New Blog Address

The Clothesline Photographs Blog has now moved to:


http://clotheslinephotographs.com/blog


I may add here for a bit but anticipate focusing on the website from now on.

Untitled

It's been almost two years since I've posted anything to say on this blog. I don't think I have much to say in the typical blog-style (not that anyone reads this anyway). But I began writing again in these last two months. This period of time has been transitional, and I've found myself getting back into a place of creation, but in a different way than I used to create. I'm not tinkering to the point of exhaustion; I'm simply creating, putting pieces together in a frame and moving on to the next project. I don't have the energy, patience or desire to labor over the details, to fix the subtle flaws. In a DVD covering the process of Ryan Adams' 'Jacksonville City Nights,' he says something to the effect of, "You can't fake a mistake like that." I've always been impressed by that idea and have never embraced it in my photography or writing. So this is the first complete poem I've written in a year and a half. It - I guess - touches on that sense of transition and incompleteness while allowing that process to be the present product.


Untitled

At midnight I woke to hands
kneading the walls,
I prayed for leaves.
I let her rest against my bed. She undresses
her hands like autumn;
she presses against my rhythm,
and we follow the trail of smoke
lifting from wounds.

Love teaches us to be limber, when we
fail and touch and crawl. I end and begin
in the same trailing sound.

I fought to unhinge you,
breaking blankets on my hip.
I chose to leave
and stay in love.
You begged me not to go.
We held the silence between us like our child,
wrapped crisp and white between our bodies.


Winter will be the sea
between us, tearing wind from bone,
giving us motion.
I hate departing gifts
as they spring lovers in coffins.
We stand, amused by the voices
that carry us.
We lift from wounds like smoke.

When dawn is on us,
we scratch the eaves of our bodies
together, and forget the errands
we promised for morning.
Our bodies cast shadows,
and ignore the limbs outside
humming against the windows.

With a parched tongue, you told me
how you pray, that you caught god
in glass panels you made in grade school.
He looks bare in the crystal
your hands shaped.
You hold him like a pendant.

You leave in the morning,
only hours left of these seven years.
You still sit like mist in the window -
eyes blue and cold -
and winter nears.

You dress yourself in smoke, smile
and hide the blue you palm.
Sunday stretches before us, casts
autumn on a line. I consider salvation,
you pray that God is still real.
You once found him
hiding in the fireplace
as your mother lit the stove.

Our bodies press lightly, damp and soft.
I hear you hum
as you catch smoke with your tongue.

status: trailer-park legend

i went to see
the graves
where my grandfather
buried his dead
without hymns.


the water tower hides the sky:
red on black,
where i hide him now.

i bury his stones
to mind the soil.

Amber

Today's been a writing day for me; I've probably spent 9 hours writing various things. I used to post my poems on my Myspace blog but I recently had to get rid of Myspace. It wasn't good for me. I'm real tired, I've barely slept in a few days and don't think sleep's coming soon, so I thought I'd post something here, and on Flickr - http://flickr.com/photos/39199733@N00/. I'll be uploading there and Smugmug - clotheslinephotographs.smugmug.com - and here a bit more soon. So no, this poem is not what I normally do here, it's not exactly about photography, but the photographs I'm posting are where some of the images from the poem came from. Unfortunately I had to convert these photos to another format so they don't look nearly as good here; they should be more vibrant and sharp... and these are doing that haloing thing. Sorry, I'll try to work that kink out later. For now, view better ones on Flickr. Safe travels to you.













In five weeks
This season’s changed
From stains to russet.
The chairs creaking
Against floorboards,
The water reaching up
To the Cyprus knobs.

In five weeks
I’ve gone from
Panting to prayer,
Gathering rain
In shopping carts.
I thought these weeks
Would be different,
Holding stamps
While I wait for the bus.

These five weeks
You pressed yourself
Against lampposts
That hold the night sky.

Each season shares
New colors,
Streaks the window panes
Like a diving bell.

These five weeks
I’ve come and gone,
My front porch is lonelier,
Carries the cold
Too well.

Each week buried
The mist, held light.













In five weeks
I’ve tasted fire
Coiled between
My thumb and finger.
The ghosts of holidays
Bore into fruitcake
And leave us begging.

My five weeks
Channeled grave robbers,
Tearing my grandfather’s
Pendant in the Arkansas sun.

Each week
Seems like falsehood and hope,
Torn from
Distant sheets you now share.

My blessings mourn
The stale wind,
The smell of exhaust
Coming through
Like hale stones.

These five weeks
I caught amber
In the mist.

This Winter is Tugging at My Heart-Strings

The month since my last post has been trying - a beginning, in order to re-examine my understanding of self and identity, of comfort and love, of all those things I take for granted, sorrow and joy. A friend once told me that he believed there were only two true emotions: joy and sorrow. I'm not sure I believe that, I'm not sure that he would say he does either, but there is something beautiful to me about that statement: that we reside somewhere on that spectrum, dangling somewhere between the two. Both are indecipherable; I lack the ability to clearly know where I am on that spectrum, at least until reflecting back on memories. How intangible and deceiving memory so often is. I find it easier to look back on a period of time as if it were something other than it was in that moment, as if who I am now changes what was then.

Photographs are equally deceiving: they alter the memory of place, time, sound with a two-dimensional representation. A photograph needs to capture pieces of that experience that aren't there, may never even have been. What it then communicates is of course inherently different than the experience; it's instead the reflection of what we as observers bring to it. We infer our own joy or sorrow, sound, smell, and fury.

