January 15, 2012

Sold to the Highest Contributor!

In today’s Washington Post, Jonathan Turley, Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University, discusses 10 reasons why the U.S. is no longer the land of the free. It’s a sobering account of the slow and sometimes transparent erosion of American’s rights after 9/11.

In addition, to our political rights, our economic wellbeing sits on a precipice. The disparity between the rich and the poor is one of the widest in the history of our country. Why aren’t people protesting? Well, they are. Occupy Wall Street and others are pointing their collective fingers at a number of issues: corporate greed, the fallacy of trickle down economics (which states the top 1% are job creators), and the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission decision by the Supreme Court which stated, essentially, that corporations could be treated like individuals with no limits on the amount they could contribute to a political campaign.

Put simply, money is the most important issue in our country today. Money brings influence and political victories while it keeps the middle class and poor separate from that power.

In my guise as the Chamomile Tea Party, I’ve created a new poster that conveys this issue. It’s free for the download in high resolution. Print it out, pass it around, and discuss within your communities.

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December 10, 2011

The Story of a Photograph That Changed Over Time

I used to say by the time one sees an artist’s work the creative process has long ended. What the viewer sees are the vestiges of that process—the skeletal remains. Yes, there is beauty, horror, and all sorts of emotions that can be reflected in the work. But the joy of creating or of telling a story has passed and the artist is on to his next idea. Yet, as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that sometimes the story continues. And, if an artist is lucky years later he is reunited with the piece on a completely different level.

The first time that happened to me was in November 2009 on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In anticipation of that momentous event I went searching my photo archives for a photograph I’d taken at the Wall in 1974. It was a family reunion with the Wall in between. In the decades since I snapped that picture and experienced that Cold War divide in such a personal way, the details of just where I took that photo were fuzzy. I remembered the event and I remembered what occurred during that visit but I couldn’t quite remember where I took that picture. I thought it was at Checkpoint Charlie and posted the image on Flickr as such. But immediately, people from around the world began to question the location. A popup community looked for visual documentation that would place the image. And as we searched historical photographs my memory slowly began to come back. The picture was actually taken one block east of the checkpoint at Charlottenstrasse. Through crowdsourcing by a group of strangers another chapter was added to the photograph (be sure to read the comments under the Flickr photograph). Images showing the same corner now showed the transformation of a united Berlin in those intervening years. The story, written as comments and questions from strangers, added a new context to the image.

Last week this happened to me again. I got a voicemail at work from a stranger. She wanted to know if I was the Jeff Gates who had taken a photograph of a storefront in Baltimore in the mid 1980s. I returned her call.

“I had a hard time tracking you down,” she said. “And I hope you don’t think I’m stalking you. But did you take a photograph of a store called Nomenclatures?” I certainly had but that was decades ago. It had been a junk store and its name seemed out of character with its wares and its working class neighborhood. I was intrigued by that discrepancy and took the photograph. But, once again, my memory of the details surrounding the image was fuzzy.

“My father owned that store,” she said. He died a few years ago but last week I was cleaning out some of his things and found a news clipping from the Baltimore Sun with your image in a drawer.”

At the time I was doing a series of photographs with stories on them. Sometimes they were a paragraph; sometimes they were just a sentence; and sometimes there was a text within the image. I had been intrigued by how words could add to our interpretation and change the context of photographs. As she spoke I tried to remember the story I’d put to that image. When I got home I went back to my archives to look.

About a year after taking the initial photograph I had passed the store again and saw it was going out of business. So I took a final photograph. Soon the store and its hand-stenciled sign would no longer exist. I used both the earlier and the later pictures to make a triptych about the value of a photograph over time. Since the place would soon no longer be there the monetary value of my photograph, I thought, should increase. The three photographs indicated each’s place in time. And over time the market value of the image increased. The pure artist in me was making commentary on the entirely different world of the art market.

The passage of time is the very thing that makes the most mundane historical images more valuable, on a personal as well as a market level. These images represent people, places, and events that no longer are there. And, as such, their meaning changes. They may originally have been made to document a family event or home but to us in the future, it becomes a slice of time no longer available to us. People are gone and places have been demolished. As we hold these artifacts of memory dear to us their value increase. Because the period in which these images is long gone and we can’t take any more pictures of these scenes, the market treats them as valuable commodities. I was commenting on monetary value but the photo I had taken was a reminder to this woman of her father and his life. I created a digital version of the triptych and sent it to her.

She wrote back her thanks but, she told me, the text on these images wasn’t the same as the one in the newspaper. “When you took the newspaper image my brother was working at the store and came out to see what you were doing. The text on the photograph was a conversation between both of you. ‘Where’d you get the name?’ you had asked. My brother replied ‘Oh that. My sister named it. She went to college.’”

“I was the sister who went to college,” she continued. “My boyfriend and I painted that sign. My father hated my boyfriend and, of course, I married him. We later got divorced but it was the two of us who named the store and made the sign.” She sent me a copy of the newspaper article and it all came back to me. I had actually done an initial version of this piece with the dialogue between her brother and me. But I had only shown this early rendition one time and that article in her her father’s drawer was for the show it had been in.

Once again, a stranger had added a new chapter to my work. The image takes on greater meaning to me now. Yes, in part because it was part of my history. But more importantly, I now knew it was someone else’s history too. I remade the digital image with the original text and sent it to her.

