The ‘Inherent’ Loneliness of Chairs and Trees

If a chair sits empty and isn’t photographed, was it ever really empty?” --John Bent

“Sitter” by CB Adams

 There’s a recent book about photographic “no-no’s” that I haven’t read, but I suspect it includes (or should include) two of my guilty pleasures: one my wife calls my Lonely Trees series, which includes one of my most-liked images ever, and the other, which I have borrowed the title for, Lonely Chairs. This latter series is less well-liked on the interwebs, as if this were any signifier of quality, but which I am drawn to repeatedly. I mostly keep such images to myself, this one notwithstanding.

This image, “Sitter” is the latest lonely chair I have put to film. I was driving down a St Louis street and my eye was drawn to the interplay of light and shadow – the light being especially pleasing, like a spotlight on the chair. By the time I found a parking space and metered the scene, clouds invaded overhead and I took waaaay too many shots before leaving.

I’m not sure why lonely chairs appeal to me, but I know they do to other photographers as well. I’ve seen countless empty chair images made everywhere from Parisian streetside cafes to junkyards. I find a melancholic resonance between lonely chairs and lonely trees, emphasis on lonely. That’s probably the appeal, the sad appeal.

“Sitter” was created with a Pentax SV, 50mm Takumar and Kodak Double X film.

Bogdanovichyssoise

“I love beautiful black-and-white movies…” – Peter Bogdanovich

By CB Adams

When I think of chemistry in terms of analogue, film-based photography, I first think of developer, stop bath, fixer, photo-flo, etc. But there is another “chemistry’ or reaction between photographer, camera, film, light and subject, as well as a less-definable emotional attraction, energy and woo-woo vibe.

I passed this structure for more than year before I brought a camera to make images of it. I don’t know why, nor do I want to know why, this small, garage-like building surrounded by arable fields attracted my attention, but it felt emotional, dark. I shuddered every time I passed it, like the old saying, “Someone just walked over my grave,” uttered after a shiver.

I often adhere to the “first thought, best thought” approach to things. My first thought was to stay off the private property and photograph the building from the roadside. This initial approach was to highlight the small window, just visible above the corn, and the horizontality of the roof. I was using a Tele Rolleiflex to make this image, and even without the chimping “advantage” offered by digital, I had the definite feeling that I hadn’t make the image I wanted, the one that drew me, beckoned me, into its energy. It was too “Children of the Corn.”

So I trespassed, as I often do. A “Private Property No Trespassing” sign is a welcome mat to me. Has been for years. I justified my trespass this time with, “Well, it’s only 30 feet or so from the road. I’m not trespassing that far.”

Clearly, “first thought, best thought” wasn’t working for me, so I shifted to Robert Capa’s maxing  “If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough,” which almost always serves my photographs well. I was using a tripod, and if you review the proof sheet you would see subsequent images you would see me inching (footing, actually) my way toward this structure. The final two images on the roll are my favorites.

The one I show here includes the out-of-focus corn, which has a creamy-dreamy cinematic glow to it, thanks to the Cinestill film, which is a cinema film. Hence the Bogdanovich quote above. This image has a “Last Picture Show” vibe to it, at least to me. The other image, which I’m holding for another time, is the same frame, a few feet closer, no corn. It has a different feel, almost winter-like and stark, like an Andrew Wyeth painting. Again, my vibe, not necessarily anyone else’s.

When a scene like this curls its come-hither finger at me, I obey. I try to make a photograph that is somehow true to the emotional resonance that my internal antenna is receiving. I feel like the little girl conversing with off-air television in “Poltergeist,” like challenged to make a cohesive image from the memory of that chaotic static. Yeah, it’s in there, but how to reveal it. I don’t question that need and can only make the best image I can and, if it passes my own muster, then I offer it to others.

Field of Opportunity

“…In the field of opportunity / It's plowin' time again…” — Neil Young.

