My Mt. Everest is Calling

I am a 60 something who has decided against all common sense to pursue his passion as a late in life career change. I aspire to be a fine art photographer, published and shown. This blog records my journey.

[mymteverestiscalling]

Difficult Month

I spent my days trying to concentrate on my photography and web design work at which I was only moderately successful. I spent my evenings wrapped in an alcohol cocoon, watching movies until it was time to go to bed or pick up my wife at the train station

Dispatch from the side of the mountain...

[mymteverestiscalling]

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Actually, mostly agony at this point. Hoping for a little ecstasy soon. I have been checking my email every two minutes (I know, seriously dude, get a life) looking for word of my success or lack thereof with my various submissions. I've actually gotten a little irritable over the fact that I haven't heard from any of the seven submissions I made in January. It's time folks. Put us out of our misery!

Read more.

[mymteverestiscalling]

Making the Work

Make the work, something will come of it. Attributed by an acquaintance to John Cage. The artist book show I am part of opened at The Center for Photography at Woodstock this past Saturday. I spent a lot of time last week getting my work ready. I had to frame four photographs, produce six copies of my booklet and deliver all that to CPW. I was binding booklets at twelve noon on Saturday and placed them in the hands of the ED fifteen minutes before the show. I had barely enough time to shower and take the dogs for a longish walk to wear them out a bit before I left.

Read more.

[mymteverestiscalling]

A bit of a roller coaster ride.

A little over a month ago I had a portfolio review with the new Executive Director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock. It went well. I had brought one of my hand bound booklets to share if the moment seemed opportune. It was looked at and I was offered a spot in an upcoming book art show. I was pleased. The year was off to a good start. I was told that I would be contacted the following week to hammer out details. The following week came and went. The week following the following week came and went. I began to wonder if I had imagined or misunderstood her words.

Read more...

[mymteverestiscalling]

I have begun an experiment with words and images. I have been toying with the idea that images and text could be presented together as equals and in a way that is mutually enhancing, neither in...

The latest on the climb...

[mymteverestiscalling]

Submissions completed, doubts set in.

November 20, 2015 #010 Beacon NY

The latest on the climb...

[mymteverestiscalling]

Will I be that guy?

I have always had a weak spot for movies about underdogs. Regular, or even less than regular Joes or Janes who have undertaken some herculean task that seems way beyond their skill set and any...

My latest blog post.

I am in the process of moving the blog to a new site on Weebly. I will continue to post links here to the posts I make, but they won’t originate here anymore. Hope you don’t mind the extra click.

[mymteverestiscalling]

Off to the Races!

I just finished assembling the submissions calendar for January 2016. Yikes, four significant submission opportunities happening at the end of the month! They are as follows:

• Center Choice Awards and Project Development Grant, due January 22nd.

• New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowship, due January 29th.

• Photography Now 2016, due January 31st.

These are all relatively major opportunities and highly competitive. My goal for this year is to win/be accepted into at least one of the major opportunities I apply to.

I note that Photography Now has an additional plus, the juror is James Estrin, founder and co-editor of the New York Times’ Lens Blog. Even if I don’t make it into Photography Now, it is always possible Mr. Estrin will see something he likes and do something with it on the Lens Blog.

Pulling together submissions to these opportunities is not as daunting as you might think, in that it will be a somewhat similar body of work submitted to each one. The hard part is deciding what that body of work is.

I will have one CPW Salon meeting prior to these submissions, and I am trying to decide if I will use it to help me edit my selections. I have not always found the Salon helpful in this way. Mostly they tell you when an image doesn’t work in their opinion. I might just bring an unrelated new set of images for their consideration.

At the end of the day, the decision is mine and I have found that you need to go with your gut and see what happens.

[mymteverestiscalling]

Looking Back

This is my last post in 2015, so I thought it would be good to review what happened on my journey up the mountain this year.

A lot really, though it started off slowly.

During the winter I applied to a few opportunities without success. I submitted to Photography Now 2015 (which I do every year, and which has opened for submissions for 2016) in January, Shots Magazine winter and spring issues, and missed a submission to the New York Times annual portfolio review (there was some personal stuff going on and I got confused about the date). No successes.

