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

My day made

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

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

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!)

A very vulnerable thing

Thanks to a late-night e-mail from Susana Raab, I caught Jhumpa Lahiri on Charlie Rose last night, and that led me to reading some online interviews with her this afternoon. In one, at The Atlantic, she said:

It’s easy for me to think, “Why am I doing this? There are so many great writers and great books—what’s the point?” I can get into that mindframe pretty easily, and the more I see that this or that book is coming out, the more easily I go into a very scared place. I know that about myself. I feel protective of my work. And the ability to stay focused is a very vulnerable thing.

Blew my mind. In another interview, she said that she doesn’t have Internet access on her computer and has only really been online looking over other people’s shoulders. (The interview was from 1999, so maybe things have changed for her in the time since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they hadn’t.)

I love blogging, love that someone I met through blogging contacted me through e-mail to tell me about an interview with a writer I’d posted about here. But sometimes I read about other photographers and all they’re accomplishing, and I just want to shut down, forget the rest of the world, and live only in my own.

I haven’t yet ruled that out.

Haunted

I should be editing again tonight, making up from several days last week spent under a blanket, socked with a cold, drinking Sprite, and eating Breyer’s mint chocolate chip ice cream while watching TV. But today was cold and dreary, a typical May day along the coast in Southern California, and all I want to do is read more of Jhumpa Lahiri. I still haven’t found a passage that describes what my neighborhood project is about, but if it’s possible to learn about photography by reading fiction, I’m doing it. Not so much with the title story in Unaccustomed Earth (which I could take or leave), but with the second and third stories, “Hell–Heaven” and “A Choice of Accommodations,” both of which I read today. I haven’t yet figured out how to evoke the kind of feelings in my photographs that she does in her writing, but just reading Lahiri makes me feel it’s possible. Her stories haunt me.

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.”

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.

Timothy Briner in the house

Well, not in the house actually, but in town. Tim was on his way up to Boonville, California, and he stopped in Santa Barbara for breakfast Monday. In between my keeping Boo occupied and away from other people’s food, we had a great conversation about photography and traveling and projects and school. I wish I’d had my camera with me to get a shot of the back deck of his car: an Ilford box, Susan Sontag’s On Photography, and sundry other photo-related items.

Thanks for stopping by, Tim! Come back any time.

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

Launch party

What: A Field Guide to the North American Family launch party
When: Friday, November 2, 7–9 p.m.
Where: Housing Works Used Book Cafe, 126 Crosby St., between Houston and Prince, New York City

The author, Garth Risk Hallberg, will be reading from the book and showing slides, and there will be free drinks and books for sale.

I can’t be there, so if you’re in New York, go for me?

California dreamin’

When I drove home from Venice last night, I took the Pacific Coast Highway, and thought to myself how calm it was. Surfers sitting on their boards in the water, waiting for a wave. Bikers congregated at Neptune’s Net (and when I say bikers, I don’t mean the Northern California cyclists—I mean guys and girls on Harleys and Hondas and Yamahas). Blue water and blue skies and slow-moving cars with license plates from Colorado and Ohio and Nebraska, with drivers and passengers all staring out their windows to the west.

When I went to bed around midnight, the winds were blowing and the dog was pacing. I awoke to pictures of Malibu burning, and thought of these words, which I read for the first time when I lived in Indiana, and which now, having lived in Southern California for six years, I know to be true:

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather.” My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

—Joan Didion (from “Los Angeles Notebook,”
Slouching Towards Bethlehem)

Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times

Field Guide

I just received my copy of A Field Guide to the North American Family, by Garth Risk Hallberg (Mark Batty Publisher, 2007), and even if I weren’t a part of this project, I would be blown away. It’s such a beautifully done book, and I’m really honored to be a part of it. If you haven’t yet ordered a copy, click here and do. Seriously.

Teachers

For reasons that I honestly can’t seem to recall, this morning I found myself thinking of Bloomington, Indiana, the small town where I went to college, a place I haven’t been back to since graduating in 1995. Indiana University is big—no bigger than many of its Big Ten counterparts, but still really big for a kid who grew up in a town of 15,000 and could walk into the local grocery store and say, “Charge it to my dad’s account,” without having to tell them who her dad was, because they just knew.

I’ve since lived in places much bigger, but when I got to Bloomington, full of expectations for what my college years would be, it felt huge and fell short. There are myriad reasons for this. I don’t think I really knew, as a senior in high school, what I wanted in a college. And I went into it passively: I assumed it would teach me, but I didn’t realize I would have to work so hard to learn, and I hadn’t yet learned how to work hard.

I.U. is a good school, and Bloomington is a great town, but I had trouble finding my place in both. Again, myriad reasons. If I knew then what I know now, it would be different, and I might even love it there. But I didn’t, and I couldn’t, and so much of my time was spent counting down the years, months, weeks, and days until graduation.

So would I choose a different school if I had it to do over again? No. Because I met three teachers there who changed the way I look at the world.