This field has grown, matured and been harvested since I made this image with a vintage Leica IIIc camera fitted with a 3.5 Elmar 50mm lens. During my bike rides just north of Snob Hill, it takes only a few minutes of cycling to fee like I’m "in the country.” This scene attracted me for a couple of weeks before I stopped to render it onto some Ilford HP5+. I’m sure there are some agrarians in my past, but from my great grandparents to me, there have been gardeners — often avid gardeners — but no farmers. Still, the sight of plowed and planted fields stirs something within me. I become attuned to the rhythm of growing and harvesting. Now that I’m a beekeeper, I feel this rhythm even more acutely. I like the lines and shapes in this scene and the way it evokes the flat bottom lands that surround the trail I ride on (a converted railroad line) and parallel the Missouri River, just over the horizon.

Countin' Shadows On the Wall

When you look at as many images as I do everyday, you notice certain macro-trends. Like many, many other photographers, I am intrigued with shadows and juxtaposition and traipsing down alleyways to record them with my camera, on the discontinued Adox Silvermax 100 35mm film. I don’t know why, but the focus on shadows led me to half-remember the Woody Allen film, “Shadows and Fog,” which led me to a bit of dialogue from it:

(Unnamed) "What better way to; to spend the rest of my life than; than to help you with; with all those wonderful illusions of yours."

(Unnamed) "It's true. Everybody loves his illusions."

(Unnamed) "Loves them. They need them. Like they need the air."

Pole Sitting

This is a photo of a flag. The flag is political. The photo is not. It’s a document of a short drive I made down a gravel road to make an image of this flag. It was an intentional drive, no different than if I were photographing an interesting leaf. I am reminded of Ernst Haas: 'You do not take pictures, you are taken by pictures.” I was taken by the opportunity this photograph offered, first by the flag, then the cloistered light of the tall trees, then the manufactured houses and finally by the second flag. It helped that there was no one around. Their gazes might has dissuaded me from driving by, then turning around, then stopping, then grabbing my camera out of the trunk, then moving around, camera to head, framing the scene. I moved in. I moved in closer. I focused. I released the shutter. Nothing political in that. I share this image. I have no expectations; nothing will change. There’s something political in that.

Why I 'Toy' Around With My Photography

“My Bird Girl”

This is not the image in the Art Through the Lens show. It’s an “oldie but a goodie” from my catalog, taken with a Holga on cross-processed

I have a photograph included in the upcoming Art Through the Lens 2019 group exhibition at the Yeiser Art Center in Paducah, Kentucky. I was asked to provide an artist’s statement. This required me to consider — once again — why a good portion of my photographic endeavors involve shooting with plastic toy cameras and then developing and printing my negatives myself. As my relationship with these low-fi rascals continues to mature, so too does my ability to express (sometimes defend) my attraction to them.

Without further ado, here is my latest take on why I toy around with this sub-sub-sub-genre of photography (they asked for no more than 150 words, and that’s exactly what I provided, wordsmith that I am):

I shoot a range of film (and digital) formats from 4x5 to 35mm, yet images captured with plastic toy cameras – 120 format Holgas and Dianas in particular – comprise a significant portion of my portfolio. I am drawn to this low-fidelity, low-tech approach because of its reductionist nature – reduced sharpness, reduced aperture and shutter control, reduced predictability, to name a few. These constraints create boundaries within which I find a rich and rewarding opportunity to render the world. Like poets who work within a rigidly defined form, like haiku, shooting with toy cameras requires discipline while offering a liberating creative freedom. By doing less, these cameras and films challenge me to do more, from taking the image, to developing the film, archivally printing the negative on fiber-based paper in my darkroom, and even to matting and framing. The limits of toy cameras make me a better – and freer – artist and artisan.

Upon Achieving the Toy Camera Trifecta: What Now?

“Hanging Tree: Commandment,” shot with a Holga camera, was selected for the 2018 Somerville Toy Camera Festival at the Brickbottom Gallery in Boston.

