Pink Elephants

Goodbye Paw Paw

2011-04-30T09:14:00.011-06:00

In April, my grandfather passed away. I struggled to write about it for months, and in the meantime the rest of my blogging ceased.

I took a red eye flight home on a Sunday night after learning he was being taken to palliative care. I remember foggily sitting at a counter in an airport Subway, trying to eat something on an early morning layover in Minneapolis. I was perched on a tall stool, my legs swinging like a kid, watching people bustle along on their way to wherever. Watching life go by.

I was in North Carolina for a week, what I would consider now to be one of the more important weeks of my life. I was so fortunate to be there with him, my grandmother, mother and sister for hours everyday. I felt so thankful just to sit quietly and watch him sleep, his favorite swing music playing in the background. He passed away on Saturday, April 30th at 5:29am.

My grandfather was married to my grandmother Charlie for 63 years. They met in Winston-Salem, NC and for him, it was love at first sight. They married in 1947 and had two daughters. They always inspired me, growing up. Even through 63 years, they remained passionately in love. Everyone asked them what their secret was – my grandmother just smiles, places a hand on your shoulder and tells you it's mutual love and respect that matters most. Having watched them together my entire life, I would also add to that the importance of a sense of humor. They laughed together all the time and made it seem like those 63 years were a total fucking blast. But they were also unabashedly romantic, going on dates and to dance clubs even into their 80's.

Watching my grandmother saying goodbye to him after a lifetime of love was one of the most heartbreaking, but also heartwarming, things I have ever witnessed in my life.

There aren't really a lot of other experiences in life that can prepare you for witnessing a loved one pass away.

I spent a lot of time just feeling, taking things in moment to moment.

For so many years now, I've only ever returned home during the winter holidays. It was almost a shock to see North Carolina in the spring again. When I finally made it home to my mom's house after a long night of travel, I laid down on a bed by a window. I meant to fall asleep, but I couldn't stop staring up at the trees as they bowed in the wind. Spring wasn't yet in full effect in Portland, and after two years in New Mexico I was spellbound by how green everything was, how broad the leaves on the trees were, how fluffy the clouds, how soft and cool the grass. Suddenly all these strange travel-by-moving adventures from the past several years took on an entirely different perspective. On the car rides to and from the hospice, I would roll the windows down and take in the warm breeze and the sunlight and the blur of the green pastures rolling by. I felt like a sponge, breathing life in, every moment that I could. Every bit.

I spent a lot of time thinking about family and what it means. How it feels to know you're bound by blood and by love. How deeply important that is.

I'll never be able to put it fully into words. But these are some thoughts.

Grandpa, we love you so much. You'll live on in everything you taught us, in the way you loved us and protected us. You're forever in our hearts.

On the other side

2011-04-08T21:43:00.003-06:00

I don't even know where to start. So I'll pick something.

How about: I'm in Portland.

The past six weeks have been a blur. There's been a lot of tuning out to the Cosby Show in the late evenings. Lots of talking on the phone with Liz. A lot of packing. A lot of cardboard boxes. A lot of scrapes and cuts and bruises. A few too many bittersweet goodbyes, but also a couple of triumphant ones. And oh, a shit ton of driving. There was New Mexico, then Colorado. Utah was astounding in all kinds of ways. Idaho was Idaho. Oregon, breathtaking. There've been a lot of random hotel rooms and early morning bagels. Many cups of strong coffee (chai for the mister). Many nights on an air mattress.

The boxes have caught up to us and as of today are now piled around our new apartment – an apartment which, even with no furniture, has already felt more like home in a week than New Mexico ever did. I take this as a good sign.

Santa Fe seems like it was a strange dream in a restless night's sleep. Here, everything makes more sense to me than it has in a long time. Life is always a slow progress, but for me Portland feels like I finally have solid ground beneath my feet. No matter what happens, I'm here.

Johnny Autry

2011-02-20T22:31:00.005-07:00

© Johnny Autry

Johnny Autry wrote me an email recently, relating to some things I've been writing about here. I clicked through to check out his work, and I'm so glad I did. These images from his series City Magic are so striking and cinematic. In this series, he's created a beautiful atmospheric portrait of Birmingham, Alabama.