I picked up the pace from spring into summer, applying to the Light Work Artist in Residency program, PhotoLucida Critical Mass, LensCulture Emerging Fifty and a call for entries from The Griffin Museum of Photography, which became my first success of the year.

The Griffin Museum show was followed by placing a photograph in the fall issue of Shots Magazine and then a portfolio spread in the Annual Portfolio issue. And finally, I mounted a one person gallery show here in Beacon NY, where the major achievement was having a cohesive show with twenty six pictures in it and a lot of people showing up for the reception.

Throughout this journey I have been prepared for signs that I might want to reconsider what I am doing, but they don’t come. Not this past year, not the year before that. To be sure, I have not yet succeeded in any of the bigger submission opportunities and there have been times when the lack of success got me down. But achievements always come. There is a perceptible and, for the time being, accelerating escalation.

I am grateful for the successes I have had and the encouragement I have received, especially from my wife, the CPW Salon and my fellow Tumblr photographers. 

Here’s to a happy, healthy and successful 2016 for all of us!

[mymteverestiscalling]

Shots Magazine!

The magazine article I couldn’t talk too much about has come out, so now I can talk about it all I want. I made it into the 2015 Portfolio issue of Shots Magazine. I am one of nine photographers featured. The article includes my answers to a set of email questions and I thought I would make that the content of my post today. It makes for a bit of a long post, but you get to learn a little more about me.

What is your earliest memory of being moved by a work of art?

Monet's Reflections of Clouds on Water, which I saw at MoMA when I was in my 20s. It was not the first time I was emotionally moved by a work of art, but it was the first time I can remember coming to my own conclusions about a work of art and understanding that a picture could be about more than what it represented in a literal sense.

I was fascinated by the intersection of object phenomena -- clouds, plants, body of water -- with the subjective and illusory phenomenal world depicted in a painting of the reflections of clouds and plants on the surface of a body of water. While plants, sky and water can be grasped as things by all five senses, reflections on the surface of the water are experienced by only one sense, though they can invoke memories of other sensations. This is not unlike a photograph. In fact, any pictorial representation has this quality.

I see Impressionism as an attempt to explore the boundaries between object and personality. What we have in this painting is a reflective world itself reflected by a personality, in this case, that of Monet.

Monet's choice of subject matter, rendered with impressionistic techniques and sensibilities, created a sublime hall of mirrors for me. The whole universe poured in.

How was it that you first became interested in photography? Who or what were your most prevalent mentors or influences along the way?

I've had a camera of one kind or another from the time I was old enough to take care of them. There were Instamatics with flashcubes and cheap Polaroid cameras in the beginning. I got my first "serious" camera, a Minolta 35mm that I still have, when I was in high school. I remember going for walks at sunset in the winter and trying to capture the magic I saw.

My father was probably an influence. He's had some kind of camera for as long as I can remember. He owned a Polaroid SX-70 when it first came out. Like many dads, he took lots of pictures of his family and kept albums.

I've had artistic intent from the beginning, but it was not until recently that I have pursued that intent full throttle, and I give both life circumstances and the arrival of the digital age credit for that.

When digital cameras arrived, I bought a series of them to use in my profession, architecture. And because of architecture, I also had Photoshop, the digital darkroom. I've never spent time in an analog darkroom. I sent film out to be developed and printed. With the arrival of the digital age, I was in full control of the image, from exposure to printing.

Why did you choose photography versus another means of expression?

I'm a miserable failure when it comes to freehand drawing or painting. Of course I took a nude drawing class when I was in college and was encouraged to keep a sketch book, but I was much better at mechanical drafting and rendering artistic ideas in precise ways with precise tools.

At the same time, I have a poetic and emotive personality. With a camera I can bring the two together in a way that is perfect for me. It provides an accurate rendering of an object or scene, which I choose for its emotive impact, and which I then process with computer tools in ways that intensify that impact.

My wife likes to say that I paint with the camera.

Tell us about the work that is presented here.

