On the corner of midnight and forever...

On the corner of midnight and forever,
with a useless phone,
a drunk is singing up the alley,
“baby, won’t you please come home”

decaying street is littered,
a thousand empty dreams,
sweeper comes along each morning,
bulging at the seams

old cat goes a- slinking,
on a well-worn trail,
ears all drooped and fraying,
missing patches on his tail

Bukowski feels right here,
‘bout as right as rain,
time to shuffle on,
get up on that train,

head on back to the truth,
to the ugly little town,
where no one seems to notice
all the sickness going round,

spin their webs a-plenty,
gossamer in flight,
snare the wounded soldiers,
staggering through the night

O sing your song, old alley-man,
I’ll be lonely this whole damn fall,
the coyotes are so far away now,
I can barely hear their call

and when I wake next spring,
a-ringing in my ears,
no one will hear my soft little sighs,
no one will see my tears

yes, this night is home,
to all the lonely beasts,
who room the streets and howl,
from a Pyrrhic inner heat

old Rome had its share,
we think we invented the tune,
wolves have been a-hunting,
forever ‘neath this moon

but let me stand a moment,
in this wan, mercurial light,
it’s still all so beautiful,
let me see it right

we are the dance

Life is a delicate balance. Always, something is ascendent at the expense of something else. These soils - wrought from the bodies of ancient microscopic sea-creatures, fertilized by ages and ages of the frothing biology of microbes, plants, insects, birds, mammals - these soils give rise to wondrous tress. Trees that seem to writhe with life. To some, in tortured, contorted poses. To me - in the embodiment of a type of dance. And when one comes to pass, the grand accumulation of all the materials gained over a lifetime will pass again on to the soils, to feed the mammals, birds, insects, plants, microbes, and of course - future trees. With care, one could imagine the long, long ages passing before your eyes, seasons upon seasons whizzing by, trees growing up towards the sky then falling and returning to earth, over and over again, the seemingly random pattern of life ever repeating, with each instance unique in all of time, an electric dance pausing for a moment, heroically, against all odds, stark against a deep blue sky.

the uplands

Just over 11,000 ft up in 'Patriarch'. It's hard to put into words, this grove. People come streaming by, some pause briefly to take a picture then go; others wander reverently where raised voices seem out of place. Some try to explain it all to those who will listen, telling the story as a stranger might at a wake, how some of these trees have stood since the time of Christ - all told with an earnest tone. But who can say what the cold winter's chill feels like after the ever-too-brief summer sun? Who can fathom the long quiet, the raging storms? We wander briefly amidst the old ones, whose thoughts are much too long and slow for us to hear. We are mere ephemera, a passing shadow to those that remain when we leave.

So, I have finally finished my book:
Lost and Found: Confessions of a Bay Area Vagabond.
It took longer than I thought, mostly because of the writing, which became a labour of love. It is interesting to have to write, which like any artistic task, can loom large and seem impossible. Now, this book is hardly War and Peace, but the act of creation is often about getting out of your own way, breaking past your pre-conceptions of who or what you 'are' or what you can be. I am ever self-limiting, reminding myself of my 'limitations' at every step, bringing to mind past behaviors, and their seemingly hard truths about who I am - all of which is just a bunch of hooey. Life is what you make it, and the Self, an illusion of convenience, crafted to get one off the hook for being in the moment, a fallback position. So, go forth and create, make mistakes, slip off the rails a bit, draw outside the lines, find a new room in your mind's house.

point of view

Each of us sees the world from where we stand. 'Tis a singular point of view, from which high perch we survey and measure all that passes before us. That we cannot always see over the hill, to the far country of an other's view is but the nature of our existence. Thus, I extend you the courtesy of my doubts, and hope for the same. We each inherit the same rights as another. We walk beneath the same sun, breathe the same air - we are siblings beyond documents. We share a small but precious rock, wheeling through the abyss of space, with no roof overhead. We want this blink of time to have some meaning beyond ourselves, thus we create. We fear that it does not, thus we war. We are but the drops from which waves are made. Tossed by tide and winds we pass - all together - through the moments of life. It is a testimony to the imagination that one can think of us as separate.

