What 09 could look like. Part IV.

Over at The Other Journal, I’m in the beginning of a photo blog project simply titled ‘Neighbor.’ 

Here’s the project synopsis.

Who is my neighbor? A timely question in an age that promises heightened connectedness. A timely question in the face of social and economic events that could reframe our ideas about wellness and security to the point where we begin to realize our own well being is better formed when considering the well being of the other. To break from a natural inclination to insularity, the photographer searches out neighbors in his life.

It’s just in it’s cradle stage so if you are interested in somehow participating please let me know. And please, please join the discussion at TheOtherJournal.com on a regular basis. It’s one of the most well done and mindful publications on faith and culture out there.

 

What could 09 look like. Part III.

I’ve teamed up with those bright fellas over at Redwire Creative to do some new projects. They do the work I like to do, often for non profit entities that have a clear purpose, like Here’s Life Inner City who recently orchestrated 150 college students willing to tromp through some of the nastiest weather Minnesota could spew to deliver food packs wherever they might be needed. If you, or anyone you know has an organization making a positive impact and may be in need of on-point and brilliantly designed collateral to tell the story, let us know.

 

What 09 could look like. Part II.

I imagine there will be more days where we put the means for young people to express themselves and to exhaust their curiosity at the Mpls Photo Center.

 

What 09 could look like. Part I.

I’m keeping an open eye to what possibilities this new year might deliver. Early projects have been incredibly gratifying, beginning with the first wedding of the year. Matt and Rina couldn’t have been a sweeter couple. Gentle, loving, kind people…those are the ones that add a fat measure of joy to what I already love to do.

Takes and Out-takes

Somehow I managed to break my photo blog. Drats. So I’ll post here. This week has been the week for fours and twos at the studio – boys. Looking through images, I couldn’t help but crack up. Here’s but a few.

Levi and Elliot

Alex and Nicky

still life from a younger life

While introducing a quiet, polite and hopefully engaged set of younger photographers to the concept of photo still lifes today, an especially clever young woman named Hasanna set up the image below. 

“I call it Snowflake Soup,” she declared with a certain amount of satisfaction, wearing something just shy of grin. 

I thought it was brilliant, so here it is for you to taste…Snowflake Soup.

 

Minneapolis Photo Center

Sunday Service

I went to a different church this past Sunday. 

 

Temple

Icons

Disciples

(yes, even Twins manager, Ron Gardenhire) 

Communion

Fellowship

Packers 37

Bears      3

Trains and bikes

 

Wouldn’t life be just a little more romantic if these were our most common modes of transportation?

Autumnal

It’s been a beautiful Fall here. No one can say otherwise. Saturday we did what apparently every other person does on a perfect Fall day, go the apple orchard. I know I gave Heath way too hard of a time about the experience. But out past all the traffic and noise, and lines, and garbages swarming with yellow jackets and all the apple commerce, there were peaceful autumn pleasures. Here are just some from the day.

What’s in a picture Part I

How I came in possession of a photograph in which a black man is naked and pressed against the black top of a major city street, with his hands zip tied behind him and taser wire still dangling out of his bare chest and stomach, with one police officer kneeling on his back and another pinning his leg down with the bottom of his boot as a whole gang of officers surrounded him to ensure he is subdued, is really no story at all. I happened upon the scene the same as any other passerby who stood now gawking, laughing or upset.

For an instant, before there are details to answer the why, the only narrative is simply that which is this scene. Before the woman who tells me that she’s carrying the man’s child can tell me what’s happened to him, there is just this – the picture I take, a man in the humiliation of his nakedness – arrested, surrounded, subdued.

Frederick Buechner asks readers to consider truth in this way:

“Picture that then, the video without the audio, the news with, for the moment, no words to explain it or explain it away, no words to cushion or sharpen the shock of it, no definition given to dispose of it with such as a fire, a battle, a strike, a treaty, a beauty, an accident. Just the thing itself, life itself or as much of it as the screen can hold…”

In the case of a photograph, it’s just one frame, one instant amidst many, and now with the image entirely separated from its context, it may become something else. Freed from a background story any meaning can be made from it. Some might see a criminal. Some might look and remember Rodney King. Some might see justice in action. Others might see injustice. Some might see a picture of Jesus.

All the tensions are there, so many unresolved – victim and oppressor, criminal and authority, powerful and the overpowered, black and white. It could be an arrest. It could be brutality. And right at that moment, before any knowing, before any judgment, before the picture is defined, before we define ourselves by the picture and our opinions, there is a space of lesser consequence, a brief moment where this single moment is free of pretense or complete understanding. It is, just for an instant, a silence.

Buechner writes about this silence when he speaks about the Gospel that is truth:

“…before the Gospel is a word, it too like truth is silence – not an ordinary silence, silence as nothing to hear, but silence that makes itself heard if you listen to it the way Pilate listens to the silence of the man with the split lip.”

The viewer of the photograph wants to make sense of it, Pilate as the interrogator wants the truth. One is asking the man constrained by the police “Why are you here, naked and ashamed?” The other is asking the beaten prisoner in his court, “What is truth?”

That moment of truth, the moment before any answer is given, is given in silence. But that silence is rife with all of the noise of a man being made somehow even less than a man by being made a victim.