Liz Kuball Photography

Print sale: Cara’s Bed, Guilford, Connecticut

The print sale is back! And this time around, I’m changing things up a bit: I’m increasing the edition size, and I’ve gotten wise to the woes of Google Checkout and switched to PayPal (which should be much easier for everyone outside the United States, and plenty easy for those inside, too).

My plan is to make this print sale a quarterly thing, or at least every February, May, and August. (I have something special up my sleeve for November. Stay tuned.)

I offer up for you this time around Cara’s Bed, Guilford, Connecticut, an image of my little sister’s bed at the Comfort Inn, the day before she got married. Here are the details:

Print size: 8½ x 11 inches (with a ½-inch border to allow for framing), signed and numbered on the verso
Edition size: 100
Cost: $20 plus shipping ($5.50 U.S., $6 Canada, $7.50 Mexico, and $9 everywhere else)

Note: This print is no longer available online. To inquire about availability or purchase a print, please e-mail me. (You can find my contact information here.)

Labels: family, for sale, prints

Longest blog post ever

It was a long, long weekend in Connecticut. Cara and Damon’s wedding was the best I’ve ever been to, from the forgetting of the bouquet to the “By the power vested in me by the state of Connecticut and www.getordained.com. . . .” Family drama, yelling, tears, denial of tears, drunkenness, laughter. I don’t know if I came away with the photo project I was hoping for, and maybe it was asking too much of myself to produce such a thing in one weekend. But here’s some of what I have and like so far (not a final edit).

I had never seen the cultural definition of family so clearly laid out.

Chris is playing a saw in this picture.

And in this one, my brother-in-law Ben wanted to get a picture of Jacob with the saw being played.

These were the cake toppers (vegan cupcakes were served in lieu of wedding cake). Cara is the shark; Damon, the unicorn. (Cara has loved sharks ever since we were little kids. In the shark-attack scenes in Jaws, she laughed while we all screamed.)

On the way to the beach for swimming after the wedding.

Arm wrestling after the swimming.

At the airport in Hartford, the American Airlines employee who checked me in looked at my flight information and saw I was going to Santa Barbara. He said, “My favorite city.” I asked if he’d vacationed there, and he said, “No, I lived there for a while in the ’70s. I should’ve never left.” When my plane landed, the sun was setting over the mountains, and I could smell the ocean, and I knew he was right.

Labels: family

Connect-i-cut

Heading to Connecticut for the weekend for my little sister’s wedding. I’m hoping to do a whirlwind photo project while I’m gone, and maybe even have a few things to post on Monday or Tuesday. Stay tuned.

Labels: family

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.

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.

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.”

Labels: books, California, family, Joan Didion, Los Angeles, S., writers

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.

Labels: age, books, family, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, Los Angeles, photographers, Richard Price, S., Shane Lavalette, writers

Me and my 9-year-old self

Several years ago, my dad started converting to DVD the many hours of videotape he shot of my sisters and me, and the rest of our family, when we were growing up. It started with a DVD here or there, arriving in the mail without explanation or a note, and I liked that it didn’t need one. Then several weeks ago, a larger envelope, with six or seven DVD cases inside; he’d been on a roll.

The first tapes were shot with a video camera that was about the size of what TV news crews use today, complete with two or three light stands, set up around the room. Our Christmas mornings in Michigan were hot—red flannel nightgowns and Dad’s camera lights.

I’m grateful that he documented our lives in such detail. He got holidays and birthdays and vacations, of course. But in between are moments when we’re just riding bikes or reading or playing in the snow.

Tonight I watched a couple hours, starting with my ninth birthday. It is such a strange feeling, even still, to watch the younger version of me in action. I often feel like I haven’t changed at all, that I’m still that little kid with the buck teeth and the wild, chlorinated hair—until I see myself on tape and feel like that’s someone I once knew, not someone I once was.