© Johnny Autry

I'm especially drawn to the first two I've posted here, but the third – a beautiful scene overlooking Birmingham – hit something visceral in me. I've never visited the central Gulf Coast, though I grew up in the South, so some of his pictures seem both familiar and strange. It makes me think about how certain landscapes are like a language you learn from knowing a place. Maybe that's part of the magic of landscapes – the kudzu in the image below takes me back to road trips through North and South Carolina throughout my childhood. It's funny how something as simple as a type of foliage can trigger memories so easily.

I was considering this same idea recently when I went to see True Grit. It was largely filmed in northern New Mexico, a landscape now immediately recognizable to me, and one that carries a certain weight from personal experiences. While walking out of the theater, I couldn't help but wonder where I'd be the next time I watched the film, and if it would always bring me back to my time in New Mexico.

© Johnny Autry

Don't miss Johnny's other images – visit his website for more. I look forward to following his life and work via his blog.

Go West, Part II

2011-02-14T16:52:00.007-07:00

Jason and I are moving to Portland, Oregon at the end of next month.

There have been a lot of tough days in trying to get this figured out. I'd like to write about it, but not today. Today I just want to keep looking forward – or maybe I should say, westward.

I don't regret coming to Santa Fe, but a year here would have been plenty, and two years got to the point of misery. With hints of spring on the air and the promise of an open road in a matter of weeks, I feel lighter than I have in a very long time.

Here's to a new chapter.

Go West

2011-02-02T00:24:00.015-07:00

Lately, Jason and I have been watching a lot of films and documentaries about artists and writers who were part of movements in the 50's and 60's. Howl and How to Draw a Bunny, films about Allen Ginsberg and Ray Johnson respectively, are two recent watches available on Netflix Instant.

It's easy to wax nostalgic about a time you were never a part of. It's easy to imagine Ray Johnson hanging out with Rauschenberg or Warhol; to laugh at images of The Factory covered floor to ceiling in tin foil; to envy how dirt cheap apartments in North Beach or Greenwich Village were back then and how, though they lived on little, it seemed possible just to be an artist.

It's probably pretty obvious how much I crave this sort of community; volunteering at Review Santa Fe counted for 3 out of my 4 best days of 2010 (it was a rough year... but still). I've spent enough time in strange corners of the world and now I want back in. More people, please.

Photo by Matt Nuzzaco

Separately, and yet related: there's something going on in California. You see those people in that beautiful picture up there? All photographers. I know and know of so many great-people-who-also-take-pictures living in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and they all seem to know each other through varying degrees of separation. Best of all, they make work together (the Phoot Camp crew is a pretty prime example). There is a constant crossing of Flickr stream paths and discoveries of "Wait, you dudes know each other?" among the photographers I know. It's happening everywhere the more connected via Twitter and Facebook we become in terms of the larger photo community, but since my giant fucking I-need-major-life-change Sauron-style vag-eye is focused intently on the west coast, California is starting to seem (in a dreamy idealist sort of way) like a fucking photonerd lover's playground.

And I do love y'all.

Lately I've been waking up every morning with my eyelids glued to my withered eyeballs and my throat sore from the soulsucking aridity around me. So, the above combined with the inundation of ocean-and-palm-trees photographs that have been streaming my way from various sources recently, is enough to make me want to throw some shit in the car, hit Interstate 40, GO THE FUCK WEST and never look back... except maybe at sunrise.

That's my shit-feels-shitty escapism talking, but genuinely all I want is to fix my broken life. In doing so, I will remember that good people are a good priority to have. Now if I can just figure this community shit out for real.

Forth and back

2011-02-01T23:50:00.003-07:00

I was going to hold off on posting anything until I actually had something to say, but according to my referral logs I've been spotted. !!

I'm moving my blog from Tumblr back to Blogger, and its proper home at pinkelephants.org. I've been thinking about doing this for a while, but had just enough domain troubles I didn't want to deal with to keep me procrastinating. At first Tumblr seemed a little more freeform, but later it started to feel claustrophic to me. So I'm back. For (pretty much mostly until someday in the eventual future it isn't) good.

As for why I've been quiet: I'm going through one of the most confusing and frustrating periods of my life, to date. There still isn't a lot to say right now, but I sure as fuck hope there will be a lot to say soon. In the meantime, I'll be over in this corner trying not to implode.

