is a war zone. My heart?
It has been a warm winter, waiting for snow. The daffodils are out (how can that be?) and I worry about climate change. The ground is all misshapen in the backyard, sinister brown with patches of bare dirt spreading, is it the hens, stripping it bare, Marilou, La Rousse, Pitiblanche, Thing One and Thing Two, laying again since mid-January, big impossible eggs, blue eggs, white eggs, brown eggs, hah here’s to all of you Misters Make American White Again my backyard flock is a motley of colors and so is my family.
The ground is hard still but the trace of the moles’ invasion of this summer I still feel under my feet, the undulation, as I pace back and forth between the back door and the compost pile, the daily chores unfolding, comforting. Things are rotting. Promising.
The promise. My backyard is not a war zone but a promise.

The light.

February 1, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

There is the darkness all engulfing. And there is the light. That morning it was in the sky, out of the peculiar drawings of the clouds, the precise hue of the blue, and the white clapboard house. It was enough.
It was in the morning and I was walking up the short street that runs from the park behind the kids’ school to a busy street with the city’s recreation facility and a strip mall and the grocery store where I shop. I had walked with the boys and continued on after they entered school, there was the familiar crossing guard, she lives just there, the house with the big trees across the street, she had a hat on, it was crisp, even if far from one of these cutting cold Missouri winter days, I walked on to the gym, and my mind wandered, and its wanderings were stopped by the scene just above my walking vision, looking up there were plane trails crossing and dissolving in the pale blue, against the dark street below and the white house to the left, banal, not ugly. I did not stop, my mind stopped and lingered there, and I was light again, for a moment.
Light against the darkness that closes in when I brush against it in my core, not all around but right here in my life, and it scares me, but just so, and the light is there, I will always know. Photography is light. It is there, just like writing, and protesting.
There is joy in the protesting, and resisting ends, time and again, when the feet start to hurt and the kids start being too restless, it ends around a pizza at Shakespeare’s, the local pizza joint favored by journalism students because it is right across the street from the Journalism School, and by most of the town along with them.
Postcards from a Mid-western town where the darkness all around sometimes is in my heart too, but soon fades in shades of soft light blue.

Farewell to my president.

January 11, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

Watching President Obama talk last night for the last time, how bittersweet, and emotional.
Despite all the inevitable disappointments, because the world is so much more complicated and messy than we know, despite the shortcomings and all that with which we didn’t agree or in which we hope he had done more, Obama has carried himself throughout it all with such grace and poise and intelligence that it is hard not to feel acutely the pain of losing him as our leader and our voice in the world.
It has been an honor to become a citizen under his watch, to receive his letter welcoming me as a citizen of this nation.
A citizen.
I will take his words and work to carry them far, do the work of a citizen, roll up my sleeves and try to make this a better world, engage people and educate and help, but also work the best way I know, making pictures and sharing them and hoping that they help, however minimally, by providing a glimpse, a thought, in someone else’s world, and thereby advance the cause of tolerance, respect, inclusion, and love.
But it is in speaking about his family, his wife, his daughters, that Obama perhaps touched me the most.
Not just because his love and his respect and his dedication make me see the possibility of what could be, but because they make me see the possibility of what should be, in this so personal realm, the seed of our wider world.

The milk.

January 6, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

The diminutive waves on the surface of the milk when it is heating up. Their undulation. The folds as if of fresh-laundered sheets. Satin white. Dark bubbles lurking underneath.
It snowed yesterday, and it is achingly cold. The kids made a snowman that looks like a teepee; its hat and scarf and the two juggling balls they gave it for eyes were still there today when we checked after school. We had hot cocoa for dinner, because it felt like it, with the French bread the store bakes fresh in the evening. I stood watching the milk lest it burn and spill.
I stood there watching the little satin waves come up and dance like flames, soft and quick and supple, and disappear. Then the milk came to a near-boil and I turned off the heat. It was time to eat. The spell had come and gone, its job done.
It is a new year. The holidays are hard but these were fine, as they come, even joyous, and the happiness in small things still grows, in me, amidst the anguish of the new order and the monumental waves sweeping the world, and me, migrations and dislocations, hatreds, divisions, all the ugly, but also the yearning for connection, and the stubborn progress I want to believe we are still making in the direction of lofty goals like acceptance and respect.
Even though I’m always drawn to the darkness in photographs, I find the unnecessary and beautiful perfection of the little waves on the surface of the milk one more reason to cultivate hope, and write.

That picture.

December 19, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

That picture.
The bravery of that AP photographer. The poise.
The white walls, the black suit, the art on the walls, pictures.
That picture.
I wonder if I would show such bravery and poise in such circumstances. I hope I never find out.
Today was a snow day for us, crowning a weekend of winter wonderland and sweet things to come. We were running errands. I was getting my hair colored. Standing there while the kids were getting their hair cut while I waited for the color to take, chatting with Ellie, the hairdresser from Nicaragua whom I’ve grown to love over my monthly vanity rendezvous, chatting about family and the cost of health insurance and how to make churros over the cup of coffee she always offers while we wait, but today she was cutting the kids’ hair and I checked my phone for news and there was the news, and that picture. The picture was going viral on social media, on its way to a Pulitzer, someone among all the photojournalists reacting on a friend’s social media page said. That picture, a punch in the gut.
Eight shots, shouting “Don’t forget Aleppo!, Don’t forget Syria!” The young man, so sharply dressed, shouting and threatening the crowd after shooting the Russian ambassador to Turkey, black against the white background, it all goes so fast and there is that picture, a photographer was there and what he did is incredible. The picture so crisp in such a tense situation, and the contrast, the clash of black and white, the face of rage against the outstretched body of the ambassador, the suit flowing, the finger raised, nothing else and everything is there.
The elegant and sober setting and this young man, his rage, but he is so composed, look at his trigger finger, somebody else on that photojournalists’ thread on social media said, he has his finger outstretched and not actually on the trigger, while throwing the Tawhid hand sign, the universal raised index finger sign that ISIS has adopted and twisted, the Tawhid the belief in the oneness of god, but for ISIS a sinister signifier of extremist rejection of any and all other views.
That picture won’t let me sleep. What bravery in that photographer and what an image.
In its perfection it reminds me of James Nachtwey’s images of the Somalia famine and how their beauty raised a storm of ethical questions among us photojournalists but ultimately prevailed: in our job as visual communicators, the reality of the horrors we may be called to cover and convey demands no less than that quality, and far from glorifying horrors and making us insensitive to them, powerful and beautiful images are the best tools we have to bear witness.
That picture is already an icon.
Here in my world I had taken a picture of an angel.