§

Things my 9-year-old self and I have in common:

We both like opening other people’s presents.
We’re both moody.
We both think we’re shyer than we really are.
We both love Grandma and Grandpa so much it hurts.
We both like being alone.
We’re both curious.
We’re both stubborn.
We’re both a little sad whenever we’re happy.
We both know what we want and what we don’t want.

Me, after getting a blue 10-speed Schwinn from my grandparents

Labels: family

Secret

Someone I love more than anything in the whole wide world told me a secret today, and I’m so happy for her, even though she’s all practical about it. Congratulations, Piglet!

Labels: family

Mythology

I posted a few days ago about the death of someone from my hometown in Michigan, and I deleted the post the next day—not because I said anything I regretted, but because it didn’t seem relevant to this blog. As more time has passed, the relevance is becoming clearer. The details about her life or my trying to make sense of why her death mattered to me weren’t so important. What is important is that when something pulls me in—intellectually, emotionally, or, preferably, both—that’s something I want to pay attention to, because that’s the nucleus of who I am.

I used to tell myself I was shy, and I used shyness as my excuse for not approaching strangers to take their portraits. In one week of confronting that fear, I found that I wasn’t shy at all. In fact, if you watched me approach strangers, you’d see someone confident and friendly, able to put people at ease and make them laugh. And I’ve done this without a struggle. It’s been fascinating to step outside myself and see me doing these things. But what it’s left me with are questions: What else am I telling myself that’s not true? What other myths am I perpetuating? And what are these myths keeping me from doing, keeping me from being?

This all comes together with the death of Mrs. Wyngarden in this way: I wasn’t close to her on a personal level. I hadn’t talked to her since high school, and though I knew she was ill, I didn’t expect to feel anything when I heard she died. Yes, it would be sad. But sad in the way it’s sad when you hear about the death of anyone. Instead, I couldn’t get it out of my head all week. Like a movie reel running through my mind was a string of memories from my hometown, my childhood.

I was stunned not only by my sadness over her death, but by the sense of connection I felt to that place and the people who live there. I love Southern California—I think I’ll likely live the rest of my life somewhere between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. But an essential part of who I am is where I’m from. It’s in the bio I wrote for myself (“and raised in the same town in Michigan where her parents grew up”), and as I edited that bio, I thought about deleting those words because they didn’t seem relevant, but the bio didn’t sound right without them.

I don’t have answers right now, but I think this is important—not just reexamining the things I tell myself, but looking at what where I’m from means in terms of who I am and what interests me.

What are the things you tell yourself about who you are? Are they true?

Labels: California, family, portraits

Pancakes

This weekend I was up in Carmel at a workshop at the Center for Photographic Art, attending a workshop led by David Gardner and Chris Pichler. Gardner is a master printer (think Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, etc.) and Pichler is the publisher of Nazraeli Press (think John Divola, Todd Hido, etc.). The workshop was on publishing the photo book, and I learned about it on Mary Virginia Swanson’s blog (here).

Beyond making some friends (check out Charity Vargas), the real benefit for me was in getting to show my work to both David and Chris, as well as the larger group, and getting such a positive reception. I thought I was on the right track with my In Store series, but when you’re just showing your work to your family and friends, it’s hard to feel like you’ve gotten an objective assessment. Hearing everyone respond to my work was kind of wild—sort of like the first time you see your name on Conscientious. (“Hey, that’s me they’re talking about!” Freaky.)

I think the most important thing I got out of the weekend was the understanding that I should trust my own instincts. It’s always nice to get some outside recognition, but when it comes to validation of my work, only one person matters, and that’s me.

Meanwhile, I’ve been shooting up a storm—a storm of pancakes. Damon Bishop, my sister Cara’s boyfriend, is sponsoring the first International Pancake Film Festival in their Chicago apartment in a week or two, and he’s asked me to supply photographs of pancakes to be used as the background of the title cards in the DVD, which will include all the short pancake films that their friends have entered in the festival. (Damon is a master DVD maker. I think Rump Shakin’ is my favorite of his.) So I leave you with photos of pancakes. Yum! (Except for the blueberry ones—just looking at them makes me want to puke. I like mine straight up, with pure maple syrup. None of that fruit and whipped-cream bullshit.)