Here's to 2011

2010-12-31T14:45:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite memories from 2010: Noah Beil, myself, Geoffrey Ellis and Leah Reich crammed into the photo booth at Benders during the SF photo meet-up.

There's less than 10 hours of 2010 left in good ol' Mountain Standard Time, and I'm so very ready for the new year. There were a lot of ups and downs for me over the past 12 months, but I leave the year with hope for good things to come. Here's to moving forward.

Forward, March

2010-12-13T14:15:00.003-07:00

I'm not saying much because there's nothing else to say. It's the same thing it has been. It's still time for a change.

I feel like this stuckness is making me suck as a person. As a friend. And so on. It's really difficult for me to stay present in this position. I've been distracting myself to death. When I get in the car to drive somewhere, I feel completely disconnected from everything around me. It feels like half of me is somewhere else, so everyday I fall back to autopilot. I go to work, I come home. It's a strange fog.

Things will be different by the end of March. Despite the agonizing wait, change is on the way.

PDX

2010-12-02T21:39:00.000-07:00

A handful of 35mm snaps from my recent trip to Portland.

I've been blessed with plenty of travel to cities I love over the past few months. Portland is such a beautiful, laid back city. I'm not sure yet if Oregon the next step, but I hope I do end up living there at some point. Even in the oddly freezing weather, it charmed the pants right off me.

To my city by the bay, and to who knows where

2010-10-29T20:33:00.000-06:00

I've been quiet here, mostly because I've been unsure what there is to say. My image making has taken a backseat to some other stuff – namely, travel and work – and a lot of my mental energy is going towards figuring out what the heck it is I'm doing exactly.

My trip to San Francisco was important on a number of levels. First and foremost, it was a business trip, because I'm working for Twitter again doing user support. I love this job, and I loved it even more given the chance to work out of Twitter HQ. I was completely beside myself at how much the company has grown and how many motivated, creative, awesome people are working there these days. The Support team is full of super smart, fun folks. It's really kind of a bummer to be working remotely from New Mexico.

My work with Twitter will be in addition to doing about ten massages a week. On top of that, I of course plan to continue making photographic work, though I'm finding my dissatisfaction with Santa Fe to be extremely distracting for my visual practice. But more on that in a minute.

San Francisco wooed me pretty hard, not just in looks (and my god is that city ever beautiful), but in people. There's a nerd for everything in San Francisco, and I say that in the most loving way possible. Pretty much everyone you meet is genuinely excited about something, if not several things. They are curious and they pursue their interests with a lot of creative energy. The smaller towns I've lived in over the past four years have had a major lack of this kind of motivation; mostly, people talk about things but never get around to doing them. I won't speculate on why this is right now, because my point is really that I've realized what a valuable thing it is to be able to crowdsource and be around people who are interested in the same things you are, with the same energy you are. And I want to be in a place where there's more of that.

Of course, I'm a much different person now than I was when I was living in San Francisco, and as much as it still feels like home to me in a lot of ways, I just don't know if it's where I belong anymore. I miss the West Coast on an almost instinctual level, and being back by the Pacific gave me a sense of calm. I don't know how to explain it other than saying I feel so much more like myself when I'm there. If we're going for full disclosure, I'll tell you that on a long Saturday walk along the waterfront, the Golden Gate Bridge came into view and I sat down and cried. Something about that sweeping view of the Bay represents so much to me that it's hard to verbalize; I guess it reminds me of the first time I was truly happy in my life. I want to be in a place where there's more of that feeling, too.

And so: happiness, contentment, fulfillment. I'd argue that these things are largely driven by choice. But the degree to which I'm struggling at the moment would have me amend that to say, I also believe that other choices you make (such as where you live, or how you live) dictate the degree to which you can be fulfilled. Which is just a way of saying that I've really tried, but Santa Fe is absolutely not the right place for me. Now I need to cut my losses and walk away.