When I got serious about photography as an art form, I began going for daily, meditative photo walks. My walks are along streets and trails in Beacon NY for the most part, but I maintain the practice when traveling. I've been doing this for three or four years now. I walk at the same time every day and I photograph whatever attracts me. When I return home, I edit the images I have captured as I feel compelled to. There is often a significant difference between the image as it comes off the memory card and the final product. People like to ask, "did you get anything good today?" when they see me on the street. I tell them "probably, but I never know until I get home and get them on the computer." It all depends on what I can draw out of them when I process them.

My work is personal and meditative. It drives at themes and questions that are on the mind of a sixty year old man -- life, death, sex, the meaning of all this, the meaning of me.

The work I have presented here is a sub-set of this larger and more encompassing effort. To me, this particular set addresses nature's fecundity (I love that word) and death.

Do you keep a journal or a sketchbook? If so, what form does it take?

I keep a written journal. Part of my meditative routine is to stop at a local cafe and write for an hour or so after my photo walk. I write using a simple text editor on my iPad. I used to write with a fountain pen in Moleskin notebooks or the like, but in the digital age I can't bear to have my written material in such an un-malleable form.

My writing starts as stream of consciousness and proceeds to whatever riffing I want to do off of that. Days, weeks, even months later I will read what I have written and some of it will be worthy of refining into a more considered piece. I've joined a local writing group to help me develop that end of my practice.

I am currently exploring the combination of images and words. My interest is in combining them so that they mutually reinforce each another without trying to describe or illustrate one another. The words and the pictures each stand on their own, on separate pages. Together they deliver a more dimensional story.

The words have a way of grounding the photographic work. They also introduce more directly certain kinds of subject material, such as people. I almost never photograph people. I am too shy to ask them. But I can sit in a cafe and observe what is going on around me and write about them without being noticed.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?

When I was in college I worked a couple of summers on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Plant in Mahwah NJ. I had some important experiences there. One in particular stands out.

It was my last day of work before returning to school. I worked the night shift. During "lunch," one of the guys working near me on the line insisted on buying me a farewell beer. We ran out of the plant, hopped in his car and raced to a dive bar on the other side of the highway. He bought me a couple of beers and I watched him down five or six mugs himself. He sat there with tears streaming down his cheeks, telling me not to be like him; to get my education and do something better with my life; to be in control of my life.

I think he had gotten a girl pregnant, married her and the next thing he knew he was on the assembly line of an automobile plant because that was the best way to support his family.

I had a number of human experiences like that while working in the plant.

I don't know what relation that has to my photography except that the bar and we would have been perfect subject material for Robert Frank's The Americans, just a few years too late.

What album/book/movie is the most meaningful to you and why?

I think I will go with Moby Dick on this one. It is probably the most relevant to the photographic work I am doing.

I tried for years to read it and never got past the first one hundred pages. And then I read a book called All Things Shining, subtitled Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. It singled out Moby Dick as the pinnacle of Western literature as far as "meaning in a secular age" was concerned. The authors illustrated the point with passages from the book that were so beautiful. I was inspired to pick it up again and read until I encountered each of the passages it singled out. The next thing I knew I had finished it.

One passage especially stood out to me. Ishmael and his boat mates become stranded in the middle of a pod of whales during a hunt. The pod is under attack from the crew of the Pequod and it is a churning mass of chaotic anger on the peripheries, but at the center it is blissfully calm. Ishmael looks down and sees in the depths of the waters all the birthing mothers and calves swimming serenely beneath him. He sees, in effect, the birthing center of the universe. Melville has him reflect on his experience this way:

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still forever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

Oh my...

In conclusion, what does being a photographer mean to your life?

It is the journey I have chosen to finish my life with. You reach a certain age and begin to wonder what you have done with your life and what it all means. You begin to acknowledge that there is a limited amount of time on the planet and you think that for once in your life you want to do exactly what you desire to do, and for me that is photography and writing.

About three years ago I stopped being an Architect and started being a Photographer and Writer. I have applied myself diligently and happily ever since. I have given myself the space to pursue deep questions with my images and writing on a daily basis. It's not the most intelligent financial decision I ever made, but it's a completely satisfying one.

When I made this decision I started a blog called My Mount Everest is Calling, so titled because it seemed a good metaphor for what I was undertaking. At the top of My Mount Everest is a published photography book and significant acknowledgement of my work.

