The David Alan Harvey Loft Workshop, entry 2: It begins casually but at sunset, David puts the pressure on me; lament for a pig

Yesterday, as I was writing my first "Loft" post, I feared that I was getting too carried away, that it was getting too long, and so I brought it to a close. Then, in comments, a number of readers told me not to worry, to just cut loose and write. I suspect that there were also a number of folks who dropped in, looked at the length, rolled their eyes, and surfed on to their next stop. Still, I took heart in the encouraging words and so, as this progresses, I will cut loose when I feel the urge - but not now - not with this post.

For various reasons, some explained in the previous post, I am getting around to this entry rather late - even later than I thought. Although it is already tomorrow in the East Coast, Central and Rocky Mountain time zones, I would like to get this post up while it is still today, Tuesday, January 3, somewhere besides Alaska and Hawaii. It is now 10:08 PM, Alaska Standard Time. This means I have 51 minutes to publish this post - any later than that, then it will be tomorrow everywhere else.

So I am going to dash through it.*

I begin here, in a train station in Newark, where I will begin the final leg of the trip that will take me to Brooklyn, home of the David Alan Harvery Loft Workshop.

Does Skip Gambert still make his custom shirts? I could call and find out, but its too late. Maybe tomorrow.

Somewhere in Manhattan, I don't remember where, I transferred to the subway. There were at least three sleepy people on this train.

He entered carrying tomatoes. I wanted a tomato, but it didn't feel right to ask.

I had been very worried about lodging. I couldn't stay in Newark - too far away and even though priced significantly lower than in New York City, the hotel bill still would have been too much for me. I have friends in Uptown who I could possibly have stayed with, but their 84th Street location was also a long commute from the Brooklyn loft. I believe they had another guest that week - a young woman, an artist.

Then, shortly after I arrived in New York, I got an email from Loft student Tracie Williams. She had got online and found an apartment for about $40 a night apiece if five of us could go in together. I joined the five. When I arrived at the apartment on McDonough Street, I was very pleased to find three cats hanging about, including this one in the window sill of the building next to the one we would stay in.

The apartment was narrow and long, with a total of four beds in two small bedrooms and a fold-out couch in the living room. I got the couch, but I never bothered to unfold it.

It was comfy enough, but too damn hot to sleep.

That's the part I forgot to mention yesterday.

New York City was sweltering.

Sweltering!

It was the hottest weather I had felt since I had last been in India, May of 2009.

Sometimes in the subway, it felt just as hot as India.

Almost.

Maybe not quite.

But it was hot.

Altogether too damn hot.

Anyway, these are two of my housemates and fellow participants - Milli Apelgren of Austin, Texas and Uwe Schober, who came from Germany.

Our first get-together at the loft would be casual - no pressure. We were scheduled to meet at 5:00 PM in the loft, visit just a bit and then go up to roof, where we could gaze out in awe upon New York City.

Before I had left Alaska, David had called on Skype. One of the things he wanted to know was if I knew what essay subject I wanted to shoot in New York City.

I was a bit at a loss, because it seemed to me that everything that I could think of about New York City had already been shot endlessly. New York has to be the most photographed city in the world - and home base to the most photographers.

One idea came to my mind, but it seemed problematic. As this round of Loft workshops would be the last ever, I thought maybe an essay on the workshop itself would be interesting. Yet, I once got involved in a mass shoot taking place all over and because I was the furthest north shooter, the sponsors told me they were going to send a video crew to follow me.

"No, don't send them!" I warned the sponsors. I would be working with Iñupiat people in their homes. It would destroy the intimacy and would create an impossible atmospher to have a video crew taping me while I was trying to photograph the people.

The sponsors said, "okay." Then on the day of the shoot, there was the film crew, tailing me about Barrow, Alaska. They were good people, but I told them to please go away because it wouldn't work. Yet, they had been hired to do a job and they were going to do it - even if it destroyed both of our projects. They followed me anyway. It destroyed both of our projects.

I did not want to do that to another photographer - or to myself. But, maybe, in New York City, if it was just me, dividing my time up among 11 photographers, it might work.

"I don't know," I told David. "Maybe The Loft."

"The loft is too small," he said. "But you could do an essay on the building. No one's ever done an essay on the building."

I did not bother to correct him, because the building sounded like it might be a good subject.

"Okay," I said. "I'll do the building. Maybe it will be like a village."

This is the building, as seen from the cab that brought us there.

If you squint hard at the open right-hand window in the bottom pane to the left, you will barely see an elbow hanging out of it, and a face, looking down at me.

That elbow and face are effective when the picture is big - much bigger than this.

David's loft is on the eighth floor, but when we entered, the elevator wasn't working. So up the stairs we went. Uwe again. His essay would be portraits of Occupiers at Zucotti Park.

Soon, we were all gathered - students, past students, various photographers of merit who had dropped by to help David welcome us and David's dedicated crew - and of course, David himself.

Then we moved up to the roof, where the view was better. It was still sweltering, but somehow it did not seem so bad up here.

