Story We Tell (January 2023)
Not sure what I am going to do in this space.
Ideally, I want the photographs to stand on their own – the “Story we Tell” project is, after all, a visual one. If words can tell the story, why do I need pictures?
Where they can’t, or where I want to remember something outside the frame to give it context, I have left notes in the “Descriptions” below the photos in the linked gallery below.
But I feel like my thoughts outside the frame are informing a lot of the photos you see here, and I want to record some of those thoughts here.
It will probably change as time progresses, but the only way to find what works is to start the cycle of do, adjust, do, adjust….
January 4, 2023: I’ve been revisiting the Doors catalog; Strange Days lands very different at age 50 than it did at age 20. And I can’t stop listening to Alabama Moon; it makes me think of the Arkansas legislature. This discussion of the Sabbath with author Judith Shulevitz on the Ezra Klein Show has me thinking about what it might feel like to add a Sabbath practice to my life.
January 9, 2023: The christian taliban in Arkansas just proposed a law banning being transgender, with a penalty of up to 1 year in jail “per incident”. Though framed as banning Drag Story Hours “to protect the children”, the law is identical to the anti masquerading laws of the 19th century; those laws were sold as banning people who dressed up as Native Americans to avoid tax collectors. They were used to jail transgender people who dared dress to match their identity.
January 14, 2023 – Once again, I found myself in the same quandary: the pull of Arkansas’ natural beauty is powerful, but can I raise a child with special needs – or any child at all – in a state whose people have surrendered their foundation in human empathy and fully embraced cruelty? This week, I definitively answered that question, “No.”
January 29, 2023 – I’ve never really understood what MLK really meant by nonviolence until I listened to an Ezra Klein podcast interview with Harvard professor Brandon Terry. This podcast started to answer the question for me – how do we live together with people who hate us? I began listening to MLK’s speeches that are compiled in the book “Where do we go from here: chaos or community?”. You can read the free book here or you can click here to listen to it on Audible. I can definitively say, however, that it is very difficult to photograph while listening to Dr. King speak.
The only place to follow the “Story We Tell” project is on this website. If you’d like me to email you when I update the photo galleries, share your email below. I typically do updates once a week or so.
Click on the first photo to see the complete photos in gallery format.
