Find Your Why

Fahan Beehive Hut, Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry, Ireland, 2001.

Of all the things I learned as the photography artist-in-residence at The Bascom Center for Visual Arts in the mountains of western North Carolina, this seems the most important: before you do anything, find your why.

It was Billy Love, the Bascom’s Deputy Executive Director for Missions and Programs, who instructed me in this idea over dinner at the Ugly Dog pub in the village of Highlands toward the end of my stay. My questions, understandably, had been this: what do I need to do next as an artist in the field of photography? What kinds of grants are available? Where should I look to show my art? All these, I know, are cart-before-the-horse questions.

The first thing to ask myself, he assured me, was why I was doing what I was doing. Why landscape photography? for example. What is my purpose? What am I trying to say? Why, in short, am I photographing rocks and rivers? The articulation of that why, as part of the residency, came in the form of the “artist statement,” a concise intonation of the purpose behind the photographs I exhibited, why I did things this way rather than how. This is of particular interest to viewers of the exhibit and, consequently, people who purchase the photographs.

He assured me that people don’t buy photographs; rather, they buy me, my story. This isn’t too different from a series of webinars I’d seen earlier in the year given by Mindy Sink, who, like me, is an author at Adventure Keen, part of Menasha Ridge Press, where I published my Hiking Kentucky’s Red River Gorge and she, for her part, published several hiking guidebooks. She insisted that people want to support you. Having a presence on social media, for example, gets people interested in your story, certainly, but more than that, they want to see you succeed. I took this to heart—especially now that I’m traveling about, promoting my Red River Gorge guide in the region.

Don’t chase money, Billy told me; instead, articulate a mission. Rather than blindly applying for grants and residencies and fellowships, and spending money to submit photographs for a curator’s consideration, instead focus on the deeper purpose and then, once it is articulated, it will be far easier to find the organizations that support the same mission as I do. They will want to help and, as Mindy said, see me succeed.

I took this to heart when I returned to Kentucky and immediately reached out to the Bernheim Research Forest and Arboretum south of Louisville. Without belaboring the point, they are involved in a legal dispute over a proposed natural gas pipeline that LG&E wants to route through this forest—home to, in some cases, federally endangered species, not to mention some of the region’s most notable flora and animals. I reached out, too, to our local chapter of the Sierra Club and another organization, Save Bernheim Now, both of which are trying to halt the pipeline process. My own proposal was simple: to go into the conservation easement that the utility giant wants to use and document—in words and on film—the place itself, what is at stake.

In doing so, I am addressing one of my most important “why’s”: my passion for conservation. My desire to see Kentucky developing resources other than fossil fuels. To learn more about the natural landscape, historic and contemporary, of Kentucky. As you might expect, all the organizations involved—with the exception of LG&E, no doubt—are interested in what I am proposing and willing to help. Anything helps, they say.

Today, as well, thinking about the rising anxieties over artificial intelligence, AI, especially as it will invariably affect (and already has) both artists and writers—the core of my own identity and, frankly, my own economy and employment—I began to write about it. And as I’ve suggested in other blogs, I myself played out the argument that relying on AI to be creative will cost us a sense of “meaning,” all the while I myself wrote in a state of “flow,” all semblances of my self lost, profoundly motivated—to put it simply, I found “meaning.” Not only found it but lived it.

And here’s the point: when I engage with my “why,” I am motivated. I feel the surge of energy that presses me on, keeps me interested and fascinated, drives me to create something that will help. I can help other people—the organizations involved in the fight, the lives of animals and trees at stake, and most importantly, the people who may not yet realize what is happening at the edges of the forest, the edges of the economy, the frontiers of society and the footnotes of the news. I can help people discover the magic of a place, delineate its value, fight for its conservation.

If you want to find meaning, ask yourself these three questions that Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, would certainly have extolled: What am I doing for other people? What am I adding to the tradition I practice and work within? How am I bearing my own grief, suffering, and troubles so that I may be a light to others?

The answer, then, is the meaning of your life. Find your why, and you’ll find your way.

Art, Flow, and the Meaning of Life: Part III

What is happiness? This is a question, but I think there is a better one: when does happiness occur? Let’s turn our attention to that now.

