The Synchronicity of Friends

Hieroglyphics, 2007

Through the years I’ve been fortunate to meet many interesting people. Some came and went from my life quickly. Some became friends that I see regularly. Some are “consequential strangers,” people who hover constantly at the edge of my life. I don’t know a lot about them. But they’re a regular presence.

And then there are the friends who are real soul mates. Now that I think about it, I have more of them than I thought. Each one is rooted in some deep personal connection. Each is different from all the others and each one makes my life richer. One of the things that defines them is a commitment to friendship that doesn’t require regular physical presence.

These are the kinds of friends you might not see from year to year. But when you do get together, it’s like you never ended your last conversation. You just pick up and carry on. Invariably, you find that your lives or moods or circumstances have been whirling in similar but not intersecting orbits.

About five years ago I found out I had a common chronic disease. It isn’t life threatening. But it could become so over time if I didn’t take better care of myself. This included getting more exercise. The only way I could figure out how to fit the necessary exercise into my day was to start my day a little sooner. So for several years I got up at 5:30 a.m. each morning and walked five miles. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. But there was a certain amount of fear-of-the-alternative that kept me going. 



During the years I was doing this, I much preferred the dark mornings of winter to the humid dawns of summer. I don't handle cold very well any more. But there were fewer distractions in the dark. It was easier to concentrate on keeping one foot in front of the other while I worked on other things in my head.

One spring I realized there was a whole lot going on in the path I walked each morning. The streets were full of hieroglyphics, it seemed. One morning I took my camera with me when I walked and chronicled some of these marks and colors and rifts in the earth. They became a series I called “At My Feet.” You can see it here.

During the summer of 2008, I had a chance to catch up with my friend Mike McDermott. We became fast friends about twenty years ago when we were presidents of different chapters of the same professional society. We both later became national officers of the organization. We are about the same age and have interesting similarities in our life stories. We're both parents of daughters. Mike's a marketing guy for a large federal agency. In his spare time, Mike writes poetry (and novels and screenplays).

The day we got together I told him about my return to photography. When I told him I’d gotten so involved that I’d even taken to taking pictures of things I found at my feet, he practically jumped from the table and told me, “I’ve got just the poem for you.”

And he did.

Herewith, “Cement Block History,” by Mike McDermott



It was cold, the walk back.


On the way, I looked down

and counted the blocks . . .


One, two, three –


boring cement blocks they seem

only if you count them.



A story was there

underneath the footprints

on the cement blocks:


“DM + CR”
“Kathy is a . . .”

“9/8/64”
cracks, old brittleness,

rough new cement,

a smashed worm after the rain,


dirt,
broken Pepsi bottle –


the pieces seeming to last

the length of the journey.



Blocks still to be there

after the journey’s done,

there to be the way

of another journey begun.

Women I Have known Dept.

Pretty Faces Talking Death, 2005

My friend Lucy has started a new blog for women. It’s called Unkempt Women. You can draw your own conclusions regarding its fit with you from the name.

You must understand that I’ve never actually met Lucy in person. So the story goes, she’s a British ex-pat living in Portugal with her university professor husband and two darling daughters.

But I can’t confirm this. There’s even one person I know who thinks she might be the fictitious alter ego of Wally Torta, of whose shenanigans I’ve written here before. Wally has several alter egos and since Wally Lamb did such a good job of writing from a female perspective in She’s Come Undone, who’s to say Wally Torta couldn’t do the same?

It’s true. You could check it out. Lucy and Wally have never been seen in the same place at the same time.

But that’s not the point. Whoever he or she is, “Lucy” is a talented artist, writer, acerbic critic of British tourists in Portugal, observer of life and possessor of a wonderfully askew sense of humor. You can see more of that here.

Her new blog got me to thinking about the changed roles of women across my lifetime. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s. My mother nearly always had a job outside the home, which made her something of a rarity. Women were only beginning to sift into the management ranks when I entered the workforce in earnest in the mid-1970s.

I know that transition from the kitchen to the office wasn’t easy. But looking back there were some strange and difficult wrinkles. The worst was probably that whole blouse-with-a-tie thing. If you had one or worked with women who wore them, you know exactly what I’m talking about. But not far behind it was the stage when women thought they had to be more like men to get ahead.

We had a client once at the ad agency who was like this. Her family owned a large consumer goods corporation. Her father had originally been our contact at the company, but as he gave her more responsibility she became our contact.