Just starting.

December 7, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

In a moment of rare quiet solitude this morning I was reading a New Yorker profile of Pedro Almódovar and when I got to the part where he talks about losses, and how he feels them differently now that he’s older, it made me reflect on the milestone I just passed, turning fifty. After a week of sheer joy with friends, basking in their love and partying as if I were twenty, it is time to start reflecting: those symbols, milestones, rituals, these heightened steps on the chaotic and haphazard and uncontrollable path of our lives. Turning thirty was a momentous time; I had made it a symbol and a hope, the day when I would start freeing myself from what was tying me down.
When I turned thirty I stopped feeling sorry for myself and my handicap (I turned deaf around my mid-twenties from a pool of bad genes) and decided to rescue an abysmal self-image (becoming a photographer better to hide) and I started opening my eyes. When I turned thirty I started rediscovering the world of sound and talk, and the social world I had been slowly leaving, digging my own hole out of fear and shame; I started consulting surgeons to find out if a minor birth defect that had come to define my life could be addressed (it could not, and so it is, and it stopped defining my life); I started taking charge, and even if I skipped and fell often as I ran, I went on running with eyes wide open and as I turn fifty I’m just finally learning to fly.
The wild rosebush in the driveway is still blooming in subfreezing temperatures, calling to me as I look out the kitchen window.
Eyes wide open I'm learning to fly and  taking nothing for granted. The leaves crunch under my feet in the morning and are ringed by frost, shades of brown and white. The fog is lifting, and as I start to fly I want to take others by the hand, better to feel the air in my lungs. I am flying free and growing strong, and I am teaching my sons to do the same, take others by the hand as they soar - no time, no time to wait fifty years. It is grey and cold today, winter is settling, and we’re learning to fly together in the little bungalow, drab outside with all the colors inside.
There’s no stopping us, the sky is clear above the winter clouds and the image is coming into focus, and we’ll be flying high because these times demand it and the losses feel acute when you’re older but they’ve always been, dead by overdose at the age of nineteen he was, when last night he was playing the piano with me - wide-eyed thirteen-year-old.
It is not just about turning fifty and hoping for fifty-five more, seeing it all clearer and sharper now, it is about coming into focus, assessing the essential, art and ideas and actions hand in heart in hand.
I’m just starting.

Almost fifty.

November 26, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

I’m almost fifty.
It doesn’t matter much to anybody but me. I’ll still get up in the morning and make lunch boxes, feed the cats and the hens and wake up the kids, plan meals and go buy groceries and cook, go around on my bike, give tutoring lessons to support myself until I can do that through photography.
One day, when I’m fifty-one.
(I couldn’t write these past weeks. The election just floored me, then spurred me to action, with a passion and urgency that has left no time left for writing.)

Baroque.

October 27, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

It’s Halloween. It’s almost Halloween, three days left, the kids made costumes from scratch, and I did nothing. From paper bags and cereal boxes, recycled plastic and paper, and much thought, and what sounded like endless debate between themselves, and urgency, because they are at that age still, not just quite over that age where it truly matters.
This is what the week looks like. I take a picture of their costumes in the baroque mess of my house.That and a friend from a buried past visiting in a whiff, a photographer friend, a Mom of two boys, accomplished and questioning, working on, work that matters, meaningful and beautiful work.
That the thought of the future opening, light with possibilities, just like that, and the engrossing sight and smell of fall, sweet and acrid, the relief.

Looking through the lens.

October 24, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

It is an evening like a rainbow.
The girls are playing in the neighbor’s yard, all these girls, friends, the ones from the neighbor in the back and the ones next door, so I tell the boys and they come out running, running to Addie’s blond ponytails and Soveryn’s brown pigtails, and her big sister Klaye’s caramel skin is glowing in the fading light against her blue shirt, the bright yellow pompoms from this weekend’s Homecoming parade that Lidia swerves around stand out against the grass, and Dylan rushes back in to our house saying I’ve got to get ready for battle and when he rushes back out I can’t see his face, he’s all ninja. The grass is turning brown in patches but it is still fair outside.
I have the urge to take pictures of all this exuberance, of the mundane joy of living right here now, in the soft dusk of a fall Monday, the myriad colors of their faces, and there is the fulfillment of using the new camera, a newer refurbished camera I marvel at like a kid, and we’re all out there, Jason, my neighbor, and I and all these kids, and he says I just enjoy watching the show.
Dinner will be yesterday’s pasta and a green smoothie, eat your vegetables, be happy, there’s the new camera and all the colors of our lives.
I see my life better through a camera. It makes everything taste better to my heart’s eyes.