Viktor Frankl, in the context of his logotherapy, makes the answer clear: in order to have meaning in one’s life, one must set a goal that is transcendental, which is to say, a goal that aims of contributing to something other than, or even larger than, yourself. But the achievement of the goal is not what brings happiness. Rather, as he says, in the progress you make toward your goal, “happiness ensues.” Happiness, in short, is a byproduct.

This relates nicely to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of Flow. Happiness, to Csikszentmihalyi, happens during the state of flow. To achieve “flow,” you need a task, and that task must fit certain parameters to allow you into this state.

It’s worth pointing out a couple important ideas. One is that there are many people who long to achieve leisure. Leisure time is, of course, time where we are freed, or imagine we are freed, from work, drudgery, and distractions. But leisure time, it turns out, is idle time that allows for rumination. When one is unoccupied, negative thoughts creep in. When you are concentrating on a task—and that task is to be done for its own sake, not for some abstract goal—then there is no attention left for rumination! It’s that simple.

As the philosopher Pyrrho suggested with the idea of ataraxis, “the only freedom is freedom from worry.”

Happiness, in short, takes effort. And the effort comes from a task that you give yourself—let’s say for me it’s photography. My photographic practice, as Csikszentmihalyi describes, must follow eight characteristics. Complete concentration on the task at hand—a kind of mindfulness, really. The task must be able, best you can, to provide instant feedback—you need to see that you are doing well. Time will both speed up and slow down. The experience of the work, art, or craft is intrinsically rewarding—you’re not doing it for a material reward, per se. it must be effortless. It must balance your skills against the challenge the task presents: if the challenge is to high, you’ll get frustrated, and too low you’ll get bored. The actions align with your awareness in complete absorption. You have a feeling of control. When all these factors are met—and I’m sure you’ve been there before—you will be in a state of flow.

The personality that Csikszentmihalyi explains as autotelic is the one that does things for their own sake. I don’t photograph, that is, to be rich or famous or get a show or whatever other goal my ego can come up with. I do it because I love it. Because it keeps me conscientious. Because it just feels good to do it. Same with writing, with playing the piano—but also, on occasion, with cooking, or cleaning out the attic.

Another interesting aspect of flow is that is accentuated and increased when done in a group. Have a family task that is interesting, demands some skill and challenge? Try it together.

As I prepare to travel to North Carolina to do my two-month artist residency, I am aware that I am working with the idea of meaning. From Viktor Frankl, I glean the idea that I am working to make art, a meaningful body of work that people might enjoy. That alone gives me meaning. From Csikszentmihalyi, I know that as I undertake the work, if I am conscientious, I will forget the worries of home—the mortgage, my tax filings, my health care paperwork, and all the other obligations I worry over—and immerse myself in what Alfred Stieglitz simply called “camera work.” I will concentrate on my subject, my composition, the view camera movements, the exposure, development, and printing. I will not pursue happiness; I will simply be in it. I will be free of worry, which is the only freedom we have.

I invite you, too, to try Csikszentmihalyi’s books on flow. One, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is more for people like me who’ve had some psychology coursework and can understand the experiments and jargon. Finding Flow, however, is meant for a more general readership, and is interesting (and shorter).

This ends, for now, a brief overview of the meaning of life. It is, simply, to take on a task that will do good for something beyond yourself, and in so doing, with full concentration, you will achieve—however briefly—happiness because you will have shifted your consciousness away from worrying and into the task at hand. Choose the task well: it needs to be challenging, but not more than your skills can handle. You can try something new; just start small, learn all you can, and progress. You will achieve, in addition, confidence. Such has been my experience with photography.

Look: if I can start from scratch with my father’s camera, or terrible poems written in high school, and yet go on to publish books, to win grants and fellowships and artists residencies, and to see my photographs framed and on the wall of a gallery, I assure you that you can do anything. There is absolutely nothing unique about me, really. The older I get, the more ordinary I find myself. But it does not limit my ambition to find meaning, to be happy, and to contribute something to the world.

You can do this, too.

Art, Flow, and the Meaning of Life: Part II

A few days ago, I found in one of those ubiquitous “little libraries” scattered through the city, a copy of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. I had first read this when I taught high school in Oregon, when I had considered using it for my sophomore English class. I am reading it again, and it is striking how much it reminds me of the story of Viktor Frankl.