There was a whole separate little building atop the roof, covered in grafitti. I went exploring to see what it looked like on the back side and was horrified to find this fellow, who had just begun to paint the back wall. He had gotten in maybe four or five roller strokes on the lower right side.

"Are you going to cover the whole thing?" I asked, meaning all the graffiti on the building.

"Yes," he answered. "I've got to get it covered before the sun goes down."

This seemed like a disaster to me, to cover up all this graffiti. I left to rejoin the group gathered on the other side, but kept coming back to check up on his progress. I did not see how he could possibly paint the whole structure before the sun went down.

He soon progressed to this point

The poor little boy on the wall - he was about to get painted over.

He was not happy about it.

In fact, he was horrified.

You can see it in his face.

Once that paint roller rolled over him, he would not exist anymore.

Zun Lee, a student from Toronto, Ontario. Zun had recently learned that his father was black. He had never known him and so was wondering if he should do his essay on black fathers.

The thought frightened him a bit. He thought maybe he would take on an easier, safer, topic.

Monia Lippi, an art photographer who lives in the building; I'm afraid I have forgotten the name of the man in the middle; Pete Longworth - a photographer based both in New York City and Europe and Michelle Madden Smith - David's daughter-in-law and right hand-woman, the one who takes care of things for him. She is very good at her job.

If I had the money, I would hire her away. I am certain she would like Alaska better than New York and North Carolina (David's other home base).

I soon discovered that Remi - a famous graffiti artist from France - was not going to paint the whole building after all. He had come to apply his own talents to just this back wall.

He was adding a new touch - a master's touch, I was informed.

I felt much better, knowing that.

The little boy would be okay.

Michael Courvoiser, the computer guru who had come to help out with the slide show presentations that we students and David's high-powered guests would be putting on throughout the week, Monia, and Michael Lloyd Young, a freelance photographer who does work for National Geographic and makes books. His latest project is Beer, Bait and Ammo.

That's the very resourceful Tracie Williams on the left, who had made our lodging arrangments. She would shoot an essay on Occupy Wall Street, an event which the main-stream media had so far done little more than make scant reference to.

"It's going to be huge," Tracie said of the Occupy movement.

You've already met Milli. In high school, she sometimes felt envious of the cool students. She would shoot her essay on the cool set in a certain area of New York. I got to visit with her enough that I can tell you this for sure: Milli is a cool person. More cool than many of the "cool people."

Next to her is Sarah Baker, our other aparment mate. She is from Washington, D.C., where she works with the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She is also a travel photographer familiar with Southern and Southeast Asia. She would do an essay on a black barbershop just blocks from our apartment.

More than once, we found ourselves visiting and talking at 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning. Visiting, talking and working, of course.

Neither of us would be so lazy as to just talk and visit.

On the right is Andy Kropa, who had traveled all the way from his home in New York City just to be here. On the day that I had arrived with one hour sleep, David had hosted a lighting workshop and Andy had attended. He would be applying his new knowledge to mostly nighttime coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement at Zucotti Park.

Remi, hard at work, the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan behind him.

This is David Alan Harvey himself, and he is looking over my shoulder at what I am trying to photograph. David is putting the pressure on me, big time. Once I discovered Remi's true mission, it had been my hope to quietly slip between the social gathering and him and to follow his work to the end of his painting - although I could see there was no way he could complete it before dark.

There was another time I had such a notion. That was in October of 1988, when three young gray whales that had failed to join their older and wiser friends and relatives early in the migration to Mexico's Sea of Cortez got stuck in the freeze-up ice off Point Barrow.

Thanks to my Iñupiat friends, I got to the whales before anyone beyond Barrow knew about them. I had hoped to do a nice, quiet, little essay on these whales, their interaction with the Iñupiat who were trying to figure out how to deal with the situation and whatever would become of them.** If you are very young, do not already know, but want to find out how successful I was at quietly photographing this little incident it to its conclusion, without disruption from my colleagues in the larger media, then go see the movie, Big Miracle, slated to be released next month.

Big Miracle may or may not show what the effort to rescue the whales was really like, but it will demonstrate the unprecedented amount of attention the incident drew.

What happened to me back then, kind of happened to me this night, too, but on a much smaller scale.

David lives in this building and he is astute. He knows what is going on around him. He knew from the beginning Remi was making a painting. He knew that at a certain point the light would be just right to bring out the most in the painting and the Williamsburg Bridge, the Empire State Building and the other parts of the Manhattan skyline visible behind it.

So David came over, and positioned himself behind me to see what I was seeing. Michael Lloyd Young joined him, as well as other photographers, noted and yet-to-be noted. They all watched, to see how I would deal with the situation.

"You are about to witness something that has never happened before and will never happen again," David applied the pressure. "You better not blow it!" No one stepped in to compete with me. Theoretically, the building was my project, so whatever picture I got would be a part of my essay.

What had been a relaxed but interesting little shoot suddenly turned into a high pressure one. "The picture is only going to happen once, for one instant, when he reaches up," David warned. "Then the picture will be gone forever. It will never happen again."

