Will and Zoe

Melanie McWhorter at photo-eye just helped me change my order of two copies of Zoe Strauss’s America from unsigned (all that was available when I placed my order) to signed (which they’re now offering). Hell yeah, I want signed. One copy for me, one copy for S. for Hanukkah.

If you’re eagerly anticipating the arrival of your copy, be sure to check out Will Steacy’s fantastic interview with Ms. Strauss at photo-eye magazine.

Copyright © Will Steacy

Good news, bad news

Today I’m on the delightful Meighan O’Toole’s blog, My Love for You Is a Stampede of Horses, and I was invited to be a part of an exciting worldwide photo project slated for November 4*. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I didn’t make the cut for Critical Mass. I’m thinking the only answer is to drive up to Portland and TP Shawn Records’s house. Who’s in with me?

This afternoon, before I found out about any of this, good or bad, I was in an exceedingly foul mood. (Just ask S.) I’ll spare you the details, but in my litany of ways in which my life, the human race, and the universe in general collectively suck, I mentioned how 2008 was a total bust of a year, that I’d gotten nothing done, that I’d wasted it. And then it hit me: There are two months left. Over 16 percent of the year remains. Sure, it’s not much, but it’s something. It’s time.

I was e-mailing with a friend tonight, and something she said really got me: “I am so delighted to be in my mid-30s, yet sometimes I feel like I am racing towards my own death. You know? Like OMG, I am not doing enough, and how do I take the next step, and what is that next step, and OMG did I miss it?!?!” I wrote back:

I feel all the time like I’m not doing enough. Not in an Oprah-watching overwhelmed soccer mom kind of way, but in a “Shit, there’s so much I want to do and see, and I haven’t even scratched the surface” kind of way. I used to work at a library shelving books, and I’ll never forget realizing one day that I would never, ever, ever have enough time to read all the books I wanted to read, even if I quit doing anything else and just read 24/7 for the rest of my life and lived to be 100. That was such a sobering thought. And then it hit me that I’d never walk on the moon, and I’d never win an Olympic medal, and I’d never win an Oscar. I never wanted to be an astronaut or anything, but it just dawned on me: Fuck, I’ll never walk on the moon. . . . There was a whole slew of shit that I was never going to do. And ever since then, I’ve been on a race against time.

I don’t know if I’m making clear the connection I see in these threads, but it’s about an age limit being assigned to the term emerging (read Jörg Colberg and Cara Phillips); it’s about knowing that I’m going to blink and it’ll all be over; it’s about being disappointed with myself for not getting enough done (and then being frustrated that I’m comparing myself to anyone else—read Susana Raab); it’s about feeling like half my countrymen are crazy (and realizing that they think I’m crazy, too); it’s about the hourglass running out and the future hanging in the balance; and it’s about the very real possibility that none of this even matters, and that we’re lucky if we make it to the coat closet.

October 22, 1999: Adlai Stevenson hangs in the cloakroom at the Democratic National Committee Club on Capitol Hill. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

* If you want to be a part of it, go here for the details on how to enter the juried portion of the event and take a picture on November 4 @600 beats.

The Wire

For the past month or so, S. and I have been watching DVDs of The Wire. We’re almost done with Season 3, and with only two seasons left to go, I’m already dreading the end of the series. I can’t say enough good things about it, can’t possibly come up with the words to tell you how fucking incredible this show is. But if you haven’t seen it, and you can get the DVDs, do. It’s beautiful and painful and so real it makes me want to move to Baltimore and find these people, until I realize they’re only on TV.

Here’s a scene from the episode we just watched. I don’t want to say anything about who these people are or what the significance of it is, in case you haven’t seen the show yet. They’re friends. That’s all you need to know.

New work

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

More of why I love S.

In cleaning his room, he came across the following article, which he had cut out of the Los Angeles Times on November 28, 1976, when I was 3½ years old.

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

Part of why I love S.

A few weeks ago, I said, in passing, somewhat jokingly (but, truth be told, only somewhat), “God, how did I miss it? Angelina had the twins.”

He said, “Angelina?”

“Angelina Jolie.”

“Who’s Angelina Jolie?” S. said.

“She’s an actress. . . .” No response. “She’s married to Brad Pitt. . . .” No response. “She’s Jon Voight’s daughter.”

“Oh . . . Jon Voight! He has a daughter?”

Copyright © People Magazine

From S.

Two nights ago, S. broke up with me in a dream. Imagine a dream where all the bad habits and annoying traits you know you have come pouring out at once. That was me in this dream, and he finally had enough. “We can’t do this anymore,” he said. I shook myself awake and I was sheepish the whole next day.

When we met up later that afternoon, I told him, “I was doing this, and then I was doing that,” and he said, “Yeah, that sounds about right.” “Hey!” I said. And he laughed. It is indescribably good to be with someone who knows you at your worst and is still surprised to hear he broke up with you.

He sent me this last night. Enjoy.

Choosing projects

Yesterday, I posted a few pictures from a project I’ve been thinking about for a few months: a series of portraits of kids with their babysitters. Melissa Lyttle commented and said, “But why?” Good question.

The idea for the project came to me in the car with S. (where most ideas come to me). We’d been listening to This American Life (Episode #351: “Return to Childhood 2008”), and in the first segment of the show, Alex Blumberg tries to track down Susan Jordan, who babysat Alex and his sister when Alex was 9 years old. Here’s the bit that grabbed me:

These are the things that I remember about Susan Jordan. . . . Me and Susan flipping through one of those Time-Life books: Rock ’n’ Roll through the Decades: The Sixties. She has long, brown hair. She’s incredibly skinny. It’s 1975. She’s wearing bell-bottom Levis, a faded jean jacket. She points to a picture of a bloated man in a powder-blue rhinestone jumpsuit, sitting cross-legged on a stage, before a crowd of crying women. “That’s my favorite picture of Elvis,” she says. This information seems somehow personal, and important.