In one scene of Solzhenitsyn’s novel, the prisoners, sentenced to hard labor in a gulag, are working in subzero temperatures to mix mortar and build a wall. What is incredible is that, though they are in some respects starving, they work to their utmost. The main character works with pride. They are not only surviving in the moment, but actually accomplishing something they value. The reason they can do this is that they find meaning in the job.

They may well have been echoing what Nietzsche famously said: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

For our purposes, in determining what, in the twenty-first century, might help us find meaning in our own daily lives, we can turn to someone who frequently quoted this Nietzschean aphorism: Viktor Frankl.

Viktor Frankl was born in 1905 in Vienna. While a high school student, he began attending public lectures on Applied Psychology, and he began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud—he even sent Freud a manuscript which was eventually published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Frankl gave his first public lecture, On the Meaning of Life, at the age of 15.

By 1924, he was studying medicine at the University of Vienna Medical School, and he was increasingly drawn to Alfred Adler’s “Individual Psychology”—in fact, the term inferiority complex comes from Adler’s theories. Frankl, for his part, was bridging psychotherapy and philosophy, and in 1926, as he lectured throughout Germany, he introduced his idea of logotherapy, a psychological treatment based on finding meaning in one’s life. In a few years, his reputation would spread, and his professional life would find momentum. He began his work at several hospitals in Vienna, where he could interact directly with patients to build his understanding.

These details are important to understanding Frankl, but what is most foundational for an understanding of his ideas lies in his persecution by the Nazis. In 1938, Austria was annexed into Germany, and Frankl was forced to adopt the name Israel as his middle name, which now appeared on documents. He resisted what Nazi procedures he could, including indoctrination of mentally-ill patients to the ideology of German Socialism and also the euthanasia of such patients. Frankl risked his life in doing so.

In 1941, he began to write his life’s work. The next year, he was arrested by the Nazis and deported to the Terezin Ghetto, where his father died of exhaustion. In 1944, he was taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where his manuscript was confiscated and destroyed. His mother, wife, and brother all died in the concentration camps. Frankl survived several camps associated with Dachau, not only surviving hard labor and near starvation but typhoid fever which nearly killed him.

How he survived is detailed in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, first published in the U.S. in 1959. His ideas, laboriously reconstructed on scraps of paper in the camps, become the foundation of logotherapy, and it is this therapeutic model we turn our attention to.

Whether it is Solzhenitsyn describing the gulag or Frankl describing the brutal realities of the concentration camp, their experiences were extreme. For Frankl, the only way to survive was to find a why that would allow him to survive the how of his existence. He gave himself a reason to live: for one, to be reunited with his wife, which was not ultimately to happen; but secondly, to bring his idea of logotherapy—which you yourself can read and understand—to the world.

Imagine suffering from edema in frigid winters, one’s feet swelling so that one’s shoes barely fit, digging ditches under the guard of soldiers armed with machine guns. This was Frankl’s life. While he did this, he imagined himself giving lectures on logotherapy to audiences. He would absorb himself in this imagination. What is striking, and what I found inspiring when I first read the book—the first of several times—was how often I myself had done this, imagining myself giving talks while I washed the dishes, drove my car, or walked through my neighborhood. Imagining such things drives you forward.

One of the most important ideas of Frankl’s, therefore, concerned motivation. Think about it: what motivates you? What, to quote a tired old saw, gets you out of bed in the morning? To Frankl, there was a progression, each piece learned from, and built upon, the ideas of Freud and Adler.

To Freud, what motivated people was what he called the “pleasure principle.” We are motivated, simply, to seek pleasure. When you find yourself stressed, unhappy, what do you do? The reaching for something that provides comfort, however temporary, is what Frankl called the will to pleasure. Whether it’s sugar, cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, or sex, the lowest form of motivation is simply to feel good. Such pleasure is, as the Buddhists have long known, temporary, even illusory. Frankl said the “will to pleasure” was the motivation of the child.

The second level is what Adler called the will to power. Children, Adler, proposed, were dwarfed by adults and therefore felt powerless—the “inferiority complex.” To compensate, they were motivated to accumulate power. In our culture, we see this: the drive for political power, money, social status, property. Frankl agreed this was a very real form of motivation, but he said this was the motivation of adolescents.