This is what I got, as David stood peering over my shoulder, applying the pressure, warning me not to blow it. He was right about that one instant. Remi stretched up on his toes, sprayed, I shot, he dropped down, then never reached up again. He moved off, to the right. Within moments - just moments - the glow in the light began to fade into something much more bland and then too dim to photograph at all.

I got the moment, yet still I fear I blew the image. I don't even want to include it here, as I am certain David will see it.

As the situation had developed, I kept switching back and forth between a wide angle view and this tighter one. I argued in my head as to what was better - wide, or tighter.

The tighter view put more emphasis on Remi's work, the bridge and the skyline. It amplified the presence of these elements in the frame. Yet, the wider view better described the whole of the little building and the setting it resided in. It gave the viewer more information.

I decided on the tighter view, to better emphasize the bridge and the skyline and Remi's work. I figured I would shoot that and then maybe David would be wrong and I could shoot it again, wide angle.

Yet, as David predicted, there was no chance for a second shot - there was one instant and one instant only.

I think now the wider shot would have been better - it would have better told the whole story of the building atop the roof on the edge of Brooklyn with Manhattan in the background in just one single image.

Maybe if I had gotten the wider shot, I would now fear that I had blown the shot; perhaps I would argue with myself that the wide shot was too busy, and that sometimes a tiny piece of a story tells the story better than does the whole story.

Hell. I don't know.

Truth is, I am damn confused.

I will never know. I got what I got. That is all I will ever get. 

I'm pretty sure I blew it.

After my great failure, we all went out and ate roast pig at a nearby bar and grill.

Correction - not all of us, as there were vegetarians in our group.

I am not a vegetarian, but I still felt bad for the pig. Pigs are smart animals, so unfortunate as to be delicious. Quietly, so that no one would hear, I apologized to the pig, I thanked it for providing me with its flesh, for transferring its life into my life.

Then I enjoyed it. It was a tasty pig, barbecued to perfection.

*Ha! 

** Assuming that between now and then I can find a way to digitize all my black and white negatives from the rescue effort, beginning on the day the movie is released, I plan to do a day-by-day blog account of what I experienced and observed over the nearly two weeks that it took for it to unfold.

Brief interlude from Loft into near present: Kalib forgives me - three studies with Thomas the Train; his brothers; the cold road

Even as I blog my Loft Workshop experience, I want to keep this blog rooted in the near present (the absolute present already being the near present the instant we perceive it). So here are some studies of Kalib and his brothers, who spent Sunday night and all day Monday with us.

Kalib - Thomas the Train, Study # 6982 - Kalib forgives me:

Sunday night, Kalib very nicely asked me if I would get Thomas out. I did, and set him back up.

Kalib - Thomas the Train, Study # 7: slowy, Kalib says:

 Several times, just for fun, I tried to make Thomas go fast around the tracks - as fast as Thomas could go. "No, grandpa!" Kalib protested each time. "Slowly! Slowly!" Then he would go to the controls and slow Thomas down to as slow as Thomas could go without stopping - because Kalib loves to study Thomas as Thomas goes slowly by.

Kalib - Thomas the Train, Study # 2424: Kalib did not cry:

Kalib keeps his eye on Thomas for as long as he can, but once Thomas goes by, he studies the cars that follow. Kalib has come to understand the situation. When it came time to put Thomas up and take Kalib and his bros home, Kalib did not protest. He did not cry. He did not pout.

Kalib gave me a hug. He knew that Thomas would be here waiting for him, the next time he comes to visit.

Jobezilla study # 54: He did not get to wreak havoc.

Jobezilla went to sleep very early. He slept through the entire running of Thomas the Train. He did not get to wreak havoc. He did not get to send Thomas or his cars flying all about.

Upon arising, he did, however, get to the still assembled tracks and tear them apart. He bent some of the connecters, but I am certainly I can easily bend them back.

Lynxston study, # 9,999,999.999999: He sleeps in Rex's cradleboard:

Lynxton was awake for awhile, and he looked so damn cute I could hardly stand it - but I could not find my camera, which I had hidden away for safe keeping so that Jobezilla could not get to it. When finally I did find it, Lynxton was asleep in Rex's cradleboard. If any of you have access to the February, 1980, issue of National Geographic, you can see a picture of Rex in this very cradleboard, made for him by his Grandma Rose.

He is not sleeping in the picture. He is wide awake. He has a serious look on his face. I always thought National Geographic used the wrong picture, in this case. In one of the others, he was smiling big - as he was prone to do, just like Jobe is now. His mom and grandma look happier, too. But they had the ultimate say, not me, and I was just happy to be having my work featured in National Geographic. I thought my career was set, that the money would forever thereafter always be there to do any job that I wanted to do.

Lynxton's Aunt LeeAnn has made him his own white buckskin cradleboard, but she and Lavina did not manage to connect before Lynxton left Arizona back to Alaska on December 10. The new cradle has not yet arrived.

Come Monday, yesterday morning, Lavina was most anxious to get her boys back. She kept sending texts to Caleb telling him that she could hardly take the separation and was thinking about jumping in the car and coming out to get them immediately.