Photo: Sun Worshipper, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

At some point, we each get to ask - what do I photograph? and why? What is it that draws me out of my shell, focuses my attention, draws me in? This is, thankfully, quite variable and dynamic, and thus we are presented with an ever expanding horizon of what interests us at a given time.

What in the past was ignored as merely a decaying garden implement can later excite in a myriad of ways: metaphorically, geometrically, etc. Most of which are, frankly, quite boring to anyone else on the planet :) Occasionally though - and seemingly against the odds - interests cross, magically resulting in an epiphany shared and wowie-zowie your photo gets 'explored' on flickr, or makes the cover of a photo magazine, or you sell a print.

And so, the question is, should we chase the shared moments - Steiglitz's equivalents if you will - or allow them to bubble up from the world around us...?

Is the prize more rewarding than the seeking?

Photo: Staff of Life, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

An author I greatly admire, Pema Chodron talks about the need to "move gently toward what scares us".  In life, I find this to be sage advice, for I often find my own preconceptions scarier than the realities I presume they portray. Street photography is a unique way of interacting with the world, and I highly admire some of it's adherents such as Andre Kertesz, Walker Evans, Gary Winogrand, and of course Cartier-Bresson. Alas, I am very 'wet behind the ears', as the saying goes, a neophyte. I struggle with the method, how to be discrete without being 'furtive' or deceptive. How to approach, how to build rapport? It is worrisome to attempt, difficult to achieve anything, far from my 'comfort zone', and the fear is that I am wasting my time. Thus, I move, gently toward what, well, makes me uncomfortable :)

Photo: Walkabout, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

a day at the beach

I sat on the beach, collecting stones. I pulled a stone that was already rounded from an ancient sea when the soft sand it sat in turned to stone, ages upon ages ago. I sat because I had lost my thread, and when that happens I need to orient myself to something much bigger. I sat because I had held the hand of a stranger through the last minutes of his life, both of us pawing at the futility of it all. I sat, picking through the stones that fate had assembled beneath me. What countless summers have caressed these stones? Here but a blink, what foolishness I am, meandering between doubt and hope, stumbling about the stones.

Photo: A day at the beach, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

When attempting to describe the Chapel at Sea Ranch, people invariably resort to such heroic euphemisms such as "an elvish barnacle-hat UFO encrusted with coppered scales..." In truth, it is a beautiful structure, gracefully referencing elements of land, sea, and the myriad lifeforms in the surrounding environments. Sit inside, and you will feel a quiet, abiding reverence for all things alive.

Photo: a bit-o-the-whimsy, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

It's not often mentioned, but most photographer's shots - mine at least - fail. And when I say most, I'm mean easily over 90% - in my case one in 10 would be pretty good overall :). Sometimes I get on a roll and hit a few in a row; but usually, something goes wrong. Sometimes, its the obvious: the thumb in the picture, here holding a yellow filter and hoping to shade the lens from the sun's rays. Other times, it's the darkslide, or the forgotten level, the wrong iso setting, the bumped tripod, or the untightened knob; the list is extremely long of ways in which I have - and continue to - ruin otherwise perfectly good images. But, the worse kind are the kind where I've suffered a lack of intent; when the image was made more or less out of habit, aye there's the rot.

"Wherever you go, go with all your heart" - Confucius

Be thou blessed, may you never take the scene for granted, may you never look without seeing, may you never stand without awe before the countless moments of magic all around us.

"If I never meet you in this world, let me feel the lack." - from The Thin Red Line

Photo: Failed, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

Sometimes, a place can take your breath away - you stand mute, eyes darting, unable to articulate your feelings in all but the most brutish of terms. The mouth becomes dry, and a weight of time bears upon the chest - at the most extreme, a sob attempts to well up past the defenses, a tear forms. What is ascendent in our deep selves - our secret hopes for the divine - this place we stand in, tempts us to celebrate, to give voice, to raise up our songs unto the very heavens which, for all we know, may be inhabited by nothing more than our hubris.

