Echoes in a Hollow Space

Beach Twilight 3, timed exposure, Venice Beach, California, early ‘80s 

I was once a prodigious photographer. For about 20 years back in the mid-70s to mid-90s I never went anywhere without my camera. First a Minox 35 GL then a Canon AE-1. I loved the little Minox, but it was automatic focus, you see, and I wanted more control. So I got the Canon. I couldn’t afford a Nikon at the time, but the Canon was highly rated and I was happy with it. I experimented with a lot of things—infrared film, timed exposures, B&W portraits, etc., etc. I used film, I used slide film. Back then I could talk the talk, but like any skill long out of practice, I’ve forgotten much of it. But I was left with a mountain of film strips and slide boxes.

Once I switched to digital, first with a baby Nikon, then the lazy way with my cell phones, I became a snapper rather than a photographer. This may have been because with my old manual camera I had to stop and consider each shot. Frame it, decide what f-stop to try, experiment with focus, etc. This was true even of the Minox. The focus was automatic, but I was still responsible for the light settings, et al.

Or maybe I always took a bunch of crappy photos and once a roll or so got lucky. Maybe I was just pretending to be a photographer and was nothing but a delusion dilettante, a snapper, a poseur. (You know the Imposter Syndrome drill.)

But at least with digital I didn’t have to worry about mountains of film strips and slides. And I had ceased being a serious photographic aficionado at some point, mainly (maybe) due to the cost of buying and developing film, maybe for other reasons I no longer remember or want to admit. Photography back in the olden days was not an egalitarian pursuit. It cost money, and not just the initial expense for nice cameras. It was a money pit of film and developing and dark room supplies. (I did get marginally smarter at a certain point and started getting proof sheets rather than paying for everything to be developed, but still.) At least with good digital and good camera phones available many more people can pursue this art form.

I got an expensive high-quality flatbed scanner back in ’06 or thereabouts and started digitizing things. But scanning is a laborious process and I was not dedicated to getting through that mountain of film stuffs quickly. After a while, the scanner went belly up. I tried reloading the software and doing a bunch of other things but alas. It may have been a victim of a power surge, but I didn’t have the ambition to send it to the dealer so I’ll never know. The warranty had run out and I didn’t want to spend the money, frankly. Recently, I thought I really should do something about that film mountain so back in April I acquired a cheaper but still well-rated mini scanner and began the process again.

At first it was a giant surprise seeing what came up on the screen, a half-remembered country that had once been so important to me. But I quickly discovered (actually, I knew this but didn’t want to acknowledge the fact) that the quality of both film and slides degrade badly over time. I also discovered what an awful lot of really bad photos I had taken. True, I started scanning with a set of vacation slides I’d taken in the early 80s in Seattle and they may not have been representative of my overall skill. In my mind, though, I remembered getting some great stuff. And if I can ever find the prints I had made of those slides back then, maybe I did or maybe I didn’t. Particularly disappointing were the pix I took of Puget Sound with its heart-stopping green beauty. I remember being pleased with how they came out—even though no photo could really capture the totality of that beauty. But when the scans came up on the screen, everything was washed out or too dark and even photoshopping couldn’t redeem them. It was so discouraging I quit scanning in despair, feeling like an entire portion of my life had been nothing but a sham.

Yesterday, I chided myself into doing more scanning. “Either scan this stuff or throw it out.”* There was one picture in particular I wanted to find but who knew where the hell it was, which box or envelope. I had labeled many of them, but not all. I picked some unlabeled slide boxes at random, opened the first one, and there it was, right on top. And it hadn’t degraded!

Shadow Dragon, Santa Monica, California, early ‘80s (?) 

Not a startlingly great shot but one I remembered fondly. One of those once in a roll lucky shots. One that let me know that I may have been mostly crap, but every once in a while I was slightly less crap. (Kind of like the old proverb, “Even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in a while.”)

I’m still looking for other remembered pictures, that lost horde of imagined gold, hoping the slides haven’t degraded too badly. Certain signature shots that loom large in my mind. They may turn out to be just as disappointing as those Seattle snaps, but one lives in hope.

*Please note: I have thrown away some of the crappy stuff, but find myself completely incapable of throwing out even the crappiest shots of any animal I have ever known and loved.