I am under no illusions. The fine art photography business is an incredibly difficult one to succeed in, and the idea of undertaking the climb at my age and with my lack of connections is just short of ludicrous. Hell, maybe it is ludicrous. But when I started the blog and thought about the insanity of what I had decided to do, the image of a quadriplegic deciding to climb Mt. Everest popped into my head. I immediately wrote that into my first post as equivalence to what I was undertaking. And then it occurred to me to do a Google search for quadriplegics climbing mountains and wouldn't you know, up pops Kyle Maynard who climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. That's it, I thought to myself, no excuses.

[mymteverestiscalling]

First day of December

It’s the first day of December. My how fast the year has gone. How fast we have moved from summer into fall and now winter. Can it be that the Thanksgiving feasting is complete and we are now in the mad dash that is the time between TG and Christmas (or Hanukkah or Festivus or Kwanzaa or whatever it is you may celebrate this time of year)?

I have been drooling over the year end lists of photo books that well regarded sites recommend we make part of our collections. Alas, none of the ones I purchased this year seem to be on the list. So much for my photo book retirement investment strategy.

I added to my collection last week. A show of self published photo books opened at the Davis/Orton Gallery in Hudson NY. I had considered entering a book of some kind to this show, but I did not have the time and developed material (the writing part is lagging behind) to submit what I thought would be a good entry, so I decided to wait until next year when I know I will have the material and will have been working on it to the point it should be ready to go when the call rolls around again. I am jealous of creators who can just crank this stuff out in rapid succession though I know it is all hard work.

My doom and gloom meter should be screaming at me to get off my tush and just do it, but I move in pretty slow and mysterious ways. The conditions have to be right and conducive and there has to be lots of time for “feeling” the final product into place. It can’t be forced, it just has to become at its own pace.

From the “how much time do I have left” perspective, it is a risky strategy, but there you are. We move our opus forward as best we can and if we expire before it can be finished someone else will just have to do the work posthumously that we were unable to bring ourselves to do humously. It happens all the time. I understand the last two volumes of Proust’s masterpiece had to be edited and shaped up by his survivors.

All the framing materials I ordered for my upcoming show have arrived. Now I have to figure out what photographs will be in the show. I need about twenty-five. Of course I will hang the photographs that will be in the magazine article coming out this month. That will be twelve or so images. I know of three others I absolutely want to hang. That is fifteen. It shouldn’t be too hard to choose ten or so more. I think I may already have an idea of what two or three of them will be. Down to seven. This is moving along uncharacteristically quickly…

[mymteverestiscalling]

Not in it for the money...

Lots of my week was taken up responding to the interview questions that arrived by email last Friday. My answers will be included with the pictures in the magazine spread I mentioned. It’s amazing how long it takes to be concise and interesting. I had all the questions answered within a couple of days, but the refining took a lot of time. I would not be surprised to learn that I put twenty or thirty hours into three or four pages of writing.

This was writing group week, so I brought my answers to the group for assurance that I had been interesing and assistance with being concise. They helped me clean up some redundancies, corrected my punctuation and assured me it was terrific. It did not get much more concise. I am hoping that it will be published in its entirety because I think my answers were good and I’ll be damned if I know what could be edited out without losing something important.

I don’t think I have mentioned that I was talked into doing a solo show in the basement of a local church. I did some pro bono consulting on space utilization for them a while back and they are anxious to repay me with the use of their “art gallery” space. I decided to take them up on it. It’s been a while since I’ve had a show locally. It will be a largish one. I will need 25 to 30 images to fill the space.

The biggest challenge in mounting a show of this size is to figure out how to frame it economically. This past year I have been manufacturing my own frames and I like the profile and look I have developed, but there was no way I was going to build twenty plus frames in a little over a month.

Swiss corner clips came to my attention after a few searches on the web. They are $6.79 per image framed. The true miracle though was finding Matboard and More in Georgia, who will custom cut eight ply museum matt board, art grade non-glare plexiglass, and eighth inch acid free foamcore backer board for $18.18 per picture shipped if you needed a bunch of them. And I love this setup, because if someone wants to frame, all they need is the frame. The rest is there already. Still a bit of a nut to swallow for 25 pictures, but the good news is, it’s a one time nut until the photo sells. I’ll be able to do more shows with the same equipment.