People ask me often why Jason and I decided to move here. The answer, I guess, is that we really just needed a place to land after being out of the country for two and a half years. The day we landed in Albuquerque from New Zealand (via a brief stay in San Francisco) was the first time I'd ever been to New Mexico. We had a couple of months before the rest of our belongings would arrive on a container ship, so we had some time to kill and wanted to see how things might go for us in the desert. We were never sure we'd stay, but thought it was worth a look. Santa Fe, for as little as we knew about it, seemed from the outside to be a small but progressive community with a thriving art market and some interesting things going on. Now, having been here a year and a half I can say that in my personal experience of this place I've been mostly disappointed on all of those fronts, but I'm not going to spend energy bashing it in this post. A couple of things have kept us here up to this point, namely lease issues and a year of massage school, but also there has been a total uncertainty about where the hell we should go next.

As tempted as I was during the last couple of weeks to say it should be San Francisco, I'm not convinced – the biggest factor there is of course the cost. But the options are slowly coming into focus, and I'm feeling more optimistic and less grumpy than I was before this trip. We're heading to Portland over Thanksgiving to give it some serious consideration, and my fingers are crossed that we like what we find. Our lease is up at the end of March, and we'll be leaving then. I'm just not exactly sure where to.

Regardless, I'd like to take a minute to thank a handful of the many San Francisco people that helped make my time in California so completely awesome (even though only a few of them read this blog). To Crystal, Nuzz, Sarah, Niniane, Geoff, Tim, Aaron & Helena, Leah, Noah and the Twitter Support team: thank you.

San Francisco Photo Meet-Up

2010-10-09T23:04:00.002-06:00

I'm all packed and heading off to San Francisco in the morning. If you'll be in the Bay Area this Friday, I hope you'll join a group of us for some photonerd quality time.

Friday, October 15th
7pm until whenever
Benders Bar & Grill

To RSVP, check out the Facebook event page or contact me. We'll be starting at Benders, but might do a little bar hopping around the Mission. If you want to join us later in the evening, get in touch and we'll work something out.

So far the following photographers have confirmed they'll be attending:

Erik Auerbach
Noah Beil
Geoffrey Ellis
Niniane Kelley
Matt Nuzzaco
Sarah Palmer
Lindsey White

Hope to see you!

Sex on the Brain

2010-10-08T19:45:00.001-06:00

One of the images from my series Alchemy appears inside Discover Magazine's special issue The Brain, which will be on newsstands for another couple of months.

You can find my image Venus on page 25, marking a section of articles on sex and the brain.

I received the opportunity to meet Discover's photo editor, Rebecca Horne, while I was volunteering at Review Santa Fe this year. Rebecca's eye for fine art imagery often shows itself in the magazine – in this special issue, I also spotted images from Grace Weston and Timothy Archibald.

I'm unsure which stores will carry this issue, but you can find it online at Books a Million.

One foot in front of the other

2010-09-25T00:08:00.000-06:00

After a week or so of scouring auctions and Camerapedia, I picked up one of these puppies today thanks to eBay.

My film of choice – okay, so it's basically the only film I've shot since 2004, maybe it's a bit more serious than "choice" – is getting more and more expensive these days, particularly in 220 format. I have less and less interest in shooting with my DSLR. I'm also growing more and more disenchanted with Santa Fe by the day, a general grumpitude that's been bleeding into my creative motivation in recent weeks.

What I'm trying to say is, I could use a little photo fun and I think dicking around with some 35mm is just the ticket. Things have been a little too serious around here lately; day to day things are going pretty well, but let's just say I'm looking forward to making some changes come spring. For now I just need some loosening up. Nothing fancy, just some good old fashioned picture taking.

Arrivals and Departures

2010-09-19T17:08:00.000-06:00

Doorway, Chicago

On Thursday I returned home from a week in Chicago, which was above all some much needed time spent with close friends. It was a jam packed trip filled with lots of the best kinds of conversation and laughter. It was exactly what I needed.

Unfortunately I missed several photographers I'd love to have met on this visit as I couldn't plan far enough ahead to put together a photo meet-up. However, I was lucky enough to steal a morning to hit up Walker Brothers with Bill Vaccaro, whom I originally met at Photolucida last year. It doesn't get much better than pancakes and photo nerding!

For those of you in the Bay Area, I'm heading west October 10th. I'll be in San Francisco for two weeks on business. I'm going to rally some fine upstanding people and see if I can get a photo meet-up happening around the 15th, 16th or thereabouts. If you'd like to partake, be sure to get in touch.