By CB Adams, Qwerky Studio, a Language and Light Incubator

“Dream Deferred” is arguably Langston Hughes most famous poem. In it, he begins by asking, “What happens to a dream deferred?” and concludes with, “Or does it explode?” I have lately turned that poem upside down, wondering what happens when a dream is not deferred – delayed maybe, but finally achieved?

That’s because during the toy camera photography “season” that bridged 2018 and 2019, I had work chosen for all three of the top gallery shows dedicated to this lo-fi artform: Somerville Toy Camera Festival, Krappy Kamera and Plastic Fantastic. I would have loved to humble brag about being included in Rayko’s Annual International Juried Plastic Camera Show, but, alas, that show is now defunct as far as I know (plus, it would have ruined the alliteration of my clever Toy Camera Trifecta).

That Trifecta title is my own, and represents my 15-year journey into, through, and around the sub-sub-sub-genre of toy camera photography – the sometimes maligned, often ignored practice of creating the best possible images from the lowest quality lenses, or no lenses at all. Toy camera photography is a peculiar pursuit and yet it exerts a powerful pull on my imagination. In a photo world of repeatable quality and pixel perfection, toy cameras are the Forrest Gump of photography: you never know what you’re gonna get.

I embrace that unpredictability. I am inspired by it. I am driven by it. I am haunted by it.

I first encountered the toy camera photography world sitting in a shabby cubicle with a shitty company-provided desktop computer in Greenville, Texas. I was a consultant then, working on a month-long project for a client. We were given some down time one day, told we had to stay on premises in an airless, secured area but, since there wasn’t much for the team of consultants to do, we were free to putz around on the internet.

“Hanging Tree: Jack Ketch’s Shame,”shot with a Holga, was included in Soho Photo Gallery’s Krappy Kamera exhibition in New York City in 2019.

I don’t know how I found her, but I encountered some photos of a graveyard in New York City, taken by Holly Northrop, who worked at the Village Voice at the time. Those pictures grabbed me. I wanted more. And, I found them, including a trove of images made with something called a Holga, a camera unknown to me.

I was off to the races. From Northrop, I found the work of Michelle Bates and some dude in Kentucky who went by (and still does) the moniker Tread. These artists were followed thereafter by the likes of Jim Rohan, Jennifer Shaw, Warren Harold, and Nancy Rexroth. Unlike that quip from Harpo Marx about refusing “to join any club that would have me as a member,” I wanted in this club. I could “do” this club. But, from the start, I was unsure the Toy Camera Club would have me.

I bought a Holga 120N. I sent it to be “modded” by a guy who had a business called Holgamods. I devoured Bates’ book, Toying with Creativity, now in its second printing. I purchased 120 film, a format new to me, ‘cause I had always been a 35mm Nikon F2 Photomic sort of practitioner. I reentered photography after a 20-year hiatus from taking anything but family snapshots and party pics.

In the same way an alcoholic remembers that first drink, I remember opening the cheap box that held this cheap camera. I had done my research, but in reality, as I held that Holga for the first time, I could not envision how I could make the photographic art that I so admired by others. Driving home that doubt was all the fine work I found in the issues of the now-defunct Light Leaks magazine (oh, how I miss that publication!).

And I began to shoot. And shoot. And shoot. I traveled with my Holga to exotic locales where I worked as a consultant, places like Pascagoula, Mississippi, and Manhattan, Kansas, and I shot close to home. I had some early success. In fact, an image from one of the first rolls I ever shot with a Holga (maybe even the first) was chosen by none other than Michelle Bates for a show called “Unrefined Light: Images by Plastic Cameras and their Friends” at The Foundry Art Centre, located several blocks from my own home. My image shared a wall with two from my unknowing mentor Tread. Four other toy images were chosen for the “The Holga Show” at the Saans Gallery in Salt Lake City.

