LAST 10 MINUTES

2 sentences

Maybe tugging a little too hard on the sheets – need to fluff the comforter, not pull at the hospital corners.  Have followed my friends onto Facebook where it is all 25 words or less.  Not sure if chocolate chips at 1AM is enough.  Having them pull the stitches extra tight on my hand to keep it short.  2 sentences.  Write everyday.  Just write about yourself.  Put all the baby stuff in the other blog.  Smile don’t smile.  Don’t worry if your mother does read this.

Okay.  Got that out of my system.

Jessica Love

Jessica was nervous about pictures.  We needed to do some warm up exercises.   This little video captures Jessica warming up and a wall in New York at the beginning of November, 2008.

I am a visual sherpa

The NY Times Magazine put that scary conversation in print today.  All the, “oh how I love to hold a paper in my hand” people can now start digging.  Media as we knew it is over.   No hurt on that front.  Was never satisfied with being a photographer anyhow.  Always thought I was a storyteller more than just trying to create a hero.   The process of taking picture is a curve of images that steers up to the magic “hero shot,” then away down the road.  I am not nearly as interested in a singular image,  as the path we get there and leave on.  All the screens we can now tell our stories on allow us to strech and breathe into the story.  The “hero shot” is such a small part of the story.  A thousand words cannot begin to describe how we touched.  I am a visual sherpa.

Signs of a Better World

I will not make this a forum for political ramblings. Was just so taken
by Roger Cohen’s op ed piece in the Times this past weekend, which I
have excerpted below. It was wild watching the whole explosion of
excitement everywhere.

Roger Cohen in the NY Times:

These are interesting times. Jobs are disappearing and General Motors is
running out of cash. At the same time, America has assuaged some of its
deepest wounds with the election of Barack Obama. We have less money in our pockets but more hope in our hearts.

Hope won’t feed an empty stomach. But it’s potent. In Greek myth, when
Pandora opened her box, she let out all the evils except one: hope. The
Greeks considered hope dangerous; its bedfellow can be delusion.
Nietzsche later saw hope as the evil that prolongs human torment.

But in the end Pandora opened her box again and released hope because,
without it, humanity was filled with despair.

At least that’s one version of the myth. What is certain is that there’s
a lot of hope about these days. It would be an exaggeration to say
people are happier now that we have less money, but accurate to say
there’s a surfacing of shame about the extent of our spend-spend-spend
excesses.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been engaged in prolonged forms of service and sacrifice that have deserved better. Better not just of a president, George W. Bush, too insecure to inspire, but of all of us for
whom easy credit became synonymous with easy amnesia. Perhaps the new frugality can also be the new humanity.

America’s moment of reckoning is global. Economic anxiety has spread far and wide, as far and as wide as the hopes vested in Obama. This moment of moral opportunity is not confined to the United States.

Anti-Bushism, straying often into anti-Americanism, has been the
defining ideological current of recent times. Its disappearance with
Obama, or at least its retreat, leaves a gaping intellectual void
needing to be filled.

For inspiration on how to do that I suggest this image: hope fluttering
out of Pandora’s box. Crisis demands statesmanship, which cannot be
composed of calculation alone, but must reach for the unquenchable in
the human spirit.

Crying Like Yesterday

This is the week of tears.  We all knew the announcement was coming, then it all felt so sudden.  We knew Tuesday evening it had become inevitable and still, it was so unbelievable when it was finally announced. We could barely read the screen through the tears. We cried like babies when he was speaking – so serious and with such strength.  We just sobbed watching his family gather and hold eachother  – as we  all held eachother.   Tears whenever anyone discussed it.  Tears whenever you had a moment of quiet to actually let it soak it in.  Tears now writing.

When I held Jackson out on the porch, looking out at the yard scattered with yellow leaves melting into the grass, I told him about a dream come true.   I told him about a moment happening all around that would define the world he grows up in.  He reached up and slicked back his little soft hair in the salty tears I had dripped there.

It is a moment to savor.  All of us.    Mr. Obama is right.  It is not about him.  It is about this feeling we all have deep inside.  Red people and blue people and tall hairy people and people with big funny feet.  It is the feeling I have been trying to photograph and the way I have tried to live my whole life.  This feeling that we are all connected.

Mr. president-elect Obama is able to show us ourselves.  The good part of ourselves.  The part where we can all sing the same song in different harmonies.  The part where we admit it is not us against them.  We are not just passing through.  There is a common purpose built from a common bond.  Things like truth and justice matter.   Things like the environment and equal rights matter.  It is totally extraordinary that our most basic American values are back on the table after being used as weapons and left as discarded shells for the last 8 years. It is completely crazy to see all the good liberals (and everyone else) feeling so patriotic.

This all sounds so corny and it is.  The is possibly the corniest moment in our lives.  The coolest moment.  The most powerful moment.  The most impossible moment.  The moment when every sweet cliche rings true.  Pete Seeger is alive.  How about that!