Photolucida Registration Open Until 9am Tomorrow!

2010-09-08T21:18:00.000-06:00

Photolucida Portfolio Walk, 2009 © Tom Hubbard

So, I'm a lot later with this post than I had intended. My mind has been on other things over the past week or two, as evidenced by my blog slacking. Lame excuse.

Registration for the 2011 Photolucida Portfolio Reviews is now open, and will remain open until 9am tomorrow, September 9th (I'm assuming Pacific time).

If you're looking to attend a portfolio review event in 2011, I wholeheartedly recommend that you go to Photolucida. My experience participating in the reviews in 2009 was a total revelation to me in countless ways, and if I choose to enter the review circuit as a photographer again I will undoubtedly go with Photolucida. Their staff is enormously helpful and puts together a fun and incredibly smooth event; Portland is also a perfect location for this kind of conference.

There's no arguing that Review Santa Fe is a top notch review session, but having experienced both I have to say they are absolutely comparable. One major difference is that the Photolucida event is longer meaning you receive more reviews and have more time to meet and get to know other photographers, which if you ask me is one of the most important (and most awesome) aspects. Sure, Photolucida is not juried, and certainly Review Santa Fe has an excellent standard for quality of work due to it being juried, but many of the same photographers and reviewers attend both events. The quality of work at Photolucida is still high; I think everyone who enters a gauntlet like four days of portfolio reviews is absolutely dedicated.

Compared to the standard 9 reviews over two days at RSF, I received 18 scheduled reviews over 4 days at Photolucida. The list of folks I met with included (but was not limited to):

Andy Adams - FlakPhoto
Brian Paul Clamp - ClampArt
Crista Dix - wallspace
Ann Jastrab - RayKo
Michael Mazzeo - Michael Mazzeo Gallery
Melanie McWhorter - photo-eye
Ann Pallesen - PCNW
Conor Risch - PDN
Mary Virginia Swanson

You guys, those are some seriously awesome people to get to sit with for 20 minutes. Photolucida is starting to add to the list of confirmed reviewers for 2011 and it's looking great, with a lot more names to come.

I'm looking to move again at the end of March, and if I end up in Portland, I'll definitely be volunteering at the 2011 event. I really hope to see you and your sweet, sweet prints next April.

Carrie Schneider

2010-08-27T13:56:00.000-06:00

Dazzle Camouflage (For Peter) © Carrie Schneider

WE (Baltic Version) © Carrie Schneider

Solargraphy

2010-08-20T14:25:00.000-06:00

Helsinki, Finland © Tarja Trygg

Solargraphy is a technique that uses a pinhole camera to capture the path of the sun over time, through days, weeks, or even months. These solar images by Tarja Trygg are completely mesmerizing.

Buenos Aires, Argentina © Tarja Trygg

Agadir, Morocco © Tarja Trygg

Inspiration and Influence

2010-08-19T21:20:00.000-06:00

It seems every artist is different in finding sources of inspiration or ideas that inform their work. It's such a personal experience and really is the basis for not only what we do but why we bother — what it is that drives us to make anything at all.

For me it often comes spontaneously in moments of contemplation or quiet. Occasionally if I'm in a relaxed or meditative state I'll suddenly get a flood of images. One of the most common points of inspiration for me is during the in between times of falling asleep or waking up.

Sometimes, though, it seems inspiration can come directly from a source of influence — and in this regard, when it rains it can really pour.

In New Zealand, long drives would often involve listening to Alan Watts. For anyone who might not be familiar with Mr. Watts, he was a philosopher who was incredibly good at translating Eastern thought for Western understanding, but without being academically stuffy or a taking on the role of a guru. He taught at a handful of universities where his teachings were often recorded, and in recent years his son has made some of Watts' talks available in podcast form, which are for sale at alanwatts.net. The site also offers the talks broken up into 15 minute segments as a free podcast.

