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.”