photogrammatical

Last night I attended the opening of A Tribute to the Life & Art of Jerry Burchfield at Biola University. Jerry was a teacher of mine from the very beginning of my interest in photography. He gave me my one and only gallery show. He taught me how to cut mattes and put the frames together for it. Really those are the least of the things he taught me, but I remember them strongest because we did them alone together. He lost his battle with colon cancer on Sept 11. His show, which was planned before his passing, went right ahead and opened as he would have wanted. But it was a somber event without him.

Anthony Morfa and I went to High School together. We were bass trombone players in the school’s marching band together. As alumni, we were two of the 2000 piece band in the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia. A few months later I would head off to Boot Camp, he would head off to college.

Today, Dr. Anthony Morfa is part of a team of chemists at the Nanoscience Laboratory, Bio21 Institute at the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. During my recent visit, Anthony took me to work, introduced me to some of his colleagues, and together they tried to explain things to me that were a little beyond my comprehension, but they had great visual aids.

Dr. Anthony Morfa

Dr. Tich-Lam Nguyen

Dr. Matthias Karg

Aside from being surrounded by science-y awesomeness like bubbling beakers, spinning vials and a laser room, they are working with “nano-particles” and “quantum dots”, finding new ways of gathering and utilizing light and energy, and pushing the limits of current LED (light emitting diode) and solar cell technologies.

Some Science-y Awesomeness

What I did understand is that these ‘green sciences’ are being studied by young, energetic PhDs who are excited about the work they are doing and the possibilities that these nano-technologies can hold. They were excited enough to get me excited. Then we were all excited, then someone brought in a black light.

Dr. Karg

Dr. Nguyen and Blacklight in the Laser Room.

A big thanks to Prof. Paul Mulvaney for graciously allowing both myself and my camera into his lab, to the “Dr.’s 3″ who gave me both their time and a brief lesson in Really Tiny Awesome Science, and to the rest of the chemists in the Nanoscience Lab who did better than tolerate my presence in their workplace.

Dr. Anthony Morfa to be specific, but more on him later.

Our vacation Down Under was all we had hoped for and more.

Vacations have a tendency to be exhausting. While I’d admit to suffering the effects of jet lag over our first days home, this trip was a pleasant exception. We packed a lot into our two weeks, but we took it all in at a leisurely pace.

It is winter in Australia. Down in Melbourne, where we spent most of our trip, it was cold and raining off and on. We stayed bundled up a good deal of the time.

We walked around a lot, almost everywhere. To the farmer’s market, to the city center, to “our” local bar. It’s a shame that most of Southern California isn’t really laid out for walking. It was quite nice.

We wandered about the country a bit as well. A short flight here and there, but I logged a lot of miles (or kilometers in this case) driving on the other side of the road. Getting my equipment through airport security was relatively painless. Although, I did have to explain to one fellow what a softbox was and why I had metal poles in my carry-on. He also seemed troubled by the look of my speedlights in the x-ray machine, but I can’t say that I blamed him.

We were staying with a friend, a self sufficient bachelor, so I did most of the cooking for the three of us. I’d have a hot meal and a cocktail waiting for him when came home from work. On nights when it was raining too hard to venture out, we’d sit around drinking Shiraz and watching episodes of Mad Men. We joked that I had become his Betty Draper. I’d wager that Betty Draper never made Kangaroo Fried Rice.

I took a lot of pictures while we were there, of course. I’ve quite a bit of editing to do. Some of it I’ll post, but most of it I won’t. I was traveling for pleasure. I took plenty of travel snaps. A lot of pictures of buildings and bridges and beaches, and my girlfriend standing in front of said scenery. I won’t bore you with our vacation slide show.

Well… perhaps just a few.

The Twelve Apostles

Tara in Sydney

Tara and the Opera House at Night

I’m sitting in the plane enjoying the last few moments of iPhone functionality. Updates to follow. 

We’d just pulled into Babylon after a long trip from the Iranian border. Our platoon would be occupying some empty buildings near a small man-made lake for a few weeks. Everyone was backing their vehicles in so we could pull the radios inside, but there was a small palm tree in the way of mine. I jumped out and grabbed the ax. With my first swing I caught one of the low fronds with my left hand. It went straight through the base of my fingernail like a staple gun. It hurt like hell, and my hand was shaking, but the vehicles still had to get parked and everyone was tired and pissed off. So I cut down that tree, and spent the next two months trying to dig that frond out of my hand.

I couldn’t go to the docs for something that small, I’d never hear the end of it. So I just put up with the irritation, but as the nail grew it was dragging the frond with it, and it hurt a lot. I put sanitizer on it often to try to stave off infection, but that didn’t work. I wore gloves to hide the swelling. I knew it was becoming a problem and if I went to see the docs at that point I might even get sent to the Army hospital for antibiotics. I couldn’t let that happen. I’d seen some guys get sent back to Kuwait against their will for seemingly minor injuries. I would have rather died.