These kinds of expenses never occur to you as you start the journey up the fine art photography mountain. They don’t tell you that you frame and ship work to galleries at your own expense. They don’t tell you how much archival photo paper and printer ink costs. They don’t tell you that there is a fee for most calls for entry. They don’t tell you that there is a fee for most portfolio reviews. They don’t tell you that if you need to print to a size larger than your equipment can accommodate, the big bucks start to flow to send it out. It can easily add up to a purchase price that seems way too high for work done by a relative unknown. Casual buyers won’t buy. Buyers who know what they are doing won’t buy unless they are really adventurous. No, they don’t tell you how expensive it is to be a fine artist.

Alright, they did mumble something about that in the “Getting Known and Being Shown” workshop I took last year. I believe they said most of us would invest far more in getting our photography out there than we are likely to recoup in sales. Yah, few artists are in it for the money…

[mymteverestiscalling]

Another Goal Met

Big good news this past week. I scored a multiple photo spread and interview in a magazine. I can't say more about it than that right now. The news came to my attention as I was setting the alarm on my iPhone and scanning email one last time before I slept. A "woohoo!" of happiness leaped out of my mouth. I was excited. I am excited. It took me about an hour to fall asleep after that. Ugh, I had to get up early the next day, so the sleep window was already going to be small. Getting enough sleep has been an issue.

It's been a somewhat rough ride emotionally lately. I've shared some of the medical stuff which has been, from a seeing the forest instead of the trees point of view, not so bad, just a little depressing in a "time is short so make the best of each day" kind of way. And then the actor Fred Thompson died at the age of seventy-three. I am sixty. Really? It's possible there are only thirteen years left? Of course, it's possible there are twenty to thirty years left and also possible there is only one day left. We never know. Thankfully the doctors are so far telling me I am pretty healthy and don't have any new issues to worry about.

My wife has been struggling too. She had an awful day at work the day the publication news arrived. My good news had to be largely celebrated alone because of that. Not that she isn't happy for me, she is, she just had a really bad day and has been having a bad stretch. Sometimes our traveling companions are going through hard stuff at the same time we are and it makes the journey more of a slog.

The publication news was much needed affirmation. I've been feeling adrift. I was beginning to wonder if I knew what I was doing, whether I had lost my way in the wilderness. Confidence was draining away.

More affirmation came my way at Salon, which took place before I received the publication news. I met up with one of my new photography friends before hand. We had coffee and a good chat.  I was a little nervous, wondering if we'd have an hours worth of conversation. We did  of course. As I said in a previous post, having a male friend is new territory for me, but I am enjoying it.

At Salon, my work was received well as it usually is. Even more significantly, I had a breakthrough in critiquing other people's work. It is routine for the Salon to like my work, but I find it very hard to let go of the lens through which I view my own work and see another's work objectively. This time, I was able to offer ways of looking at work that were not about my lens and were well received. Most importantly, I was able to articulate a sound idea about the connection between photographs in a group one member presented that ran against the prevailing Salon opinion that there was no connection. I saw something that pulled them together, and when I said so, the leaders of the Salon agreed. It gave me the sense that I am beginning to understand how photographs can reverberate with one another in subtle ways.

I often find myself looking at sets of photographs -- on line, in photography books, at Salon -- and while I understand there is something powerful in their collective presentation, I have generally been unable to articulate what it is that makes the work feel that way. I just know it is good. This time I sensed a subtle and powerful connection between three photographs that raised them to the level of "wow!" for me and I was able to articulate that.  It gives me hope that I am on the verge of becoming a better assembler of my own work.

One of the Salon leaders has been making it a point to tell me "nice work" at the end of each Salon and to generally be very encouraging. It's funny, because I was slow to recognize he was a fan of my work, possibly one of my biggest fans. He is the same one who told me my work is good enough to submit to anything I wanted to submit to. I recently found out he has work in the Museum of Modern Art and in other significant places. That raised his credibility level, though it was already pretty high because his work is so good.