This woman—I’ll call her Celeste—was one of those women who believed she had to be tough like a man to get ahead. (She seemed to have failed to realize that birthright alone was doing that.) Celeste was coarse, abrupt and rude. She drank and cursed like a sailor. She was duplicitous in her business dealings. I suppose she might have had a nicer side. We just never saw it.

Celeste’s behavior was so noticeable because we were a generally decent bunch at the ad agency. Yes, we went out. We entertained clients. We acted silly some times and had our requisite number of jerks on staff. But we certainly didn’t treat other people the way Celeste treated us.

When our agency founder first heard about Celeste’s behavior, he didn’t believe us. He was in his late 60s. In his world women didn’t do that kind of thing. (Think the Bertram Cooper character in Mad Men.) It took having dinner with Celeste for him to be convinced. After that, he suggested, as only someone of his genteel Southern upbringing would have put it, that:

“She needs to have a talk with her mother.”

A Room with a View

Fairfax, 2008

I wish I could evoke the same feelings about a view in my writing that E.F. Forster did in A Room with a View, or portray it as well as Merchant & Ivory did in their movie version of the book.

But alas, the view I write of today is far less dramatic and a lot more irreverent.

For almost ten years I was research director at an advertising agency. We had offices in a number of cities. I was based at the agency’s headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia.

It was a wonderful agency. Great talents everywhere. The requisite number of idiosyncratic personalities you’d expect for an ad agency. Everyone passionate and obsessive about their work. The place had the kind of avuncular personality—our new business presentation, after all, was narrated by Bob & Ray—that once led AdWeek magazine to describe it as the kind of place where “Ward Cleaver would have worked if he’d been in advertising.”

The agency looked out for its people. But it didn’t believe in excessive spending on décor and fittings. The chief financial officer swore that the path to ad agency financial ruin was paved with Oriental rugs and lithe young receptionists with soft English accents. Consequently, workspaces were spare. New employees were sent to the basement to scavenge whatever ramshackle furniture and art they could find.

I would like to brag and impress upon you my importance in this operation by telling you that I had a corner office on the top floor with a floor-to-ceiling window half as wide as my office. Technically speaking, all of this is true. But the building was only two stories, the window was very skinny, my office was only twice as wide as the window and prior to me occupying it, the room had been a broom closet. The office overlooked an asphalt parking lot.

Diagonally behind our building was a company that made prosthetic devices. It was nothing to look out my window and see arms and legs of various compositions, sizes and colors set out to dry on the top of the dumpster behind their building.

Even more interesting was when customers would come in for new or replacement limb fittings. A lot of them were apparently military veterans and rough looking guys who looked as if they would have ridden in on motorcycles had they had a complete pair of legs.

I don’t know much about the making and fitting of artificial limbs. I gather it takes some time to get the fit of a new limb right. You’d see customers walk in the front of the store on crutches and out the back door to test new legs by taking a walk across our parking lot. They might repeat this exercise several times in an afternoon.

Because they used so much petroleum-based material to make prosthetic limbs—there was always a cloud of varnish vapors and WD40 in the air—customers weren’t allowed to smoke inside the store. It wasn’t uncommon to see one of the prosthetic technicians walk a one-legged customer out to the back of the store and prop him up against a wall so that he could have a smoke between fittings. Some days I’d look out my window and see not only all the limbs laid out to dry on the dumpster top, but also three or four rough looking limb-needy guys propped up against the alley wall, smoking cigarettes and talking jive about their time in “Nam.”

The Sad Tale of the York Spit

York Spit, 2003

People who live in coastal regions tend to be sentimental about boats. Old watermen, for example, can recall the personalities of every boat they’ve ever owned.

The York Spit was built in the late 1930s for a local oyster processing company and used to guard its oyster beds against poachers. To give you an idea of the seriousness of this job, York Spit was originally fitted with a machine gun on her forward deck.

There were once several of these boats patrolling the lower Chesapeake Bay, each named for the river whose oyster beds she guarded. Only the York Spit survives.

When I first came upon her, York Spit was tied at a pier not too far from where we live. Her years as an oyster bed sentry long over, she was fitted out for pleasure cruising. Whenever I’d motor past her in my little runabout, I’d admire York Spit’s practical design, her elegant lines and her sturdy wooden construction. I never actually saw anyone take York Spit out. But every year or so they'd spruce her up with a fresh paint job and a new canopy.