From Lassus to Leadbelly, the cry of our song comes from the deep wellsprings of our pain, the haunting loneliness of a vast and unending universe. And if there is no God, then we will create one in our own image.

Photo: Ascendent, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

O'er the methane seas,
sailed the tentacled thieves,
blasting a fugal tune,
'neith a Jovian moon,

and the barnacled sheen
of the mermaid queen
led many a man
to his wat'ry doom

tales 'twere told
in rhymes of old
were but the pale
facsimile of the truth

and many a salt,
swooning with malt,
sings regrets of the
actions of youth

O' I hear a knocker,
in Davy Jones' locker
a canker in the
womb of the sea

She'll spit him back up
and he'll raise his bony cup
and give a gallant toast
to his family.

"Me ma was a tart
me pa was a fart
and gave never a mind
to their progeny

I raised myself up
drank from the bloody cup
and stood toe to toe
with those better 'n me

'twere your last breath
as you stand it's your death
if you get between
what's coming and me

I give as was given
to dead and the livin'
and stands no man
between God and me."

---

OK, so-so poetry, but the point is, IR images
hinting at what the world might look like
through other alien irises seeing different
wavelengths...

Photo: Through the eyes of others, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

Sudek

"I remember one time, in one of the Romanesque halls, deep below the spires of the cathedral [St. Vitus]--it was dark as in catacombs--with just a small window below street level inside the massive medieval walls. We set up the tripod and camera and then sat down on the floor and talked. Suddenly Sudek was up like lightening. A ray of sun had entered the darkness and both of us were waving cloths to raise mountains of dust 'to see the light,' as Sudek said. Obviously he had known that the sun would reach here perhaps two or three times a year, and he was waiting for it." - Sonja Bullaty

For me, Sudek is a mentor - a vague faraway force, whose muted axioms lay hidden in the layers of his deceptively simple work. I assert that you cannot take a better photograph of an onion than Sudek - his glow with an inner light unseen by most mortals in possession of an imaging system be it digital or film - though perhaps an old master of oils could equal the effort.

A glass on the windowsill. I flip past seeking the images my over-saturated eye has come to expect and need as 'art' - and yet I return thinking - but it's just a glass of water, how could the muse be reflected in that? and then I notice that somehow through a distant mirror, Sudek has winked at me, led me into his little room, shared his facility with the north facing window's miserly light, implanted a bit-o-the-equivalence, slyly, sneaking it under the door of my pseudo-refined artistic editor/conscience and tweaked my nose with a cryptic smile. I, who will willingly drive hundreds of miles to take photographs, have to acknowledge that Sudek travelled far in his little room.

Photo: Neo-romantic, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

what I found in the forest

... and so I walked into the woods, as oft I do, a glance beckoning me towards soft light falling amidst the tall leviathans. I grab gear and venture but a short distance from the road, set the equipment down and start to wander, surveying the locale, listening, smelling, kneeling down to touch the earth; why am I here?

After a few moments of silence, I realize that I am far from the bustle of the world. Look: faeries dance, ravens cackle, and old snags drift lazily in the evening swell wagging their forms against the twilight. Orcs and goblins peek from behind distant trees, shapes move, figures play with the edge of my vision: I am alone in the dark woods and find myself brushing up against primal fears in my mind. A snapping twig: was that a footstep? My posture stiffens, no one is here yet I am intimately aware of all the sounds in the woods around me. My spine requires it, the vestigial reptilian inside me ensures that I am on heightened alert here. These are just the woods, my educated brain says: no one is here, no mountain lions, no bears, and yet the sense of wild pervades even though I am but mere yards from the road.

