Have Camera, Will Travel

I’m back! I took some time off from blogging, but I’m ready to return to the written word. For today, however, I’m sharing pictures. I got a new phone (smart phone with camera!) and a new camera (just a camera!), and I’ve enjoyed documenting my adventures, including a retreat about dementia and two delightful excursions with my daughter. So here, in no particular order, are images from a life that seems to be always in a state of metamorphosis . . .

Box Turtle near Asheville, North Carolina

Wild kitten near Asheville, trying out a new home

Buddha and a buddy, Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center, Bloomington, Indiana

 

Ants making a home in Queen Anne’s Lace, Asheville

Release

Today was not my best day. I went to the dentist and found out my back molars need serious work or extraction. I took my daughter to a class, and we were late because of the dentist appointment. I lost my temper over something small and felt terrible about it.

In general, not a day to record for posterity, unless posterity would like to remember that some days are hard.

So instead of writing, I went looking in my photo files for something interesting to post, and I came across a picture taken sometime last summer. It’s a shape study; I was infatuated with circles at the time. When I opened it from the thumbnail, the word in the lower left-hand corner caught my eye.

Some days are hard. But guidance is out there, if you know where to look.

Object Lesson

Every week, WordPress issues a photo challenge. So far, I haven’t been ready to grab my camera and shoot pictures specifically for a post, but this week’s challenge reminded me of some photos I’ve been wanting to share.

The theme this week is “object”, and the challenge features a compelling picture by Cheri Lucas Rowlands. The object in the photo — a clear ball on a beach — is simple, but it grabs my attention and makes me want to step into the picture.

The obvious photo (but it still makes me happy)

The object of my recent photo shoot was a vase of flowers. (When I take my mother grocery shopping with me, she often insists on buying flowers for me and chocolate for herself, so we both win).  I had these flowers on my dining room table and was struck by the way the afternoon light played with the glass, water, and clear marbles in the vase.

I’d been reading The Unforgettable Photograph by George Lange with Scott Mowbray.  (This cool video will tell you what the book’s about.)  I photographed the vase of flowers using the advice in Chapter 4:  Move Your Eye.  I love Lange’s exhortation:

“Keep moving until you find the place where, suddenly, you’re seeing things differently.  Forget about what is right and be open to being seduced by what you might have thought was wrong.  Always be hunting for a new angle.”  (p. 60)

That’s what I tried to do with my vase of flowers.  Here’s a sampling of what I got.

A bruised petal

Porch railings in light and shadow

Glass in water in glass

Lange’s book is for everyone, not just photo geeks.  I highly recommend it.  Who knows what you might capture, if you let yourself see things differently?

 

 

The Real Thing

The other day as I was getting ready to go to work, I hesitated whether to bring my camera bag. I lug a lot of bags to the theater: at a minimum a lunch bag, a backpack for my laptop and script, and a purse. Adding the camera bag means trudging in from the parking lot with enough luggage to pay airline fees.

I started to leave the camera at home, and then I heard the voice in my head:

“If you were a real photographer, you’d take the camera everywhere you go.”

So I took the camera. Just to prove to myself that I’m real. What’s up with that?

I remember a time when I used to sit in the dressing room, getting ready for a show, thinking I wasn’t up to the task but I’d just have to do my best until a real actor took over. You know, from New York. Where the real actors live.

It’s the same with singing, writing, teaching, you name it. I want to do something, I try it, I might even succeed at it, but in my mind I’m not the real thing.

So who decides? Who gets to say what’s real and what’s not? I write a blog, but am I a real writer? I’ve put enough time and energy and money into singing lessons to consider myself a singer, but not a real singer. (I do consider myself a real actor, after more than twenty years in the business, so that’s something.)

Enough is enough. I don’t know what external forces are at work here, but I’m ready to face up to the internal one. I don’t want to listen to the voice in my head any longer, not if it’s going to shame me into believing that my passions are hobbies, that the arts I pursue – acting, singing, writing, photography – are beyond me. That I will never be more than a talented dilettante.

It doesn’t matter whether I take the camera everywhere I go. When I pick up a camera, I’m a real photographer. When I sing, when I act, when I write, I’m really there, practicing my craft. Nobody is going to show up from New York and take over my artistic life. It’s mine.

I am real.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

I live in an artists’ colony.

Actually, I live in an ordinary middle class neighborhood, but I like to think of it as a collection of artists’ studios, and I’m not exaggerating much. I’m an actor; my next-door neighbor is an artist and yoga instructor; another neighbor does graphic design, builds fine furniture and plays in a band; his wife is a retired ballerina . . . the list goes on.