This transported me back to the ’70s and ’80s, back to super-skinny Debby Jones standing in front of the full-length mirror in my parents’ bedroom, wearing a bikini, pinching herself, and saying, “Don’t I look fat?” Lisa Piaskowski, who had a crush on the cousin of one of our neighbors, and who gave us a love note to run over and put on his windshield when he was at our neighbors’ house. Suzie Dragoo, sitting on the deck, with the phone cord stretched from the wall in the kitchen, crying to one of her friends about a boy.

The years when you babysit are tumultuous ones. Everything is drama. Feelings are extreme. And you bring that into the lives of the younger kids you’re charged with watching. If a teenager babysits for one family more than a few times, the kids usually feel a connection to her. And she tells them things she might never tell her parents or her peers. Teenagers think kids don’t listen, or don’t understand. But kids are like sponges, especially when this exotic creature called a teenager comes into the house.

I like the idea of trying to look for that connection in a series of portraits. As I said in my response to Melissa, I’m just getting started in this, and I’m not sure whether it’ll go anywhere. But I usually have to try things to see if they’ll work. Maybe the portraits alone won’t do it. Maybe I would need to incorporate words or kids’ drawings. Or maybe I’d need to change it up and, instead of doing more formal portraits, take more candid shots (the way I did with my sister’s wedding). I don’t know yet, but I like posting things that are in progress, not fully formed or defined, because I think there’s something to be gleaned there about the process.

Rob Haggart posted today about the importance of choosing a subject. He quotes from a Guardian article in which Elisabeth Biondi, visuals editor of The New Yorker, talking about photographer Pieter Hugo, says, “Some people have said to me that Pieter’s subject is so dramatic that it would be hard to take a bad picture . . . but, you know, a photographer chooses his subjects, and that, too, is an important part of having a great eye. Photographers go where their instinct leads them and then try and work out their fascination for the subject through the photographs they take.”

What we don’t often see are the starts and stops, the missteps, the things that don’t go anywhere. I work out what I think by writing. I work out what I feel by photographing. I don’t know yet what I feel about this subject, or whether the depth of my feeling will be substantial enough to take me anywhere. But I’m interested enough to try.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been thinking a lot about my In Store series, about why it doesn’t work for me, why it’s stalled. I think there are two key reasons. One of them is that the idea occurred to me as a concept, a theme, something I could get my hands around. I do think the proliferation of storage facilities says something about our culture. And I think it’s an interesting story. But I have no connection to storage facilities myself. I don’t have stuff in storage. I have a tiny apartment and comparatively little stuff.

This is not to say that all photographers must have a personal connection to their subjects in order to make great photos. It’s just that I think I’m at my best—in writing, in photography—when I make it personal. If I’m not feeling anything, something’s wrong.

Found and not yet found

In writing, people talk about voice. In photography, maybe it’s vision, but voice works just as well, because they both get at the point: what you have that no one else does. I think about this a lot, both in terms of writing and photography.

Recently, I decided to start adding labels to my blog posts, and so I went back through my blog, from the beginning to the present, and I copyedited it and labeled it, and in the process, I saw that somewhere along the way I had found my writing voice. I had become myself. I haven’t done that yet with photography. (Maybe I should get back to photographic sluttery—it’s only through the repetition that it happens, that a voice, a vision, emerges.)

If you’re in that same position, if you ever wonder what you bring to the table, how you’ll ever stand out from the crowd by finding your own way, check out S.’s post today. Definitely worth a read.

My angst and me

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Joan Didion. She’s the one I go to when nothing else works. I’ve also been thinking a lot about my place in photography, where I fit in (or will fit in), what kind of work I want to be producing and why. The two are connected, in ways that dawned on me this afternoon.

When I do this, when I look at other photographers and try to find someone who’s doing what I want to be doing, I often come up empty-handed. The art world drives me crazy with its valuation of inane artist statements. Stock photography makes my eyes glaze over. Journalism doesn’t do it for me. Editorial has possibilities—but only if I’m hired for my style, my vision, not to execute somebody else’s. But what exactly is my vision? What kind of photographer am I? What kind of photographer do I want to be?

I sent out two prints to each of the people who participated in my print sale—and they’re completely different in style. If you saw the two photographs, you’d never guess they were taken by the same person. That’s not a good thing—it’s a sign (or a symptom) of my current lack of clarity.

Before you send me an e-mail telling me I’m being too hard on myself or I’m overthinking things or I’m focusing on my angst, and I just need to get out and photograph, I should tell you: This is who I am. I overthink things. I focus on my angst. That isn’t going to change, and I’ll be better off if I learn how to put my obsessive-compulsive, control-freak tendencies to work for me in my photography instead of trying to fight them. As S. pointed out today over coffee, “I’ve seen you do this numerous times. You work things over, worry them, until you come to some understanding of what you believe. How many times have you talked for hours like this, and then said, at some point, ‘That’s it! I’ve got it!’ You need to work things out this way—that’s who you are.” (God, it’s good to be known like that, you know?) But it makes sense. There’s the noun form of worry—“mental distress or agitation resulting from concern usually for something impending or anticipated; anxiety”—and I’ve got plenty of that. But the worrying S. was talking about is a verb: “to shake or pull at with the teeth [a terrier worrying a rat].” I gnash at a thing over and over until I get to the heart of it. (That’s much of why I like Didion so.)