This early success was followed by several years of photographic desert-like hell. I submitted. I paid entry fees. I peddled my toy camera wares to any call for entry that seemed appropriate. I found no takers, except for a show at the Columbia (Missouri) Art League, which accepted an image I had made with a “frankencamera,” inspired by Jim Rohan, who had shared his design for modifying a German Isoly 120 camera with the flipped lens from a Holga. And the Somerville Toy Camera Festival included an image, too.

Those small successes were barely enough, but I kept shooting. I kept buying film. I kept paying labs, such as Richard Photo Lab and The Darkroom to develop and scan my film. I knew I was fortunate to have the means to pursue this expensive and seemingly quixotic endeavor.  Slowly, steadily, I began to have a body of toy camera work, though I was loath to allow myself to think of it as such.

Fast forward to last year. Somerville chose two of my prints, followed by Soho Photo Gallery’s Krappy Kamera, which accepted two prints (after a dozen years of submitting, on and off), and then Plastic Fantastic, which also chose two. In a strange sort of symmetry, the Krappy Kamera juror was Michelle Bates (who didn’t remember me from the “Unrefined Light” show those many years ago), and Plastic Fantastic, at Lightbox Gallery, chose a photograph I took while attending the Krappy Kamera opening earlier in the year.

And, though not part of my Toy Camera Trifecta, I am also proud to have had toy camera photographs accepted by some other galleries, including Art Saint Louis and the Saint Louis Artists’ Guild, during this period.

I wasn’t owed this success after so many years of trying, but I do feel a certain sort of vindication that my doggedness and dedication to this arcane form of photography has paid off. Yet, this is not a drop-the-mic moment. If anything, it is a challenge to not only make more work, but to make even better work, especially now that I have my own wet darkroom, a decent film scanner, and Lightroom software.

A dream achieve, for certain…until the next call for entry.

Oh, and by the way, with two photographs accepted into the 2019 Somerville Festival, I’m on my way to a Toy Camera Trifecta repeat. Or, perhaps after that, I’ll chase the Trifecta of Toy Camera Trifectas…

This year, “Prescription,” shot with a Holga, was included in the Plastic Fantastic exhibition at Lightbox Gallery in Astoria, Oregon. This photograph was shot in New York City while I was attending the opening of the Krappy Kamera exhibition.

Star Boy & Creatures of Habit

This is an insight from my Adventures in Lightroom. I have years and years of digital images that I’m uploading, organizing, editing, etc. Nothing special ‘bout that. But I also have stacks and stacks of negatives that require scanning. As anyone who has undertaken this type of project, you know how arduous and time consuming it is. Add to that my limited scanning abilities, and it’s almost an overwhelming challenge.

But all of that aside, as I’ve been deep into my back catalogue, I’m constantly confronting something I read from Sally Mann: “Photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.” When I encounter an image that I had forgotten, I am immediately returned to the moment of the shutter firing. I re-see what I saw then, though filtered through my current situation. This is a notion I intend to explore in more depth, later.

This image triggered a different insight. I recently posted a photo of my oldest son. In it, he is in middle school and running a race at his school’s annual field day. He responded with, “That’s still my running face.” And he’s right. And that’s true. Not only for him, but I suspect for all of us. If someone takes enough photos of us (as I have done of him), you are bound to discover certain “go to” looks, signature looks. These appear in us early and stay with us, even as our bodies morph and change. One will still find that recurring look, stance, tilt of the head, etc.

Not a great revelation, but proof of something my mother likes to say, “We’re all creatures of habit.'“

Indeed, Mom.

“That’s still my running look”

This Is Why I Don't Do Weddings

I am my own worst critic. It’s true. I’ve been told this throughout my life, and most of the time I have to agree. Yet, this self-criticism is what makes me the artist that I am (such as I am). Yes, it often makes me hard to live with as I crab and complain and bitch and rail and wail.

