Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Some Days I Need To Be A Photographer


Everything was going fine - cuppa tea made, bike race from Europe watched, cat fed, emails being answered, even worked on the taxes (even though it's April that's way early for me - I'm chronically late to the IRS... but then again they are chronically late with providing all the education and social services I think my money should support), and then I bumped into a trio of stories that I felt compelled to post to my facebook page - after the third posting it hit me: today I miss being a photographer.

Each of the three photo stories had a common theme - they were stories being told through photographs. Different yet the same. Posted here for those not on facebook (I completely understand.) Each about the "need" tearing at my soul today.

First was - 

Photography in the Docket, as Evidence


Then came - 

How A Female Photographer Sees Her Afghanistan

by Farzana Wahidy



Finally, 
Photographs: The Battle We Didn't Choose | My Wife's Fight With Breast Cancer
By Angelo Merendino


It wasn't like this when I was younger. I shot a lot, but the need was different. Now it's bloodstream stuff. It's a need flowing through me, begging me to not be satisfied not being me. It's the me trying to take control of the eyes and tell a story. After all these years, it still bewilders me that I can't identify this mood in the beginning - it's the one that starts as a hint, slips into attention disorder about all other things, then gnaws at my bones as if I am being consumed from within. Some days I need to tell a story. Some days I need to be a photographer.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Travelers Never Come Home


Portland, OR -
The photograph that graces the header to this blog is called "Earthrise" by astronaut William Anders during NASA's Apollo 8 mission. That mission was the first to orbit the moon. My late camera-colleague Galen Rowell spoke my sentiments best, "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken."

In my satchel-like wallet I carry a folded copy of "Earthrise", I have always thought of it as a picture of  "home." It has become my most influential photograph ever taken. It travels in there aside my U.S.Passport, a folded copy of the 20 things to remember from All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, and the quote, "If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it." from the speech at the Rio Summit by 13 year old Severne Susuki. Collectively these are my home.

I have spent much of the past 12 months on the road from, Indo-malaysia to East and Central Africa, and more recently in India and Sri Lanka. Some of the time I spent alone, some together with my Great Ape Diaries film partner Skye and most recently guiding a collection of tourists. All surrendered different thoughts on this thing I do, travel, observe, reflect.

Reflecting on recent wandering I am certain it is impossible for travel to occur in groups - only tourism. Groups reinforce living in the past. A constant comparison to what was. Someone said to me to travel "they need to step out of their comfort zone" - agreed, but they cannot while always reinforcing their comfort zone with one another. Stepping out of one's comfort zone one does alone. Or at best with a kindred spirit. Three in a space capsule may be the limit of oneness.

The latter, guiding tourists, is something I am self-limited in doing. It has it's teaching moments, or should I say reminder moments. A reminder that touring is not traveling, despite the desire of the tourist to travel. They never come fully prepared to travel, fully committed to accept never returning. Traveling is what the crew of Apollo 8 did on that first circumnavigation of earth's moon in late December 1968. They left their earthly limits. They accepted on some level the opportunity of never coming home.

When I first started traveling I was still living at my parent's home. As my father backed out of the driveway the first time to take me to the airport my mother stood and wept. She later told me it was because she was afraid I would never come home, to that home I never returned. I accepted the opportunity of never coming home, she knew that. She had seen me run away as a child and knew I had insatiable gypsy-feet. Home was where they took me, were they stood.

True traveling assumes a new tomorrow without a comparison to today, or even more critically, all one's yesterdays. That is where the road forks between travelers and tourists...

"And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back."


Traveling in turn trusts everywhere is home. But therein lies the danger. Home becomes everywhere, every place, and everybody and thing your neighbor. Eventually there is no "there" only here. A war in Congo is here, in me, it's faces my neighbors. There is no international news, only neighborhood affairs. I step into the kitchen and turn the tap and see refugees filling plastic yellow jugs, a family of women and their children bathing at a broken corner hydrant in Kolkata, a rancher in South Dakota looking desperately skyward for rain, and an elephant raiding a community well in Namibia. We share the same roof.

In the past couple years I have turned to Al Jazeera news when in Portland, my only way of seeing the comings and going of my neighborhood. I am at once homesick and lost. The heartache is daily. I think, it's my home, "If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it." Then I'm reminded, they are only tourists, they think when it's all over they will go home.

Travelers never come home, they close their eyes and see the Earthrise.