Anyway, in my worrying over coffee, talking this out with S., I came up with this:

• I need to not fight who I am (see above). Take Didion and Sontag. Both good writers, but completely different in their approaches. Sontag was all in her head, and Didion comes at things equal parts mind and heart. To read Didion is to have the very real sense that you know her; you can read lots of Sontag and never feel that way. Neither approach is better or worse—but they know who they are (make that past tense for Sontag). So when they approach a topic, they come at it in different ways. That’s what a good photographer has—a sense of who she is, what she cares about—and that’s what helps determine, even if subconsciously, the subject and the approach.

• I want to be in my projects. Not the way Amy Elkins is in hers—not in self-portraits. I don’t want to do projects that are directly about myself. But I want people who look at my work to get some sense of who I am, in the same way that Didion’s essays, though about, say, 1960s America, are also about her. I want to choose projects that I care about that much, projects that I have an emotional connection to, not just projects that are interesting or timely or that satisfy my curiosity. Those things are nice, but the most important thing is the connection, because if that’s there, it’ll show in the work. So whether I’m doing my own personal projects, or I’m doing an assignment, I want to come at it with who I am at the forefront. There are thousands of good photographers out there; the only thing that sets me apart from anyone else is my take, me. The voice, the vision, that’ll come in time. Until then, practice. And if I’m not in it, walk away.

Goodbye to all that

I was back east the past few days, visiting my parents in Michigan and my sisters and newborn nephew in Chicago. I can’t visit my family without some drama or another; everything is heightened there.

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

As my plane made its descent into O’Hare, two guys behind me, apparently native Californians, remarked on how green and flat the land was. That comment set the tone for me, in many ways, and I started seeing parallels between the landscape and my relationship to my family. The intensity of the colors mimicked the intensity of emotion; the flat land, my inability to hide.

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

The first night I was home, I called S. and I was still myself. I had gotten out of bed in California that morning, and there was California dirt on the bottoms of my flip-flops. The second night I was home, I called S. from under the covers in my childhood bedroom and cried. Cried not because I missed him (though I did) and not because I missed California (though I did that, too), but cried because my sisters were both in Chicago and I was alone in the house with my parents, cried because my parents are grandparents now and my grandparents are dead, cried because I felt guilty for all the ways in which I’ve let them down and all the ways I’ve hurt them, cried because my mom said she wanted to sell the house before my dad died, so she wouldn’t have to move from it alone someday, and though that was all theoretical (my dad isn’t ill), it was also frighteningly real.

I’d brought Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album with me, and on the way back I read nearly all of the former. Didion makes for a great traveling companion, particularly when your destination is California and California is home. On our descent into Los Angeles, I looked out and saw muted shades of gray and brown, green and purple, and I felt better. I can’t live my life against a backdrop of such intensity. I need the chaparral and the palm trees, the dust and the sand, the marine layer and smog, and the smell of jasmine in the air. I need the ocean out the window, and half a continent between my past and me. I need to feel, as Didion writes, “some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

Copyright © 2006 Liz Kuball

Marine layer, corduroy, and silver hair

As everyone back east is sweltering in the heat and humidity and flooding rains, it’s a typical June day in Southern California—64°F (18°C), the marine layer creeping into my apartment through the open balcony doors.

This was Summerland this afternoon, after I mailed the free prints to all those who bought from me last month.

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

S. always has a way of fitting in with whatever landscape he’s in. (Could his corduroy jacket and silver hair be more perfect? I don’t think so.)

What Remains

I’ve had What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann in my Netflix queue since it came out a couple months ago, and it finally arrived this week. I watched it last night, and I think I might watch it again tonight and again tomorrow with S. when he’s over. It’s that good.

Mann was one of the first photographers whose work I fell in love with—particularly Immediate Family—and this film only deepens my admiration for her, as a photographer and a person. There’s so much in these 80 minutes to find inspiring, but here are the first couple minutes of the film, which are inspiration enough for now.



There is the temptation, I think, when you’re just starting out in something, to look for big ideas, big stories, big topics, because you think that if you find something important, your work will be important. But usually, the smaller and more personal you go, the more you pare things down to their essence, the more powerful they are.

Look for projects from me in the coming months that are more personal, less about the world outside my life and more about the world I inhabit. I’m planning to do a zine of one of them later in the summer. I’ll keep you posted.

Um, yeah

Oh, come on. If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you couldn’t possibly have expected me to hang it up for very long, could you?

I had every intention of staying away for the summer, or at least through mid-July. As I alluded to in my last post, I was wrestling with a couple issues. First, there was the very real sense that I was spending too much time reading other people’s blogs, and I’m not going to argue that. There are simply a ton of interesting blogs and interesting photographers out there, and moderation and I have never been acquaintances, much less friends. In other words, I was bingeing on blogs and I had a serious hangover. And in the midst of that hangover, I wasn’t differentiating clearly between reading dozens of other blogs, and writing my own. It was like getting drunk on alcohol and swearing off milk.

I wrote that post and waited a couple days to publish it, to make sure I meant what I said. I didn’t want to be all melodramatic and declare my blog over, only to regret it the next day. (It always sucks to have to call your boyfriend the morning after a big fight and say, “Oh, so when I broke up with you? Yeah, I didn’t know what I was saying. We’re good now, right?”) I think I knew, deep down (and S. knew it when I read him the draft, and after I published the post), that I love blogging. Not because of all the reasons I was worried about loving it—not because I was getting more hits or more e-mails from readers or more recognition (and believe me, it’s not like I have, or—so far—deserve, that much). But because this blog is, and always has been for me, a place where I can work out my own thoughts and feelings—whether frustration or excitement or confusion or anger or even, god forbid, the occasional (and short-lived) bout of ennui. Often, I’ve come to some important realization about my work, or myself, through writing this blog. (When I don’t figure out what I think about a subject by talking about it, I figure it out by writing about it.)