So one night I got good and drunk, left the boys playing spades, and climbed into the back of my vehicle. I washed my hands as best I could with hand sanitizer and heated my knife up with a lighter. I slid the blade in quickly under the nail until it separated. It hurt A LOT.

I squeezed hard and the frond came out immediately. I was shaking from the pain, and I remember feeling relieved that it had come out on the first try, because I wasn’t sure I could squeeze like that again. I put more sanitizer on my hand and instantly regretted that decision, but I knew if it was going to heal properly I’d have to keep it as clean as possible.

I was surprised and a little impressed by the size of the frond, more than a quarter inch. I’d carried it with me through so much it didn’t seem right to just discard it. So I taped it into my journal, a little souvenir from my summer vacation.

When you talk about injuries sustained in war, a thing like that is not even worth mentioning. But it was something small that I carried with me for too long, a painful irritation that never let up until I dealt with it the hard way. Sometimes there are things like that in life. This one got taped into a little book I keep in my desk drawer.

I have a desk drawer where I keep Iraq. All the negatives, all the test prints, my ragged journal stuffed with wallet pictures and dinars. When I first got home I’d pored over the images, disappointed with most of them. I don’t know exactly what I wanted them to be, but I’d felt they largely fell short. I made a small edit at the time of about 20 or so that I’d show to people, and the rest just got tucked away. As time passed I didn’t want to look at them, I’d made my selections. I didn’t feel much like reading my journal either, not for years.

A few months ago I decided it was time. I sat alone in my room and read my journal from start to finish, I spread all those prints out on the floor. I’ll admit it was hard for me, reading my own words sparked a kind of total recall. The images brought sounds and smells and absolutely overwhelming emotions. Looking back, I’d been so young. Young in a way that you don’t get back.

But it’s all a personal history now. I’d left most of the war on the plane, and tried hard to bring back only pictures. Pictures that upon later inspection offer a view into what I’d seen at the time and felt a need to photograph. It wasn’t digital then, and I’d had a limited number of frames to remember by.

I’ve begun revisiting those images I’d been ignoring. I remember where I was for each one, and many of them coincide with stories in my journal. I have mixed feelings about sharing some of that work. The photographs are often snapshots, made by a young man who didn’t fully understand his light meter. Some of them were with a disposable camera. I know now where I went wrong technically. I know now how I could have made them better. Like a schoolyard fight lost, I’d give anything to relive it as who I would become.

But six years later, I see now where my own history was a part of our history, and I think that’s a story worth sharing.

I’ll start with a new gallery on my site, SPACES.

I got the call today. Frank the Fish is dead. At nearly five years old he was the final survivor of the Fishbowl Gang, a motley crew of feeder fish I’d bought in the fall of 2004.

It was the first assignment in a photo class I was taking. Photograph one object 36 different ways. 36, of course, because everyone was still shooting film then. So I went to Walmart, spent under $10 and walked out with a large fishbowl containing five goldfish.

Tara and I were still newly dating. She dutifully held the fishbowl in the passenger seat as I tried unsuccessfully not to slosh the water onto her jeans. We drove all over town looking for places where the light seemed just right. At a park, at a bustop, in the center divider on a busy street. It took several hours, but I was happy with the results.

At the end of the day I suggested that we give the fish to the first kid we saw on the street, or else set them free in a local pond, but Tara would hear none of it. She’d named the two largest fish Frank and Fatty and she was determined to keep them for what we assumed was their short lifespan.

The three smaller fish did die almost immediately, and Fatty passed after several months. But Frank was a fighter. As the years passed his fins grew impossibly long like an old man’s whiskers, and he took to spending his days just sitting on the bottom, watching us.

Several times I mentioned that we could buy Frank a larger tank, perhaps a couple of friends, but Tara seemed to think that Frank was staying alive out of pure spite for his circumstance and that spending any additional money on him might be issuing him a death sentence.

And so Frank lived on in that same bowl, the regal lord of Tara’s parents’ kitchen. Always watching, only bothering to swim at meal times or when his possible demise had come into question.

But alas, old Frank’s number had finally come up.

Tara called this afternoon and said,

“Bad news, I just got to Mom’s house and Frank is dead.”

“Are you sure he’s not just resting?”, I said.

“Sorry honey.”

That was it. The undignified end of what was a remarkably long life for a lowly Walmart feeder fish who rose to prominence in the lives of a lucky few.

Frank will lay in state until tonight, when I can give him a proper burial.

Goodnight sweet prince.

Mark Smuts and I have been friends since we were 15. We went to high school together, we worked in a restaurant together, he took me to a bar at midnight on my 21st birthday.

When I was in Infantry School, Mark would get calls at 1am on Saturdays and he’d drive down to Camp Pendleton to pick me up.

The day I came back from the war it was just Mark and my girlfriend at the time who were there to take me home.

He’s a hell of a guy, and a hell of a friend.

Happy 29th Birthday Smuts.

Too bad you grew up to look like “The Commish“!