Tag Archives: photo

Inspired by “Dear Photograph”

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A couple of weeks before my final research trip for West Texas Interlude, a friend sent me a one line email: Hey, have you ever heard of dearphotograph.com? I think you should do one on your March road trip!

Not content to stop with one, we printed out a few shots from my grandfather’s slides to take along with us. Here’s what we came up with…

Monahans Sandhills, fall 1957

 

Judge Roy Bean’s place in Langtry, November 1957

 

sign at the Pecos River Bridge, November 1957

 

Kit Carson rock outside Fort Davis, 1958 or ’59

The last one is kind of fudged — we never found the exact spot, although we thought we were close.

This…

and this…

are what it looked like when we scoured our locations for just the right angle. No one really asked what we were doing, although one girl napping on a picnic table beside the road gave me a dirty look, presumably because I interrupted her by climbing on a rock a hundred feet away. Oh well.

P.S. We’ve submitted a photo to Dear Photograph — I’ll keep you posted if they use it. In the meantime, you should check out their site.

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Name of this town?

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Over the next few days, I’ll be posting a photo a day on the Kickstarter project page. Here’s the first one, but for the rest you’ll need to check the updates over at Kickstarter:
“I pulled out a few more photos with locations I thought you would recognize and will post one a day for the next few days. 

In today’s photo, Bob’s Ford is parked outside a legendary West Texas saloon from the 19th century. What’s the name of the town where this photo was taken?”

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What is Kickstarter?

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I first heard about Kickstarter.com last year when a couple of guys used the site to raise the last bit of funds for the movie version of Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz. Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years meant a lot to me (it was one of my favorite books from 2010), and I was fascinated to see how the story from that book (about the writing of the BLJ screenplay) was continuing to be written by the book’s fans. They wanted to see the completion of the movie badly enough that they were willing to give money to make it happen.

I like that idea. The idea that the people who will eventually enjoy the fruit of someone else’s creative endeavors can become a part of making that creative endeavor happen.

At that time, my thought was that it’s a good thing for me to be able to support other artists, whether through Kickstarter or buying their cds or recommending their books or whatever, and I was excited to think about a group of people coming together to make a project happen. Now, here it is less than a year later, and I’m starting my own campaign on Kickstarter for my nonfiction book, West Texas Interlude.

My campaign launches August 30 and ends September 30. I’ll have one month to reach my fundraising goal for the money it will take to do the research and writing of a first draft of my book’s manuscript. I wrote a blog entry a few weeks back that describes the book (read it here), but basically it’s going to be a collection of photos and stories from West Texas in the 1950s. The vintage photos are oh-so-cool, and there are more than 800 of them for me to edit down to a respectable number for a book. The research for the written sections will require three trips to Texas for interviews and location visits.

So, how does Kickstarter work, and what is it going to involve over the month of the campaign?

* Kickstarter is a website that helps people fund creative projects. Campaigns go through an approval process with the Kickstarter staff. Your project must be creative in nature, and there must be a clear beginning and end to the work you’re wanting to have supported — it must be a true project, not a vague idea or “please give me money so I can write/paint/sing/design more.” My project is to do the research and writing for a completed manuscript. The goal is to help artists finish a project, not just start it and then get stuck without funds to complete it.

* Because the concept revolves around completing a project, funding through Kickstarter is all-or-nothing. I set a funding goal — I wrote a budget for what it would take to do the research and writing from now through June 2012, and that amount is my goal. In order to receive any of the money people give in pledges, I must reach the goal. If September 30 rolls around and I’m short of the goal, none of the backers will be charged for their pledge.

This is one of my favorite things about Kickstarter. All-or-nothing funding is a huge assurance to backers that the project will actually see completion. If I only get 50% or even 75% of my funding goal and backers are still obligated to meet their pledge, how unfair is that to those backers? They were pledging to help me research and write a complete manuscript — not to help me research a book, stop and get a job for several months because I’m broke, lose momentum, and then never finish the book. In some ways, all-or-nothing is extremely stressful for me to think about, but the urgency of it also helps the campaign move along. And when it comes down to it, as a writer and as a person, I would rather work with the type of integrity that all-or-nothing funding demonstrates.

* The other cool thing about using Kickstarter to fund projects is that backers get some pretty great rewards that correspond with their level of support. The rewards are all related to the project itself and usually involve the finished product that the artist/writer/whoever is wanting to fund. For my campaign, anyone who pledges $25 or more will get a digital version of the completed West Texas Interlude manuscript. There are other rewards that are rather fun as well (postcards from West Texas, prints of the vintage photos, a homemade cream pie), but I like it that my backers can get an actual copy of what they’re supporting, for a reasonable price.

Look for more to come about the campaign — I’m not going to turn my blog into all-Kickstarter-all-the-time for the next month, but I will definitely keep you posted on the progress.