I’ve been working on editing my mother’s memoirs for a while now, and I’m in the final stages, I do believe. Which means it’s time to replace my bracketed placeholders [insert that picture when you find it] with actual photos. My mother had a huge collection of snapshots and in her later years we’d sometimes go through them and I’d ask who everyone was and pencil in the description on the back. Then Mom “put the boxes away in a safe place” one day and subsequently couldn’t remember where. I’d made a half-hearted attempt to find them—and did find one small collection—but there were tons of photos I could remember but couldn’t find.

Then one day last week I realized there was a gigantic plastic tub—maybe 18 in. tall and wide and about 2 ft long—buried beneath a bunch of bags with books in them waiting to be recycled. I cleared off the bags and looked inside. The pictures my mother and I had both been looking for had been hiding in plain sight all along. So, I started going through them and scanning ones I needed for the memoir. And for other reasons. I’ve only made a small dent in this enormous collection. Many have the penciled information on them, many do not. And Mom kept everything, even the inside-your-purse-mistake photos, the thumb-enhanced photos, the so-blurry-you-can’t-tell-what-you’re-looking-at photos. (Back in the day when you took your film to One Hour Photo and the like they’d print everything, even the crap ones.) I have managed to throw away those, but the others? What to do with old photographs of people you don’t know?

I know what Cleaning Nazi Marie would say, but I just can’t throw them away. It’s like throwing the lives of those people away. I tell myself the old ones at least might have some historic value. And if that self-con doesn’t work, I remind myself that there is something of a market for these things at antique stores and flea markets. I don’t plan on selling them, but maybe the poor unfortunate who comes after me and cleans this place out can make a few bucks. Or finally get around to throwing them out. Either way, I won’t be involved.

My mother was not a particularly talented photographer. Too impatient to wait, frame, focus, get those thumbs out of the way. Just point, snap, and move on. Which is odd because she was a good and patient painter and crafter. There are a number of vacation snaps she never got into albums of places I can’t identify. I may get around to chucking those. Most don’t have people in them and they’re the kind of thing that is only precious to the one taking the picture because it evokes a memory of time, place, feeling. A memory I don’t have.

She also kept every note from baby gifts when I was born, every congratulations message, early birthday cards from her to me, and an entire keepsake book of Pamela paraphernalia. All the things to let me know I was once held precious by someone. I don’t say that in a pathetic way because it makes me feel warm inside. And miss her. The mother she was then, the mother she became again in her later years, not the mother in-between who tried to make me who I am not and who I fought with and hid from so much.

Memory is a double-edged sword, but I’m keeping all the memories, even the bittersweet, because they made me who I am today—as much as my mother did.



 

 

Random quote of the day:

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

—Diane Arbus, “Five Photographs by Diane Arbus,” ArtForum, May 1971



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.”

—Brassaï (Gyula Halász), quoted in Brassaï: Paris by Jean-Claude Gautrand

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Returning once again to my old favorite, Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland by Eddie Lenihan and Carolyn Eve Green, to speak of fairy horses, the fíor-làr. There are many, many stories in Celtic lore about horse spirits, but Mr. Lenihan’s informants say that they are generally born to regular mares. There’s some debate what makes a horse fairy instead of ordinary, because to outward appearances they look like any other horse. One story goes that you know you’ve got one of those “funny fish” when the gestation of the foal takes 366 days—the old, magical formula of a year and a day. Most foals gestate in ten or eleven months (according to the old timer telling this story).

Like as not when you have a fairy horse they will be a good horse, but given to disappearing for short spells of time when the fairies require its services. But never fear, the fairies play fair in this regard. If you’re depending on that horse, they’ll substitute another until it’s time for the fíor-làr to be returned to you.

And then there’s this, a more spirit-horse version of fairy horses, taken from The Paranormalist.

He recounts the story told him by author, Herbie Brennan:

Shortly thereafter, as Herbie and Jim turned to leave the rath, along the top of the earthen ring, there suddenly appeared a herd of approximately twenty to twenty-five tiny, white horses “no bigger than cocker spaniels”, in the words of Mr. Brennan. The tiny horses galloped along the top of the earthwork, disappearing down the opposite side. Herbie and Jim ran out of the rath andto the other side to see what had happened to to the tiny horses, but they had vanished. Neither man had any explanation for what they had just seen.

Some years later, Herbie told the story of the white horses to his good friend, the late author Desmond Leslie. Leslie had a fascination with mythology and was quite knowledgeable about the subject. Upon hearing Herbie’s account of the tiny horses, Leslie replied, “Dear boy, don’t you know what those were?”. Herbie replied that he had no idea whatsoever what they were, only that he’d seen them. “Those were faerie horses,” Mr. Leslie continued. “They’re associated with the megaliths of Ireland, and there are also reports of them in Japan.”