I wish my wife weren't having such a hard time, and I will be happier when I have finished running the gauntlet of doctors for the year, cardiologist this week, gastroenterologist soon, maybe another visit to the skin doctor to check another spot that is causing me concern. Doctors have a way of making me feel mortal. It's not their fault. I'm a bit of hypochondriac and easily convince myself that the good health sky is falling down. But yah, looking at the forest and world events notwithstanding, life was good this week.

[mymteverestiscalling]

Practice, Practice, Practice.

A rainy Sunday morning. I stood on my front porch with backpack and camera contemplating what to do. I decided against the photo walk and gave brief consideration to a photo drive but decided against that too. I came back into the house and readjusted my thinking about how the day would start. I made myself a cup of tea and headed upstairs to my studio. There is lots to do today. This blog post for starters.

Then there are the more than eight hundred photographs I took of Back to the Garden 1969 — a cover band dedicated to re-living the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival. Seems there are lots of aging hippies and hippy wannabes that enjoy reconnecting to their glory days.

I need to sort the photos from October for posting on Tumblr and on my portfolio site. There’s the top 100, top 28–31 depending on the month, and the top 10–20 that will make it onto my portfolio site. I have more pictures to choose from than usual, but the month was kind of erratic. I am not sure what the choosing will be like.

Also there is the Shots Magazine Annual Portfolio Issue submission, deadline tomorrow. I have to look at all my pictures from the year and try and arrive at 12–20 that will make a standout portfolio submission. This is one of my weak spots. The selection of groups of photos. I’ve been totally unsuccessful at getting anyone to publish or hang more than one photo at a time. Practice, practice, practice.

The good news is that I am feeling better about things this week. I’ve made my way through much of the medical profession gauntlet without too much disturbing feedback. I still have to do the 24 hour heart monitor test, but I am not expecting anything significant out of that.

I decided to let the new dentist do the deep periodontal cleaning they had proposed as part of their five grand constellation of things that need doing. Damn if I didn’t actually feel physically better in general a couple of days later. Of course other things have been changing too. My alcohol consumption is down; I am eating better; I’ve doubled my exercise; my ankle has almost stopped hurting (did I tell you I sprained it badly while on vacation in September?). Of course, the general wisdom is that you should get yourself in good shape before setting out to climb a mountain, but this being a metaphorical mountain that is as much about finding one’s self as achieving a specific goal, it makes sense that part of the journey is moving into a better physical and emotional space.

Someone told me a while back that Mars has been an issue astrologically speaking. I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that it has overtaken Venus in the morning sky, so, coincidentally things are improving as Mars bypasses Venus. I don’t plan to make anything of that. It’s just something beautiful to contemplate in the morning.

Have I inched any higher on the mountain? I think it is more that I have overcome some setbacks and am getting ready to return to the climbing effort. Time will tell.

[mymteverestiscalling]

Of Darkness and Light

Since nothing of photographic significance happened this week, I thought I might quote from my journal about significant things that have been happening that have impacted my frame of mind. In any creative climb, frame of mind is all important and we don’t get to control everything that impacts that. It’s part of how our resolve and determination gets tested.

October 21, 2015

How hard life tries! This thought comes to my mind as I remember the day we said goodbye to our dog Calvin. He was still a vital dog in some ways, getting up from the blanket we had placed him on in front of the vet to get a drink of water as if nothing unusual was going on. Creatures are like that. They keep trying.  But it was clear to us and the vet that he was going downhill fast and that suffering was not far away; clear that we needed to help him ease into his darkness.

I'm feeling good today, so I don't know why this thought occurred to me, or perhaps I do. The finiteness of life has been on my mind. There have been many health care professional appointments lately.

First came the skin doctor who assured me that my worst fears had not been realized, but we agreed that one little bump should be biopsied. I walked out relieved, though still fairly sure that the news would be pre-cancer or cancer. Because I have had a few basal cells removed, I assume it will be more of the same. Towards the end of the following week a call from the skin doctor confirms pre-cancer and my need to return. It's been many years since one of these came up positive.

