diary

last night at the reservoir

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“last night I walked into the hills & kept climbing. came upon a hiking trail between the million dollar houses & wandered through to lake hollywood park. looped around to walk along the reservoir as the sun crept lower & lower. came back to the paved streets & meandered through the narrow roads in the hills until I ended up back at home in the early twilight of a hot winter day.”

yellow sky diary

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no filter, shot on iphone. 10 september 2020.

no filter, shot on iphone. 10 september 2020.

the air is dusty but after a moment you reliase it’s not dust, it’s ash.

another blurred yellow morning. I couldn’t sleep because as the sun comes up the smoke gets worse. my throat catches. I rub my eyes.

no one ever said a transformation would be easy, but I wish it wasn’t quite so hard on those of us not insulated from its worse effects. maybe this is a wake up call & the world will be better afterwards.

maybe it will be much much worse.

everything inverted in my tarot spread this morning. an indicator of confusion. everything turned upside-down & opaque. maybe searching for beauty in the middle of all this is the task at hand.

maybe small, shimmering, moments of beauty is all we have.

pandemic days

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we’re about to enter month five on stay at home guidelines here in california. as a freelancer who worked mostly from home before, my days haven’t changed too drastically, I just don’t have the workload I once did. thought I’d make a little video about how I’m spending my time at home.

the park

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journal, mt. hollywood summit

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if butterflies are symbols of transformation then mt. hollywood must be a place of transformation because it’s always swarming with butterflies up here. they make me nervous.

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summit

I forgot

how to wear myself

comfortably draped

a swirl of cloth

tied at the elbows

& knees.

expectation of give—

I never learned

what holding firm is.

notes on ocean healing

in

el matador beach, malibu

the ocean is angsty today. churning & brown like dirt & dried blood.
the wind blows me about like a strip of burnt fabric.
the sea birds eye me warily.

I’m wary too. raw like the charred branches left behind as skeletons in the most recent fire. I let the salt waves slip over my feet—healing I think.

I have three crystals for my heart. I let the ocean cleanse them.

may the salt purify our wound.

I walk back to my car barefoot, picking around the broken glass & sharp edged rocks. I am sharp. I’ve broken off a long forgotten bottle. the soles of my feet anticipate the prick of sudden pain. I keep walking.

I remember walking barefoot & sandy alongside the rocky road between the beach & my grandparents cabin as a child. tired & parched from the cold sun. my skin pinked from the chill of pacific. the solitary cold didn’t bother me then.

Notebook: When Photographs are Poems

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In my self-directed photography studies I find much overlap between photographic concepts & poetic concepts. I make notes as I read:

  • Photographer Robert Frank said that when people looked at his photographs he wanted them “to feel the way they do when they read a line of a poem twice”. I think there must be some fundamental link between photography & poetry. After all they are both a type of image making.

  • The etymological meaning of the word poetry is “something fashioned or made” which seems to me to be exactly what a photograph is as well. Richard Avedon said; “All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”

  • When you freeze a moment, either in words or pictures, you make it into something unto itself. It’s not life but it’s also not not life. A simulacrum of being?

  • Perhaps poetry was the first kind of photography—before the camera existed. Suspending moments in blank air.

  • We make a poem to understand what words can do. We make a picture for the same reason. “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” - Garry Winogrand.

  • “I see poetry as the medium most similar to photography… or at least the photography I pursue. Like poetry, photography is rarely successful with narrative. What is essential is the ‘voice’ (or ‘eye’) & the way this voice pieces together fragments to make something tenuously whole & beautiful.” - Alec Soth

Reading: The Documentary Impulse by Stuart Franklin.

Photos are from my recent photo essay, Jardin du Souvenir.