Walkabout With One's Self

From a mountain top I dream beyond the horizon,

there, where a world not unlike me exists,

there, where minds drift in concert, but not in forfeit of self.

Such a place seems real,

such a place dreams in others,

such a place lives in me.

Why from this mountain top does it seem so far?

So beyond grasp, beyond more than a dream?

Beyond a lifetime’s journey.

I am about to wander down from this mountain top and journey a road in search of that beyond-horizon-place of shared hopes and imaginings.

That road, traveled in stretches and segments all my life, now feels unknown,

a path of great mystery, filled with fear and emptiness.

I have months yet to think of wandering, of perambulating, of walking in reality’s shadow.

So for now that beyond-horizon-place is just that—a mental mirage.

It hasn’t filled a void or crushed a dream or sung a song of hope.

There remains a child in me searching for magic unseen,

a child wanting to touch a special dream.

A dream like that of no other, a dream that lives over the horizon and knows a possibility that we all claim to cherish, but fail to set free.

A child remains a child as long as he sits upon the mountain top,

a safe place to dream.

With trepidation I takes his first steps, knowing that day will lead to day and he will never return.

Only if across that new horizon there should be a new mountain top to climb will there be a chance to dream again,

and a child be once more.

Fear of what you will find

When the ancient cartographers created maps of a world they yet didn't know they marked the blank spaces with illustration and wrote "here be dragons." I fear the map I have chosen for my journey will soon have silent spaces with voids, "here be extinctions."

“And after they are gone, there will be silence. And there will be stillness. And there will be empty places. And nothing you can say will change this. Nothing you can do will bring them back.” 

- Bradley Trevor Greive

Discovering Who You Are Begins With Discovering Where To Begin

I have arrived on a portico fifty-seven years into my journey. I came to learn do the job intended with my life: to be a journalist, a story-teller of truths. After much procrastination I realize I am here because I first must be an apprentice. "My job is to tell people what they don’t want to hear. That is not what I set out to do. I wanted only to cover the subjects I thought were interesting and important. But wherever I turned, I met a brick wall of denial."

Those last words are not my words, but those of writer-journalist George Monbiot. They are the most accurate words to describe the past few years of my life, whether working the Gulf after the BP oil disaster or globally on great ape extinction.

 Like all apprentices I ultimately must find a teacher, at least a guide. My realization, and then pursuit of a mentor is at times known, but more often unknown. Equally important, mentors must change over time, the mystery is knowing when. When is often later than it should be. Monbiot's words come at an important time.

Becoming an apprentice means giving up on thinking you know something, almost anything of where you intend to travel. After experiencing degrees of previous success, the idea of starting anew has tarnished appeal. In my case success is supported by people's accolades and acknowledgements, fans.  To bastardize a quote: Nothing destroys the hunger to discover who you are more effectively than being treated as the hero you were.

The fear of apprenticeship is time. The time it takes to start over. And during the time of starting over you are not successful. There's a fear in that. Ironically, fear fosters procrastination—the squanderer of time. There are few apprenticeships anymore, there is no grace of time.

So, I have been sitting on the steps of the portico, staring out into the world of before, fearing to go inside and begin the journey into the world of after. I need to give myself permission to pass inside, to fail, to not care what others might think, to lay myself open to learning anew; no one else can grant that permission.

Monbiot wrote, "I still see my life as a slightly unhinged adventure whose perpetuation is something of a mystery. I have no idea where it will take me, and no ambitions other than to keep doing what I do. So far it’s been gripping." What I do know is I need to be a story-teller of truths, a journalist, I must find a way to tell people what they don't want to hear, in doing so, I know with conviction, I have heard it.

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The Image - A Covenant of Uncompromising Trust

Over the past two days a couple of stories have erupted on an old, but problematic issue that will never go away yet now more than ever is fanned into full fire by global digital winds: image theft.

Thousands of words have been written on the subject and I'm tired of repeating any of them. My complaint, my concern, here lies in the breaking of what I believe is the "Photograph's Covenant" the image creates an uncompromising trust with the viewer. It says what you see is real, the truth.

Simple theft has reparation. I can asked to be credited, I can ask for the abuser to stop using the image, I can sue their arse off. Breaking the Covenant destroys something I can never repair.