One was Barry Kroll, whose Vietnam literature course (with texts like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried) formed the basis for the political beliefs I hold today. We knew, throughout the semester, that Professor Kroll had served in Vietnam, and we all speculated things like, “Hey, do you think he ever killed anyone?” (What else would a bunch of 18-year-olds wonder about?) But when he stood up on the last day of class and put on a green military jacket, we cried, and I have tears in my eyes just thinking of it today. I didn’t think much about war before I took that class, and I haven’t seen war the same way since.

Another was James Madison, who taught American history, and who made it come alive for me in ways it never had before. I still have a clipping in my file cabinet of a letter he wrote to the editor of the Indiana Daily Student, in response to an article about rewriting history, in which he said, in part, “The past is up for grabs—always. It’s not static, it’s not dead, it’s not even past, as one pretty smart American once said. Rather than one and only one way of seeing it, we are free to see it as we see, struggling through reading, thinking, observing, and talking to understand in our own way. That we all will differ in what we see is what causes such confusion and what scares those who perhaps haven’t yet looked hard enough at the past.” Madison was it, you know?

The third was Scott Russell Sanders, who taught an English class called “A Sense of Place,” and who once, on a beautiful afternoon walked out of the classroom and asked us to join him, as he led us on a walk through Dunn’s Woods, silent all the way. Some of my classmates were whispering to each other, asking what the point was, whether this would be on a test, where we were going. I was first in line behind Sanders, and I was willing to follow him wherever he led me. And where he led me, where he led all of us, was to that sense of place that he cared so deeply about. I don’t think I fully grasped it when I was 18. But I think of him often, and I’ve come, over the years, to understand. (If you’re interested in reading an article by Sanders about Bloomington, and his devotion to and care for that place, click here.)

Can you imagine anyone who makes a greater impact on the world than a teacher?

Accessing Taryn Simon

I bought Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar recently, and I’ve finally gone through it in detail. I like to pay attention (even if it’s after the fact) to my emotional response when I get new photo books, and also to my response as I look at them. When I got this book, I was pleased, but as I read and looked at it, my pleasure slowly turned into respect, and that’s where it stayed.

I don’t know about you, but I think respect is overrated.

Don’t get me wrong—I want to earn people’s respect, and I don’t think it’s a small accomplishment that Ms. Simon has earned the respect of so many. But if that’s all I elicit through my photographs—as it was all she elicited in me—I think I’ll have done something wrong.

I feel about Ms. Simon’s work the same way I feel about Susan Sontag’s writing. Respect, definitely. But that’s the extent of it. I don’t feel anything when I read Sontag, and I don’t feel anything when I look at Simon’s photographs. I think things, but I don’t feel.

Copyright © Taryn Simon

Proof: I had Simon’s book for several weeks before I’d finally finished looking at all the photos and reading all the text. I had Mitch Epstein’s Family Business for 48 hours and I’d already read it in close detail, twice. Alec Soth’s NIAGARA, 24 hours. I didn’t want to put those books down.

What’s the difference? Why the connection to Epstein’s work? Or Soth’s? I have as much trouble describing it or defining it as I do describing or defining why I’m attracted to certain people. I just know it when I feel it.

Copyright © Mitch Epstein

I respect Ms. Simon for her skill, her commitment, her follow-through, her ability to get a camera into some pretty unusual places. But I found that I rarely moved past the question of “How’d she get access to shoot there?” There’s a place for this work, of course. (Justin James Reed has a recent post about Burtynsky, Polidori, and Gursky along these lines.) It just isn’t a place I want to spend much time.

Copyright © Alec Soth

Women will be paid

Last month, for my birthday, my boyfriend gave me a copy of Marc Joseph’s New and Used, and I haven’t been able to look at bookstores, libraries, or record stores the same way since. I wasn’t aware of Joseph’s work, so the birthday present was not just this lovely book, but also an introduction to the photographer. I highly recommend both. If you’re a fan of Alec Soth’s Friday Poem posts (as I am), you’ll enjoy the poetry mixed in with the photographs (not to mention the short stories and essays—Jonathan Lethem, anyone?). Makes me want to go out and buy American Pitbull, too.

Meanwhile, here’s a library shot from this afternoon.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball

John Paul, Mary, and Ajax

Since I got the good news about being part of A Field Guide to the North American Family, I’ve spent some time looking at the photos of the other contributors. Shane Lavalette posted on his blog a tentative list of the photographers who are part of the project. Here’s the list he posted—I’ve added links to the photographers’ Web sites (when links were available), so you can easily find more of their work if you’re as interested as I am.