A dark wooded ravine runs down into the deeper woods, and my mind plays with thoughts of what walks there while I sleep. How oft we forget that we are but animals, and beneath the layers of civility, the same terrified primal outlook of a deer resides in us. Occasionally we remember, and this remembrance can exhilarate, terrify, or awaken a wanderlust to seek out the primordial in ourselves.

Photo: Wizard's wand, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

lost coast

The north coast of California is the edge of the great migration, the final shore upon which the waves of westward seekers washed up. But it is a formidable country: rugged, incessantly damp, covered by thick forests of redwood, Douglas fur, and western hemlock. So after the logging slowed, most went their way to sunnier climes where the living was easier.

According to the occasional roadside attraction, Bigfoot lives here, his visage along with other denizens of the mythic stand in mute testimony to the back recesses of time and our psyche. We need there to be wild places,where man is but a seldom visitor at most, where the mind can still believe that mystery lives.

Photo: Wild coast morning, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

seen better days

Every moment contains some echo of the past, rippling forward with lessening vigour, until it is but a whisper to those who would listen. I hear these whispers of the past - the echos of the sunny day when this screen door was new and freshly hewn, the functional exemplar of its form. What days passed, what weeds grew, what attentions wandered in the interim, I sculpt with imagination, filling the blanks with a loving brushstroke. Others might seek a different tale, each according to their desire, and therein lies one of the Great Mysteries of Art.

Photo: Seen better days, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

thoughts on granite...

Say the word Yosemite, and someone will whisper 'Ansel' in return. As a lad, in the scouts, we hiked from Devil's Postpile into Yosemite. Cold crisp mornings, stroganoff, switchbacks, and the cleanest granite you've ever seen. And to me, and others no doubt, the granite somehow provides the essential mental image of the high country. 'Tis the 'scrith' laid bare, the understructure, the very bones of the mountains, so satisfyingly strong yet laid about in random confusion tumbled here and there in chaotic heaps. Mighty forces have forged these stones and others moved them, scoured them, polished them to a lustre of the finest brass. We but scurry about their flanks, clattering over the scree, in awe and wonder looking for the breccia of creation.

 

Photo: Twilight of the Gods, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

Ghosts of Fresno

As a child, I had dreams about these tracks, the smooth shopworn rails stood for something quite profound, of which now I have only the vaguest recollection. Somehow, they were good, true, and reliable - things that seem so scarce in those times, looking back. Apparently, we lived in Fresno's Chinatown - on G street. Once a thriving hotbed of shady and legitimate commerce, today it is rundown, boarded up, and not far from a sizable tent city. It was a place my folks went to hide: from life, from parents, from the law. Not long ago, remnants of long rumoured tunnels were found beneath the streets, maybe some secrets are better left alone...

BTW - The Rolleiflex is - by far - my favorite camera. Having one lens and a square format may seem too limited in these days of zoom lenses and and photoshop. Sure, it reduces your options, but constraints can be good - forcing you to work with a scene. Yes, not everything 'fits', but working within it's confines - for me at least - is often very liberating...

And, thank god for Kodak :)

Photo: Ghosts of Fresno, ©2010 Timothy A. Sandstrom

Here's an image by Q.T. Luong from Specimen Ridge.

I've been researching hikes in the Yellowstone area.

Certainly, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

should be on the short list, go see Q.T.'s images!!!

Some candidates [so far] for the death march:

- Black Canyon of the Yellowstone [12 miles]

- Bighorn Peak [14 miles]

- Osprey Falls [9.2 miles]

- Fan Creek [5-11 miles]

- Sevenmile hole [10 miles]

- Upper Gallatin valley [9-13 miles]

Anyway, add some ideas!

Yellowstone 2007!

OK, here's one place we can start posting stuff about the trip. I've got a book on hikes

in Yellowstone [like Artists Point, etc]. Here's an overall lowres map to get oriented...

I got this from :

http://www.yellowstone-natl-park.com/hike.htm