Frankl’s question is, then, what is the motivation of grown men and women? His answer was the will to meaning. We are motivated, that is, to find meaning and purpose in our lives. He said there were three main ways to do this, and each has but two requirements: one is that the task involves taking responsibility—because it is responsibility that lends one the meaning to carry on—and the second is that the task is transcendental, which is to say, it lifts one out of their self-concern, their self-interest and instead work towards something larger than oneself.

The first way is to produce a great work. For Frankl this was his book. For me, as well, it is a book I’d like to write—several in fact. I also want to make photographs. For any artist, what they are working with is a tradition, and this is the transcendental aspect: the tradition of photography, of art in general, is far larger than me. I add to it, making photographs or writing—even a blog like this—to give people meaning.

The second way is to devote oneself to the well-being of another: a child, a spouse, a neighbor stricken with illness, an aging parent, even an animal, or a houseplant. This is especially transcendental—and it is the core of much of Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism, which is about cultivating compassion, empathy, and then acting on it. Caring for another rather than stooping to please or power yourself has a direct benefit and gives you the why to live. For me, of course, it is caring for my daughter; when I learned that what she most wanted to do was to travel the world and learn about other cultures, I immediately set to work. I got her a passport and planned out a trip to tour England—and I find my motivation and compassion both blossom.

The third way is what one does in dying. When one has no choice but to die—as much by cancer as by persecution—then one mindfully dies with dignity. This is an act of utmost importance to Frankl because to die with dignity—to not give in to pain, fear, any of it—demonstrates to everyone around you, the world in fact, that one can be strong until the end. It is a demonstration of the resilience and moral character of humankind.

What does this mean for you? You might begin by reading Man’s Search for Meaning, and you might even continue on, if you are comfortable with more clinical prose, to Frankl’s The Will to Meaning. Then ask yourself: where do I seek comfort and pleasure? Where do I seek to compensate my lack of meaning for power and prestige? Then turn your attention to where you do find meaning and emphasize them: where do I help others? What is it I create to aid people in their journey? What is it I endure that I might turn to a deeper power, a more gratifying pleasure?

Which brings us to the final question here: what is Happiness? Frankl has an answer to this fundamental question. I will offer this answer in light of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of “Flow,” which fits nicely with Frankl’s philosophy, in my next writing.

Art, Flow, and the Meaning of Life: Part I

I have a dream that has taken shape over the last three years: to teach a class, to conduct a workshop, on achieving meaning in life.

What do I mean by “The Meaning of Life”? What do any of us mean? For most of my life, certainly since I was a teenager and began questioning things—my parents and authority in general, what I was being taught in school, the principles of the Catholic church—I have imagined that there was some sort of underlying meaning to the universe, a purpose really. There was something, I imagined, that if I came to understand it would change my life.

In college, towards the end of my baccalaureate years, I came upon the Tao te Ching. It would be unsurprising if I, being only 22 years old, didn’t misinterpret what Lao Tzu was suggesting (and at any rate, I would go on to wrestle with its ideas for decades), but what I saw in it was this: there is a fundamental order to the world, and our task is to align ourselves with it. This is, of course, easier said than done.

But this is not necessarily what I pursued. Instead, slowly at first, I began to live an ideal that went like this: if I can change my circumstances, I can change my life. My environment needs to be the right one, I thought—so I would move around. After college, I left upstate New York, where I’d grown up, and moved west to Oregon. I lived in Eugene, then Bend, then Portland. There must be greener grass, I told myself. Many good things happened in those years, for certain. And yet you may see the trap I fell into.

My friend who studies Buddhism put it best: I imagined, he said, that I could, by willpower alone, make a nirvana out of samsara. This, naturally, is not the point of Buddhism or its practice. It’s entirely wrongheaded.

A major understanding came when I began to realize that there is no universal meaning of life. There’s not one answer to which we all must conform. There are principles we live by, certainly—justice, equality, fairness, creativity, and perhaps most of all, kindness—and those principles are, so far as I know, universal. But meaning is entirely individualistic; that is, the meaning of life is the meaning of my life, of your life. It is how we ourselves, each in our own reality, actualize these universal principles in practice. We are not all the same—some of us are engineers, parents, artists, managers. Why should our meaning be precisely the same?

Around the time I conceived of creating a kind of workshop to help people achieve this meaning—and I had two friends whom I met for coffee each week whom I discussed these ideas with—the pandemic began. The lockdown followed and, within a month of that, I was laid off from my job. I quite suddenly found myself applying for unemployment insurance, scraping together any emergency funds I could. It took a year and a half until I secured some regular work. Not long after that, my mother died.