She wrote back thanking me and added “We talked about you at Thanksgiving.” My ears were burning. All of this because of a store she named and the photograph I took of it. Twenty-five years later I wanted to know the rest of her story.

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July 31, 2011

The Attack of the Wasps!

Last Sunday at 11 a.m. I was attacked by a swarm of wasps. More on that in a minute. But first, what good is a trauma like this if you can’t come out of it with a good story. A good story is the souvenir of traumas —providing you recover.

Two decades ago I was visiting my friends Bob and Ellen in San Francisco when we decided to go camping in Yosemite. I’m a California native but had never been to this national park. Bob and Ellen found this odd, but mostly sad, and they took it upon themselves to fix this. So we traveled from sea level to 11,000 feet in one glorious day. Except, by the time we got to Tuolumne Meadows to begin our hike it was nearing dusk and I was starting to feel a bit queasy. Sunset turned into night. Queasy turned into altitude sickness and we were all so tired we just slung our food over a low branch, rather than follow the strict guidelines for keeping bears at bay.

In the middle of the night we were attacked by said bear. The details of this encounter have become legendary and, much to the chagrin of our friends, have been told and retold a thousand times. Over the years, the details of our attack have diverged. Bob, Ellen, and I all now tell very different stories (the bear was light brown, no, black, no, dark brown). Most importantly, our relationship was forever cemented by this event. But if it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t have been a story.

The next day, tired and traumatized, we had to move to a new campsite at 6,000 feet so I could recover from the high altitude. There we happened upon friends of Bob’s and Ellen’s. Still in shock, they started to retell their tale: “Guess what? Last night a bear came in to our campsite.” They waited for the expected reaction of horror and sympathy. Yet, there was none. “Oh yeah, that happened to us a while back,” their friends replied. Bob and Ellen were crestfallen. It was time to step in. “Friends,” I said, “you need to know how to tell a good story. You don’t say ‘a bear came into our campsite.’ You say ‘Guess what? We were attacked by a bear!’”

And so, I was attacked by a swarm of wasps. Only this time I really was ATTACKED. Relentlessly.

A couple months ago we reseeded our lawn and after nurturing the new grass it was finally time to mow. It was hot and muggy and I constantly had to wave the gnats away from my face. We never had gnats before. Suddenly, the “gnats” started stinging. As I look back now, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. I remember my surprise at this sudden gnat aggressiveness until it dawned on me. These were no longer small harmless bugs. I didn’t actually see the wasps. Not yet. But I instinctively tried to protect myself as I ran to the front door. Which was locked. I pounded and heard someone scream. Me. Simultaneously, I was both being attacked and completely disembodied.

My youngest daughter sauntered to the door. She had no idea what was happening. As always, her timing could best be described as “teenage leisurely.” But my oldest yelled out to my wife that it sounded like Dad was being mugged. I ran into the house and the wasps came with me. Then I came face-to-face with my savior. My wife had just gotten out of the shower and as I ran screaming into the bathroom she pushed me into the tub and turned on the water. Again, I was operating in two entirely different worlds. I was still being stung but I had the wherewith all to remove my iPhone and wallet before being drenched fully clothed. I told my wife I couldn’t breathe but told her it was because I was just out of breath, not because I was in anaphylactic shock. The adrenaline rush was huge. She got me a kitchen chair so I could sit down in the tub. As she removed my clothes I watched the mound of drowned wasps grow by the drain. She placed my soaked jeans in the sink.

People in shock usually don’t know their in shock. It’s simply their reality at the moment. As I retell this tale it’s pretty clear I was in shock. As I sat in bed, I realized my head was really hurting. The wasps’ stingers had mercilessly banged at my skull. Ice pack in hand, my wife tried to figure out the right dosage of children’s Benadryl we had on hand. I’d never had a systemic reaction to bee stings before but I’d never had so many stings at one time. She calculated six teaspoons. But when I talked to the on call nurse, she thought that probably was an overdose. I survived. With ice pack in one hand, I posted my status to Facebook with the other. I was coming out of shock.

Later I found at least eleven stings but also found out that, unlike bees which sting once and die, wasps can continually pump venom into you over and over. They were angry and vicious. Apparently, the sound of the lawn mower going over their nest in the hole in the ground set them off.

The nurse told me what the next few days would be like. The stings didn’t itch yet but they would start the next day. That would last about 48 hours and then it would start to subside. Luckily, I had time to recover from the actual attack before the untenable itching commenced. It was unbearable. I couldn’t sleep. My only saving grace was that each sting seemed to take its turn at being insufferable. Itching can literally drive you mad. I tried digging my nails into my fingers to offset the itch. It didn’t work. In the relative calm of the middle of the night I contemplated my insanity. The next night I slept with boo boo bunnies we had saved from our children’s childhoods (little plastic ice cubes wrapped up in a plush little rabbit). Ice saved my sanity. And, just as the nurse had predicted, by the third day the itching started to go away.

My wife counted over thirty wasps in the tub but was shocked to find 22 more (some still alive) in my jeans. I was very lucky.

I usually am good to insects. Live and let live, I say. But we had an exterminator to the house on Friday. Those insects met their match. And they paid dearly for their innate aggressiveness. I made him go over the entire lawn, inch by inch. But it may take me a while to get back to mowing. A trauma is a trauma. I was attacked by wasps. I’ve lived to tell this tale. And this is my souvenir.

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