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New Project and Social Media Fast

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Last November and December when I was in Texas before moving to Washington, I spent some time with my grandmother, learning to make the cream pies she’s been bringing to family events for as long as I can remember. Part of my goal for the time was to learn to make the pies — part of my goal was to hear her tell stories. Man, does she love to tell stories (you can read some of those stories in Passing Down Pie Heritage, a new article I recently had published at Texas Cooking).

I’ve heard quite a few stories from her over the years, some of them related to the time she and my grandfather spent in West Texas during their early years of marriage. I’ve also heard quite a bit about that time from my dad and my aunt, especially in preparation for my West Texas camping trip with friends last October. And especially since my aunt and her husband had been diligently scanning and labeling the 800+ family slides from the 1950s, many of them taken in West Texas.

West Texas and those slides have hovered in the background of my imagination for months. I’ve looked at the photos, mesmerized by the scenes they depict. Cowboys and wide open landscapes.

My dad and his siblings as shiny faced kids in 1950s clothes and hair styles.

My grandmother sitting on a swing in a park, the background opening wide behind her.

My grandfather working out in the oil field with his survey crew buddies. (The colors on this photo haven’t been altered — that’s what the slide looked like when they scanned it!)

Those slides are precious to me because they hold family — and they hold the land that made us who we are, the land that captivated me last October. The slides are also precious as a glimpse into that era and that place. West Texas in the 1950s is the same time and place that shaped George W. and Laura Bush, and I was also captivated by Laura Bush’s descriptions of it in her autobiography.

And so, I’ve felt the stirring to do more with the slides and with my family’s stories than let them sit and simmer under the surface of my imagination. My grandparents, well, they’re not young, and if I’m going to document their stories of that time period and put them together with the images they made, I believe the time is now. Funny how this idea took full shape once I moved across the country to the opposite border, but I also believe this scenario isn’t a mistake. It will take some careful planning, careful budgeting, and most likely an upcoming project fundraising campaign on Kickstarter, but I think it can all come together to do the research, organizing, and writing of my first nonfiction book here in the Tri-Cities area, with a few trips back to Texas.

Another thing I’m sure of as I type out this idea on this blog (making something public is so very scary!) is that I need to spend some focused time making sure I’m headed in the right direction with this project. First, I want to seek God deliberately on this issue — I’ve been doing that all along, but I want to step back and make absolutely sure. Also, I want to spend some deliberate creative time on the first stages of the project, including what the scope of it will be and what it will take to get the funding. I’m at the point of wrapping up my novel revisions and sending that book out in search of a publisher — now I’m figuring out how to move forward with the next project.

In order to do that, I feel like I need to take a social media break. A bit of a fast, if you will. I’m not throwing off social media for good, just for a while. I want to use the time that I normally spend each day (and it’s spread throughout the day, not just in one blob) to be quiet, to be creative, to pray, to make sure I’m hearing things correctly. I feel so inundated with information from the internet most days, and I contribute my own voice to share in that cacophony. I need to step away for a while and not post or read blogs, Facebook, or twitter. I don’t know how long I will do this, at least a week or two. And hopefully when I come back, I’ll have great news to share with you about the next big project and how you can be involved!

Until then, email me if you need me…

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Remembering the Mystery

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I remember when I used the phone as a phone. To call and talk to people. I don’t have a smart phone, but I still find that I text more than I call people.

I remember when, if something funny happened during my day, I called a friend to tell the story, or I waited until I saw whoever I was eating dinner with and told the story over the meal. Now my first inclination is to formulate the cleverest, pithiest, succinctest Facebook status I can, and I post it as soon as I can. It’s good to allow myself this writing exercise, to practice brevity — but I miss calling people instead of posting. Calling individuals instead of posting.

I remember when I had joy (or excitement, or sorrow, or frustration) in my daily goings-on, grand or mundane, though I didn’t notify the greater population. “If a tree falls in the forest,” so the saying goes. If I experience a moment of sublimity and don’t update my Facebook status, is the experience still sublime? Or more sublime?

I remember several years ago I started uploading my photos to the Kodak website so I could share my albums from China or vacation or wherever with my family. I never would have dreamed of sending the link to anyone other than my parents, my sister, my cousin, and my aunt. Who else would want to see my photos in an online album? What’s the point in that?

I remember even before that, when I still had a film camera, I would sit down with one or two family members on a corner of the couch during a holiday gathering and flip through an album, narrating as much as they were interested in hearing, trying not to be the person who tells boring play-by-play stories of every moment of a trip.

I remember meeting my friend for coffee at a bookstore in Arlington so that she could show me her album from her previous summer in China. It was 1999, and I was thinking about going to China for the summer myself. Hearing her stories, seeing her photos, it made the country real to me, it gave me the chance to ask her questions, to hear her own former reservations. That conversation over coffee was pivotal in helping me decide that a summer in Asia wouldn’t be the end of me. It’s hard to say how things would be different if this had happened several years in the future, but I can’t imagine experiencing the same emotions while clicking through a Facebook album. There’s something about the time involved in sitting down to talk, a time wholly dedicated to communicating with another person, the dialog that can happen when you’re talking face to face.