I am not not photographing because of my blog—if I were publishing as much as Rachel Hulin does over on the PhotoShelter blog, maybe I could use that excuse. In fact, I’m not not photographing at all. I am photographing. I’m not taking three-week trips down the Mississippi, but I’m snatching the time where I can every day. That’s what I can do right now, and that works for me.

So I’m back, with my list of blogs in my Google Reader dramatically reduced, eager anticipation of the new edition of The Americans set to be delivered from photo-eye on Friday, and new images in my camera. Now is the time to “stop focusing on the quantity of work that’s out there and focus on the work that matters to me.” But this is part of the work that matters to me, and it only took four days—and a publicly declared, self-imposed break—to make me realize that.

Now is the time

A while ago, I turned off comments on my blog. I was sick of them, frankly. Sick of the reminder that people were out there reading my words. That seems naïve, I know. You publish a blog, you post regularly, and you get readers—that’s the way it works. But nevertheless, I started finding even the most innocuous comments an intrusion, as awful as that sounds. (I should be so lucky to have readers—how could I turn on them in this way?)

I realized yesterday—or maybe the realization finally crystallized—that my desire to turn off the comments was less about turning off the comments and more about stepping away from the blog and the world of blogs.

It is so easy, when your Google Reader is always full of excellent photographs, to feel as though the rest of the world is producing constantly, consistently, at a level you’re simply incapable of. It’s almost as if all the photographers whose blogs I read have become one photographer in my mind, and that one photographer never stops, never has to work, never gets sick or lacks inspiration. I know this isn’t true, of course—know that they all have their own struggles, that they all work hard to produce the work they do. But when all you see are the beautiful photographs, it’s hard to keep that in mind.

When S. and I were first together, I clung to him. Not literally, but so figuratively that it was almost literal. I was afraid that if I passed up one opportunity to spend time with him, one of two things would happen: (1) He would find someone else, or (2) he would die, and the last memory I would have would be of my saying no. The first fear came from years of insecurity, plus a cheating boyfriend or two for good measure. The second came from early losses in my life, as well as the very real fact that he’s simply an age at which people die without eliciting shocked gasps from those who read their obituaries. The why—on both counts—is less important than the what, and the what is less important than the effect it had on me, and on our relationship.

At some point in the past couple years, and honestly it’s been more of an evolution than the result of some turning point, I realized he loved me, and that I didn’t have to hold on so tight, that if he found someone else, well, that would be his loss, and if he died, well, that would be mine, but either way, I can’t control it. And it’s been so much better, in every way, since.

All of which is a way of saying that I’m feeling clingy with the blog. Feeling lucky to have drawn in some readers, and not wanting to lose them by not posting regularly. Feeling lucky to have gotten a tiny bit of attention for my work, and not wanting to lose that by not producing more. And not only that, but what if I don’t read all the other blogs out there? What if I miss out on something brilliant, something important, something crucial to my education as a photographer?

It’s time to let go. To stop focusing on the quantity of work that’s out there and focus on the work that matters to me. (Thanks, Ben, for that reminder.) To have faith that, if and when I start back up—whether that’s a week from now, a month from now, or longer—you’ll find me again. And if you don’t, I can’t control that. It’s time to focus on what I can control—my work—and nothing more.

I’m not sure when I’ll be back. Keep me in your Google Reader (or add me if I’m not already there), and chances are, my name will be bold all over again someday, and I’ll have something new to add to the conversation, some new light to shed, some new work to share. Until then, I’ll make like Alec and leave you with some words—Eastman, though, not Whitman:

Now it is day.
The sun is up.
Now is the time
for all dogs to get up.

“Get up!”
It is day.
Time to get going.
Go, dogs. Go!

—P. D. Eastman (from Go, Dog. Go!)

Stephen K. Schuster: Kelly

Copyright © Stephen K. Schuster

Last week, photographer Steven K. Schuster, a curator for Humble Arts Foundation and director of photography at Mass Appeal magazine, e-mailed me and let me know about his new self-published book and asked if he could send me a copy. Like Amy Stein, I love getting gifts in the mail, so I wasn’t about to turn him down. Plus, I liked his simple description of the book: “a limited-edition photography book on a past relationship. It’s called Kelly. . . .” Given my past few days of thinking about a photo project on my relationship with S., it seemed serendipitous.

I don’t think it’s easy, photographing a relationship. I could see some photographers using the camera as a barrier between themselves and their partners. There’s that whole idea that if you’re photographing something, you’re not really experiencing it—you’re thinking about the camera instead of engaging in what’s happening around you, or you’re objectifying the person on the other side of the lens (like, some would say, Harry Callahan did with his wife, Eleanor—as Jon Feinstein alludes to in his introduction to Stephen’s book). And yet, to really photograph a relationship that you’re part of, I think you have to be all in—you can’t hold back any part of yourself. It seems like it could be a delicate balancing act. And if it is, Stephen has managed it without a misstep.

These images give me a real sense of who Stephen is (or who he was with Kelly), as well as a sense of who they were together. I keep looking through this book trying to figure out how or why I feel this way . . . and I don’t know if I have an answer yet. I just know that this little book is one I’ll return to again and again, and that’s no small thing.

For what it’s worth, I think that I experience things more deeply when I’m photographing—there’s a level of focus that I don’t have otherwise. And that makes me want to photograph my relationship with S. even more.

Thanks, Stephen, for sending this my way.