This made no practical sense, however, as I need to take Margie into Anchorage so she could spend the rest of the week babysitting. She could not ride back with the boys, because once they are buckled into the family car, the family present, there is no more room for Margie.

Having spent the night battling shingles and thus sleeping little (yes, the damn shingles still hangs on - not as bad, but bad enough to make good sleep hard to come by) I was slow to get going. Then, I had committed myself to starting the Loft Workshop series yesterday and it took me a little longer than normal to get that post put up.

So we got a late start to town, about 5:30. But here we are, in town, exhaust condensing in the chill air, ready to drop the boys off and then go to a movie.

Now we are in the driveway of their parents. The temperature is - 8, F (-22 C). On the colder stretches of highway coming in, it had been close to -20 (-29 C). Compared to Interior and Northern Alaska, this may be relatively warm, but it is still deadly. 

What a responsibility it is, to drive these little people around!

Even in warm weather, for the highway is always deadly.

What a responsibility!

God help me to always live up to this responsibility; God help me to shun road rage - even when the other driver is a total jerk who should be banned from the road.

The movie was "The Descendants" with George Clooney. I would highly recommend it but with this warning - however different your home situation might be, it will put you back in the hospital or hospice rooms, or perhaps your own bedroom, with any loved one or cherished friend that you have ever been at the time of their passing.

It will put you right there.

And if you are like me, come one or two scenes, the memories will be so strong, coupled with the knowledge that you are not yet done with this life and so more such scenes await and that they could involve absolutely anyone that you love, so strong, that tears will leave your eyes and roll down your cheeks. You will not be able to stop them.

Afterwards, I dropped Margie off to babysit, gave out hugs all around and drove home. Here I am, about to go under the Palmer overpass and enter greater Wasilla.

When I pulled into my driveway, the temperature was -18 and dropping. The house was empty of humans, but there were cats moseying about. The last logs in the woodstove had nearly depleted themselves and were little more than glowing goals. The air was very chilly.

It was after midnight and I did not wish to rebuild the fire, just to heat up a house that would be empty, except for me, sleeping. I spent two hours on my computer, acccomplishing nothing, then went to bed. I piled the blankets on.

When I first climbed into bed, the blankets were so cold as to chill my entire body, feet included, but in time my body-heat warmed them up. The cats came, and burrowed their way into the blankets with me. I was so tired I wanted to do nothing but sleep, sleep, sleep - and for awhile I did. Then the shingles began to manifest themselves.

The air grew so cold as to penetrate even the thick pile of blankets I had covered myself with. Finally, somewhere between four and five AM, I got up and turned on an electric heater. I hate to do that, because the heaters really burn up the wattage, but I just could not go through the process of building a new fire at this time of morning.

I did not sleep good until it was time to get up. I did not get up. I stayed in bed until 11:30, then got up, threw a couple of logs into the fire that Caleb had built after he returned from his night shift, before going to bed himself.

Then I went to Abby's for breakfast. It was midafternoon when I returned home, the warmest part of the day. The temperature in the driveway stood at -16 (-27 C). I have not checked, but it some of the colder parts of Alaska, I would not be at all surprised to learn that temperature are 30, 40, or even 50 degrees colder than this.

So I am way behind. But still, I will post another Loft workshop entry.

This one will be easy. It will cover our first get-together, really just a short social gathering. So for this one, I do not have much to work with. It won't be that hard to get up.

So check back in about four hours. Maybe five. Possibly six.

Right now, I am going to go to Metro and get my afternoon coffee.

The David Alan Harvey Loft Workshop, entry 1: Logbook: getting from here to there

On the tarmac in Anchorage, through the window of the Alaska Airlines flight that would take me on the first of three legs to the New York City, New York, airport of Newark, New Jersey.

In a way, the events that I plan to recount in perhaps half-a-dozen posts did begin in Asia - South Asia; India - the city of Bangalore, on November 22, 2010, when my beloved soul friend, relative and Muse, Soundarya, took her own life following the death by car crash of her husband Anil.

As I tend to do in times of deep grief, I turned to my keyboard. This used to mean my personal journal, where, knowing no other way to cope, I once wrote over 400 pages, 12 point, single-spaced, to lament the disappearance of the black cat, Little Guy. I also turned there after the deaths of my brother, my mother, father, and other friends and relatives.

Now, as my personal journal is defunct, I turn to my blogs - and that is what I did then. In times of grief, one also tends to turn to family and friends, and so I posted a link on one of the dialogue threads kept by Magnum photographer and story-teller David Alan Harvey on his creation, Burn Magazine.

She does not accept cash - only plastic.

The purpose of Burn Magazine is two-fold. First, to create a venue for emerging photographers, most of whom are young, but not all. At least one is older than me, even, but just now showing her talent to the world. Second, to a lesser but significant degree, to showcase the work of "iconic" photographers - the truly famous photographers.

I fall somewhere in between.

Somehow, in creating Burn, David also created a new family - a mix of the emergent, the iconic, the inbetween, the middle-aged, the young and the old, photographers and lovers of photography and through the internet has brought us all together.