Like many, I found my mind spinning. I questioned my choices in the past, the actions and behaviors I judged relentlessly that left me divorced, a single parent, and now unemployed. I constantly fretted over the future, over money and health care, over whether or not I would keep my house, which I had mortgaged with money my father had left me when he died a little over five years before.

In short, I ruminated.

What is rumination? A common definition is the act of regurgitating food and rechewing it. The psychological definition is what happens when one repetitively and obsessively goes over and over the causes of distress, chewing and chewing on the same thought. Rumination is thinking in its most negative form. In some ways—my Buddhist friend made this clear to me—this is what the mind does. It is an evolutionary maladjustment: the mind seeks the causes of troubles so as to avoid them in the future. In the case of stumbling upon a predator in a certain place, this would be enormously helpful. But in a complicated world, rumination likewise gets complicated. The worlds of dating, of careers, of relationships, or of parenting are not simple. We ask ourselves over and over, what did I do wrong? Rumination is an underlying factor of clinical depression.

Buddhist thinking points out that the “mind stream” is always running. The brain secretes thoughts the way the stomach secretes acids, my friend told me, quoting a Buddhist saying—or the way the heart beats or the lungs fill. It is what the brain does. The key, though, is to see that rumination becomes problematic when we fix our attention on that very thought-stream. The way out of rumination, in fact, is to shift one’s attention. To what?

The answer—and herein lies the “meaning of life”—is simple: shift it to any task. It could be washing dishes, working on a car, or building a class around the meaning of life. This is essentially the task of what we think of as “mindfulness.” However, there are ways to set the stakes high. Art, it turns out, is one way to escape the hell of rumination. As Lucifer intones in Milton’s Paradise Lost,

“Me miserable! which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; / And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep / Still threatening to devour me opens wide, / To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.”

Perhaps you’ve been there. I have.

There is, in fact, a kind of relief. For me it begins, as I would come to learn, with the incredible story of Viktor Frankl. It continues with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of “Flow,” which many of us know about but perhaps not to its full psychological significance. And for me, it ends with the task I have chosen: art, both writing and photography. Parenting is another task I focus on, cooking, yard work…there are many ways to achieve flow. Art is not the only way, but it is one I might use to illustrate how one achieves what Frankl refers to as transcendence. Especially as I prepare to leave for my two-month photography residency.

I will continue this idea in the next blog tomorrow, where I will outline the basics of the transcendental goal that allows one to achieve meaning in their lives—and in the lives of others.

What We Need

I am fifty-two years old, a single parent. I live alone in a house I’ve mortgaged for more than seven years, and I work as what could generally be called a knowledge worker: I am involved in copywriting, content marketing, things of that nature. I am, when all is said and done, an independent contractor. I’m also an artist.

Making time for art and writing has always been a challenge. In 2017, I was working with a local start-up as an email marketer, when I took a leave of absence for a month to be a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, where I intended to work on a nonfiction manuscript. I did do that, but I also ended up writing quite a few poems, something I hadn’t done in a long time. That summer, I attended the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky for a week—I took vacation time from my job to do so.

Later that summer, I was thinking about my father, who died in 2014 of cancer. I had been considering what it is our parents leave us with; it may be that we can only think of these things when we have lost a parent. One thing that struck me was that my father had long photographed, snapshots for the most part, which were kept in family albums growing up. In 1983 or so, he gave up a Kodak Instamatic in favor of buying a Pentax K1000. It seemed like a marvel compared to that little Kodak which he ended up giving to me.

When I came out of college, I began shooting irregularly. I asked my youngest brother if I could use the camera he had from the high school, and I went shooting around Seneca Lake. After I’d moved to Oregon in 1995, I would have access to cheap point-and-shoot cameras, film cameras of course, and I began to keep my own album. In 2000, as a member of the AmeriCorps, I started a middle school photography club with one of my fellow service learners. It ended up running for three years and was very successful.

Twenty years later after my father had bought his SLR, he ended up sending me the Pentax. That year, 2003, while I was living in Bend, Oregon, I took a photography class through the community education office of the local community college, where I myself had taught poetry classes. I learned the fundamentals and then began shooting regularly around Central Oregon. When my wife and I moved to Portland, I continued to shoot film around town until she somehow convinced me to buy, instead, a small digital point-and-shoot.

