Photo/Text 5: Hands

“I want to marry him,” she said when she was five and he was two, and she was indignant when a six-year-old neighbor girl declared that siblings marrying was not only against the rules but also disgusting. Later, when she had to part with him to go to kindergarten, at the end of the day she would run to him from the school bus, grabbing his hands, crying, “All day at school I’ve been yearning to hold your sweet baby boy hand that’s soft as silk and rose petals!” And now he is five, and his big sister, who can read books without pictures, who can braid and multiply, still leads him everywhere by the hand. He says to her, “I want to marry you. Is that OK?” And she replies with her indulgent smile, evasive: “Well, we can live together always. How about that, sweetie?” Yet he protests: “I want to marry you,” the word carrying some special meaning in his five-year-old heart, and so she marches him up and down the sidewalk in front of our house, telling him something in a low voice, explaining the ways of the world, never letting go of his hand.

Photo/Text 4: Skin

When he sees the rim of the blue whale rising from the Pacific like a landmass, most of it hidden iceberg-like below, when he learns that its heart weighs 1,200 pounds and beats only six times a minute, that a human could swim through its aorta, and after the whale goes down, when he looks long at its footprint on water, the kiss of its full body on the surface, I suddenly think of the snakeskin found by his sister years ago on the steppe of western Nebraska under a harvest moon, the dermis still wet and pliable from a recent molt, and how, a trimester away from birth, he shuddered within me, as if in anticipation of one day being gifted this treasure so that he could gently hold the skin of another beast close to his own, asking if the snake that shed it six years before was still alive, and if so, where it was and what it was doing—and so, I hope he continues to remember the whale whose presence is like the snake’s: a being he almost knew, almost touched, a being whose vestige of skin or hidden heart have imprinted on his mind, a being to wonder about always.

Photo/Text 3: Medusa Reading

A friend made the hat and gave it to her along with a book of Greek mythology before she could even read—a friend who perhaps recognized something in her that I could not see, unleashing a love of myth so powerful that she now lives in a world peopled—godded?—with the likes of Zeus, Aphrodite, Hestia, Hera, Ares, Icarus, Hermes, Artemis. She even dreams of gods, mumbling, when awakened, of Arachne’s boastfulness or the Caledonian boar hunt. For half her life she has been Medusa, the terrible snake-haired gorgon with the power to turn those who dare gaze upon her to stone. She wears the hat to school, where the boys sometimes hiss at her, but she doesn’t care because snakes for hair make her powerful, and more than this, knowing the Greek gods and their stories—the knowledge of these other worlds—makes her powerful. She tells her classmates of Hades kidnapping Persephone, of Odysseus’s encounter with Circe, of the tormented Althaea who must throw the enchanted log into the fire to end her son’s life. “You be Athena,” she instructs her classmates. “And you be Poseidon. You be Hephaestus. You be Hades. And I’ll be Medusa.”

Photo/Text 2: Trucks

They strike me as relics, like the Pripyat bumper cars, though it’s been only a month, maybe two, since he left them parked in the sandbox, but so quickly the marks of our presence are buried—pine needles fall, maples sprout near red tires—and though this is probably not the last time he has left them—probably he will return yet, to turn sand, to haul another load—there will nonetheless be a last time. The trucks will be abandoned, and he will be fully grown, a man, a person who does not concern himself with plastic toys. But now, when he sees that I have taken an interest, he comes to explain that he baked a cake with a candle in it for me in the truck bed and it’s been waiting here all this time. I thank him; I tell him I like his trucks. Pleased, he wants to know why I am taking pictures. Because, I explain, I want to remember what his trucks looked like the last time he played with them. But this is not the last time, he protests. I know, I tell him. But I am marking it now anyway, so I don’t miss the last time.

Photo/Text 1: Legs

When I find them, their legs dangling through the slats of her bunk bed, lined up to dip their toes into the bedroom air, it’s as though I had a plan for all of it: a quarter of a century ago traipsing all over Southern California malls with my grandmother, seeking the dolls whose scarcity was nearly inciting riots, looking for particular hair and eye and nose combinations, sewing the dolls elaborate costumes, displaying them like fine china on shelves, and later, after my fetish had faded, packing them carefully away in boxes, and moving them a dozen times in four different states, so that I could discover them again in a basement in Connecticut and give them to my daughter, who would haul them into her bed, undress them, arrange them. And now, when I encounter them here, I can see clearly why I have kept them, why I acquired them in the first place: simply to delight in finding them in a girl’s bright yellow-walled room. “Mom, their diapers are a bit saggy,” my daughter says, apologetically, as though this fact is a reflection on her mothering abilities. “That,” I tell her, “is bound to happen after twenty-seven years.”

Camera, Part 3: Nikon D600

A week ago, I got my new camera: a Nikon D600. So far, I’ve taken 1,121 photos—most of which I’ve deleted. I am trying to learn to think like a photographer, to consider light and composition and exposure. I am trying to learn to make good images with a DSLR camera. I am trying to give real thought to what I see in the viewfinder before snapping the shutter.

As a writer, I have always believed in the primacy of language, but I am learning that sometimes, images can be as crucial as words (and many would argue even more crucial than words). I am also learning that to see as a photographer can help me as a writer, and vice versa. How do I frame the shot? What do I include? What do I eliminate? These questions are as valid for the writer as they are for the photographer.

I am interested not only in the images by themselves and the words by themselves, but also in how the two can be wedded, balanced, both image and text present in a work but neither overpowering the other. What will these text/photo pieces look like? I am only beginning to see.

 

 

Camera, Part 2: Olympus Camedia

Nine years ago, my husband bought a digital camera: an Olympus Camedia C-740 Ultra Zoom. At first, I wanted to have nothing to do with it. I was still using my Pentax K1000, and I wasn’t interested in switching from film to digital. For one thing, I was still skeptical that a bunch of dots would ever produce the kind of sharpness that is possible with film. And second, I knew how the Pentax worked. The digital camera, a point-and-shoot model, was unknown territory.

Finally I did pick up the new camera and begin to use it, but I still also used film for my “real” photos. After my daughter was born and it was time to send out birth announcements, I loaded film into the Pentax and photographed her when she was just short of two months old. But all the pictures of her before that—including her very first photos taken in the hospital—were shot with the Olympus, and I had to admit that the quality was excellent.

And slowly, over time, something happened. I began to use the Olympus constantly. A day came when I no longer loaded film into the Pentax. It went back into the camera bag and stayed there. The Olympus was simply too convenient: I took it everywhere without worrying about buying, reloading, or developing film; I could email the pictures to family and friends; I could buy prints online. Gradually, the Olympus became my camera. My husband relinquished it, and now he uses it only when I place it in his hands and tell him to photograph something.

I’ve taken thousands of photos with the Olympus. Both of my children’s first photos were taken with it. My life in Nebraska—Lincoln, Sidney, then Omaha—and then my life in Connecticut have been documented by it. It has traveled with me to California, Montana, New Mexico, Maine, South Dakota, and other places in between. Nearly every photo I have ever posted online has been shot with that little camera.

I admit that I’ve grown fond of it. But now, as I find myself wanting more control over camera settings, more lens options, and higher resolution images, as I become a student of photography, as I place the image at the center of my attention—not as an afterthought snapshot but as a composition in its own right, integral to my project of seeing and documenting the world—I understand that I have outgrown the camera. Reluctantly, I am putting it away. Reluctantly, I am moving on.