You can watch Mr. Brennan himself tell the tale below, the first of three stories that explain how he was very reluctantly convinced in the reality of fairies through personal experience:

Watch on YouTube

I’ll have more to say about “fairy photography” one of these days, but let me conclude by saying that I think anyone who’s been around horses much—and I used to be, although sadly not so much anymore—knows that some horses just are special. Even if they don’t have unexplained disappearances to their credit, are not miniature white glowing spirits, sinister kelpies or what all, some of them do seem to have a touch of the fey. Great, dreamy-eyed beasts that they are, they often have their heads in two worlds at once and seem to know much more than the two-leggers astride them. Old souls or fairy-led, I cannot say. Just that they are special.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Please note the dust on the shelf. That is an important accuracy in any of my self-portraits. In this case, the “art” tag should definitely be in quotes.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

So I went to the Santa Monica Festival on Saturday. Festivals were blooming all over Southern California this weekend, as the weather was splendid and it's post-Aprill with his shoures soote, the time when longen folk to goon on pilgrimages and all. I'm not much of a festival kind of gal, but a couple of my friends had a booth there. They do lovely letterpress printing and design—cards, plus the usual run of printed items. As this card attests:



Tell 'em Pam sent ya.

It was a lovely day—and I think I got another picture of a ghost. I can't think of what else it would be. Notice that the only ones paying much attention to it are children, and they do say kids are more sensitive to psychic emanations:

What is that thing?

[broken link]

It sure ain't Barney. I guess they're thinking since Santa Monica is by the ocean a nautical theme was appropriate, but this park is about 28 blocks from the beach.

Here's the festival grounds, or some of them anyway:

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Here's Carl looking kind of grim—but at least it's a decent enough shot of the product:

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Here's Lynn looking cute as a button:

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This trio looks like someone just told them their cats had died—but again, you can see the product line okay:

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And that is all. We ate delicious homemade tamales and listened to an inane MC on the performance stage really humping the diversity theme. After some Korean drummers finished their set, she got on the mike and said, "Wow! Wasn't that fantastic?!? I'm not even Korean and I'm proud!"

That's very multicultural of you, dear. We're proud of you, too.

(Sometimes it's difficult trying to be a reformed cynic.)

So I wanted to post some pictures of my pets as so many others have done before me. Alas, I have no pets. :-( This makes me very sad. So I visited Mom. She has pets.

I have the silly pictures to prove it.

[broken links]

This is Mom's pet starling, Baby. Starlings are part of the mynah family so you can teach them to talk if you hand raise them. Baby fell out of a nest when he was a little shaver, so Mom raised him. He's a wild bird, but because he's an introduced species (European) it's not illegal to keep him as a pet. Baby's favorite word is "Ouch!" Baby often mistakes wrinkles for worms. Starlings are not seed eaters.

Mom asked me why I always take pictures of her when she's talking. Real answer: She never stops talking. Hardly ever. What I said: I suck at taking pictures, I guess.

[broken links]

See what I mean.

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But she's cute, Mom. A bit of a pixie.

Here's what passes for pets at my house:

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This is Guardian Baby. She's a real sweetheart. (That's an udder, not another kind of appendage.)

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And this is Claudia. She isn't the chatterbox that Mom or Baby or Guardian Baby is, but she's solid as a rock.

Um, okay, I just want my Canon AE1 to know I still love it and I don't want to end that relationship. It's valuable to me and it's been my mainstay for many years. I hope we can work things out, but...

There's a new toy in my life.

Maybe it's a temporary thing, maybe it's pure lust and will burn itself out quickly, and maybe I'm risking something precious by fooling around like this, but I haven't felt such excitement in a long time.

Okay, maybe I'm just caving to peer pressure here. My friends were messing around on the side, had been for a long time, but I steadfastly maintained my virtue. I was a manual kind of girl. I just couldn't see myself stepping out on one who had stood by me over many photo shoots, several continents, the one I could always rely on. But I just didn't understand the lure of Something New. And to pay for it. God, how could I have used the grocery money that way? Now my children will starve just for my cheap moment of gratification!

Wait. I don't have any children.

And I put it on a credit card. That's not real money, right? So I guess that's okay. Like any addiction, I just want to do it again and again. I've been locked in my apartment since last night doing it over and over. Maybe later today, I'll actually leave the house to take pictures.

Nikon Coolpix 5900, be kind. I'm new to this infidelity thing.