All this aside, I royally screwed up during my younger son’s wedding last fall. First of all, I agreed to shoot the wedding. I also agreed to bake the two wedding cakes. I’m nothing if not a master of overreaching, over-scheduling and generally being overwhelmed.

The older brother of the groom loomed over the nuptials. A double loss — portrait of a son as well as the happy couple. Sad.

I have shot only a couple of weddings in the past, and I didn’t like the process. Too much pressure. The stakes and expectations (for photographer and subjects) are too high. There’s no “redo” with wedding photography. Fortunately, one of the weddings I shot (of a distant family member who couldn’t afford a “real” wedding photographer) ended in divorce, so I’m sure those photographs are thankfully in a landfill somewhere.

My son and daughter-in-law had a somewhat nontraditional wedding, and their photographic needs were in line with that philosophy. Rather than hire a professional photographer, they wanted a variety of family members with a variety of photographic skills (and equipment) to randomly shoot the event. Then they planned on assembling an album with all these various photographic “voices.”

I agreed to participate, but the pressure was on. I decided to shoot large format 4x5 (color and black and white), some digital and even some point and shoot. In total, I have a handful of photos that meet my own criteria for a “keeper.” And, I think much of what I shot is superior to that of the other wedding press corps.

But I dwell on the images that reveal my failures as a photographer. I grossly underexposed what should have been a good backyard portrait of the groom. I ruined another two shots with a double exposure of the happy couple. I have said often that I am haunted by the photos I didn’t take — and I will now add that I am haunted by the photos in which I failed as a photographer.

This, I tell myself, is further proof of why I don’t — and won’t ever again — do a wedding.

Until the next time I’m asked. I’ve still got an unmarried son to go.

A disappointing wedding-day portrait. It’s not bad, but it’s not the great I was going for.

When Good Enough Has To Be Good Enough

At the intersection of being a photographer and a father who photographs lies a shot like this.

When shooting a portrait, a photographer faces multiple challenges in terms of the craft of making a photo. When you add the challenges of shooting family in general and an unwilling subject in particular, things get interesting. When you add some additional elements such as a malfunctioning camera (in this case, a fussy Russian Kiev 88 and a film back that scratched the film the entire length of the right side of all frames) and poor lighting (in this case, slow shutter speed and wide-open aperture), things can get really interesting.

What happens when all of the above challenges converge? Well, I got this photo. There is much wrong with this shot, but it’s still a memory and moment that I cherish, despite the imperfections (not the least of which is a slight focus issue). And one of only two salvageable shots from the roll.

It may not be professional. It may not be great. Hell, it’s probably not even good. But it’s still a keeper. Warts and all. And, truth be told, I love the bokeh.

The Clarity and Charity of Time

I am not a patient person in general and definitely not a patient photographer. This is often at odds with the analogue, film-based photography that I practice. You might think that digital would be my thing, given my impatience. But no. I have to shoot old school and then practically run to the nearest darkroom.

Like Popeye, I am what I am. Yet, I am now involved in the long process of inputting, organizing and otherwise getting my photographic shit together while enjoying my new, custom-built computer, dedicated to my photo workflow. This means I have been viewing some long-forgotten scans. It’s been, well…eye-opening. It’s like I’m seeing some of this work with new eyes. And perhaps I am.

As I revisit this old work, new images now attract my attention. I still like most of the ones that originally got my juices going, but I’m finding some gems (to me, anyway) that have just as much merit and potential. I feel like a musician who is reinterpreting an old song. I’m thinking of my favorite version of Springsteen’s Born To Run; a very slow live version, not the album version. This is also like the advice that I received (and I still pass on to my writing students) about putting your piece of writing away in a drawer and then coming back days or weeks or even months — and it’s like you’re looking at something someone else wrote. Perhaps they (you) did.

This image is a case in point. I was shooting a light-leaky Agfa Isolette camera. Most of the 15 frames are shit. But a few from this sequence spark my imagination. This was lit with 100% golden-hour sunlight right in my own backyard. I think it has a David Lynchian quality.