Then she disappeared, having once again taught me that I should have taken a picture of her when I thought of it, not when I got around to it.

You see, I’d always wanted to do a photo essay about the York Spit. She’s not only an elegant and rare old boat, but also a tangible connection to a form of maritime commerce that's quickly disappearing.

You can imagine my joy, therefore, when a year or so later I came across York Spit one day while driving through an old section of Norfolk, Virginia. She was at a pier on the Lafayette River. I had my camera with me and quickly took a few pictures from a nearby bridge.

I tried to find whoever was taking care of her so that I could ask for permission to photograph her up close. But it’s a densely packed neighborhood where she was. Knocking on doors just got me yelled at by a lot of people, none of whom knew anything about York Spit. So I had to content myself with seeing only what I could see of her from the bridge.

Then the York Spit disappeared from the Lafayette River.

Fast forward to November of 2o08. I was prowling the waterfront in Norfolk and found this rotting old hulk up on blocks behind the oyster processing company that had owned York Spit. A little closer examination revealed that I had once again found York Spit. I took a few quick pictures of her sad condition and moved along. (Actually, a security guard came out and moved me along.)

York Spit, 2008

Fast forward again to this past September. I was attending an art show opening where, at one point, I could have sworn I heard some people standing behind me say the words “York spit.”

I don’t usually accost people I don’t know. But this was too much. I interrupted their conversation and asked if it was the York Spit they were talking about. It was, and they explained that they were part of a small band of enthusiasts who were hoping to rebuild York Spit.

It seems that the elder member of the family that owns the oyster company wanted to preserve York Spit, but was too old and ill to undertake the project. The younger members of the family just wanted the boat gone. As a compromise, they’d allowed the people I met at the gallery to haul York Spit away to a location where it would be out of their way and, to appease their great uncle, theoretically accessible for repair.

None of the people I met has the kind of money needed for this project. But at least for now York Spit is sitting on blocks and under a protective tarp behind the house of a local photographer friend of mine. Using the rotting boat timbers as a starting point, she has created a fascinating series of abstract, York Spit-inspired photographic images.

Magical Moments of Red

Red Maple, 2006

There is a magic moment that comes once a year. It’s brief and if you’re out of town for a few days you could miss it completely.

We’re in that time right now.

It’s the time when the leaves on the maple tree outside my window turn from green with just a twinge of red to bright red for just a few days before turning brown and falling off the tree.

My father had a neighbor who had several red maples in his front yard. Whenever I admired them, Dad declared with a fatherly finality that made his intentions completely clear, “The leaves are a pain in the neck.” Actually, he didn’t say “neck,” but you get the drift.

I had to hold my tongue about this because Dad’s yard was full of pine trees. Anyone who spent a lot of their youth raking pine needles knows pine needles are far more insidious, tree-for-tree, than red maple leaves, and a no easier to rake up. Pine needles get into everything. Red maple leaves add color and interest to anywhere they fall.

This maple outside my window leafs out in the spring about as quickly as it goes red in the fall. But it is the fall that this tree thrills the most. The colors of the leaves of the other trees in our yard vary from year to year based on rain and other climate conditions. But this red maple never disappoints. Sometimes my wife and I sit out in the backyard on crisp fall afternoons just so we can watch this one tree sway in the breeze.

I’ll save you the labor of enduring the usual clichés about red trees and simply say I’m a sucker for red and I love this tree.

Foreign Affairs

Alumbic, 2006

By the time my wife and I were planning a 30^th wedding anniversary trip to Paris, I had been going to the same barber shop for almost a decade and having my hair cut by the same woman. She’s a small Asian woman with a wonderful sense of humor and hands that wield scissors like nobody’s business.

When Ritanna learned I was going to Paris, she urged me to go visit her old employer/landlady at her boutique on the Rue du Four in the Saint Germain. This lady had taken Ritanna and her sister in when they could no longer endure the violence and abuse of the Parisian slum where their mother had settled them after arriving from war torn Cambodia. She’d given them jobs in the shop and a room upstairs in which to sleep.

This wasn’t the first time someone had urged us to look up someone we didn’t know while traveling abroad. In 1989, my wife’s uncle encouraged us to call one of his ham radio buddies while we were traveling in England. We called several days before arriving in their part of the country. They invited us to stop by, but we got the distinct impression they had no idea who we were and were just being polite. (We’d been hoping they might extend the courtesy of allowing us to do a load of wash.)