My daughter’s spinning wheel

We also collect artist friends from other neighborhoods. Besides the usual suspects (my theater friends), we know dancers, musicians, glass blowers, and painters. My sixteen-year-old daughter has introduced me to the worlds of leather craft, blacksmithing, and fiber arts. (She is the proud owner of a spinning wheel. When she needs beautiful yarn, she rolls her own.)

So I should not have been surprised when one of our friends showed up at the door with a Ziploc bag and asked if she could harvest our lichen.

Lichen??

Paula is a brilliant hand-spinner and natural fiber artist who teaches workshops all over the country. She had spied lichen growing on our old wood pile by the driveway and broken off a few pieces to try in a dye mixture. She liked the results so much she wanted to make more batches, with different acid and base contents, just to see what she could create.

I was fascinated. Paula is the kind of person who comes up with a way to spin fiber from kudzu, which ought to win her a Nobel prize for land reclamation. I was game for any project of hers. I found myself out in the yard plucking handfuls of lichen from old firewood and looking around the yard for more. I became captivated by the beauty of the lichen itself, so I brought out the camera and took some shots. The artistic possibilities were endless.

 

People often talk about “the arts” and “arts education” as if they were separate from real life, as if they were an afterthought: a bonus, perhaps, but not essential. I think we forget that art is everywhere, that beauty is inextricable from life, that nature is showing us her finery and inviting us to create something exquisite in response.

Singing back to the birds, spinning yarn from the sheep’s wool, telling stories by the fire: these are arts as old as human civilization. They are what bring us together and change us from lonely individuals into lively communities.

Like my neighborhood.

Rescue Me

Today I had an urgent need for beauty.  Fortunately, I found it close by.  I’m not sure I could have gotten through the day without it.

A rain-soaked spiderweb outside the front door

Monkey grass sprouting in the side yard

A fading flower in the kitchen windowsill

Beauty to the rescue.  I wonder where I’ll find it tomorrow.

Shutterbug

My fascination with photography began when I discovered a roll of black-and-white film rinsing in the bathroom sink.  I was five, and I was supposed to be washing my hands or brushing my teeth, but there was this magical twist of images in my way.  What could it be?

It was overflow from my brother’s darkroom.  He took pictures for his high school yearbook and developed them in a closet-like space my dad had built off the carport.  I remember that mysterious room, the sawdust on the cement floor while my dad was building it, the chemical smells that emanated from it when my brother was working.

I started composing photographs of my own with a Kodak Instamatic when I was eleven or twelve.  I didn’t have a darkroom, but I loved snapping pictures and taking my film to the drugstore to be processed.  At fourteen or fifteen, I visited my brother and his new wife in a faraway state, and he turned me loose with a real camera.  He even set up a darkroom in the bathroom of their tiny apartment and showed me how to print my own pictures.  I remember seeing images emerge in the chemical bath, and learning to pull the photo paper out of the tray at just the right moment so the picture wouldn’t be too dark.

Photography became a favorite hobby.  I worked two jobs one summer during college and saved enough money to buy my first 35-millimeter SLR.  I learned the ins and outs of apertures and shutter speeds, and photographed everything that caught my eye. 

My first job after college was in public relations.  I was looking for work as a writer (I hadn’t yet allowed myself to dream of an acting career), and a job opened up for a P.R. person who could both write and take pictures.  Darkroom skills were required. I hadn’t been in a darkroom since that teenage vacation, but I hustled to relearn the process and applied for the job.  Lo and behold, for the next three years I had a professional darkroom of my own.

Fast forward to the digital age.  I’ve been acting for more than twenty years.  Over the course of many birthdays and holidays, my husband has gradually replaced my old camera equipment with new digital gear.  But my hobby lies dormant; parenthood, career, marriage, and the needs of an aging mother take precedence.  The camera spends most of its time on the shelf.

One day I’m cast in a play about a photojournalist (Time Stands Still by Donald Margulies, at Horizon Theatre, fall 2012).  Before rehearsals begin, I pull out my camera and begin to explore what it might feel like to see the world through its lens.  I take it along on a trip to Haiti and find I cannot put it down.  The camera frames my world, shapes my experience, makes me slow down and see things I might have missed.

I’ve been taking pictures for a couple of years now, and I have no intention of stopping.  So here I am:  newly in love with an art I discovered in the bathroom sink.  Grateful for the technology that turns my laptop into a darkroom. 

And fascinated, still, by the images all around me.

Haitian sunset