Monthly Archives: February 2025

you have to be there

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The question came up again today. “Is there a relationship between the way you write and the way you shoot photographs?” Somebody asked me a similar question a couple of years ago, and this was my response:

My response was pretty simple: Never thought about it. And then, of course, I started thinking about it.

And, of course, since the question came up again, I started thinking about it again. The last time I was asked the question (yeah, I actually had to go back and find that blog post and re-read it to know how I responded last time), I focused on writing and photography as matters of craft. I said they were two very different crafts, and…

[W]hile writing and photography are both vehicles for self-expression, they’re completely different vehicles. Asking if me if I write the same way I shoot photos is like asking me if I drive a truck the same way I paddle a kayak.

That’s still true. But this morning it occurred to me that there’s another fundamental difference between the two crafts. It’s this:

Photography is the only medium of self expression that requires you to be physically present.

You can paint a picture of a house on the edge of a mountain meadow without being there. You can write a scene that takes place in 17th century Venice or on the planet Tralfamadore. You can dance the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy without being in an enchanted garden. But to shoot a photograph, you have to be there. (Yeah, sure, you can set up a tripod and rig some sort of timed or remotely triggered shutter release, but c’mon, you know what I mean.)

I can write anywhere. To shoot a photo, I have to be there. Right there, at that precise spot in that precise moment. Five seconds earlier, five seconds later, it’s a different moment. Five inches higher, five inches to the right, it’s a different photo. When you shoot a photo, you’re right there.

This isn’t to say photography is more real, or more powerful. I could write a scene…or, better yet, a poem…about the way light falls on a coffee cup that would be as emotional or more emotional than a photo. I could write a scene about a man crossing a street as the light is ten seconds away from turning green that would be full of tension.

A photograph is just now. That both limits its power AND gives it power. A photograph is a real moment as it’s happening.

I hear a lot of people saying stuff like, “This photo tells a story.” No, it doesn’t. A story has a beginning, an ending, and a middle. Again, a photograph is just right now. It might suggest a story, but it’s the viewer who supplies it. It’s not inherent in the photo. A story is what’s taking place outside the frame, what the guy is looking at, why he’s looking, what he’s NOT seeing. A story is what’s in his pockets, what he’s thinking, where he’s going, where’s he’s been, what he did when he was there.

The photo is just a guy with his hands in his pocket, crossing the street while the Don’t Walk warning is flashing.

Back to the question. “Is there a relationship between the way you write and the way you shoot photographs?” Sort of. They both require practice to be consistently good, they both require a certain degree of disciplined composition, they both require a weird merging of passion and control. And (for me, at least), both writing and photography require me to be open and welcoming to the moment. Sometimes a random thought will completely change what I’m writing.

The difference is I can edit and correct what I’ve written. Reality isn’t so easily revised.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This isn’t really relevant to what I’ve just written, but it’s been a while since I’ve mentioned how critical it is to burn the patriarchy to the ground. Burn it, gather the ashes, grind the ashes into dust. Wait for a high wind then scatter the dust so that no two particles exist within a mile of each other. Then bake some bread and eat it with butter and honey.

recruited?

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Over the last couple of days I’ve seen a few social media posts and online articles repeating a claim made by Alnur Mussayev, the former head of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee. In the British tabloid The Mirror, Mussayev wrote: “In 1987, our directorate recruited Donald Trump under the pseudonym Krasnov.”

I don’t believe that. I simply don’t believe Comrade Donald Trump was recruited to be a Russian intelligence agent. Part of my objection is semantic; recruitment involves getting folks to enlist–which literally means to sign your name on a list. I don’t believe ANY intelligence services in ANY nation would consider enlisting Trump as an intelligence agent. He’s not qualified to be an agent. He simply doesn’t have the skills, the temperament, or intelligence to be an agent.

No intelligence service would recruit this smug, self-satisfied, duplicitous fuckwit.