By the time we approached in Taunton, Somerset, Stan must have spoken again on the radio with my wife’s uncle. When we called for final directions, you’d have thought we were their long lost children. Stan and his wife Jackie insisted that we stay the night (and do laundry). They invited their neighbors and their son and his children over to meet us. They took us for a drive in the country to see some of the local stately homes and gardens. That evening they treated us to dinner at their favorite pub. We became fast friends and have stayed in touch ever since.

I didn’t know, on the other hand, what kind of reception I could expect at the Alumbic boutique in Paris. My barber, Ritanna, isn’t the world’s most dependable person. You spend much time with her and you get the impression that she’s not above doing things other people aren’t comfortable doing if that’s what it takes to survive. She told me how her sister used to “borrow” from the store’s cash register and how she herself used to sneak away from the job and smoke pot in the basement with the owner’s son.

To be honest, I hadn’t intended to spend much time retracing Ritanna’s Parisian stomping grounds. But one day my wife and I discovered while walking in the Saint Germain that the name of the street we were walking on had changed to Rue de Four. I looked around and there, right across the street, was the Alumbic boutique. (I have no idea what the name means.) We stepped into the shop and I asked to see the owner. When she appeared, I asked in my best tourist French:

“Connaissez-vous la femme appelée Ritanna?”

The owner looked at me suspiciously for a moment. Then a big smile formed on her face and she came around the counter to hug me, all the while talking so quickly in a mashup of French and English that I couldn’t begin to understand what she was saying.

The store owner insisted that we wait while she called her son (he of the pot smoking). When he showed up, he pulled out his Daytimer book and showed me, pasted inside the front cover, Ritanna’s business card from the Holly Famous Barber Shop in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

I really didn’t have much else to say other than that Ritanna sent her regards. But the store owner insisted on sending us back out onto the street with armloads of mini-cigarette lighters with the store name on them that even if we had been smokers would have probably landed us in Gitmo if we’d tried to take them on the plane.

I wish we had such contacts in Venice. I wouldn’t mind a cheap place to freeload there from time to time.

What It Looked Like to Me

Fairview Beach, 2007

Over the years I’ve figured out that people like to be able to classify you. They like you to be predictable so they know what they can expect from you or when you would have the greatest utility to them.

I’m advised by people who are in a position to know that this phenomenon applies ever more so to gallery owners. They want you to have a single, consistent point of view, theme or visual style. They want to know what it is you do and that you can do more of it if it sticks with collectors.

One of the things that makes photography interesting to me, and apparently frustrating to gallery owners, is that although over the course of years there are some consistencies in my work that one might stretch and call a “style,” on a day-to-day basis I’m all over the place.

One day I might be all about telling a story with pictures, reflecting the inspiration that people like Eugene Smith, Frances Johnston, Dorothea Lange and the Magnum photographers had on me when I was first starting out. On other days you can see the influence of André Kertész’ photo essay, “On Reading,” coming through in the up-close slices of life I refer to as “small moments.” And on still other days my photographs can take on the decidedly non-representational feel of the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler.

Fairview Beach started out pretty straightforwardly. I was driving down Rt. 218 just east of Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was the kind of August morning that is so hot and humid in these parts that your glasses (and camera lenses) fog up whenever you step out of an air-conditioned car. I had just finished taking some very traditional documentary pictures of a 200+ year-old “primitive” Baptist church when I saw the sign for the turnoff to Fairview Beach. I’d never been to Fairview Beach before. But it was just a few miles away and promised a good view of the lower Potomac River.

Fairview Beach looks like the kind of seasonal cottage community to which middle class families of Fredericksburg and Washington, D.C would have retreated in the summertime in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Most of Fairview’s cottages are on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River. The cottages are modest and lack the kinds of decorative curlicues and architectural flourishes you see at, say, Cape May or Oak Bluffs. But they are neat and colorful and have the kind of comfortable, lived-in look that belies many generations of use.

My journey that day didn’t allow me much time to explore Fairview. On a crisp sunny day I expect you could capture a lot of Americana there with a camera. But I did take a moment to stop and look out onto the Potomac. The river is more than two miles wide when it passes Fairview. In the humid haze of that August morning you couldn’t see the far side. The color of the river blended almost seamlessly into the haze and then into the sky. Fairview Beach isn’t exactly what it looked like to the uncritical eye. But it’s what it looked like to me.