Robert Frank and relationships

Any book—photo or otherwise—has my adoration when not only do I want to return to it again and again, but every time I do return to it, I find something new to love. That’s the way it works with everything in my life, actually—people, places, dogs. If I find everything there is to know and love on the first visit, it won’t last. Lucky for me, I find new things to love about S. all the time.

I’ve been looking at The Americans again, in anticipation of the new edition from Steidl. The images that are grabbing me today are these. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that these are all images about relationships. Amy Stein suggested the other day that I do a photo project on my relationship with S. I’ve thought about that possibility in the past, but I’ve always set it aside because I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Since Amy’s e-mail, though, it’s been on my mind, and possibilities are starting to come to me. I’m not sure any of them will stick, but the wondering is fun.

Charleston, South Carolina. Copyright © Robert Frank

Chattanooga, Tennessee. Copyright © Robert Frank

Indianapolis. Copyright © Robert Frank

U.S. 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas. Copyright © Robert Frank

Patrick Romero: 28 famous views of los angeles

Too long ago for me to only be writing about it now, Patrick Romero sent me a copy of his self-published 28 famous views of los angeles. My delay in writing about the book should in no way be seen as a commentary on the work itself—it’s beautiful, the kind of book I aspire to producing myself someday. In 28 photographs—a mix of portraits and landscapes and street photography—he finds a way to evoke the essence of Los Angeles, which is no easy task.

I had my copy sitting on my desk. S. and I were on our way out the door, and I thought he was right behind me. When I realized he wasn’t, I went back to my office and found him sitting in my chair, looking at the book. “This is good,” he said. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Word is, Patrick may have a few copies left for sale. Snag one while they’re still available.

P.S. Thanks, Patrick, for sending a copy my way.

Searching

I’ve really only worked a lot on one project, In Store—I don’t count South of Cota, because I didn’t realize it was a project until it was nearly done—and In Store is such a literal project in my mind, straightforward facts, unvarnished reality. Writing the statement for the project was easy, and what I wrote hasn’t become outdated in the months since.

I have several new projects in the works—one I haven’t started photographing yet, another I’ve only just begun, and a third that I’ve delved into a little more deeply, though it’s still in the beginning stages. Of these three, the one I haven’t started yet is probably the most literal, the easiest to describe in words. The other two are less prose, more poetry. I’ve been trying to think of how to describe the third one, the one I’m farthest along with. All I can think of is that Jhumpa Lahiri’s words are the closest to getting at what the project is about. So last week I read The Namesake, and I’m just now starting to reread Interpreter of Maladies; her most recent short-story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, is waiting on my nightstand. I thought I might find something—some quote or passage—that would get at what the project is about for me, but so far, I haven’t. The feeling I get when I read Lahiri is the feeling I’m going for in this project, but it’s hard for me to be more articulate about it than that.

It’ll come. In the meantime, I’m getting to read one of my favorite authors, someone who, as I told S., “really has a way of taking your heart and tearing it apart.”

Classic

S. has a hot little Leica that he carries with him everywhere he goes. Today, we were on our way to Peet’s, and he saw something in an instant that he wanted a picture of. I asked if he wanted me to turn back, and he said, “Fuck, Weegee I’m not. I can’t get everything.” Classic.

Lessons learned from S., on the five-year anniversary of leaving the door open

I’m not just a girl with a camera. I’m the oldest of three girls, and my younger sister, Katharine, just had her first baby on Saturday, and my youngest sister, Cara, is getting married in July. And I’m turning 35 next month. I’m old enough to be Shane Lavalette’s mother. Okay, so I would’ve had to get pregnant in the ninth grade, and I wasn’t doing anything in the ninth grade that would’ve even come close to getting me knocked up, but still, it’s biologically possible.

It’s really easy, when you’re starting something in your 30s, to focus on the numbers. It’s really easy when “emerging photographers” are almost always defined as being under 30 (or under 31), to think you’ve missed the boat. It’s really easy to feel like you’re in a race against time. To feel like you have to shove your work out there in the world now, fast, hurry up!

When my mind starts going into that dark place, S. will say or do something that makes me realize that age makes no difference. He is decades older than I am, and he is always learning, always growing, always trying new things. He’s more adventurous than I am, by far. He faces challenges head-on, never shrinking from them or questioning why. He sees life as a grand comedy, and even in the most difficult times, he finds the humor in it all. He is confident beyond my comprehension, without being remotely arrogant. He has read more than I’ll ever read. He understands music in a way that blows my mind. He’s all curiosity and enthusiasm and energy.

I used to think it would’ve been cool to know him when he was a kid, but it occurred to me recently that I already do—that the person he was when he walked down the street, to the corner of Sixth and Cochran in Los Angeles, reading his Big Little Books and chewing on licorice, the remainders of which he would wrap in wax paper and bury, leaving them like a treasure to be discovered anew the next afternoon, is the same person I know now, except instead of Big Little Books it’s Richard Price and Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri, and instead of licorice it’s coffee from Peet’s.

It’s really easy, when you’re starting something in your 30s, to focus on the numbers. And it’s really easy, when you have S. in your life, to let that all go.

Knee socks and saddle shoes

I posted today congratulating a variety of photographers whose work I admire, respect, and in some cases love, all of whom were included in A Photo Editor’s Flickr pool. Over a thousand people submitted two images, and on the basis of these two images, Rob Haggart chose 276 people to be featured in a slide show that he’ll advertise to photo editors and buyers. Any way you look at it, it’s a great opportunity. And my congratulations to the people I mentioned, and to everyone else included, were sincere.

Here’s where I need to come clean: Sure, I’m happy for them. But as I said to S. in the parking lot of the Summerland post office today, “I’m sick of being everybody’s runner-up.”