Among those members of this new family of mine who responded to my grief in an effort to console was David himself. He told me two things that struck deep into my badly wounded pysche:

In time, he said, a new muse would come into my life.

Within a year's time, he would see me in New York. He stated that he knew this with a certainty - he was not speculating. This was something that would happen.

I did not know how he could make such statements. It seemed unlikely to me that either would happen. In the case of Soundarya, not only did I know it could not happen, I did not want it to happen.

Poor guy from Outside was stuck in the middle, with the wonder of Alaska beneath him. I let him peek over me.

She played an absolutely unique role in my life - one that no one before her had ever stepped into and one that no one after could ever step into.

As for seeing David in New York within a year, this seemed most unlikely. I had no plans to go to New York, I had no money to go to New York. Sometimes, I go to New York because someone brings me there. I could see no circumstance anywhere on the horizon that would cause someone to buy me a plane ticket to New York City.

The wonder that is Alaska.

No - despite the deep respect and admiration I held for the man - not only for his photographic talents but the creative and dedicated way that he has given of himself to find, nurture, and publish young and other emerging photographers of talent, I did not see how either of these predictions that he had written of with certainty could come to pass.

I knew I could and would find inspiration here and there - but another muse in the mold of Soundarya? No. Impossible. It could not happen. A muse such as she does not come into an artist's life but once in a lifetime.

New York could happen, but the possibility seemed so remote as to hardly be worth contemplation.

As we flew over Puget Sound, it seemed that we had our own tugboat, pulling us to Seattle.

Yet, I did contemplate it, because I always want to go to New York and I wanted to meet David Alan Harvey in person. Also, while I have had an interesting, unique and if one does not put that much weight on the financial side of things, successful and rewarding career, I felt that I had stalled out two rungs below the level of obscurity. I had a huge amount of raw work that I needed to reshape into formats that would enable me to put it before the world, and I also had many things left to shoot, gather information on and write about.

I did not know how getting to New York and meeting David in person might help with these objectives, but it seemed to me that it might.

Still, no one had plans to bring me to New York. I had no excess resource to bring me there.

As I waited at Seattle - Tacoma's Sea-Tac airport for the flight that would take me to Denver, I ran into Henry, a carpenter, who was once a Barrow housemate of mine.

More than half-a-year later, on June 4, an amazing thing happened. While I had been reluctant to do it, as it seemed kind of like begging, enough readers convinced me that I should so that they might give my work some modest measure of support, I put up a Paypal "donate" button on my original wasillaby300 blog. I will put such a button on this blog, too, but I also plan to add a store so that people who want to support my work can get something physical back in return - a print, perhaps - an iPad book; who knows what else.

A calendar?

I anticipated getting very few donations, and I figured that what I did get would be mosty in the $5 to $25 range and that would be fine with me. In fact, this pretty much proved true, but with some exceptions - including some dramatic exceptions. I did receive a handful of $100 donations of $100, a of $200, one one $300.

And then one day I received a donation that practically blew me away from my computer screen. It was from another photographer, a friend of David's. I would like to identify him and if he says it is okay, I will, but I have had the feeling that he would rather stay under the radar.

He is a photographer who I admire greatly. He creates photographs and images that I could never make. His work rides a much harder edge than mine generally does. It is powerful, often disturbing, and makes strong statements about the often brutal nature of this life.

I had been pleased when I had managed to score window seats all the way from Anchorage to Newark. Unfortunately, my window seat from Denver to Newark had no window.

His contribution was large enough to cover the cost of a round-trip ticket from Anchorage to New York and still have enough left over for three or four pizzas. So I decided to use that money to buy the ticket that would make at least one part of David's prediction come true.

Now I had to decide when to go. Occassionally, David hosts workshops - dedicated to shooting, to lighting, or to creating photo books. His is a large name in the world of photography, and so he brings in other people whose names are large in this business, be they photographers, editors, or important people in the publishing world.

I did manage to get a peek through a window on the other side of the aisle.

I have a number of books in various stages of incompletion and so I thought that I would like to take in one of his book-making working workshops.

I could bring the images, a partially or wholly done rough layout, rework it under the master's eye, present it to publishers who would be right there and see what might come of it.

David had no book making workshops scheduled. 

On the Airtrain from Newark Airport to P 4, where the hotel shuttles pick up and drop off guests.

David did have a shooting workshop scheduled. It would be based out of his loft on the eighth floor of a Brooklyn apartment building. I was interested, but hesitant. First, by my standards, it was pricey. Then, too, what could I really get out of a shooting workshop? With one two-year break to serve a Mormon mission, I've been shooting constantly since I did my high school yearbook in my senior year, 1967-68.

Plus, I knew I would likely be the oldest photographer in the class and I was certain it would be competitive. I would be up against bright, young, energetic, photographers who had already demonstrated superior talent, or else David would not have accepted them into The Loft.

I feared they might shred me to pieces.

P4. I would not reach my hotel and get settled down until nearly 5:00 AM. I had slept only one hour the night before I left home and I was unable to sleep a wink on the flights down.

