[I applied for something.]
My Photo Life
I was born in 1958
in Belleville, Illinois and grew up on the east coast, while cheering
for the St. Louis Cardinals. I became serious about photography at
the time I retired from over 30 yeaers of teaching American poetry
and creative writing at the University of Hawai`i-Mānoa. I’ve
always been a writer. I work through through ear and printed word. My
vision began to develop when my mother’s dementia deepened in the
mid-2000s, I kept a blog that detailed the progression of her illness
(and its digressions). The blog was published as two books. The
discipline of keeping this blog over several years taught me to
attend to what was directly in front of me, whether it was my mother
or the love story between two Alzheimer’s patients in her “home.”
I used to wander the care home looking at the residents’ “memory
boxes,” framed spaces that held photographs of them when they had
been active, engaged. Many were World War II veterans or their
spouses, who had posed in their jaunty hats at a much younger age.
The boxes were intended, we were told, to remind the residents of
which room was theirs, but because they couldn’t remember
themselves, they served to memorialize them for family and friends.
(In Alzheimer’s, memorials come before, as well as after, death.)
My friend, the noted photographer Gaye Chan, was fascinated by the
idea of these boxes. She designed the covers to my books, both of
which have flat “boxes” of photographs on the back. The first
volume’s cover shows my parents in their Virginia living room, my
late father a shade, and my mother blurring. The second volume
features the page of an old photo album whose photographs are
missing. What’s left are yellow lines, intended to help the owner
set her photos straight on the gummy page.
Gaye and I also
worked, for a decade, on a small poetry press, Tinfish, which I
founded in 1995. I found the words and she assigned student and
professors as designers, or did the books and journal issues herself.
What an education for me in image and text! More than once, we
gathered at large tables to put a publication together; the social
aspect of it was part of the larger process. The journal issues were
especially intriguing, as Gaye used recycled materials (print shop
proof sheets, old cereal box covers, x-rays, and so forth) as the
basis for her work, and as covers. Often, every cover would be
different from the others, so that opening up the boxes when the
finished work arrived was like being a kid again at Christmas-time.
As a teacher of
creative writing, I increasingly let go of “knowledge”
transmission (how to write a poem, how to scan a poem, how to
construct a metaphor) and took up “attention” as my focus. My
students had become unfocused, what with smart phones and financial
crashes, sick relatives and two jobs, addiction and climate change
anxieties. So I wrote a list of 30 “attention exercises” for them
to do. Stand at a bus stop and watch and listen to people; watch a
sporting event and pay attention to things that happen away from the
action of the game; meditate on a raisin; take a walk with someone
else, dog or person, and attend to what the other being notices.
These exercises changed my own practice, and also led me into
photography.
I have always
snapped photos, but until recently, they were photos of things,
snapshots, goads to memory. After getting a smartphone in 2019 (I’m
an adoptive mother, but a very late adopter of technical gizmos) I
began to change my way of looking at the world by getting my phone
lens close to what I saw. The “whole” fell away and the “part”
became my focus. Often, a very ordinary thing (the back of a tow
truck, for example) became wonderfully strange if I got close to the
back, where a metallic eye sat under a metallic brow. I take most of
my photos, even now, on walks with my dog Lilith (Lilith Walks is
another of my books, with photos, as writing and photography are
coming together for me). I take close-up photos of rusty dumpsters
(which remind me of modern art), pieces of trash with partially
erased words on them, my dog’s tail as she wanders out of the
frame. I’m especially fond of decay, of which there is so much in
the rain forest of the Big Island, where I take photos of abandoned
houses (eager to suss out family stories that were simply abandoned),
brown hapu`u ferns, abandoned cars and boats covered in the asemic
writing of mildew and mold. I’ve taken rust and lava walks with a
friend in Volcano Village, who also loves to see the world through
her camera’s lens.
I’ve taken a
couple of photography classes since retiring from my professorial
gig. I use a camera for many photos now, though my technical skills
are still developing. For the final project of the first, course I
took photos of roadside memorials on O`ahu and the Big Island. These
are sites devoted to remembering someone—rather like outdoor memory
boxes—who died there. They’re often built in intricate detail,
then largely ignored by passing traffic. I wanted to see them close
up and to record what time had done to the memorials themselves
(following the advice of my friend, Gaye). For my second class, I
took photographs of a local Eucalyptus tree, one of those that
ribbons in reds and greens and drips sap and bark. It’s a messy
tree, but beautiful. Black and brown sap runs slowly down the dark
trunk, reflecting reds and greens; bark peels off in sheets. A
Facebook friend suggested that the Eucalyptus had invented Abstract
Expressionism. At around that time, an old poetry acquaintance gave
me a copy of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, so
I wrote a sequence of meditations on the
tree, my photographs of it, and my relationship (I and Thou) with the
tree. The manuscript, titled
I and Eucalyptus, is a fusion of
photograph and word—the links are not direct but in conversation
with each other.
I’m a practicing
Buddhist, so my attention to attention has taught me other lessons,
on equanimity, the power of ordinary objects and moments to make
meaning, on the meditative process of looking (as far as possible)
without a screen of thoughts and memories. The idea of sangha (or
community) strikes me as important in art, too. I am developing a
sangha of fellow photographers, many of them poets who, like me, are
late to the practice. But fervent.