On the drive down to L.A., I second-guessed my choice of images, and when I was done with that, I second-guessed myself. By the time I was getting off the 10 at Normandie Street, I was actually scouting locations for that cardboard box I’ll be living in someday. The refrain running through my mind: I suck.

I’m not looking to be propped up with support or “Hang in there, Liz” or “What does Haggart know?” (This is not like my mom saying, “I guess I’m just a horrible mother” so that my sisters and I would say, “No, Mom, you’re great!”) So don’t even bother with comments like that. I just want to be honest: I’m not all “Rah-rah! Go team!”, at least not all the time.

And yes, I know, it’s just one guy’s opinion. Today Cara Phillips quotes from Jezebel, where a former model says, “My shoulders, too broad for one client, will be criticized for their narrowness by another,” and that’s a good analogy for photography (and much of life). But I’m starting to feel like my shoulders aren’t to anybody’s liking except my own. Yeah, yeah, I’m the only one who matters. But let’s get serious: That’s bullshit, and we all know it. Sure, we photograph first to please ourselves, but we do it as much, if not more, for other people. Otherwise, we’d all be content to keep negatives in shoeboxes or RAW files on hard drives. And we’re not. I’m not.

I want to be on the field, not holding pom-poms on the sideline.

Collect this: You Are Important

Oh, I have done a bad, bad thing: I just bought the medium-size print of this kick-ass photograph by Stephanie Cinelli from 20x200, and I know, I know, $200 for a photograph you love is really not a huge expense, but I am the same girl who, just last night, asked her boyfriend if he wouldn’t mind paying for dinner at Art’s Deli on Ventura Boulevard (even though she tries to offer to pay every other time and it was definitely her turn) because she didn’t know if she had enough money in her checking account to cover the bill. And I am the same girl who, at the age of 34 years and 11 months, has only $143.37 in her savings account. But come on, who can resist this photograph with all its sadness and humor, Listerine and Barbasol? This photograph is fucking it as far as I’m concerned. And besides, I’m just doing my job to stimulate the economy. Do yours here.

P.S. My trying-not-to-spend-money thing is going really well.

Copyright © Stephanie Cinelli

I’m back

In early January, I attended Review LA, a portfolio review sponsored by Center and held in conjunction with photo la in my old neighborhood, Santa Monica. This was my first official portfolio review, and I came away with concrete advice on places to send my work, images to cut from my portfolio, approaches to take going forward—it was everything I hoped it would be.

And yet, since then, I’ve been stuck in the doldrums. Just in the past few weeks, I’ve bemoaned my apparent inability to get anything done, thrown in the towel (at least temporarily, on my In Store project), tried to get going on something else, all with lackluster results.

Today I realized that I haven’t been wasting time these past couple months. I’ve actually been processing everything I’ve learned—I just didn’t know it.

I went out this morning on my second shoot for a new project I’d been thinking about for a while (and on which I’d gotten some strong encouragement at Review LA from Kristine Wilson of Ogilvy & Mather). It’s the kind of project that looks good on paper but doesn’t hold as much promise in the execution. I may give it another try, but I identified some critical issues with it that just aren’t going away, so if you’re placing bets, I’d bet against my resuming it anytime soon.

The good news is that, while working on this new project, trying different approaches, thinking about why it wasn’t working for me, I defined more clearly for myself what my In Store project is about for me and why I am (present tense, not past) passionate about it. I’d gotten some feedback from people that they wanted to see more images of the items in storage, images with people in them. In fact, Portrait Month was all about my getting comfortable with making portraits, in an effort to prepare myself for incorporating portraits into In Store. I had so much fun in December, and I’m really pleased with some of the portraits I made. But I don’t think portraits belong in In Store, and here’s why: That project, for me, isn’t about the people who have stuff in storage. It’s about the places where we put our stuff. I say in my project statement, written before all this talk of portraits began, that for me it’s about “imagining what’s behind closed doors.” Imagining. Not literally finding out. For me, the magic of these places is more real when I focus on the buildings and structures themselves, telling myself stories about what’s there and why.

When this dawned on me this afternoon at coffee with S., I could feel the wind pick up and my sail caught that wind, and that was all I needed.

I went home and took a fresh look at the images in the project, and I could see that, of the 45 images on my site right now, only about 15 of them are ones I consider good. The rest are lacking in some way. But that’s okay—I’ll keep working on the project, swap out the images that aren’t working with new ones that do, until I have the project where I want it to be, until it’s done.

Another agenda item: Read more poetry. (Who doesn’t need more poetry in her life?) Step away from the television and PDN, and pick up a book, something that has nothing at all to do with photography. David McCullough’s 1776 has been on my shelf for a long time. So have Pablo Neruda and Coast of Dreams. Maybe I’ll start there.

I’m back.

Funk and futility

I’m moody. Just in general, I mean: I’m a moody person. The past week or two, a funk has been on the horizon, and I think it made landfall today.

Do you ever feel a cold coming on for days or even weeks, and you get so tired of feeling like you’re on the verge of getting sick that when you wake up one morning with a full-on sore throat, you’re actually a little bit happy, because you don’t have to wait around anymore, and you’re that much closer to actually feeling better?

I thought the funk was because I was working on an especially awful project in my day job, the kind of project that I dragged out over many days instead of just getting it over with, because just getting it over with meant actually working on it, and I couldn’t bear to do that. I finally did, though, yesterday. Work on it, that is. So much that I actually finished it, and I was in a good mood for much of the afternoon.

Quiet before the storm.