The Pentax, with its 50mm kit lens and flash, went into a box. They would stay there for more than a decade.

So in the late summer of 2017, I took the Pentax K1000 out of the box. I had it serviced and began using it to photograph my daughter, who was eight years old then. I photographed people a lot: kids from her school and the Girl Scouts, friends of mine. Then I began to think about art, and I would check out books from the library: Sally Mann, Edward Weston, Walker Evans. I began to think differently about what photography could mean.

Poetry, for me, stopped. Photography took up its place. By the next spring, I had purchased my first large-format camera. In 2018, I took a workshop with Kim Weston, Edward’s grandson, out of Edward’s original home at Wildcat Hill on the California coast, shooting at Point Lobos and Garapata Beach. I went home and built a darkroom out of my mudroom. My photographs appeared in a few galleries around Louisville, and in the late autumn of 2019, I took my second workshop with Lynn Radeka in Death Valley. I learned the basics of contrast masking and some advanced printmaking work. I learned the Zone System.

In the spring of 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, I was laid off from that full-time job. I would spend the next year-and-a-half on unemployment, applying for scores of jobs until I managed to get some contract work with a former colleague. But during that time, too, I devoted myself, as much as I could, to learning photography. It is one thing, I believe, that kept me sane. I even managed to get a grant from the Great Meadows Foundation to photograph in Capitol Reef National Park in Utah—the trip was waylaid a year by the pandemic, but I finally went on that adventure in the summer of 2021.

I spent most of 2022, however, in a fog. In the spring, my mother died. My photography had dwindled to the point that my chemicals went brown, totally oxidized. I rarely took the cameras out much that year. I felt uninspired, without direction. I set up my website but then did nothing to maintain it for the course of a year. Even my social media pages languished, and I could find little conviction to write creatively.

But toward the end of the year, in an email newsletter I receive from the Kentucky Arts Council, I saw an opportunity that I found myself thinking about. It was for a photography residency in the mountains of North Carolina. I thought about being away from home, away from my daughter, for two months. I thought about the expenses, though there was a stipend attached. But some of the things it offered in addition to an A-frame cabin to stay in and a one-man show at the end were the chance to give public talks—something I’d done in the “photo salons” I once led here in Louisville—as well as the chance to teach something about photography to middle school students. It seemed like an opportunity I could, at the very least, apply to. Just to see what happened.

I was stunned when The Bascom: A Center for Visual Arts called me to offer me the residency. With the $2,500 stipend attached to the honor, I could build a collection of twenty prints to show at the center’s Joel Gallery in April, 2023. I wrestled with my own doubts: Could I actually pull this off? Is it OK to be away from my daughter for weeks at a time? Am I actually an artist?

Listen: We’ve all been through a lot these past three years. A global pandemic. Political division. Loneliness. Financial struggles. I have felt each of these things acutely.

I’ve spent long periods of time alone. I have struggled to talk about school shootings when people who are purportedly friends turn defensive. I have held what money I have in a clenched fist, arguing with myself whether investing in my life—buying a bit of film, taking a trip, going to a show—is worth it. Finally, a few weeks ago, I contracted the coronavirus, probably the omicron variant. It could have been worse, but I have to think how I was alone when I had it, quarantined even away from my daughter. If it had been worse, what would I have done? How much time, I often ask myself, do I really have?

In light of all this, in all we’ve each been through, I have asked myself this question increasingly: What is it we need?

I believe we need connection. We need to reach out to each other not just politically, in light of our opinions, but with an understanding of our mutual conditions. I believe we need inspiration and a belief in the ideas we have for ourselves, the lives we imagine for ourselves and our families, and the confidence and faith that there are possibilities beyond the constricted narratives we have been taught our whole lives. We need something more than just a job, more than health insurance and money to pay down our debts, more than mere property. We need purpose. Vision. Meaning.

I have decided to place my belief in myself in this fashion: that there are people who believe in me, that are willing to invest in me, to offer me an opportunity to grow, to create, to become. I will put my faith in the idea of action, that if I do what my heart tells me, in however small a voice it sometimes appears as, that there will be consequences to those actions that will give me a deep sense of purpose, of gratitude, and of contributing, even of peace. I will have confidence that what I create—what I print from my negatives, what I write on social media posts or in local publications—will touch people, move people, even inspire people. And while I am in the mountains and forests of Highlands, North Carolina, through the end of winter and into the spring, I will work to make my contribution. To manifest my best self.