Maybe I was channeling Lynch’s eye.

Monochrome Pentimento by CB Adams, Qwerky Photography.

This I Believe - On Artist's Statements

I’m not alone in fearing and loathing artist’s statements. I’ve written my share of la-dee-da and contrarian and tortured artiste and obtuse versions — usually at the behest of whatever exhibition or call for entry had requested or required one. I have come to realize, however, that they can and do serve a good purpose when written with the proper intent. They can be a way for others to understand, with limits, what a photographer is about, who he or she is.

My new approach to artist’s statements is to follow the guidance I received from a history professor at university. He was providing the standard by which he would be grading our term papers. “What do you mean,” he said. “And how do you know.”

I’m not going to present an artist’s statement here. I am, however, gong to say a quick something about this photo — why I like it and why I hope you appreciate it, too. I believe what “makes” this rather ubiquitous bench scene is, of course, the vines and other vegetation growing through it. For me, though, it’s the plucky branch extending from the left, like a feather boa (to this associative mind, anyway), that sets this apart from others like it. I also like the contrasting horizontal lines and patterns, and that sliver of the basement window.

So there. I said it. I made a statement. Talk amongst yourselves.

“Boa” From the Series Closer To Home by CB Adams

Isn't It Symbolic

Due to a mix up at the Gallery, my artist's statement wasn't included in Art Saint Louis's "Symbolic" exhibition. So I'm including it here: "A symbol is succinct, like this cross in the basement of a Spanish mission in Texas. Unlike its literary cousin, the metaphor, a symbol’s meaning resides not in explanation (if you have to explain it, you ruin it), but in its context. The artist’s challenge is to trim and trim and elevate the symbol within."

CB Adams at the opening of "Symbolic" exhibition at Art Saint Louis. The silver gelatin photograph, "Concepcion" is available for purchase, $275 at the gallery.

A Shoe By the Door I Remember

And when she leaves I weep a little
And when she returns I weep a little
And when I weep I am little
And when I am little I am little
Again

.

I Ain't No Chimp

OK. We know that there's a term called “chimping” that describes the habit of taking a picture and then immediately going, “Oh, oh, oh,” like a chimp, while reviewing it on the camera’s LCD screen. I shoot some digital myself, but I don't ooo or ahhh, but I do get that kind of chimp face when reviewing a shot I just took. Can't seem to stop that habit.

On the other hand, there's no opportunity to chimp with a film camera. That's one of the aspects I love about shooting film. Delayed gratification -- that's good for most things except sex. Anyway, I knew this shot would be a keeper as I took it. Call it intuition. Call it 40+ years of experience. Call it luck or karma. But it felt good and right and exciting.

Anyone seen my banana?

Re:Framing Childhood

Post-funeral. Dismantling photos framed by her parents. Petals dropped from vase-full of memorial flowers. Trying on new frames. Her turn to define memories of childhood.

Coulda Woulda Shoulda

This is from my latest additions to The Blaine Project. The youngin' came home for 48 hours and he carved out some time for the two of us to hang out and take photographs. It's always a delight to work with a willing subject -- more than willing in his case.

What appeals to me most about his shot is the foot at the bottom. It adds a bit extra to an otherwise not uncommon portrait angle. So much depends on this one detail.

This photo marks one of the first using my new Toyo 4x5 with Schneider 135 lens. I used Portra 160. When I received the scans back from the lab, I immediately was drawn to this image. However, there was some flare seeping around his head and I wish I had aligned the camera more parallel to the bench. And the focus could have been sharper.

This was another reminder of the thought and even forethought that should go into setting up a shot. This, after all, is one of the "benefits" of shooting large format. I can't get this day back. I can't go back and make it better. I have to live with it now.  And that's okay. Many will probably say it is good enough. But it's never good enough.