If I came at a time when no workshop was in progress, then there would really be no need for me to spend anything or to compete against anybody. David had invited me to stay at his loft. He is a busy man, yet he is famous for his hospitality, for finding time for his visitors, not only shoot the bull and drink beer, but to impart of his knowledge and to arrange contacts they might want to get to know.

And all this I could get for free - no need for a workshop fee - or a lodging fee. He would have a dozen students - too many to bunk in his loft. So all students would have to find lodging elsewhere.

For a bookmaking workshop, such an expense could be worth it - but for a shooting workshop? When I am already and practiced shooter with decades of experience?

Yet, I decided I wanted to be part of a workshop. Something good would come from all that interaction, even if I did get shredded by the younger photographers of great talent. It would be good to mingle with other photographers. Here in Alaska, there is a community of talented photographers and it is always good when I get to see any of them. But it rarely happens. I live a life almost devoid of interaction with my colleagues.

As a photographer, I am virtually alone. When I do see my friends and colleagues, the meetings tend to be brief - usually little more than "hi, how are you, boy, things are getting tougher and tougher these days, but hanging in there..." that kind of thing. 

By the time I awoke later that morning, the hotel restaurant had closed for breakfast but had not opened for lunch. This was okay. The first time I ever went to New York, right around 1980, the first thing that I ate was a pretzel in Times Square. Times Square does not have the flavor it once did, nor do its pretzels. Still, when I arrive in the city, the first thing I do is go to Times Square for a pretzel.

Without knowing for sure how I would be able to spare the full $2500 workshop fee, I made the $500 deposit.

Then I worked extremely hard, all summer. I would have anyway, even without the workshop, but it gave me a little bit of extra incentive. In some ways, it was horribly frustating, because it was mostly production work and it kept me inside throughout the long, light, summer hours. I would escape into the light about once a day to pedal my bike and that was just about it.

I never want that to happen again. When you are a photographer in Alaska, it is tragic to have to yield most of your summer to indoor production work.

Because hotels are much cheaper there than in New York City, I would spend one more night in Newark. I am on the train, headed back to P4.

That is exactly what happened, yet in so doing I was able to generate some decent income - plus, a couple of unexpected windfalls came along and so I came up with the money for the workshop and more.

Well, once again I am getting carried away and this is getting kind of long - more words than most internet readers will have the patience to read.

Anyway, I did make it to New York and to the Loft workshop, which was to be one of the final two, back to back, David Alan Harvey Loft Worshops ever.

To come to the loft was in many ways a desperate act for me. I feel I have so much yet to do, but it seems to me that all the venues for doing it are closing down in front of me. And the decades are piling up on me so fast that I know it will all soon be over and I will be dead - but I've got to get some significant work done before that happens.

That's why I created these blogs - to make my own venue. But how does one find the means to finance such a venue?

The man who stood by the door on the train from New York City to Newark. The next morning, I would board the train again - bound for Brooklyn, and the Loft.

I would go through the Loft workshop in a state of almost continual desperation. I would experience technological failure. I would arrive with nothing dear to my heart to shoot as my project, but only a hazy notion of what could possibly prove interesting. Then, suddenly, catching me completely by suprise, I would find myself taking on a shooting project that would put me right back into my own, personal history and experience, among the community and extended family of my origin - right in the middle of New York City.

Yet, that family and community would resist me, make my project difficult, shut the door in my face and send me off looking for a replacement community, a replacement family, that I might document. In the end, as I perched on the brink of humilation and complete workshop failure, the entire experience would take a plunge into the bizarre, into a diverse community of the entire world - Christian, Hindu, Aheist, Jewish, Sikh, Agnostic, Muslim... all come together in a strange and alien way, all united in pursuit of the spiritual unity of artifice and the superficial; a community among which I would be free to wander and work as I saw fit.

And those young photographers that I so feared? Would they shred me? We will see.

Good weather greets the New Year; moose dines, cat ruins picture

After a nice, cold, crisp November, December fell upon us with horrifying warmth. On several days, the temperature rose above freezing and, while we never lost our snow cover, there were days that it rained and turned everything into ice. 

The wind blew 40, 50, 60, 70 and sometimes, depending on the location, over 100, even 110 mph.

Before Christmas, the temperature began to drop. This morning, at our place, it stood at -29 (-34 C), so maybe, out here, it dipped down into the -30's overnight.

This is me, walking down Brockton, past the corner of insanity and on towards the Talkeetna Mountains. I had planned to walk much farther than I did, looping back to the top of a certain hill where the view of the Talkeetnas is spectacular, but I was wearing my regular shoes and two pairs of socks.

After I had been out about an hour, wandering slow, snapping pictures here and there, my toes got pretty cold. I figured it would take me another hour to finish my intended walk. By then, I feared my feet would be frozen, so I went home instead.

Next time, I will wear boots.

Ravens don't care about cold. They've got their jobs to do, so they go out and do them.

I began to wonder about 
Grotto Iona, and what it might look like, with all the frigid snow that had fallen, a little bit almost evey day, since just before Christmas.