Then I ran out of Blood Pressure med's and took the bottle in for a refill. The pharmacist informed me he couldn't give me the last refill. The expiration date of the prescription had passed and my insurance wouldn't pay for it. I left with a couple of pills and the realization that this would mean going to the doctor for a check in. I wasn’t ready for a check in. I had plans for my weight to be down and my habits to have changed. I ran home and checked my BP, which I had not done in a while. It was alarmingly high. A call to my GP yields a date with the nurse to check it. The following day I appear. The numbers are better but still high. My prescription is renewed and I am scheduled to see the doctor a week and a half later. Good, I am thinking, I have a week and a half to change my ways and present better numbers when I see her.

Then along came the new dentist. According to the new dentist my mouth is falling apart. After many X-rays and a cursory cleaning by the hygienist the dentist comes in, a young Chinese woman barely out of school, and spews out a long laundry list of work that I need to have done. I am told to see the billing department on the way out where they hand me an estimate totaling more than five thousand dollars. I am the proverbial deer in the headlights. "You don't need to do it all at once she says." I look at the young woman in the billing department who is all smiles and positive attitude and say, "You know, I just met you." Which is my way of saying, “why the fuck should I trust you at all?”

But beyond the hideousness of the idea that I might have in excess of five thousand dollars worth of dental work to do is the even more hideous possibility that maybe they are right and my mouth is falling apart. I resolved to have this confirmed by yet another dentist in town.

My skin doctor and GP appointments fell on the same day.

At the skin doctor I find out my pre-cancer is squamous cell. Haven't had that one before. Still, it's better than melanoma, the Darth Vader of skin cancers.

Later at the GP the nurse takes my BP a couple of times. Systolic in the mid to high 130's. Better. After a long wait my GP comes in and we chat about my habit changes and discuss a strategy. She listens to my lungs and my heart. “Lungs are clear but I am hearing extra beats” she says. “Palpitations, could be due to many things,” she says, -- like maybe my conviction that whatever doctor I am seeing is about to give me the worst news possible -- I think to myself. That of course will be true one day unless I drop dead before I can get there. She wants me to have a 24 hour heart monitoring done and will call with details later in the week.

I have long thought that the universe is more darkness than light; that the light we experience as the dominant fact of our existence is really in very short supply and the darkness in very great supply. We are like little light factories in a vast dark cosmos. We busy ourselves manufacturing as much light as we possibly can, but we can only push back the darkness so much and not for very long.

There are times when that darkness seems to be closing in on me, threatening to overwhelm my little light; as if I am something anomalous that should not be let too far out of the box; as if I am something that must be beaten back for fear that I will attain some level of understanding I can not be allowed to have. How is it that the more I think I am on to something the more conscious I become of the darkness?

I have become determined to make every lifestyle change consistent with lowering my blood pressure that I can make myself aware of. No more alcohol. No more caffeine. Double the exercise. More sleep. Known BP positive foods. Two weeks out and these changes are sticking and the BP has come down and I have lost some weight. They say it takes a month to learn new habits, only a couple more weeks to go. I resolve to order myself one of those misfit fitness and activity monitors. Light factories need good gauges to monitor their performance.

[mymteverestiscalling]

Companions on the Journey

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from a gentleman introducing himself as an almost neighbor (lives on the block behind me), photography enthusiast and fan of my work, which, in his opinion, rose above much of the work being done by local photographers. He also shared some of his work, which I skimmed over and thought I liked at the time and since then have looked at more closely and decided that I really like. He got my contact information from another near neighbor and acquaintance. He wondered if we might get together sometime. I thanked him and said sure.

We met at a local coffee shop this past week and spent a couple of hours talking, mostly about our photo likes and dislikes but also a little about our relative life histories. It turns out that we are about the same age and on a similar journey. He is recently retired from a career in commercial photography and now reveling in the freedom to enjoy photography for its own sake. Like me, publishing a book is a goal. We’ve exchanged a number of emails since then and it looks like our tastes overlap while also heading off in some different directions. Excellent.

I’ve made another male friend through the Woodstock Salon. He doesn’t seem to have a website, so I can’t give you a link, but he has an amazing eye and interesting photographic ideas. We enjoy each other’s work and friendship and support one another in our photographic efforts.

