A two-fer today. And some word play and double entendres.
I’ve been watching and following the developments in the Kiev, in the Crimea, in Caracas, in Bangkok, and other places. People demonstrating in the streets; people protesting, attempting to right some wrongs; people attempting to write the future of their countries. People clashing, protesting, resisting, fighting against overwhelming – and man made –forces. People hoping. People dying.
As you might imagine-with New Mexico being a desert and all-rain is scarce here. This year especially we received less than an inch during the first 6 months of the year.
Drought? Perhaps.
Desert life, mostly.
We are fascinated with rain here. We have drainage channels (Arroyo’s) that stand dry most of the time with associated folk tales warning of their dangers (La Llorona). We have levees, we have storm drains, we have firemen specifically trained in water rescue. In the desert.
For when comes the rain, it comes. Hard and fast and cold it comes turning the dry arroyos into raging torrents, flooding streets, and breathing life into this desert community.
In my young children’s lives rain is an oddity, and an opportunity.
The summer rains came the other day.
I am just returned from vacation. A family trip, to visit family. Time by the lake. Play in the water. Tubing, swimming, paddle boarding. The sound of children laughing, cousins playing, music on the stereo, motorboats, ice cream, bonfires, glow sticks, and s’mores. The things summers at the lake are made of.
But the morning rose slowly, softly. The visual accompaniment to the childhood snores emanating from the children’s’ room. A mist blanketed the lake and seeped through the trees.
Quiet held off the advance of day as long as she could.
Baseball, it would seem, has begun again. The twitters is all aflutter; boasts and threats and promises are being made on Facebook. Some are claiming that all is right again in the world; baseball for them is akin to civil rights, justice, even oxygen.
This is an image from my project-in-process: On The Bench, for which I received Rear Curtain’s Fellowship Award to support its completion. A bit of a preview, if you will. A teaser. Happy baseball everyone!
A two-fer here today as I play with the way I present these sketches and work through what I am photographing and presenting. A good friend asked a couple of weeks ago about these sketches and why I consider them so. In truth, I consider them sketches because I am trying things. I am trying things out in the field capturing the images, and I am trying things in terms of presenting the images. And I am learning, curiously learning; making stuff. To my mind, this is the process of art, no?
So today, an image – in color – harvested (pardon the pun) from a long series of images made on President’s Day as we spent the day with two neighbor families fishing at Isleta Lakes on the Isleta Tribal Pueblo here in NM. Following the color image is a series I shot with my iPhone and Hipstamatic’s app telling the little story of the day in broad strokes. Let me know what you think. I am playing with storytelling, both in single images and in series of images, and I am limited in my photographing explorations by the necessities of my family. So I do what I can, sometimes wishing I had more time to photograph, but grateful that, as I was reminded, I get to do my hobby all the time….! True that. It is the limits that forges the creativity after all.
The series below you may have seen already if you follow me on Twitter or Instagram as I posted the individual images over the course of the day. Here it is again with two additional images to round out the series. I attempted to capture the cooking process (stuffing the fish with garlic, lemon and herbs, and grilling them in foil) without much success. To my mind that is missing from this series. Lesson learned.
There is something about the Asian aesthetic that I just love. I live in a land dominated by Catholic Christian mythology, rites, and art which I am slowly appreciating. But there is always something calming and peaceful for me in Asian religious artwork. These bells were a gift to me and reside in my office.
A young child shields his eyes from the bright sun while riding his tricycle in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2012.
A Native American boy watches the International Indian Finals Rodeo from a catwalk at the Tingley Coliseum in Albuquerque, New Mexico. September 2012.