I remember a particular drive home from Golden Bay, winding through lush green mountain roads and listening to the first part of Following The Middle Way, which you can listen to here (ignore the lame "video" element and just listen). Something about it struck the right cord with me that day, and those first 15 minutes inspired three eventual images. Mostly for my own curiosity, here are the pictures with the words that inspired them:

"To feel yourself as a separate ego, a source of action and awareness that is entirely separate and independent from the rest of the world, somehow locked up inside a bag of skin, is seen as a hallucination. That you are not a stranger in the earth that comes into this world either as a result of a natural fluke or being a sort of spirit that comes from somewhere else altogether, but that you in your fundamental existence, you are the total energy that constitutes this universe, playing that it's you. Playing that it's this particular organism, and even playing that it's this particular person. Because the fundamental game of the world is a game of hide and seek."

"The basis of life is spectrum. ... All sensation, all feeling, all experience whatsoever is moving through spectra. You don't only have the spectrum of color, you have the spectrum of sound, you have various complex spectra of texture, of smell, of taste and you're constantly operating through all the possible variations of experience. And it implies that you can't know one end of the spectrum without also knowing the other. ... And behind everything that we experience, all our various sensations of sound, of color, of shape, of touch, there's the white light. And I'm using the phrase 'the white light' rather symbolically, I don't mean it literally. But there is common to all sensations what you might call the basic sense. And if you explore back into your sensations and reduce them all to the basic sense, you're on your way to reality, to what underlies everything, to what is the ground of being, the basic energy. And to the extent that you realize this, and know that you ARE it, you transcend, you overcome, you surpass the illusion that you are simply John Doe, Mary Smith or what have you."

Again, all quotes are excerpts from Following The Middle Way, by Alan Watts.

John Cranford

2010-08-19T12:48:00.000-06:00

Last night I happened to notice that Wilmington, NC based photographer John Cranford had started following me on Twitter (follow him! @withfilm) and fortunately clicked through to his website. I was immediately taken with his Airstream series, everything from the water caught in mid-air globs to his choice of rich black and white tones. Also be sure not to miss his ongoing documentary project Circle Acres, about sustainable living.

I look forward to keeping up with his work, with thanks to the good ol' social interwebs.

Don't go away without first clicking through to John's portfolio website.

Process: Red & White

2010-08-16T14:05:00.001-06:00

This post will probably make your eyes hurt.

For the second image in the project on color I've been thinking about, I was inspired by my local co-op grocery store's display of these chioggia beets. I thought they were totally peculiar looking and immediately wanted to make something with them. I took an iPhone picture to refer back to and held off on buying any until I knew what I wanted the picture to look like.

Eventually the idea of comparing the red & white natural beets to a man made candystripe pattern came to mind. I found just the right piece of fabric, gave it a good ironing and attached it to a board for the background.

I shot this in my garage using an old wooden table, sunlight and a reflector. I'm a fan of makeshift studios—do what you gotta! When the beets are cold and dry, their color fades; to keep the color rich they needed to be damp, which in the desert meant wiping them down with a wet paper towel every couple exposures.

Here's the final image in all its wacky glory:

And then I ate them. Num num num.

Balance, revisited

2010-08-15T00:08:00.001-06:00

While I was making Alchemy, I couldn't get an image of balancing scales out of my mind. I originally started with the idea of balancing earth & fire; I tried it once and wasn't totally happy with it, so I kept experimenting. Between 2008 and 2009, I went through two sets of brass scales and made probably 10 attempts with various bad ideas before I got what I was looking for. Here are a few outtakes with the final picture.

Almost, but no.

No.

Definitely no.

Yes!

Welcome to my crazy.

Steffanie Halley

2010-08-10T11:57:00.001-06:00

I found Steffanie Halley thanks to today's FlakPhoto, where she's featured with one of her lovely portraits of women from the series The Space Between The Sky And Me.

Perusing her portfolio, I definitely picked up on the palette and foliage of the southeastern coastline. Having spent summers on the beaches of South Carolina as a kid, it haunted me as I looked through her pictures. Though there's not much info on her website, it appears she's based out of Savannah. I've been there only once and was entranced by the soft sand beaches in spots like Tybee Island; her images bring back a lot of sensory memories, and make me want to visit again.

Hamster Appreciation

2010-08-09T22:00:00.000-06:00

I'm having a hard week. Existential anxiety or something. So let's all just appreciate this hamster while I try and scrape my shit back together.

Cesar Lechowick

2010-08-05T15:20:00.000-06:00