Fantasy Redux

Photos I've developed since I posted Operation Brightstar.





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Reckless, Part Two

Reckless, Part One

my first word was "tractor."

Downtown Portraits

More here.

Destructo and Bard @ Salem Black River

So the funeral was held just down the road from the Salem Black River Church. The Bard and Cpt. Destructo were kind enough to give up a day and a couple tanks of gas to make sure the service wasn't too classy.

Afterwards we rolled over to the Brick church boneyard, so I could show them all my other dead relatives. Leave it to the Bard to make light of any situation:



Seriously, though. It was surreal to see them in that place. Two paths I never thought would intersect. Thanks, boys.

On the Steps of Brick Church

After the funeral, shot with the Leica. Before you laugh at my tie, it's the MacGregor tartan. My brother wore the Cooper tartan so that we would cover both sides of the lineage, and both look equally plaid.

My photo essay on Brick Church is here. It's strange to shoot photos at that place and not send them to my dad.

Jes looks good in black, and parallax is a bitch.




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A Father's Day Post

My hero Eugene Smith was a compulsive photographer. Not only was he an excellent craftsman, he was feverishly prolific, leaving thousands of rolls undeveloped at his death.

My dad was also an amazing photographer. I believe there is one roll undeveloped on his desk.

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When they loaded him into the ambulance, my dad had no idea that he was leaving his home for the last time. As we went through the motions and he was transferred to Hospice, we all gradually realized that he would never again sit at the kitchen table, write an email from his computer, or look out the bedroom window.

I think it bothered me more than him. He mentioned that it was strange to be in a different environment, and that was about it. But I kept thinking, "What about your stuff?" The books, the cameras, the furniture. What if you want something? The answer soon became clear: You don't need anything to die.

Since then, I've wanted to divest myself of everything. There are a handful of possessions that mean something; the rest are just dross. I don't want to end up on my deathbed thinking about my stuff.

So the question that raises is this: If I want to rid myself of possessions, why do I keep making more images? Aren't they just stuff? Am I really going to lay there and say, "Yes, it was nice knowing you, and could you please hand me that copy of SHOTS with my photos in it?"

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My dad was a wiser photographer than I'll ever be. Having said that, digital really confused him. And the older and crankier he got, the less patience he had for it. For example: JPG capture. I told him time and time again about the benefits of RAW, but for him it just wasn't worth it. It's too bad. JPG capture is for the birds.


[Photo by Drayton Cooper.]

It was immensely difficult to clear the memory cards on his Pentax. We used to argue about his K10d vs. my D200, and I went on and on about the "professional features." I was stupid. What would someone in my dad's position do with a pro-level DSLR?

It illustrates the divide of perspective. If you're going to jump in the fire, you need a camera that can take the heat. But for my dad, it was a struggle to walk from the car to the doctor's office. So it's the same idea. "Nurse, get me my full frame DSLR with my 300/2.8, and while you're at it, would you help me lift this glass of water?"

At some point I realized that I was asking too much of him. So I came up with crazy ideas. So you can't walk: Why not mount the Pentax to a tripod and shoot through the window? Think of the birding portfolio you'd have after a few weeks. I realize now that I was in the stage of grief known as bargaining.

Imagine my surprise when I turned on the camera and found that he actually did it. Not the tripod and all, but there were a couple dozen bird photos shot from the house. If I had seen them before he died, I would have said, "Shoot RAW! Use a lower ISO! Don't trust auto-levels!" Now I just say thank you. I don't even know who I'm thanking.

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Nothing is ever perfect.

I've already discussed the sunset dynamic. But imagine this: You have terminal cancer, and you're sitting on the balcony of a cruise ship looking at the most amazing sunset you'll ever see. What are you going to do, not shoot it?

Well, yes. When it hurts to move, and you're completely exhausted, you might ask your son to shoot it instead.




Yes, those are new sunset pictures. They look exactly like the old sunset pictures, because all sunset pictures look alike. What differentiates sunsets is not how they look, but where you are when you look at them.

I am a from the Eugene Smith school of thought: In photography, as in the rest of life, anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Or until you run out of ammo film. For example, I shot almost a hundred pictures of my friend Tom and I building my the box for my father's ashes. It made Tom very uncomfortable. I don't even know why I did it.



These days, I don't even know why I run this blog. I reap almost no benefit from it, and yet I can't imagine life without it. "Compulsion: a strong, usually irresistible impulse to perform an act, especially one that is irrational . . ." I run a backlog of about ten rolls of film. At times it has been more. Nothing compared to Smith, but an order of magnitude more than my father.

Then again, my father also drank his scotch over ice. Like Eugene Smith, I prefer it straight. Why do I draw useless parallels? Probably for the same reason that, at the end of his life, Eugene Smith threatened to burn all of his negatives.

Even to the end, literally in his deathbed, my father never stopped looking. His eyes were sharp until he lost the strength to focus them. On the cruise, he would call me out to the balcony and say, "Son, what do you reckon that is way out there?"