Today, I’m tired and bored and looking at every glass as though it’s broken—forget half-empty. I forced myself to go out and photograph a little today, and for the 45 minutes or so that I was out there, it was good. (One night recently, in the midst of this building funk, I actually pulled out my camera and just sat there watching TV with my camera in my lap. I felt better.)

They’re obvious, the reasons for all this: I’m so sick of my day job that the woman in line in front of me at the 7-Eleven today who was buying an insane number of lottery tickets actually seemed smart. Hatred is not too strong a word for the feeling I have about my job right now. And to top it all off, I’m actually pretty good at my job. (Being good at something you hate, now there’s misery for you.) This feeling about work is draining me of all energy. So when I do have some free time, time to do with what I please, I don’t feel like doing anything. Plus, I know it sounds crazy, but I’m really worried about the campaign, and I care so much about it that it weighs on me. (I know I’m not alone: S. said he got up three times in the middle of the night thinking about it himself.)

FYI: Michael Clayton, though a really good movie, is not something to watch with the blinds drawn on a sunny Saturday afternoon. I watched George Clooney riding in that cab while the credits rolled, watched the thoughts on his face, and all I could think was how futile it all is.

If you knew me, you’d know how funny this is: futility and I in the same sentence. I’m like the most industrious person you’ll ever meet. (That “like” in there . . . that’s because I Netflixed My So-Called Life and have been watching that for the past few weeks. There’s another thing: Sure, there are scenes where I relate to the 40-year-old parents. But at 34, I still get Angela Chase better than I get Graham and Patty. How am I 34 when I still feel 15?)

I think feeling all dark and depressed serves a purpose in my life. I need periods like this to figure things out. And the thing is, these moods, they do pass. When I was 15, I didn’t know that. So, I guess, I’m not exactly the same as I was then. But still.

Felipe

After I took Felipe’s picture, I told S., who was patiently waiting in my illegally parked Jeep with Sally and Boo, that although I’m often excited when I’ve taken a picture of a building or a storage facility or some inanimate object that really grabs me, I don’t think it compares to having gotten a picture (that I really like) of a stranger. Photographing people is much harder, but the payoff, for me at least, is exponentially greater.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball

The girl in the gold Jaguar

Much harder to get a portrait on a weekday than it was over the weekend—that pesky day job got in the way. Plus, Boo Radley, the coolest dog in the world, tested positive for roundworms today. Disgusting. And how the hell can you make a decent portrait when you’re mired in Internet research about roundworms and worrying that you’ve caught it and will go blind, despite the fact that you’d pretty much have to be eating dirt to get it, and last you checked, though you do have the palate of a kindergartener, dirt is not on the menu? (S. says I remind him of the Anthony Edwards character from Northern Exposure. I’ve never seen the show, but I have a pretty good idea what a hypochondriac he must’ve been.)

I asked four people and got rejections before I found this girl, who talked on the phone while I took her picture and while her mother waited for her in their gold Jaguar. Nice girl, but not such a great picture.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball

The picture I didn’t get was of two teenagers making out. (Do people still say “making out,” or have I just made myself sound as bad as my mom does when she refers to people “necking”? Necking? Jesus.) They were leaned up against a car, and they were interesting to look at and would’ve made a wonderful photograph, but there was no way to get them without asking, and when I asked, the boy said yes and the girl said no, and 50-50 doesn’t cut it.

I say who, I say when, I say how much

I have a great affinity for writers: I work with them, I used to want to be one, and I’m in love with one. Anyone who does anything freelance—and I’ve made my living as a freelancer for the past seven years—knows that nothing is more valuable than calling the shots. Kit De Luca said it best: “We say who, we say when, we say how much.” Saying who and when is important, but saying how much is maybe the most important, because the “how much” part is where you can lose it all—and by “it,” I mean your self-respect. If you do the job for less than the job is worth, or less than you’re worth, you’re giving yourself away, and then you’re not just a hooker, you’re a whore.

This video is, to me, an excellent explanation of why the writers are striking and why we should support them. It’s also a lesson in how not, as photographers, to give our work away.

via A Photo Editor

Tag

I’ve always thought those memes that tend to circulate the blogosphere like chain letters did my elementary school were kind of silly, but when I read S.’s comparison of it to a game of tag and the Internet as one big playground, I figured what the hell. Apparently, I, too, have been tagged, and because tag requires the buy-in of all the kids on the playground—besides, I’ve never been one to let a good game die—here goes.

The Rules

• Link to the blog of the person who tagged you. [I’ve already linked the hell out of S., but for good measure, click here to go to his blog.]
• Post these rules on your blog. [Done.]
• List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself. [See below.]
• Tag seven random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs. [S. put a question mark after random, because, I’m sure he was thinking, “What the hell is a random person?” I’ll let the wording slide. But here’s my list of tagged people: Lane Collins, Shawn Gust, Ben Huff, Shannon Kuhns, Jennifer Loeber, Susana Raab, Amy Stein.]
• Let each person know that he has been tagged by posting a comment on his blog. [That’s where I’m drawing the line. I believe in an all-volunteer tag game; I’m not into drafting people who don’t want to be drafted. I’ll distribute the propaganda and try to get them to enlist, but that’s as far as I’ll go.]

