Day after day I saw a new addition being built about two miles away from our house. The houses looked interesting, as much as a suburban tract house can. Finally a sign appeared showing an open house so I went to check it out.
The woman showing the house was tall and willowy with a decided stylish side to her. She showed me around and we got in a conversation about how she ended up selling real estate and her background as a model. We went out onto the little front porch and as we did so the light illuminated her face in a wonderful way. That clinched the deal for me and I asked her if she would be willing to let me take some photos of her. She agreed and that was that.
In the end, after many renditions and much more complicated collage efforts I kept coming back to the beautiful detail of her skin in that light. The color was fantastic but so was the texture all by itself so I landed on the monochrome/color diptych as a way of showing off both those elements.
The urinal was so low that I almost peed over it. Just had to take a photo. It was not in my top ten nice convenience store restrooms. I was on a solo road trip to California to take my father’s furnishings back to San Diego where he was moving after two years of living in Oklahoma.
I was at a conference in OKC that was rather uninteresting for part of it. The light was really quite good for being indoors and everyone was so still that I could resist setting my camera on my lap and pointing it in different directions. I didn’t look at the camera, just took photos randomly, sometimes zooming in, sometimes not. It wasn’t until I looked at the photos later that day that I saw what I had captured. This was one of the best of the lot.
This is an imagined story about the cake seller at the outlet mall with the incredible eyes and the cake she was selling and the TV image of the flamenco dancer that I shot in the Bose store demo movie in the small dark theatre where they showed off their sound systems which I did not buy but I got a number of shots of the screen that I liked and then realized how they fit and imagined a story of love.
Another in my postcard series, #7 from our Colorado road trip in the summer of 2007. There was a great trail close to the home where we were staying and I took a hike on my own just for the purposes of photography. When I do something like that I often am not looking for a single shot (though I find those of course) but I am looking for pieces, for moments, etc. that will be part of the raw material for a collage. So in that case I am not worrying always about composition or lighting or a complete image. I am finding the essence of a place or a person and recording it.
In this case the trees had the knots in the shapes of eyes everywhere I turned, flowers were abundant and the creeks had the most amazing light playing on them. The final connection came for me when I saw this woman and her wonderful dog running on the path. The dog was protective and turned to scrutinize me, making sure I wasn’t a threat. The eyes of the dog were compelling and I loved the juxtaposition between the tree eyes and the real eyes.
I went to see Jane Goodall speak here in Tulsa in 2005
My very first report I ever did in school, 3rd grade, was on her and her chimps. It was from the first article about her ever in National Geographic. I have been in love with her and her work and spirit ever since and have followed her the whole time.
I got a chance to see her, draw her and then talk with her. A big moment for me, one of my all time heroes.
These were all taken on a brilliant October day in Luray, Virginia. My eldest daughter was getting married and some of our dearest friends took the day off and drove from Annapolis, MD to be there. This is a collage of the mother and the eldest daughter of that family. It includes the fabric from their dresses, a necklace, freckles and collarbones.
Way back when, in the 1980s, there was a very young and stylish guy who came to work at the restaurant where I worked, Eulipia. He was 18. We became friends over many years of working together. He moved down to LA eventually and I met him once down there for dinner with his girlfriend. They eventually married and he became a flight attendant on USAIR.
They settled in Annapolis, MD and many years later what should happen but my daughter attended St. John’s College in Annapolis. We reconnected with him and his family and my daughter ended up very close to them all, babysitting the young ones, staying at their home one summer, etc. We would visit whenever we came to town.
So, now that 18 year old kid who met my daughter when she was born, was at her wedding 18 years later with his wife and daughters who I was able to photograph. It was a great and glorious reminder of the beauty that is within the longevity of relationships.
My photo session with this friend consisted of following her throughout her day, from waking on. I noticed when she was doing her make up that she held her eyelash curler with both hands. I asked about it and she said she had once been getting ready for a date, curling her eyelashes when something startled her and she tore out all her eyelashes on that eye! The date arrived moments later and they spent the evening looking for false eyelashes. They didn’t have a second date. So, from then on has used two hands to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
She served drinks at my father’s squadron reunion barbecue in Iowa. She watched and I could see she was impressed by the young marines in uniform who came to visit with the World War II vets.
It was very hot and humid day out and her skin glistened as it told a story of her own skirmishes and battles. Her bars and stars weren’t on her chest, but she earned them none the less.
Gordon Corbet Powell was my Uncle Bunny. He passed away this week, bringing back a flood of great memories of my childhood and young adulthood.
He was ‘Bunny’ because he was born on Easter Sunday and the nurse gave him to my grandmother saying ‘here is your little Easter bunny’ and the name stuck. When I was older he asked me and the family if maybe we could call him UB instead of Uncle Bunny, which we did sometimes.
He was a funny and eccentric character, a woodworker and engineer. Could fix and build most anything. One of my best memories as a kid was the boat/fort he built in his back yard (right around the corner from our house) for my cousin Jim, who is just a year younger than I am. This was a real solidly built building type fort in the shape of a boat, with a deck and bunks and a bridge to stand on top of and pretend to drive the boat.
They moved up to Mill Valley in Marin County, California in the 60’s and it was great fun to visit them there. Hiking up Mt. Tamapais and seeing ‘black bread’ in a little alpine restaurant on the way for the first time.
He founded the Marin Zeppelin Society, which was only open to people who had survived lighter than air disasters. Of course, since all who were alive had survived everything, anyone could join. It was a joke lost on some people. My father, who was in aviation his whole life, actually got the MZS group a ride on the Goodyear blimp and they got a certificate and everything. The group really was just an excuse to get together with a bunch of guys and shoot the breeze at a local diner.
He did fanagle Mill Valley into putting an MZS plaque on the entry marker to the town alongside the Rotary and Lions club plaques. That always cracked me up to go into town and see that.
He built a home in Mill Valley and around that time read about the ‘Aubrey holes’ surrounding stonehenge in the UK. They are holes filled with chalk in a perfect circle some distance from Stonehenge. They were discovered I think when a certain Mr. Aubrey was walking his dog and stuck his umbrella or cane into the dirt and it had chalk on the end of it. My uncle built an aubrey hole at his new house so he would have the only aubrey hole in the colonies. THAT was his sense of humor.
The photos above were taken in Estes Park, Colorado where he spent his summers with the rest of my mother’s side of the family. He later harness raced at the Del Mar racetrack in California.
He was a great uncle. I have wonderful memories of him.