The Black (and White) Experience

Self-Portrait 1983

And now, a few words from this Blogtographer. As I've been recently spinning my social networking web, I have been asked some very pointed questions about myself. Here, then, are the very pointed answers:

1. Yes, I still shoot film; it's familiar and I love the smell.
   
2. No, I'm not a digital-hater; I just don't like the smell of memory chips.
   
3. ​Yes, I'll be featured when the vintage and toy camera episode of "Hoarders" is produced.
   
4. ​No, I do not ever wonder what my photographs would look like if they weren't blurry.
   
5. Perhaps I will "like" your Facebook page and "follow" you on Twitter and Linkedin.​
6. No, I am not related to Ansel Adams, but I used to lie about this to impress The Ladies.​
7. ​You Betcha, I consider myself an artist, but I prefer craftsman.
   
8. ​Yes, I do more than take photographs. I am also a published, award-winning serious fiction writer. So, nanny-nanny boo-boo.
   
9. No, sexting is very, very wrong (at my age).​
10. And finally: yes, I know qwerky is spelled incorrectly.​

Thanks for visiting my site. Return often. Stay late. Take lots of pictures with whatever camera you have handy.​

Camera Down, Don't Shoot: The Michael Brown Mural Incident

I find it interesting that in an environment in which practically everyone has an image-making device at the whim of their fingertips and in which anyone can claim – and many too often do – to be a photographer (define that term any which way you can) and citizens call for body cams and car cams and nanny cams (but no stoplight cams because that’s a violation of personal rights), that even now the sight of someone with a camera in his hand raises suspicion and anxiety to pervy flasher levels. Encountering such resistance and fear (at the risk of boiling it dry with hyperbole), reminds me of the glaring/sheepish look on my dog’s face when he sees me watching him while he takes a shit in the backyard.

We are apparently living in an environment in which everyone is entitled to their own private privacy (pick your definition, you drone haters) as well their own private publicity. I identify this rather schizophrenic conundrum only because I encountered it firsthand while preparing to photograph this large mural in North St. Louis dedicated to the Michael Brown situation.

I call it the situation because it has bled well beyond the actual and terribly unfortunate loss of a young man’s life. Situation, but this is not about that. I’m not poking that particular bear. Rather it is about me, standing in the middle of a side street on a Sunday morning in a not-so-good part of town, wearing a knee-high orthotic boot, my Smart car idling a few feet behind me, and holding a 50-year-old piece of plastic known as a Diana camera while positioning myself to take a photograph. It’s about this. It’s about that.

I was in my photographer’s zone, looking at everything while focusing on just one thing. I had been planning on photographing this mural for two weeks, after I had noticed it driving home on a new route (for me, anyway). Photographing signage, in my opinion, is too easy. I resist all the time the urge to capture other people’s need to force a message upon the world. It is, for all intents and purposes, akin to photographing bumper stickers – writ large.

And yet I succumb to this baser of my photographic instincts time and time again.

To reach the mural, I had to pass the one-way street on which it is located and turn on the next street, then drive back along an alley so I could park facing the correct direction. While parking and fumbling in my camera bag, I looked around to ensure I was alone in this we’re-not-in-the-suburbs-anymore-Toto area of the city, but especially as a middle-aged, orthotically booted white dude with only a plastic camera for protection. I noticed a grey sedan down the street being spasmodically jockeyed into a tight parking space between two battered trucks, but thought nothing of it.

In my zone, I stood in the street, peering through the plastic viewfinder when I heard a car approaching. I was on the cusp of taking a series of shots and was thusly loathe to pay the car much mind, even though I was smack in the middle of the street.

Let them go around me was my thought and attitude. The car slowed to a stop, the window lowered several inches, the cloudy brightness glinted on the glass, and a nicely dressed and coifed woman (from what little I could discern) started speaking. Again, I admit I was reluctant to pull myself out of the transcendental zone I had been working to achieve for most of the morning. My zone is such that I am hyper-attuned to my surroundings while also being super-embedded in my own head – talk about schizophrenic. After a good shoot, I emerge from the zone post-coitally, basking in an afterglow, in need of a symbolic cigarette, and desiring always just a little more camera cuddling.