On the other hand, he’s an ideal intelligence asset. An asset is just a person (or a thing) that can be used to gather or disseminate information that might be useful to an intelligence service. An ideal human intelligence asset is somebody who is 1) easily manipulated through intimidation or flattery, 2) gullible and/or ignorant, 3) vulnerable to various forms of kompromat, 4) impulsive, 5) immoral or amoral, and 6) has access to useful information and/or can serve as a conduit for misinformation/disinformation. As an intelligence asset, Comrade Trump is a whole protein–he contains all the essential ingredients.

I totally believe Trump has been a Russian intelligence asset for decades. I absolutely believe Trump has knowingly served Russian geo-political interests. It’s indisputable that Russia engaged in coordinated disinformation campaigns to help get Trump elected, both in 2016 and in 2024. Back in 2021, The Guardian published a report stating the newspaper had possession of a Kremlin report of a 2016 meeting between Putin and his senior intelligence ministers outlining an intelligence operation to help Trump become POTUS. They felt electing Trump (who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”) would “definitely lead to the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system.”

And hey, bingo. Look at us now. You know Vlad Putin is a happy boy.

Even before his 2016 election, Trump was promoting Russian interests. Remember, when candidate Trump’s team established the GOP party platform for the 2016 election, the ONLY change they made was to weaken support for Ukraine’s defense. The original GOP platform promised to “provide lethal defensive weapons to the Ukrainian government” in response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea and their ongoing attempt to militarily annex the Donbas region. Trump’s people had that strong anti-Russia language removed (at the insistence of Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign manager at the time AND who, according to the Mueller Report, made at least US$75 million for supporting Russian interests in Ukraine).

Now that he’s been re-elected, Trump is more openly supporting Russia and Russian interests. He may not have actually been recruited as an agent back in the 1980s, but there’s little doubt that he has now enlisted in the service of Russia.

land of the not-so-free and home of the scared shitless

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You know that song, right? The Star Spangled Banner? It’s sung at the beginning of almost every sports event in the United States. Yeah, that song. It looks like we’re going to have to change the lyrics. There are four verses to the song, though folks generally only sing the first verse. But each of those verses ends with a variation of the same line.

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Turns out the answer to that question is a firm “Nope.” Doesn’t matter if the banner is waving or not, because the US is no longer the land of the free or the home of the brave. Evidence? I got your evidence right here. Vanity Fair just published an article with the title

“They’re scared shitless”: The Threat or Political Violence Informing Trump’s Grip on Congress.

Over the last month we’ve seen Republicans in Congress cower before Trump, confirming Cabinet members they know…they fucking know…are unfit and unqualified. We’ve got a drunk misogynist wife-beater who mismanaged a couple of charities for veterans in charge of the Department of Defense. Pete Hegseth wouldn’t be considered qualified to drive a goddamn school bus. We’ve got a Director of National Intelligence who is a Russian apologist, an ongoing distributor of Russian disinformation, and who has refused to acknowledge that the Syrian dictator Assad used chemical weapons against his own citizens. We’ve got a Secretary of Health and Human Services who has a 14-year history of heroin abuse, who is an anti-vaccine nut, who is a Covid conspiracy nut, who claimed in a divorce proceeding that “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died” which accounted for his…ah, fuck, you get the idea. RFK Jr. is a quack. These are NOT serious Cabinet candidates.

So why have Republicans in Congress supported them? Because, as reported by Vanity Fair (and others), they’re fucking cowards. They’re afraid for 1) their careers and 2) their safety.

Look, I’ve been legit afraid for my life and safety. I understand what it feels like when you’ve been told if you do X, then Y will happen to you. I was threatened several times during my years as a criminal defense investigator. I’ve been threatened by a burglary gang; I’ve been threatened by the guy who actually committed the bow and arrow murder my client was accused of (this was a guy who’d already done time for murdering another person by stabbing him multiple times with a bayonet); I’ve even been threatened by the police for outing an officer who’d slept with a witness. It’s scary to know that there are people out there who seriously want to harm you and are capable of following through with it.