This is new for me. I can count on one hand the number of male friends I have had in my entire life. It’s not something I do well, largely because I am into very little of what other males in my culture are into and I am definitely not into competing with them in any kind of macho way. I love to cook and read poetry and other types of good literature. My music tastes run in the direction of folk, jazz, classical, choral and gregorian chants. I astound my wife with my lack of knowledge of the contemporary music of my and her day (Rock and Roll). My movie tastes are either chick flick (I cry at all the right moments in all of them), the soulful quiet ones, like Smoke or Big Night or erotic (but generally not porn). Ok, I guess I am showing some male stripes with that last one. Still, I am a male with a strong feminine side, not in the “I wish I had been a girl and maybe I should consider a transition way,” but in the I want to cook for her, watch a good relationship movie with her (perhaps with a little sex in it), talk with her and then have a good roll in the hay kind of way. At dinner parties I tend to hang out with the women in the kitchen rather than the men in the living room, not to flirt, but because I can talk with them, trade recipes, stuff like that. It’s a shame we never had children, I am sure I would have enjoyed sharing with them about that as well.

It surprises me, to be developing some male friends at this stage of life. I am guessing it’s because I am now doing something that is in complete tune with the core of my being and finding some men who feel the same way.

It makes me a bit nervous. I wonder if at some point one of them will call upon me to do be or  do macho. I don’t do macho.

For the time being though, I am enjoying the idea of having some male companions on my journey. I hope it continues.

[mymteverestiscalling]

Feedback!

One of the calls for entry I submitted to, LensCulture Emerging 50, offered a review of your work regardless of whether you were chosen or not. All you had to do was request it. No extra charge (a relief because entry fee to this one is fairly steep). This is novel. All other calls for entry don’t tell you squat if you aren’t chosen. Just thank you and try again.

It took a long time for the review to come. To be honest, I expected it to be encouraging (don’t want to chase away a paying customer) but was not sure how useful it would be. Still, I was genuinely pleased with the reviewer’s comments because it was clear that a perceptive individual had looked at my work, understood it and appreciated it. I thought it would be good to reproduce the review here in it’s entirety because it is pretty darn accurate relative to my own perception of the work and all the suggestions, photographers to look at, things to try, are pretty bang on because, with the exception of photographing people, something I’ve yet to get comfortable with but feel I should, I have tried the approaches suggested (and like them) and looked at the work it was suggested I look at (and like it). So here it is:

Hi Michael,

Thank you for sharing these images - you have a great eye for these small moments of suspended time, where elements together unexpectedly to form a picture. There is an obvious compositional strength, and I think your variety of seasons and subjects bodes well for the long-term project. The variety of scale in your images is also quite good; you present us with a range of both detail and wide shots, establishing a setting and then bringing in an emotional or atmospheric note with the close-up.

I'm reminded, of course, of Walker Evans' work, and to a degree George Tice, though he tended toward a more middle-distance view of everything. Timothy Briner, a contemporary photographer, would also be someone to look at. Though he's been doing a lot more abstraction recently, his work post-Sandy has a similar feel of showing a place but not being conventional about it.

My advice (besides that you should keep doing what you're doing) is to consider shooting at night; obviously this is more a seasonal thing (night is earlier in the winter) so I'm not necessarily suggesting you wander about at midnight (though that would also be interesting) but that using the absence of light, or perhaps experimenting with on-camera flash (it sounds crazy, I know, but really) I think has the potential to add another style of working which might be compelling. If flash (try it! Look at Lars Tunbjork's book Vinter - totally dissimilar vibe, but he uses flash really beautifully) then maybe natural light will still help - George Tice, who I mentioned before, has some marvelous nightscapes. It's just a matter of grain; I don't think the noir gritty feel is in keeping with your project, and I'm not sure if the long exposure is convenient enough to be part of your practice (hence the suggestion of flash)

I would also be interested to see people; who else is out, what else is happening, or perhaps self-portraits? The two reflection images is quite interesting, but I want to see more people on the street. I think it helps us, as viewers, put ourselves into the scene by proxy.

All in all, a strong project, and a great book candidate. Good luck, and I hope to see more soon!

It sheds no light on where I might have stood among all entrants, like, was I number 51 or 901? I also know the reviewers were instructed to uplift, not tear down, so the response might be a little warmer than objectively warranted by the work. Still, I found the review both relevant and useful. Thank you LensCulture!