It occurred to me recently, while hiking around for a job, something that is so easy to overlook but I think necessary to better communicate a sense of place through a photograph. It's easy for me to be walking along a trail, a city street, a country road, and not turn around or simply veer from the direction that I'm heading. It's simple, and still, easy to forget that everything has a new face from another vantage point. Hunkering low to the ground, climbing up a fire escape, changing a portrait's angle, new light lingering on brick, a mountain ridge coupled by a withered tree; these things bring new stories. You veer off the trail and the same subject tells you something new.

Winter seems like a good time for me to turn around and gain a new perspective. It's easier to pause in the cold, turn around, take in something different than what I would expect. Rather than trying to capture images as I expect them, or clarify where I am on some arbitrary spectrum, this winter I need to try new things, make myself uncomfortable, see and experience a bit differently: personally, professionally, photographically.

Stealing the Image

I was reading a thread on a photography site recently where someone was requesting advice on how to best approach a new city or environment, capturing the essence of that place and those people's lives. I responded, "I would say that it's necessary to have a general theme. Typically I have an idea, whether it's focusing on the juxtaposition of wealth/ inequality, looking at the architectural development of the place, interactions between socio-economic classes/ races, etc. While this keeps you focused, allow yourself to stray if something impressionable takes place, but having a theme keeps me turning the next street corner with curiosity rather than stranded in a three block radius."

That being said, I realize that I have been relatively established in Asheville six months now and haven't really dedicated much time - if any - to explore Asheville beyond my radius, which usually takes me outside Asheville daily. I often shoot as an excursion, more interested in stories from afar rather than the stories of where I'm living. Even as I write this, I don't believe it's true, that I'm less interested in where I am, but more, that I'm intimidated in the places I'm comfortable.

When Shosha and I were living in Buenos Aires, I felt curious and excited to be somewhere in the city with intentionality, exploring something so foreign to me even as the city had begun to feel common with my daily routines. And still, I felt constantly intimidated by something else, by being seen as trespassing on a different culture. I was concerned with seeming patronizing behind my lens. And honestly, I was especially concerned with having my camera stolen (we were mugged soon before we left).

In March 2007, I went to a protest where Hugo Chavez was speaking at the same time Bush held a meeting in Plata del Mar over some trade agreements with Argentina. As we were entering the converted futbol stadium, I turned around and took a picture of two boys behind us. One was facing down but looking at the camera; he seemed angry. Over his shoulder, another boy was looking up, and it's his face that I can't really gather. There's surprise, but there's also something else on his face that I've never really been able to put my finger on.


Something about that photograph always intimidated - and intimidates - me about shooting people. On the one hand, there's seemingly overt aggression, which I'd like to believe has nothing to do with me and my camera. And on the other hand, there's an expression that's more subtle but confusing, and in that, is similarly disconcerting. Both stories are honest, and that's what I love to see conveyed in an image, and that's what I'm similarly intimidated by, because in every point on the spectrum between the two, I can never decide where I fit in. As a photographer, I'm conveying something about my space and time, but not something intrinsic about me or the subject. Radiohead's Thom Yorke sums it up well:


There's a gap in between
There's a gap where we meet
Where I end and you begin

Turning Stories Around

I recently got to see a friend who's a brilliant visual artist that - even though she can produce just about anything she wants - simply uses pens now with a particular, unique, Southern-gothic theme and style. We hadn't seen each other in nearly six months; it seems that happens more and more now the farther out I get from college with most people.


In college, everything was so laid out and easy for lives to blend together seamlessly. Regardless of what we studied, our communities had a central-point, and we each experienced similar things, had common goals and complications. And especially in Charleston, social circles were incestuous, and it was impossible to really go anonymously on the street for more than a few days.


So I met my friend up at this restaurant and started talking art and photography and found myself exploring questions about why I shoot and - as importantly - why I shoot what I shoot.


The person I consider my mentor recently contacted me to see if I'd maybe be interested in starting to shoot more professionally, doing events and weddings. I think that before I actually started taking photographs - and especially before I shot my best friend's wedding this Spring in PA - I would never have considered it as something I'd be interested in. But because of that wedding, I realized that there are so many more scenes to capture photographically than I'd previously given credit in the events and rituals of our lives.


For instance, at Jeff's wedding, I could work behind the scenes, not doing the standard wedding thing but trying to eye it more from a photojournalist's perspective, seeing the communal dynamics playing out around this one event. People come together, in celebration, typically (though there are those few that want to make it about them). And that's the story, seeing the reaction of this event on the faces of people who matter to the couple.


And in some ways, these events aren't completely about the couple themselves; the couple is what brings together the array of family-quarrels, the lover's hanging up their spurs, the friends they haven't seen in years and the ones they saw last week. The couple is the conduit for stories to be brought to light in a forum that never would have happened without them. They're mirrors, reflecting the people they love, the ones they feel complicated about, and those they felt obligated to invite.


What it takes then, is for the photographer to turn around and find these stories coming out. We can find a story in everything. I was telling my artist friend about a small tool-shed that I pass everyday on the way to work. It's sheltered into the side of a hill that's being overrun with kudzu vines, and they've also started taking over the exterior of the shed. This shed's probably been there 20, 30, 40 years maybe, and in that single image, there's a story about Appalachian America that needs to be told. So maybe next time I post, I'll stop doing the Torres del Paine pictures and have that one instead.