I decided to take a look. As I approached, I saw the statue of the Virgin Mary, standing her vigil atop the shrine where people go to pray.

It seemed like a chilly day to be a statue standing alone in a grotto, where some are buried and others go to pray. 

But no - she was fine - snugly covered in a nice blanket of fluffy snow.

Yesterday morning, I took my breakfast at Abby's Home Cooking. For new readers who may not know it, or for readers who missed that post, it was Abby's dad who made the Grotto for his wife, Iona, who he now lies beside just yards from the statue. Now Abby has her little restaurant and I try to have breakfast there once a week, sometimes twice.

This week it was twice, and I didn't have to pay either time. As I noted before in the original Wasillaby300 blog, an anonymous gifter who likes horses bought my breakfast just a couple of days ago.

Also Arlene Warrior, the mother of Aurora whose wedding I, who am not a wedding photographer, photographed December 16, told her friend Abby that she would be picking up my tab for awhile. I could go nuts and eat there five days a week, but I won't. 

When Abby opened her restaurant on July 4, I took some pictures of the mostly empty stools at the counter and speculated as to when the day might come that I would take a photo of a butt on every stool.

Now you see it - a butt on every stool.

Not long after I returned home from breakfast at Abby's, I discovered that a guest had come to our house to dine in our back yard.

Ha! Who am I to call this young fellow my guest?! His ancestors were roaming and munching this property when mine were struggling to survive in northern Europe and the British Isles. We newcomers who have settled down in Wasilla are the guests here.

We should try to remember this.

Please note the blood-caked snow at the base where his antlers had recently broken off, and at the top of his eye.

I had left the door open just a crack. He seemed docile enough, but you can never be certain about a moose and we were pretty close together.

"Be sure Jim doesn't get out," I told Margie.

Then, an amazing picture began to take shape before me. The moose moved to some alder branches thick with snow, very close to me, then lifted his head, ready to take a bite. The angle, the light - everything was amazing. I was certain this was going to be the best moose photo that I had ever taken.

Suddenly, Jim shot through the crack and onto the porch - about 20 feet away from the moose. The moose bolted, and headed for the woods.

Damn cat. Cost me the best moose picture of all time.

Still, I let him hang out with me for the rest of the day - and all through the night, too.

In fact, that cat is with me right now - sleeping on my jacket which lies on the table just behind me.

Another cat, Pistol-Yero, sits between my keyboard and monitor, making it hard to see what I am putting onscreen.

Passing by Wasilla Lake.

Coming up Shrock Road, from the Little Susitna River. Right after I took this picture and climbed back into the car, a bald eagle flew between me and the moon.

I had earlier stated that I might try to get two more posts up. I made this statement before I realized that Kalib, Jobe and Lynxton were coming out to spend the night. Their parents came for awhile, too, and so did Melanie. So I did not do all that I planned. I could still get up another post, but Kalib wants me to set up the Thomas the Train HO electric version, so I will. I think that will pretty much take up the rest of the night.

Tomorrow, I plan to launch the long-overdue series on the experience that I had late last September when I went to New York City to take part in the David Alan Harvery Loft workshop.

Speaking of which - I am certain all you who have visited here before have taken note of the new, very classy, blog banner. This is the work of Haik Mesropian, a graphic and web designer who works with David Alan Harvey on Burn Magazine and his recent Rio Book.

Thank you, Haik!

Logbook - a title of hope, faith and undying dreams

The Running Dog, tied down on the Unalakleet River, Unalakleet, Alaska, March, 2000.

Once upon a time the airplane named "Running Dog" was whole and fit and for 15 years I flew it here and there, all about the main body of Alaska and into the Yukon and Northwest Territories of Canada. I never took it into the Aleutian Islands, for it would have been insane to fly an airplane like this from here to out there, and I never took it to Southeast.

As airplanes go, the Running Dog was economical to fly. It could burn car gas as well as av gas, which was a big plus when traveling about in Rural Alaska, because sometimes car gas is all I could find; sometimes, I could find av gas but it was so expensive that I could fall back onto the car gas instead. I purchased this little 1974 Citabria 7GCBC in 1986 for $15,900. My annuals probably averaged about $2000 - several came in just over $500, some at $1000, a couple at $1500 - but what raised the average bigtime was when I had to replace the engine. 

A story came to me - a vision if you will - about how the Running Dog got its name. To make it short, the airplane was possessed by the spirit of a sled dog named Citabria that had burst its heart in grief at the death of its musher - just as this Citabria airplane flew. The spirit of the dog merged with the plane and then came to me.

When the Running and I would fly together, I would sometimes talk to the airplane as if it were a comprehending individual, yet, at the same time, it often felt to me to be an extension of me. I could feel the wind against the skin of the plane as if it were my own skin - especially during manuevers like a tricky cross wind landing, when a pilot must be completely aware of the interaction of the plane and the wind, if he is ever to put the plane safely down.

I used this airplane to get me to where I wanted to go as I put together various publications, such as Uiñiq magazine and Alaska's Village Voices - but I had a vision that went beyond all of that.