What I will do, I think, is heal. We can all do this, so long as we support each other. As Barry Lopez has written, at the close of his seminal book The Rediscovery of North America, “We must turn to each other, and sense that this is possible.”

Art as Redemption

A work of art is an act of redemption.

For some time now, I have thought about the idea of redemption. To my mind, I define the concept in as simple terms as I can find: redemption is an act of recovery.

In the past few years, I have lived through several disasters: divorce, the death of both my parents, being laid off from my job of some six years, a global pandemic. Such experiences can quickly reduce one’s life to ruins, or to a wreck at the ocean’s bottom. But what is one to do?

In 2017, I turned to photography. Rather, I turned back to photography, as I’d never really stopped taking photos, though I’d long since stopped making photographs on film. I took my father’s Pentax K1000 from the closet, and I began shooting in earnest. This was, of course, the first act of redemption.

What I’d done was to recover what was of value of my father, and in this case it was the camera he gave me, but it was also the love of creativity that I shared with the man who was, for much of his life, an engineer or a professor of engineering.

By 2018, I’d purchased my first large format camera and built myself a darkroom. This image, a print of patches of moss on a colossal boulder of sandstone, was taken just above the Rockcastle River in southeastern Kentucky, in the Appalachians. It, too, is an act of redemption, but of a different order.

It is, to me, redemptive in the sense that it is an act of recovering from that day the gold that lies in the experience. I had traveled to this property, a wilderness demonstration site owned by the group Appalachian Science in the Public Interest to meet the caretakers, a couple, both former Buddhist monks at the Furnace Mountain Zen Center in the mountains above the Red River. I wanted to see how they lived. Gretchen Lee Collins, whom I’d followed on social media for a few years, often posted inspiring poems, words, and photographs. It was she who showed me around the trails—her partner, Martin Mudd, left after I met him to do some woodcutting work, if I remember right—and this trail, crossing over a few dry washes, was one.

A photograph is an impression. I think of Edward Weston when I say this. Gretchen, who was doing work around their living space, left me to my own devices. I settled into the draw and looked, listened. It was late October, many colored leaves still on the trees. The quiet was punctuated only by an occasional wind. I found what I would guess to be an old logging road and followed it up to this boulder—”house-sized,” as is often said.

My eye settled on the shapes, the negative impressions left in the moss. They made me think, naturally, of Brett Weston and of Minor White. “Be still with yourself,” White had said, “until the object of your attention affirms your presence.” I set up the view camera, stretching the bellows around 1/3 of a stop past infinity, and shot this wall several times.

It is enough to have left the place with a single negative. I had spent the morning shooting, too, along some cliffs above the road with my Pentax 6x7. But it was this negative that redeemed the experience, where the value of the day was released from the investment I had made—the traveling, the expenditure of fuel, the time. Had I walked out with nothing, I could have likely been satisfied. Often I am, but this time I gathered something. I figured I was like Jason with the Golden Fleece, all the journey made more valuable because I’d found the treasure that I could take back to the village, to friends.

As I was printing this, I had one such person in mind. When I’d posted a scan of the negative on social media, one friend, Megan Falce, whom I’d met out at the Pine Mountain Settlement School years before, loved it. My response was instantaneous, and I resolved to make a print for her. I have by now done so. It makes me happy to do so; she enjoyed it, so why not offer it to her? Isn’t this why we photograph? To share? To explain the value of a place, a time, a moment?

Redemption is to cull the merit of such a moment. It is to make a negative from a day spent in the mountains. It is to perfect a negative from fifteen minutes spent in the darkroom. It is, finally, to make art from days spent at the enlarger, from washing and toning and drying prints before cutting matboard, framing them, mailing them to a post office box in a far reach of Kentucky.

The redemption of art is what affords us the reward: the pleasure that not only I take, but that a viewer takes, be that viewer a friend or stranger. I work toward such achievement.

Photography of Feeling

When I was driving through Nelson County, Kentucky, south of the city of Louisville, where I live, I was looking for an Indian mound I’d been told about by a volunteer at the small history museum in Shepherdsville. He had indicated the location on Google maps—large enough, as he pointed out, to be clearly seen on the satellite image. I drove east on the Clermont Highway toward Bardstown. I had often photographed in that area: the Bernheim Forest, the distilleries, old buildings around Bardstown.

