Only Connect
Connections matter. People matter. The past also matters, but life is in the present and future. I'm starting to figure out what that means when nothing is certain.
Hey friends!
Josie has been a constant at my side since September 2023, and she turned a magical four over the weekend. I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate with my past pups, and she’s no exception. A year ago, though, I was in such a life crisis that I wondered whether I needed to find a new home for her. I’m damn glad I didn’t.
A Shoulder Season Update
I’ve been very fortunate to have received several pre-orders for and many others say they plan to buy copies of Shoulder Season. In a perfect world, I would have shipped out the orders already, but we live in a world where it is increasingly difficult to find local printers who can print short runs of high-quality art books affordably.
The company I chose, Mixam, is one that many friends have used to print their work to solid results. One had minor issues with color casts, a flaw when four-color printing is not done correctly that leaves a tint across color and black-and-white images. Having spent a quarter of my life as a print designer, I made sure that my files were set up in a way that should have mitigated any issues.
It didn’t. The printing was delayed, and every copy came back with a wash of magenta across the monochrome photographs and over saturation of the color images. A week later, I’ve finally gotten word that Mixam will be sending me a proof print before running the full set. With any luck, that means I’ll have books to ship by the middle of next week.
In the meantime, here’s a quick taste of what you’ll find in the book:
Signed, numbered copies are $22, shipped or hand-delivered. Order yours here!
A la Récherche
Have you ever shut out periods of your life from the greater story? I’m not talking about painful, traumatic events that we block out in self-defense; I’m referring to happy, formative experiences that you put aside because you needed the world to see you differently. If so, can those times be brought back into the fold or are they forever lost to an incomplete past?
For better or worse, I’ve been guilty of doing so more than once. Scanning old film, some of it dating back forty years, has served up plenty of reminders of those cases, most particularly from the summers I spent at the National Music Camp, now known as the Interlochen Arts Camp, in Northern Michigan.
This is a much longer story than this post, and it ties in with some of the topics I want to explore further. I’m curious about the mechanism of shutting off good things, but more than that, I’ve been thinking a lot about how identity is shaped and how we shape it through choices.
I spent five summers as a camper and one summer on staff at Interlochen. Those summers were essentially how I survived my teenage years because it was one of the only places I felt like I belonged, and the bullies were hundreds of miles away. After all, it wasn’t easy being a late-blooming boy who played the flute in the Eighties. I was teased mercilessly and said No, I’m not gay more times than I can possibly remember, and I eventually lost interest in studying or playing music.
Instead, I started taking photos more, while doing just enough to satisfy my mother’s pressure to keep playing. I cut my teeth on black-and-white photography and print production with the summer yearbook, and it became such a part of my life that I spent half of my staff summer volunteering on the project.
But I was afraid to actually study photography. Weird, right?
Then I left the midwest and stopped keeping in touch with people. I stopped thinking about those times, and I shut that world out.
The preppy, classically trained flutist who grew up (mostly) in Ohio wasn’t how I saw myself once I’d followed family roots to Boston and dreams to New York. I was hanging out with slam poets, artists, pool players, photographers, and more at bars in the East Village, and who cared what I did before… That old version of myself didn’t fit in my new life.
It’s one of several points in my life where I wish I could go back, tap myself on the shoulder, and whisper: Changing doesn’t have to mean cutting people out. I wouldn’t need to say anything else, no interferences that might change the future, just the reminder that we need the friends who “can see where you are and know where you've been.”
In Memoriam: Melancholia
First, the artistic note: this corner of my living room has amazing morning and afternoon light angles, and I spend more time than I probably should watching the motes. I was planning to develop some film last Saturday and had a few shots to finish on a roll of Kentmere 200, so I decided to play with a few zone-focused self-portraits to see how the light played. The softness of the film is actually a nice touch for this image, compared to the higher contrast of the Tri-X I usually use.
Second, the personal note: I put my head on the back of the couch and let out a deep breath before I hit the shutter so I could capture something close to a resting expression. I didn’t expect it to be so… sad? Tired? Gloomy? Morose?
What I see is the exhaustion of endurance. I’ve been through one of the lowest periods of my life and recently wrote an advanced directive that said I did not want to be resuscitated if something went wrong in surgery. But I’m still here, and my body is healthier than most cirrhotics. Barring a sudden change, I likely have years ahead of me before a transplant, but it’s strange to live in the liminal space of terminal illness. The fear of things changing on a dime speaks up whenever a new ache or pain strikes, and the abiding uncertainty makes building (or maintaining) relationships complicated. I try not to let my history of moving on from people and places play out too much in the present, but it’s hard to connect and stay connected with an abiding current of uncertainty.
The surgery was a sudden reminder that having people around matters and that looking at everything through a dire lens just ain’t healthy. As I sat in the hospital, I remembered my recovery mindset: I didn’t fight to get sober and rebuild my health to be miserable. How that plays out now is a work in progress, so stay tuned.
Be well, friends.