On New Beginnings

I've been thinking quite a bit about new directions my life will be taking as the result of the break-up of my family. Lately I've given lots of thought to my photography post-divorce.

Prior to being sued for divorce, I had defined for myself a long-term (life-long, perhaps) project of portraying nearly every aspect of my hometown through my 4x5 camera. I had listed approximately 40 portfolios that I wanted to put together over time that would illustrate certain aspects of Portland, and taken together, these individual bodies of work would coalesce to emerge as the most comprehensive view of a city ever put together by an individual photographer. Think Atget on caffeine with film instead of glass plates and a longer time frame in which to work. The hundreds, maybe thousands, of resulting 4"x5" and 4"x10" contact prints would eventually find their place in a historical museum of some sort.

But that all seems to have changed now. I used my 4x5 exactly two times in 2007. Once was for approximately 20 minutes while my wife waited in the car. The other time was for a brief afternoon outing to two locations. That was all I did with that camera last year. Nearly every free moment was spent with my children, or on trying to save my marriage. I certainly do not regret any time ever spent with my kids, but it was very clear that things would never be the same again. My photographic life's work became a mere afterthought, and a very trivial one in comparison to trying to protect my children from having their father removed from their lives.

Now I don't know if I'll ever take up that work again, nor whether I will even print the negatives I've already produced. I feel an odd sort of estrangement from that project, and from the pictures I've already captured. I am very much into the new work I've undertaken since accepting the failure of my marriage: self-portraits with 35mm cameras, pictures of my own shadow, and pictures of my kids with my shadow cast into the frame. This last motif lends itself well to the family picture aesthetic I've written about here before. I'm energized and enthusiastic when I am photographing my children; perhaps even more so when I'm including myself via my shadow.

But the feeling of abandoning my previous project is sad, at least somewhat. Things may change in the future. I certainly won't be allowed to spend time with my children every single weekend, as much as I'd love to. And maybe on the weekends when I am not with them I might hear my 4x5 calling again. But for now, I feel like I must put that phase of my creative life behind me. I won't destroy my existing negatives, as some might. But I don't even feel like looking at them right now. Fortunately I feel confident that my new work direction will provide sustenance for years to come.

Onward.

On Fathers and Senators

"In the end I suppose that's what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents' attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy's election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrowmindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble. A useful fiction, one that haunts me no less than it haunts my family, evoking as it does some lost Eden that extends beyond mere childhood.

There was only one problem: my father was missing. He had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact. Their stories didn't tell me why he had left. They couldn't describe what it might have been like had he stayed. Like the janitor, Mr. Reed, or the black girl who churned up dust as she raced down a Texas road, my father became a prop in someone else's narrative. An attractive prop-the alien figure with the heart of gold, the mysterious stranger who saves the town and wins the girl-but a prop nonetheless."

--Quoted from Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama

I just started reading Senator Obama's first biographical book last night, stirred by his speech in New Hampshire Tuesday night. While I am only a few dozen pages into the book, I gather from its title, and from passages such as those above, that Obama longed to know his absent father as a young child. Perhaps his father's absence carries through this entire book; I have not read enough to know yet.

But it would appear that even our nation's leaders, even our most inspiring and motivating citizens, have or had the same basic need for a close father as the most humble and anonymous among us. The title alone was enough to get me to start with this book when I sought more information on Senator Obama, but passages like this have made me jump into the text with both feet.

And I'll be damned if I'm going to allow myself to become nothing more than a prop in stories told to my children.