The woman started talking. Her words confounded me as I felt myself being pulled out (photo interruptus) like a sun perch at a fishing derby. Whatever she was saying—and she was saying it emphatically—her passenger, also a nicely dressed and coifed woman in an on-the-way-to-Sunday-service sort of way, was agreeing with her by communicating with an energetic head bob. Like a faulty speaker at the drive-thru, I heard words broken by unintelligibility (my own, not hers), as if I were someone for whom English is a third-word language.

Can’t park

No supposed

Calling police

Move away

These were the staccato words I thought I understood through the speakeasy slot of the car window. I thought I replied in my own Jar Jar Binks pigeon language. In my head, I wanted to respond and defend my presence with the appropriate confidence cum sarcasm that I learned during my journalism training.

Public street

First Amendment

Right to

Not breaking any

Who the fuck are you

But what came out of my mouth was something along the lines of, “What? I’m just taking a picture of this mural,” while my camera-clutched hand was raised in supplication—instinctively hands-up. I looked around, hoping to see someone who was witnessing—maybe even recording—this encounter, this situation. I don’t know why I did that. I’m not poking that bear, either.

In a different scenario, I would have ignored the intrusion to my photo-taking activities, but this time, she was blocking my view with her car. I was not so frustrated that my process was being interrupted as I was resentful at what seemed like an unnecessary intrusion and distraction.

I was not at that moment interested in either her motives (was she concerned for my safety, was she warning me, was she protecting the mural?) or her mission (play that funky music, white boy). Even if she had some sort of protective ownership of the mural, that ownership was at least partially subsumed by the public nature of it.

This encounter, punctuated by the broken signals of our communication, lasted no more than ten seconds. She must have agreed in part with my explanation because she nodded slowly and turned to look behind her. I heard:

Okay

Just

Moment

Not

Long                                                                                                           

I said thank you and held too long the last syllable in an act of civil passive aggressiveness like waving a cocktail-sized Don’t Tread On Me flag.

She backed away, the reverse gear whining as she weaved and receded to the parking spot between the two trucks. I raised my camera, reaching for the disappearing mirage of my zone in the desert of the moment.

And I took this photo, put my camera down, and drove home.

Not knowing. What I had.

--CB Adams

Aflutternation

As I stared at this photograph, trying to think of a title, Flutternation came to mind. So I Googled it to see what would appear. First, I was asked "Did you mean Glitternation?"Well, no, that would be a completely different image. There were hits for flutternation. Several concerned something called Social Butterfly TV, and which people had posted things about being furry and social and whatnot. There was also a cardiologist who specializes in atrial fibrillation and has an organization called Flutter National.

So avoid confusion, I added an "A" to make this my own, and frankly, I like it better because the flag is aflutter. As a nation, we are aflutter. As a symbol for America, I love our flag. But that is all it is: a symbol. Honor it as you see fit. Or not.

I remember hearing about young people being arrested because they used flag patches to mend their jeans. I remember Mick Jagger causing a controversy by draping himself in a flag (probably Great Britain's, but still). I remember people plastering their vehicles with American flag stickers after 9/11, as if to ward off terrorism. ("The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity," eh Yeats?)

This all seems silly. The mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote about the masks of god. The concept behind this book is that the word god, the name god, and the image of god are the final obstacles to experiencing god. Using this same reasoning, the flag essentially masks what America and freedom are all about. The flag is just a bunch of strips of cloth. The Bible is just some ink markings on some pages. A cartoon of Muhammad is just some squiggles drawn by an artist. None of these things ARE the things they represent.

This photograph exemplifies the state of the nation, blown around by whatever winds are passing through, some I agree with and some I abhor. For each of us, the answer is blowing in the wind -- at least some of the time.