Labels: Ansel Adams, books, Charity Vargas, Chris Pichler, David Gardner, education, Edward Weston, family, John Divola, Jörg Colberg, Mary Virginia Swanson, portfolio reviews, Todd Hido, workshops

My kind of town

I’m in Chicago visiting my sisters. Today, after Cara got off work, she and I went around looking for storage facilities. I think I got some possibilities.

My favorite of the day, though, was this one of Cara.

Labels: family

Favorite picture

My dad took lots of pictures of us when we were little, but my favorite photo is this one, a shot of my grandma drying my sister Cara’s hair. We were on spring break in Florida. They weren’t aware that their picture was being taken; Cara had her finger in her mouth. The color is off, the shot is a little blurry, but I think it’s a perfect picture. It helps that the people in it are two of my all-time favorites.

Labels: family

Dirt

Family visiting. Sister. Brother-in-law. Cousin. Cousin-in-law. First cousins once removed.

Labels: family

What makes a great photograph

Jörg Colberg posed the question, “What makes a great photo?” Click here to read responses from a wide variety of photographers and bloggers. Most of the responses acknowledge that trying to quantify what makes a photograph great is difficult if not impossible. Some mention the way you remember the image long after first seeing it.

For me, what makes a photo great is a combination of the feeling I have when I see it, and the way I can recall that feeling—even if I can’t recall the image—many years later. I don’t necessarily have to remember what the photograph looks like in order for it to have been a great one—the key is the effect it had on me.

There are books I read as a child, books the plotlines and characters of which I can no longer recall. I may be able to tell you the title of the book; maybe just the color of the cover. But I can close my eyes and think of that book, and I can feel all over again the way I felt when I was reading it, and the intense sadness that hit me when I reached the last page.

When my grandpa died, I was 15, and I worried that, with time, I would forget details about him—things like the way the hair on the back of his hand felt, the feeling of one of his hugs, the sound of his laugh, what he looked like shaving or combing his hair. I have forgotten some of the details. I have to strain to remember others. But the one thing that remains is this: I remember how I felt when I was with him, and I remember how I felt when we were apart. Those feelings are with me today, so much so that, just typing these words, I have tears in my eyes.

These two seemingly unrelated experiences—loving a book, loving a person—are to me completely connected to loving a photograph, and to what makes a photograph great. It’s the feeling it produces in me, a feeling that becomes a part of me and stays with me long after I’ve forgotten the details of what the photograph looks like.

P.S. I’m still working on choosing my favorite photo of all time. I can’t even choose my favorite photographer, so I’m not sure how I’ll narrow the field. For now, as promised, here’s one of my photos from today.

Labels: books, family, Jörg Colberg

Look at the pretty horsies!

I’m not sure what it says about me that I left a small Midwestern town for California, only to find myself taking pictures of horses and roosters. Okay, it was a 10-foot-tall statue of a rooster, but still.

When I was a kid, there was a family in my neighborhood that owned a horse and a rooster. I used to hear the rooster crowing in the morning, and occasionally, the horse would get out of his corral and follow my dad on his daily jog.

Labels: family

Friday, August 01, 2008

Print sale: Cara’s Bed, Guilford, Connecticut

Monday, July 14, 2008

Longest blog post ever

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Connect-i-cut

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Goodbye to all that

Thursday, April 10, 2008

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

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Me and my 9-year-old self

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Secret

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Mythology

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Pancakes

Thursday, August 16, 2007

My kind of town

Friday, May 25, 2007

Favorite picture

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Dirt

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

What makes a great photograph

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Look at the pretty horsies!

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