But you know what? I still did my job, because it was important. Because there were principles involved. Because civil liberties matter. Don’t get me wrong; I was scared and I took every precaution I could. There were situations I avoided because I was so fucking nervous. But I did my job.

MAGA Republicans are right to be scared. There are a LOT of MAGA lunatics out there eager to prove their loyalty to Trump by engaging in violence. Many of the Republicans in Congress were potential victims in the January 6th Insurrection. They know what Trump supporters are capable of doing. What they’re willing to do.

But they have a job to do. And they’re…not doing it. Their job is a LOT more important than my job was. There’s a LOT more riding on their job than there was on mine. And they’re too afraid to do it. Oh, a few of them may actually agree with Trump, but many/most of them know better. They’re just too scared to stand up.

Home of the free? Land of the Brave? I’m not convinced the US has ever truly been the land of the free, though I like to think there have been periods in which we’ve tried to be. But we have, in the past, been the land of the brave. When fascism threatened Europe in the 1930s and 40s, the US…okay, we dodged around as much as we could, but eventually we stood up and fought to support Europe. We haven’t always been consistent in opposing totalitarian regimes, but we’ve always at least voiced the notion of freedom and representative democracy.

Now? Not so much. Now we have a POTUS who is openly pro-totalitarian. We have a POTUS who openly spreads Russian lies and disinformation, who openly undermines the very foundations of representative democracy, who is openly corrupt, who openly dismisses the legitimacy of the Constitution.

The Republican Party is fully aware of what he’s doing. And they’re unwilling to oppose him. Because they’re afraid. They’re willing to allow democracy to die in the US because they can’t find the courage to say ‘no’. Hell, they’re not just willing to let it die; they’ll volunteer to help bury the body.

in which I look at an old photo (part 5)

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Right, quick recap: Back in the Spring of last year I was slowly emerging from a photographic funk. I hadn’t picked up an actual camera in…I don’t know, months, Several months. This had happened to me once before (see the endnote if you’re interested). Anyway, for whatever reason, I was coming out of that funk and starting to think about photography again.

That included reading about photography again. I came across an article on some photo website that suggested looking at and analyzing your old photos as if they were made by a different person. That seemed ridiculous to me. I’m not terribly interested in my old photos; I mean, I’ve already seen them, right? Why would I want to look at them again, especially when there are lots of photos by other people that I haven’t seen?

But I thought I’d give it a try now and then. This is my fifth time in nine months. I’m still not comfortable in doing this. But several years ago I wrote about Alfred Stieglitz and his notion of practicing in public. The idea, as I interpreted it at the time, is that if you’re serious about photography, you’ve got to be willing show your whole ass in public. So that’s sort of what I’m doing. So, here we go:

The metadata informs me I shot this photo on September 18, 2014 at 9:03 in the morning with my old Fujifilm X10 (ƒ/4.5, 1/450, ISO 200). It’s one of six photographs I shot that misty morning. I tend to be parsimonious when I shoot–a habit from the days when I couldn’t afford to piss away film.

I don’t remember anything about that day, but it’s clear to me why I stopped long enough to take this particular photo. It’s all about those angular lines. The railroad tracks, the dirt road, the rising line of poles, the telephone wires, and that terrifyingly flat horizon line (although I’m living in Iowa, I’m not a country boy, and I’m always a tad freaked out when I find myself in the flattest and most open parts of the Midwest countryside. There’s so much sky and so little to break up the horizon. It always reminds me that I’m on the surface of a planet, which makes me feel incredibly small and unimportant; that’s both humbling and sort of a nice reminder that everything is temporary when seen on a planetary scale).

I’m sort of surprised I didn’t shoot this photo in monochrome. If line and form are the predominant features inside the frame, I tend to opt for black-and-white (okay, yet another tangent, sorry. It’s silly, I know, but I deliberately choose to shoot in either color or in monochrome. I almost never turn a color photo into monochrome, though that process certainly gives the photographer a LOT more control over the final image). I have to assume that at the time I took the photo, I thought the mist-muted colors added something to composition. Maybe it does. I’m not curious enough to process the image in b&w to find out. I mean, this is the photo I chose to shoot, and there it is.