I had a lot on my mind. My mother had been in the hospital for a week. I had contracted shingles, and though I caught the infection quickly, I had a sense of my own health, how frail a body could be. A friend of mine commented on how stress affected our immune systems. It was a warm day in March, spring imminent, the sky mostly clear.

I left the highway and turned north toward the Deatsville Road. It was a highway I’d not been on. Approaching the railroad tracks, I was stunned to see a massive complex of dilapidated buildings and, just beside them, the original Deatsville train station. I parked the car in a bit of gravel beside the station. I saw the moon rising in the east; in my mind, I framed it beside the smokestack beside the tracks.

In the trunk, I had my Sinar 4x5. I set it up, facing the moon and the tower. I tried several lenses, but I could not find a composition to my satisfaction. The image didn’t have the scale I envisioned, and what I saw on the ground glass made little impact on me. I had plenty of afternoon light left, and time enough to find the mound, so I explored a bit more.

The edifices and structures I examined—part of an abandoned distillery I’d not heard of—were behind a chain-link fence, so exploration was out of the question. But two towering silos before me, crowned with what seemed a little guardhouse, soon occupied my attention. I positioned the camera and used movements to effect a straightened perspective. I wanted a sense of the imposing quality of the silos.

The details may not matter so much—I used my 210mm lens, TMAX 100 shot at a speed of 50, a red filter—though they occupied my mind at the time. I had to practice patience; the day was breezy, and a cumulus cloud blocked the sun intermittently, briefly allowing light for a few seconds at a time. I made two exposures (actually three, but the dark slide got caught on the film on the first shot) and packed the camera up, continuing north toward the mound.

I developed the sheets the following morning. I mixed fresh developer—D76, which I use 1:1—and ran the sheets one at a time. I was being cautious because I knew I had a good image. They came out, best I can tell, perfectly, save for the two clouds at the crown of the tower, which I knew I would have to fix with masking. By the afternoon, the film dried, I scanned them and liked what I saw.

By the time I moved into the printing the next day, I knew that I had found in the image an equivalent. I had fussed over the camera, both rear and front standards, to straighten the form to my satisfaction. I wanted its geometry perfectly, to be solid, sheer even. But it took time before I had realized precisely why.

I often photograph towering objects framed by the sky. They are often singular, individual. I began to see in these images a longing for strength, an emblem of confidence, a bearing. I see in this image, however subtly it may appear to a viewer beside myself, a kind of courage. This distillery—even the idea of distillation appeals to me enough to include the word in my title—wears the clothing of fortitude. It resembles to me a figure, of course, its chest lifted, its spine straight, arced toward the heavens.

My photographs teach me, much as my poems and essays do, what it is, exactly, that I am thinking. It teaches me what I believe, in fact. The photograph may even, at times, admonish me. In this case, it’s my conviction that I asked, however silently, for a totem to measure myself against, a model to match. I believe that I found it here, unexpectedly, in the abandoned, ivied steel.

A Life of Art

This year, 2022, I have been actively questioning how I might bring about the life I want: spending my time creatively, writing, photographing, printing. By establishing this website, I believe I have made an enormous step.

I have, in a far corner of my house, a darkroom I have been building for nearly four years. I have the cameras I desire. I budget for materials, for film, paper, chemicals.

In the kitchen, I keep my writing desk, my inkjet printer, my film scanner, all squeezed between binders full of negatives.

On my bookshelf are stacked books I purchased this year: the Aperture volume of essays from the Minor White years, a hardcover of Octave of Prayer, all of which I am reading concurrently.

I work, more of less, as an independent contractor. I write as a content marketer, but also as a freelance journalist and a travel writer. I carry my cameras wherever I go.

And lately, I have been traveling eastward into the Appalachian Mountains to photograph. I have slept in a number of cabins—on Pine Mountain, above Cumberland Falls, and in the Big South Fork. I have sought to find a place for myself in these regions so that I might come to understand them.

The products of my travels—I might even say the totems—will be kept here on this webpage. I invite you to look over my work. I have made prints available for sale, all of which I make myself, by hand. I post links to my published articles where possible.

I hope you will join me as I write the story of my life.