One could extend the Covenant to documentary film and journalistic reporting, both audio and writing, as well. It's simple—the viewer's trust is in the reality of photograph's content. It's an unspoken trust of truth. As photographer Ami Vitale said in a recent NYTimes Lens interview The Real Story About the Wrong Photos in #BringBackOurGirls, regarding an egregious disregard of the covenant:

We are responsible as photographers and journalists when we make promises to do justice to their stories and honor them in the way that they have honored us by sharing their stories." 

Like the loss of trust in all relationships, once compromised there is forever lingering doubt. But what saddens and frustrates me more is the increasing disinterest in the trust. No one thinks about it and no one seems to care (except the original creators.) And once decapitated it is gone. As in this example when I recently attended a film documentary about photographer Vivian Maier with friend/photographer Joni Kabana, in Joni's words:

"Another example that some might not realize constitutes theft: last weekend I went to see the Vivian Maier documentary and I saw someone photographing her images, up close, that were on the promotional poster. When I went over and pleasantly reminded her that she was infringing on copyright material, she got nasty and said to leave her alone. She continued to photograph the images so that they looked like she took them. I continued by saying she could not post or use them anywhere, as the rights to the image belong to the photographer."

Sharing images and content from so many sources, from around the world, has inspired and enabled a wonderfully powerful change that I celebrate. Like all changes there are cost, some appropriate, some too high. Loss of the Covenant is too high because we pay that price with our trust.


Above Photo: A screen shot taken from Chris Brown's Twitter account May 1, 2014, depicting the Twitter campaign for #BringBackOurGirls that went viral regarding the hundreds of Nigerian school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. The images, created by photographer Ami Vitale in 2000 in Guinea-Bissau, has absolutely no relationship to the school girl kidnappings.

To see Ami Vitale's original story with the images used as she intended Guinea-Bissau: Rediscovering the Soul of a Forgotten Land
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"he had this great book that he wanted to write"

A day of struggles with writing, knowing you have a story eating away at you from the inside, a global tale, and Steinbeck and the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath:

"One of the amazing things about the book is that Steinbeck knew that he had an epic that he was going to write. He spent months researching it. He spent much of the mid and late '30s with migrant workers. He wrote a long series of six articles for the San Francisco News, and he knew that he had the raw material of an American epic. He was really almost kind of crushed by the awareness that he had this great book that he wanted to write, this large tale that was both personally but also societal, that was sort of economic but also moral. 

And he was plagued by the pressure of it as he's writing it. In his journals, you can tell that he is really weighted by the idea of how to get this right. And he wrote about it: I've done my darnedest to rip a reader's nerves to rags. I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived, not the way books are written. He wanted the book to become a part of the culture immediately and it did. I mean, if you think about the idea that a major industry was burning this book and you - you know, you move forward to 2014, that's quite astonishing. Can you imagine a novel that would move a major industry to burn it? That speaks to how much of a nerve Steinbeck was hitting in." - Steve Almond

The lingering echoing words, "kind of crushed by the awareness that he had this great book that he wanted to write, this large tale that was both personally but also societal, that was sort of economic but also moral. "

Is What We Carry Is What We Are?

In a few months my ten-year with my current passport will end and I am forced by decree to obtain a new one, whether I like "it" or not. That raises an irritating issue: the newish U.S. over-the-top nationalistic passport that will be forced upon me. "What’s in the Australian passport? There are wombats, dingoes, koalas, emus, and kangaroos, but they don’t say a word." that's the final line from the Slate.com article on one of my pet peeves THE RIDICULOUS U.S. PASSPORT. Like the author I'm proud to be American and very patriotic in a Thoreauvian way, but cling to my old subtle-paged passport with its few blank remaining pages as a symbol of democracy with discretion, intelligence and compassion - like the majority of the tiny percentage of Americans who actually have a passport and use it. On the other hand, perhaps the new one is more accurate, the passport of paranoia and posturing - and all things I travel to get away from.

And by the way... what ever happened to all those yellow, orange and red alert colors the Bush Administration came up with to remind us of how paranoid we should be traveling beyond our front steps?



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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

By James Estrin

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.