I like this photograph. I think I’d like it no matter who shot it. I like the simplicity of it. I like the balance. I like the emptiness.

So, is there any real value in this whole ‘looking at an old photo’ bullshit? I kind of hate to admit it, but I think there is. I may not be learning anything new, but the practice does reinforce the reality that I see and react to the world differently than regular people. That’s true of all photographers; it has to be. It validates the willingness to stop your car at some random spot, and get out in the chill mist, simply because you’re smitten by a series of visual lines that other folks wouldn’t notice.

So I’ll probably do this old photo business again in the not-too-distant future.

ENDNOTE: My first long-term photographic funk came at the end of my career as a criminal defense investigator. I used my cameras a LOT as a PI, but in a very technical forensic way. The photos I took for my work were all potential evidence to be used in court. The work was very object oriented. The photos were sometimes technically challenging (I once had to photograph the undercarriage of a wrecked car, which involved some tricky lighting and wide angle lenses while lying on a roller beneath the vehicle, which was claustrophobic as fuck). The problem was that there was no joy in that sort of forensic photography. Blood spatter patterns might be visually interesting, but it’s hard to appreciate when you’re shooting them. When I ended that career, I stuffed my cameras into my Sam Spade Conjurer’s Kit and stuck it in a closet, where it sat for about 3-4 years. I had no desire to hold a camera in my hand in all that time.

red hat ladies

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So here’s me in this small town (we’re talking fewer than 500 people) where there’s a little diner that serves the most excellent desserts (they make their bread pudding with cinnamon rolls). While I’m having lunch, there’s an impossible-to-ignore table with about a dozen older women. They’re all wearing red hats. Not MAGA hats, just hats that are red. All sorts of hats. And these women, they’re having a good time, laughing and talking.

It was fun to see them, and I thought about shooting a photo, but decided not to. I could have justified it ethically in photographic terms, but my momma taught me that old women deserve a few extra layers of respect. So I didn’t.

But after lunch, I ran into a couple of them at a gift shop across the street. And I chatted them up, because I was curious and because I like talking to strangers. We must have talked for more than ten minutes. And at one point, I asked if I could take their photo. And they said yes.

They belong to the Red Hat Ladies. It’s an informal group of a couple of dozen women who meet for lunch maybe once a month, maybe every couple of weeks, depends on their mood. They have rules, sort of. You have to be invited to be a member. You have to be over 60. You have to be sorta kinda approved by most of the other members (they indicated that wasn’t actually a rule, but you know, there’s some folks that just don’t click). And you have to wear a red hat to lunch. Most of them also wore red coats. I got the impression that many (maybe most) of them were widowed or divorced.

And they were a hoot. I teased them, they teased me back. They were so very clearly happy with themselves, and it made me happy to see them and spend time with them. There’s something wonderful about the way older women gather together, something liberating and caring, something that leaves them highly opinionated. It’s like they’ve learned to shrug off so much of the bullshit they’ve had to deal with for most of their lives. And if they haven’t actually shrugged it off, they’ve learned to shove the bullshit off to one side long enough to get together and have a good time. You have to respect that.

I suspect (and I hope this is true) that there are similar Red Hat Lady collectives all over the world. I’m pretty sure I’d object to many of the political and religious views of these women, but I’m inclined to think I’d trust them to run the country. Certainly, I’d prefer them to the hateful crew that’s now in charge. The thing about the Red Hat Ladies, they know when to be sensible and when to stick a purple bow on a red hat and if folks don’t like it, they can go eat lunch someplace else.

I’m pretty much content with being a guy, but I’m also sort of envious of these Red Hat Ladies. They’ve got something few men will ever have. One more reason to burn the patriarchy.