My Answers

1. I almost hit Donald Sutherland in the parking lot of Sav-On Drugs on Santa Monica Boulevard.
2. I turned down a job offer to teach in my hometown because, when I used my illegal copy of the master key to the school district (long story) to get into the classroom where I would be teaching, the key broke off in the lock. The broken-off key has been on my keychain ever since.
3. My standard order at Neptune’s Net on the Pacific Coast Highway, known for its fresh seafood, is a grilled-cheese sandwich.
4. I sat in the same row as Senator Edward Kennedy at a performance of The Producers, and all I could think to say when I had to climb over him to get into my seat was, “Senator Kennedy, I’ve always admired you and your brothers.” How frickin’ unoriginal could I be? Plus, what about Eunice?
5. I believed in Santa Claus until the second grade.
6. On a Sunday afternoon, I was on my way out of Big 5 Sporting Goods on Wilshire Boulevard. When I was about 15 feet from the door, Jon Voight walked in. He was incredibly tall, wore a long coat, and was lit from behind by the bright sunlight outside. When I saw him, I gasped, stopped dead in my tracks, and said, under my breath, “Midnight cowboy.”
7. I once bought a Jeep Grand Wagoneer over the Internet.

Tag! You’re it!

Shawn Gust

It worked out: I met up with Shawn Gust tonight in Los Angeles, and although I knew he’d be a cool guy, he was even cooler than I thought he’d be.

He was driving from Idaho down to San Diego, with his brother Thor and Thor’s 2½-year-old daughter, Leila. When they got out of their van, I immediately recognized them from this image.

Copyright © Shawn Gust

So here’s what it’s like to have dinner with me: I’ll offer to pay for you and your traveling companions, you’ll say I don’t have to, I’ll insist, and two minutes later, I’ll see the sign on the wall that says cash only, and I’ll be like, “Um, so the dinner thing . . . actually, I’m not buying—I don’t have enough cash.” Jesus.

Dinner was Philippe’s: French-dipped sandwiches on paper plates, peanut shells on the floor, Corona for Shawn, Coke for me. We talked about their trip and then, of course, photography. What he’s working on, what he’s shot so far on the trip, people he’s met. We walked outside afterward, and on the way back to their van, we passed a security guard who was watching the parking lots for the restaurant. Shawn said the guy would make a good picture. We talked for a little, and then he said he was going to go ask the guard if he could make his portrait. I went along to watch, because it’s a well-established fact that I’m terrified of taking people’s pictures, and I wanted to see how someone who does it so well would work.

We walked up to the guard. Shawn said, “Hey, how’s it goin’?”

The guard said, “Fine.”

Shawn said, “I’m on a road trip from Idaho and I’m taking pictures of people I meet along the way, and I’m wondering if I could take your picture.”

The guy sat there, silent. Then he said, “Of the cars?”

“No,” Shawn said. “I can see cars anywhere. I just want to take a picture of you.”

Again, the guy sat there, with a look on his face like, “What the hell does this guy want with me?”

This is the point at which I would’ve started babbling, filling the silence, trying to defend myself, explain myself, blah blah blah. But Shawn just stood there and didn’t say a word. My mouth was hanging open.

Finally, the guard said, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Shawn said. “I’ll go get my camera.”

We walked back to the van, and Shawn got his equipment together. Again, this is when I would’ve been rushing, scrambling, feeling like, “Shit, I’d better hurry before this guy changes his mind.” But he took his time. He moved quickly, but he didn’t rush.

When we got back to the guy, Shawn introduced himself, and then he started setting up his camera. While he took a meter reading, he let me look through the lens. I’d never looked through a large-format camera before—such a different experience from a 35mm. The meter said he needed a two-second exposure, so he told the guy that he needed him to hold very still and to just do his best. On the first shot, when Shawn told him he was ready, the guy nodded for the entire two seconds. The second shot, Shawn waited for him to stop nodding, and then he exposed the image, and I can’t wait to see what it looks like.

He wanted to take my picture, too, and I obliged. We talked a little longer, and Thor and Leila caught crickets in the parking lot. Crickets in a parking lot in downtown L.A.? It was as if Idaho had come pouring out of that van with Shawn and Thor and Leila, and though Los Angeles is always beautiful and magical to me, it was even more so tonight.

My only regret was that S., who so wanted to meet Shawn, had a class to teach and couldn’t join us. He would’ve been thrilled to be there. And I would’ve wanted to see the picture Shawn would’ve made of him.

It was a remarkable night in so many ways, but most of all in this realization: As I watched Shawn talk to the guard, set up his camera, and take the picture, I was in awe. But when I got into my car and headed down Grand Avenue, back to USC, it hit me: I could do that. I don’t mean that I could be as good as Shawn is, or that I would interact with people in the same way (I couldn’t, even if I tried). But I could do that. I could approach strangers and take their pictures, and if I did it a lot, I think I could eventually do it well.

My peeps

In what was my first non-electronic communication with a photographer whose work I admire (to put it mildly) and whom I met through this odd thing called blogging, I had the pleasure of talking on the phone this afternoon with Amy Stein, who, when I e-mailed her with a question about photography last week (as I’ve done before) suggested that it would be easier just to talk than to e-mail. After a few days of phone tag, we finally connected, just as S. was due to stop by after a long day at a writers’ workshop he was leading, and I kept him waiting for 45 minutes while I was on the phone. (I mean, S. is great and all, but I wasn’t about to put off a chance to talk with Amy Stein.)

The question was regarding when and whether to apply to Review Santa Fe, given my perpetual sense that I’m trying to run before I can walk. The answer, in the end, was yes. But the most compelling reason for me was the relationships Amy made with other photographers while she was there. As someone trying to go this without the context of a formal education, the more of a sense of community I can build for myself, the better. Showing your work to other photographers is nice, but it’s more than that: It’s having people to turn to when you have questions; being able to help those same people in turn; and learning from their work (how they edit their images, how they arrange them and present them).

Blogging has given me a taste of that community—well, maybe somewhere in size between the free taste on a pink plastic spoon you get at Baskin-Robbins and a single scoop on a sugar cone (mint chocolate chip). The very fact that I was talking with Amy, and planning to get together next month when she’s o