Jordan Alport, Timothy Briner, Jessica Bruah, Kara Canal, Sandy Carson, Alana Celii, Janice Clark, Jason Curtis, John Paul Davis, Chris Eichler, Amy Elkins, Jason Falchook, Elizabeth Fleming, Catherine Gass, Hans Gindlesberger, Andres Gonzalez, Maury Gortemiller, Jonathan Gitelson, Jennifer Greenburg, Ben Huff, Christy Karpinski, Mickey Kerr, Liz Kuball, Michael Kwiecinski, Shane Lavalette, Jason Lazarus, Stacy Arezou Mehrfar, Nick Meyer, Matt Nighswander, Alexis Pike, Colleen Plumb, Gus Powell, John Putnam, Shawn Records, Rebecca Blume Rothman, Christopher D Salyers, Matthew Schenning, David Shulman, Kevin Sisemore, Brandon Sorg, Brian Sorg, Sai Sriskandarajah, Tema Stauffer, JJ Sulin, Brian Ulrich, Consider Vosu, Grant Willing

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball

I’m in

I got wonderful news today from Garth Risk Hallberg, author of A Field Guide to the North American Family, a novella soon to be published by Mark Batty Publisher: I’m in! One of my photographs has been chosen to illustrate “Entertainment” in the print edition of the book. According to Garth, there were 700 submissions from 100 artists; the book will include 63 sections, one photo per section. I’m completely honored and thrilled to be included in this work. I’ll post more about it as I learn more (the list of contributors and such). For now, if you want to preorder a copy of the book, click here.

A great big thank-you to Shane Lavalette, whose post about this project led me to submit one of my photos in the first place, and to Garth himself, for e-mailing and requesting two more photos he’d seen on my Web site (one of which is the one chosen to appear in the book).

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball

Oversight

Went to the closing of an exhibition of Horace Bristol’s photographs at the East West Gallery in Santa Barbara this week. The gallery—a great, small space—just opened a couple months ago and is run by Bristol’s son, Henri. I didn’t really even recognize Bristol by name, but when I walked into the gallery, I knew immediately who he was. His Tom Joad was on the cover of one of my copies of The Grapes of Wrath. Bristol took the photo during his travels with John Steinbeck to the migrant camps of the Central Valley of California for what was to be a nonfiction book pairing Steinbeck’s words and Bristol’s photos. Instead, Steinbeck turned the stories of the migrant workers into a novel, and high school kids have been reading the CliffsNotes ever since.

Copyright © Horace Bristol

It was my extreme oversight not to include Bristol’s name in my earlier post about Matt Black’s work; to see some of Bristol’s photographs, click here.

P.S. I took this picture of a eucalyptus tree this afternoon in Toro Canyon.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball

Conceptualize this

I’ve spent countless hours—hours that I’ll never get back—in literature courses, and it’s taken me years to return to a place where I enjoy reading. There’s nothing like picking apart a great book to ruin it completely. Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, historicism, deconstructionism . . . the isms were, for me, a killjoy. When I got out of literature classes and started spending a lot of time with writers—at workshops, at conferences, and in grad school—I discovered that lit crit lives in an entirely different dimension from the people who write the books that are being dissected. Writers generally don’t set out to write something with those isms in mind; they set out to tell a story. The isms come after, and they often have nothing to do with the writer’s intention.

I’ve recently noticed that this same dichotomy isn’t as distinct in the art world. The academics seem to have a stronger hold on artists than they do on writers. Artists think and talk in terms of critical constructs that you just don’t hear writers using. It’s not just about the artist creating; the artist has to have a concept for her work. Concept, schmoncept. It’s as though the scholars and critics have gotten into artists’ minds, and the artists have bought in to what the critics are saying. Don’t get me wrong—I think there’s a place for the kind of intellectualizing that academics groove on. I just wonder whether it has any place in the realm of creativity. How much can you possibly produce when you have all that theory—all that stuff that should come after you’re finished with your work—floating around in your mind?

When their last album was released, I heard the Dixie Chicks say that whenever they’re not sure what to do, they ask themselves, “What would Bruce Springsteen do?” Well, whenever I’m not sure what to do, I ask myself, “What would Joan Didion do?” There is a place in this world for the Susan Sontags. But give me Didion any day. I would argue that both women were/are brilliant, but where Sontag was entirely in her head, Didion volleys back and forth between her neuroses and her heart, with curiosity as her compass. I can’t imagine Didion saying, “I think I’ll write an essay about my existential angst as exacerbated and illuminated by the Santa Ana winds,” or “My concept for this piece is a postmodern look at The Doors waiting for Jim Morrison.” I think she wrote, and writes, to try to answer her own questions and to make sense of the world. After Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly and unexpectedly on December 30, 2003, with their daughter, Quintana Roo, in a coma at Beth Israel, Didion wrote to cope with her own grief, and the result was The Year of Magical Thinking, a road map of grief that made me feel, upon reading it, that I could now handle any loss, any death, because at least I would be able to turn to this book and know I was not alone.

And that’s what I want in my own life, in my own work. I want it to be about my questions, my answers, my fears, my opinions, my vision, my voice. I don’t want to get caught up in intellectualizing it—I’ll leave that for other people.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball