I have a new show opening tomorrow at the Empty Space Theater Gallery. Just a small show of 13 black and white photos. Most are 5×7, two are 8×10. Since this month’s theme on Creative Every Day is telling stories, what better way than to have each photo tell its own story? Each photo is for sale, by the way, and you can order unframed prints from me!
Girl Power
The story on this is funny. My friend Michael Purcell and I were going to Colorado to visit my daughter last year. We were just outside of Las Vegas and there was nothing there – but I needed to stop and get something out of the ice chest. I pulled off on a dirt road that perhaps said no trespassing (it was government property) and it was as desolate and barren a spot as the moon. Only hotter. Michael said, “This is the kind of place someone would come to dump their porn collection so no one would ever know.” Right. Except as I wandered off I found these video tapes just as you see them. Um, the one in front is called Girl Power. Some are Superstars of Lesbianism or something like that in multiple volumes. Not all the secrets the desert holds are natural ones.
Cacti Mundo
On our Mexican Riviera cruise last December, we took an excursion in Cabo San Lucas that stopped at Cacti Mundo. It was amazing! Especially if you like cacti. Patterns are so intriguing. I’ll bet we could make up a story about these little cacti – lined up like soldiers in perfect precision.
Popcorn
Yep, you can pop corn right off the cob. I think of this ear of corn as something like an egg sac, and all the little kernels are struggling to get away. Most made it, these couldn’t break free. Doomed to be mama’s kernels forever. Traded freedom for the security of mom.
Rain
Three photos from Martin Luther King Day this year. What wonderful clouds. Think of the stories they could tell, especially in relation to struggles for freedom. Is the sun about to break through, or are the raindrops trying to escape the confines of the nebulous clouds? Do they portend a gathering storm or are they empty threats? I love all the metaphors that images yield.
Maybe they mean nothing more than it’s going to be a rainy day. Which reminds me of one of my beloved childhood poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.
The rain is falling all around,
It falls on field and tree.
It rains on the umbrellas here
And on the ships at sea.
The Bath
Walking through the woods near our cabin I came upon this bathtub. Nothing relaxing in this tub but pine needles. I don’t know what story this tells other than someone didn’t want to move it either into a cabin or out to the dump. But I sure love the tub. And the photo is almost but not quite black and white. I left this in color as well as one red traffic signal in a cloud photo.
Do Fences Make Good Neighbors?
This lovely little fence near Telluride, Colorado, could tell many stories. It reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem The Mending Wall.
Frost asks,
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
And his neighbor answers,
Good fences make good neighbors.
Like all of Frost’s poems, there are layers and layers of subtlety in this.
Man in Telluride
Telling stories with pictures almost makes me want to teach again. I’d love to know what kind of story my students would construct around this lone man in Telluride, Colorado.
The Hotel Padre
Bakersfield’s Padre Hotel already has plenty of its own stories. In fact, they are so colorful I don’t think you could make them up! You can read about them here.
The Stormy Day
You know, I’m not sure how good a photo this is, but I keep coming back to it. That in itself makes it good enough for me to put in the show. It’s been a bountiful rainy season in Bakersfield so far. We’ll probably exceed our annual average of 5+ inches. Yes, to us rain is exciting and we often wonder what that wet stuff is coming down from the sky. We could turn it into a Chicken Little story – the sky is leaking! The sky is leaking!
Quonset Hut
There seem to be a fair number of quonset huts scattered around Bakersfield. Guess they never wear out. The bounty of the rain left a puddle big enough to make this look like a cylindrical building. Cool, huh? Every picture tells a story.
Surrounded
I started with the drive through Las Vegas and I’ll end with it. Michael was driving and he speeded up (or maybe he slowed down) so I could get a picture of the back of this trailer. “We’re surrounded…that simplifies our problem.” Is it a line from a movie? I think this is one story I don’t want to know! A little scary.
So that’s the show. If you live in Bakersfield please drop by The Empty Space and take a look.
Wonderful! Wish I lived closer to see your photos first hand:)
You are amazing, you know that? Love the photos, love your writing, love your spirit!