Wandering Again

This is a detail of a bust stop shelter I've been walking past several times a week for the last 7 years. This detail is only a small part of the shelter, every surface of which was used by local artists, writers, sages, and gangsters, broadcasting their urgent messages to the world.

I'm speaking of it in past tense, because the city just demolished and removed it. The removal of bus shelters and sidewalk benches is part of our "war on the unhoused," but in this case, it was probably just because they considered it an eyesore. I've never seen anyone occupying it who wasn't waiting for a bus.

I loved this shelter and I regret not taking more pictures of it. I would have, had I known it was going to be erased. I appreciate graffiti of all kinds, including tags. And stickers, and flyers, and posters for local events. A couple of local straight edge punk clubs are always represented on the exterior panels. But there are also posters for art exhibits and sidewalk sales and community events. What some consider vandalism or defacement, I see as cultural markers and neighborhood beautification. Signs of civilization. Urban sigils.

This image can't be full appreciated unless you download it and zoom in. I've assembled a surrealist poem from just a few of the fragments.

Hi Karen Williams,
Stop Eating Pussy
Fuck Fascists
Kill All Nazis
Kill All Democrats— scratch that
Kill Democrats
OFF WITH HIS HEAD
Fuck an erect cock— scratch that
ABOLISH ICE... with flaming flames!
Atonement & Enlightenment
Q&A Session
with venurable mastur
lectchures Cost $20
“YOurFeowlochure Awaits”
* SCRAM *
— Greg Gray, The Mano

T/Making photos is helping me get through this dark time—

Alert! ICE activity is taking place right now at 12th and Clay Sts!

Run down stairs, put on my shoes, lock down my phone, then,

"Pam, I'm gonna run out for a few minutes."

"OK. Thanks for letting me know."

(Glad she didn't ask where I was going.)

Fortunately, for me, when I got there 12 minutes later, all was calm with no signs of ICE. I hope it was a false alert and not the aftermath of a successful kidnapping.

As I was saying, photography helps. Even just sorting through hundreds of similar digital photos, organizing, tagging, and deleting is soothing. But editing is the best part, which I enjoy even more than printing. It's become my home meditation practice.

I occasionally sit in silent meditation for 30 minutes or more, but I've never been able to cultivate a daily or routine practice. I'm a little better with my yoga practice, which is a form of moving meditation. I get to the hot studio at least 3-4 times a week. But more and more I find myself wanting to go outside with a camera and wander without a plan. Discovering photographs in the wild is what I imagine sport hunting is for people who hate themselves.

Sometimes I compose photos in my living room or yoga studio attic, but I rarely like the result. I won't say I get a more or better results roaming the city, but I enter a completely different mind set.

I remember walking a lot as a young child, alone. Usually with my eyes down on the ground, looking for treasure. Discarded and rusted bolts or metal scraps were the best. I can still see the pavement and sandy shoulder of Pond St, not far past the cow fields.

One time after school, I was acting out on the bus, while it was still filling with my fellow fourth graders. I don't remember what I did to deserve it, but the driver told me to get off. Without hesitation or alarm, I did. It was no big deal. I would walk home. It wasn't far, maybe 3 or 4 miles. I almost made it. When I was less than a mile from home, the bus driver pulled up behind me, in his own car.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Walking home."

"Get in." I did and he drove me the rest of the way.

As a teen I went out almost nightly. I would walk a mile to the main road, hitch-hike downtown (4 miles), hang out at "the benches" or find my way to a keg party, which were typically in the woods on the outskirts of town. Then I would attempt to hitch-hike home, which often meant I would walk home. I never minded. The dark is quiet while the town is sleeping.

For my last two years of high school, I journeyed further, another 4 miles, to hang out in Woods Hole. The late night hitch-hiking from there was almost pointless, so those nights I would often walk the full 9 miles home.

I began making photographs in high school. I used my father's cameras. A twin-lens Yashika and a half-frame Olympus PEN. Black and white. I unloaded the film from the cameras by feel with both hands slid backwards through the black sleeves of a changing bag. I would wind the film onto plastic reels, insert the reels into plastic tanks. Then the chemicals, the red light in the dark room, the enlarger and the prints. I only remember a single photo from that time. It was of my brother Gregg swinging on a rope in the woods. It was an action shot that caught his delighted face in perfect focus, surrounded by blurry trees and leaves. I was proud of that one.

While living in Oakland from 1980 to 1987, I continued making photos, this time with a Nikon FM2. I rented time in a community dark room. When I moved to Atlanta in 87, I brought with me a large box of negatives and photos. I was proud of a lot of those photos, too. I loved leafing through them and I eventually arranged the best of them into a few scrap books.

What happened to them? I don't know. I still have maybe 8 or 9 photos from those collections. There in a box somewhere (I know exactly where.). I don't remember when or why I sold my Nikon and I always regretted it. I vaguely remember throwing all the negatives away. So much of my life is vague. Blurry memories.

Pam and I took a lot of snapshots of our life together and we still have those. My old black and whites are buried under them. But those are snapshots and not like the photographs I used to love making.

As a child, teen, and young adult, I was also creatively writing. A lot. Poetry, creative non-fiction, short stories, musings, and a manifesto or two. I threw all of it away in another fugue state of which I don't much recall. Purging is what it was.

In writing this, which I thought was going to be about a single photo, I am starting to sense more of the patterns of my life. Remember more of the paths I've walked.

Getting back on point, I'm making photos again, and I am walking again. Not at night, although I'm tempted. I've got a new (old) Nikon FM2, the exact model I had in the 80's, and several other film cameras, old and new. I also continue to shoot digitally. I'm sure it was having an iPhone that slowly drew me back into making photographs.

But I'm also sure that rediscovering my creativity is a result of remembering who I used to be. Before all those years of trying to remake myself. I don't want to be who I used to be. But I think I'm ready to be who I was meant to be. Still figuring that out.