In this vision, the Running Dog and I would put together a magazine all of our own. We would call it:

The photographic

Logbook

of the Running Dog

I am not a poet, but I did write a poem to describe the nature of the Running Dog:

Kalib, a couple years back, between the wreckage of the Running Dog and our house.The Running Dog

doesn't walk.

The Running Dog

doesn't lie around

scratching

his belly.

The Running Dog

doesn't

even

run.

No. This dog

has wings

And so he flies

and goes

where he wants

to go.

Once, an unexpected windfall of cash descended upon me. I added a little bit more to it and made a prototype issue of the Logbook, which, upon printing, left me broke once again. When I tried to get the magazine into the stores and onto magazine racks, I found that there was a system in place, with its own hierarchy, which I could not beat.

It took me several weeks, months perhaps, to get it into a just a few stores and then it was tucked into places of low display, often hidden altogether by the money maker magazines.

So the Logbook magazine never flew. Even if it had, I had no mechanisms to keep it going. I did not want to mess it up with ads, so it had no ads. Had I sold every copy, after the magazine distributor and the stores took their cut, I would still have fallen short of printing costs.

Logically, what I did made no sense at all. It was just the pursuit of a dreamer, who does know how to dream, how to fly and how to put a product together, but has no economic or financial sense at all. I had no idea how it all might come together, but I figured if I tried to do it, somehow, it just would.

I was wrong.

One day I crashed the poor, damn, Running Dog and the dream seemed to die altogether. The plane that had cost me $15,900 to buy would now have cost over $45,000 to put back together. And it would cost about the same to buy another Citabria 7GCBC of the same vintage and airframe and engine times.

Not only did I not have that kind of money, I was so deep in debt that I did not and still do not know how I would ever recover.

Yet... I had faith... and hope... I believed that somehow, within a year or two... the means would come to me and I would get a substitute plane. This substitute and I would make that magazine and one day the means would come that I could also put the Running Dog back together.

That was over ten years ago.

It hasn't happened.

But now I can publish without paying printers, distributors and stores.

So now I want to set out and do the Logbook for real.

But I have no plane, no money to buy one. Financially... well... enough said.

But still I have faith in my idea... I have hope that the means will yet materialize to put me back into the air again and to grow and expand upon this second version of my blog until the dream becomes reality.

Call me foolish if you will and perhaps you are right, but that is my hope and dream and even though the decades are piling up on me, turning my beard white, I refuse to give up this dream.

Hence, the first part of the title of this blog:

Logbook

I will log my travels however I make them.

The second part of my title:

Wasilla - Alaska - Beyond

I intend to document life in Wasilla, elsewhere in Alaska and Beyond.

And as for:

One photographer's search for community, home, and family

I have come to recognize that this search is what my entire career has been about - I think because my dad kept moving us from town to town, neighborhood to neighborhood. Everytime I would begin to get a sense of community, I would find that community gone, a new one before me. So I just keep looking for community, home, and family. In Wasilla, I have found the community where my house is, where I raised my family and where I hang out with my cat buddies. Wasilla is a place set in magnificent beauty but often dominated by people whose sense of the dollar so outweighs their appreciation of the beauty that they would destroy it, even as they praise it.

I suppose I am guilty of this as well. When we live a modern life, that is what we do. We destroy natural beauty to earn the dollar that we need to survive. But it could still be done better here in Wasilla than it so far has.

In the Arctic Slope and all across northern Alaska, I have found the community of my heart, my spirit. But climatically it is a hard and frigid place. Margie does not mind my going there for periods of time but she has no desire to follow, nor does she care to eat maktak. Wasilla winters, mild by comparison, are much too cold for her and this time of year she longs to go back to Arizona and I often feel a little guilty for having dragged her so far from her Native home.

Essentially, the goals of Wasilla, Alaska by 300 and then some remain the same in this new blog: to document life in this town where I live - Wasilla; to get out and about in Alaska, the place that I love above all others, northern Alaska in particular; while I do love Alaska above all other places, it has become clear to me in recent years that I love this entire, beautiful, stressed, brutal, endangered planet that we live on.

So I can't keep the blog just in Alaska. I have to go Beyond. But when I do, you will know that I will not stay out too long but will come back.

Some may not understand this, but when I leave Alaska, I am always happy to get to the place that I am going, but it isn't long before I don't feel so good about it anymore - no matter how much I might be enjoying myself, a bright and warm sun, or the company of relatives and friends seldom seen. Soon, all I want to do is to get back to Alaska, where the air is mostly clean, the mountains big, the animals wild, the land vast and mostly empty.

Alaska is the kind of land that demands an airplane.

So I must succeed at this and I must get another airplane. I hope I can still pass the medical.

I make this statement on the first day of the new year, 2012, having not one paying job lined up ahead of me, a mountain of debt and enough resources on hand to last maybe six more weeks.

Do you think I can do it?

I have no idea how it all might come together, but I figure if I try to do it, somehow, it just will.

If not, then why the hell did The Creator put me on this earth in the first place?