I remember at one point in my life I wrote e-mails to close friends and family to update them on the latest happenings in my life. Before that, I wrote letters on stationery. These letters and e-mails went to only a few people, only those I felt the need to stay in closest contact with. Now, often in a conversation I’ll start to tell a story or reference something that happened recently, and people who I never would have suspected will interrupt me and say, “Yeah, I read about that on your blog.” The blog, Facebook, they’re efficient ways to communicate, but I miss being able to tell people things in person. I miss life being somewhat mysterious, not knowing seemingly everything about everyone through online connections, not having people feel like they know everything about me through a 160-character Twitter profile.

I remember when I journaled every day.

 

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Family Portraits

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When you print pictures at a photo shop in many parts of Asia, the technician automatically assumes you want one copy printed per person in the photo.  Especially in smaller towns and in villages, cameras are still a rarity, and printed photos are treasured possessions.  I try to print copies to hand out to friends in villages, and some of the ladies in MN are aware of this and asked for an impromptu photo session on a recent trip up there.

The first in line was a tiny, weathered grandmother with teeth blackened by betel nut.  She straightened and rebuttoned her thick black jacket, while I dripped with sweat in the blazing sun waiting for her to be ready.  Because I had used the minority language to ask her if she wanted her picture taken, she had decided I was fluent.  It took a couple of minutes of her chattering on about who all she was related to in the village before she realized I was smiling and nodding out of politeness, not comprehension.

Next up was a middle-aged lady and her daughter and two friends.  The mother declared that everyone needed to wash their faces before the photo, and her daughter responded with the universal language of teenage girls—she rolled her eyes.  Mom didn’t stop bossing the girls about which parts of their outfits needed straightening the whole time she splashed her face clean with water from an outdoor faucet.  Still giving advice to unlistening ears, she pulled her head wrap down, wiped her face dry with it, and retied the damp cloth over her hair.

I took several configurations of that group picture before moving on to Julie’s two-week-old baby boy.  He slept through the entire photo shoot, obviously unconcerned that his older relative wanted a picture with him to mail to her sister in a province on the east coast.

And so I came back to town with several photos that I will take on a thumb drive to print in a local shop before my next trip up to MN—where the process will begin again.


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Family Photos (pt 2)

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The only time I have visited Colleen’s grandparents was in the summer of 2007, and I wasn’t sure if they would remember me.  They knew both me and B, though, and were very touched that we brought Adam and Lydia along with us to visit.

I didn’t talk much to the grandfather last time, but my conversation with the grandmother is discussed in a previous blog entry.  Colleen’s grandfather was in rare form this day, and he was more than eager to let me practice B language with him.  At 74, his mind isn’t as sharp as the grandmother’s, though she is 78 now.  He repeated himself a lot and kept calling B by S’s name, but we could tell it meant a lot to him that we had come to see him.

We sat outside on their covered porch, drinking tea and chatting in the shade.  B gave them the pictures of their family from her last visit with them, and the grandfather went inside the house to fetch their family photos so he could add them all together.  He pulled the set of six or seven photos out of a plastic sleeve and flipped through them, proudly telling us the year and content of each:  his youngest daughter on a trip to the provincial capital, a group photo of the family in front of their house, a visit to an elephant park, a golden temple.  He accurately described each picture, but we realized his eyesight is failing when he held up the wrong pictures to match the descriptions he was giving us.

With the four new pictures B gave him, the family photo collection (beginning circa 1985) almost doubled.  It’s so hard for us to grasp, in this era of camera phones and online albums, but many people in the world have never seen a picture of themselves.  This is why we try to give copies of photos out in the villages we visit.  Not only does it give us a good reason to go back and visit someone a second time, but it also brings delight and joy to people in a simple, tangible way.

As Colleen’s grandmother looked through the photos, she smiled sweetly and patted B’s knee.  “Thank you for bringing our photos—but I want pictures of you, too!  You live so far away, but if I had your picture I could look at it whenever I think of you.”  So we each took photos with her there on the porch and promised to come back with copies for her during the big festival next month.

The grandfather had one request for me—to take his picture while smoking his pipe.  I did so, but he kept stepping closer to my camera before I could get it snapped, so I couldn’t get a good, in-focus shot.  He was happy with the results on my little viewfinder, though.

When it was time to leave, B prayed for and blessed the grandmother, while the grandfather bustled around shaking hands with the rest of us.  Both grandparents insisted on walking down the stairs with us, the grandfather holding mine and B’s hands on either side of him.  They walked us down the path to the edge of the village, and after an appropriate number of goodbyes and many promises to come back for next month’s festival, we began the hike back down the mountain through the dust.  My black pants were completely coated with a golden layer of dirt by the end of the day, and my ankles had a nice dirt tan.  The dust was more than worth it, though, to spend time with precious people on top of the mountain.

(to be continued…)

Next in the “Back-to-Back Trips” series:  ”Mountain March Madness“

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