I would zoom the 55-200 all the way out and then pixel peep on the LCD and then say: "I don't know." There were structures, figures, vague lights. Did it bring him any comfort, that I produced those images? I can't say, but it gave me great comfort to find them on his camera. Even if they are just JPGs, shot with a cheap zoom on a "prosumer" body.

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Soon I will begin the process of archiving all of my dad's photos and writings, as he archived his father's. This is a daunting and heartbreaking task. It will likely take me years. To begin, I've been reading my grandfather's account of our family history. I didn't even know it existed until my dad gave it to me a year ago.

It's a strange experience to read something that was written for me by a man who died before my birth about people who died before his. He barely mentions himself. What would compel a man to do that kind of work? You'd have to stand at a great height to see so far ahead. And what could he have seen of the future? Structures? Figures? Vague lights?

From beyond the grave, I receive advice from my father and his father before. It is good to be compelled, they say, as long as you are young.

#

I drink my scotch straight and neat. Lately, I've been drinking too much of it. But I have learned from my dad: I did not take pictures at the funeral. At least not while the minister was talking.

Gene Smith seemed to believe that photography would keep him young, when all it really did was leave him battered and blind in his old age. After the last few weeks, I feel like I've reached old age myself. I used to say "F8 and be there." But we are all trapped, with only a window.

Life is short: A photographer needs courage and wisdom. It is courageous to look out as far as you can. It takes wisdom to make a record of what you see.


[Photo by Drayton Cooper]

6x9 Fail

At one point back in the day Larry White lent me a Fuji 6x9 rangefinder. My dad called it the "Texas Leica."

I took it out and shot some great night work. Except for the fact that Fuji's T mode is nothing like everyone else's B mode, and the camera did not close its shutter before the film transport engaged. Therefore, my carefully composed, impeccably shot existential night photos were ruined by all the light sources dragging across the image.

I never figured out if it was my fault or the camera's fault. I was done. But I was intrigued with the 6x9 format, which is basically the biggest negative you can get without going panoramic or large format.

All these years later I have inherited this camera from my dad:



Scale focus? No problem. Light leak? Adds character. Too big? It folds up into my pocket. Hazy lens? Makes people look younger. What could possibly go wrong?

After the second shot I started thinking, "Gosh, the shutter is quiet." Of course it was. Shutters don't make much noise when they're stuck open.

Oh well. It looks great on the shelf. And I did get two frames:

You wreck me, baby.

Yeah, you break me in two.

The Treehouse, 1991-2011. RIP.

Alexandra Duncan: The DarkTopo Interview

From a book-clogged room overlooking the River District's rail yard, Asheville's Alexandra Duncan writes science fiction. The trains couple thunderously. The keys click feverishly. It's a very DarkTopo scene.

But after reading her work, you might think DarkTopo is very Duncanesque. In two years she's appeared five times in the prestigious Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with subject matter such as death in space, trains caught in timelessness, and--my favorite--a mysterious door built into a rock face in the Western North Carolina woods. The current issue includes her strange re-working of the Rapunzel tale, a novella-length work called Rampion.

Now, Duncan is included alongside Neil Gaiman and other sci-fi notables in The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, an anthology that hits the shelves today.

This is the first time I've interviewed an artist who isn't a photographer, or even working in a visual medium. It's a photoblog, after all, but when I find work that asks many of the same questions DarkTopo poses . . . well, that just leads to more questions. Alexa was kind enough to answer them:

DT: Why do you write?

AD: First and foremost, I like telling stories. If I’m not writing them down, I’m coming up with them in my head anyway, thinking about how to phrase them, and wondering what the story is behind that guy with the neck tattoos in the grocery checkout line. I think I would go crazy if I couldn’t get them down on paper. Or worse, I’d forget what I came up with. I guess I could compare my reasons for writing to how some people feel about running. They get to a point where if they don’t do it every day, they feel like something is wrong, like maybe they left the stove on or forgot to pick up their great aunt at the airport. It’s something I like to do, but it’s also something I need to do.

DT: Your stories all contain parent/child tension. Elaborate? What do your parents think of your work?

AD: I think the parent/child tension in my stories is definitely an autobiographical influence bleeding through. My parents divorced when I was three and each remarried other people, so my childhood reads like a playbook of all the stereotypical things kids go through when that happens, along with some added weirdness that comes of being a preacher’s kid.

My parents have actually been very supportive of my writing. My dad is a little bit of a sci-fi nerd, so he started subscribing to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction after my second story appeared there. My mother’s reaction to my writing has been the funniest and the sweetest, though. Science fiction and fantasy aren’t her thing at all. She seems kind of baffled that she ended up with a daughter who likes writing about spaceships, zombies, and temporal abnormalities, but like a good mom, she reads all of my stuff anyway. After my first story was published, she asked me what I was working on next.

“Well, it’s kind of a love story. . .” I started to explain.

But she got too excited and cut in. “In space?!”

My mom is the best.

DT: In your stories, death or its approach is often a driving force. How do you decide which characters will die and which will live? Do you set out to write knowing if a story will have a tragic or happy ending?

AD: I usually start a story with a vague idea of the tone I want to set, but I rarely know exactly how it will end or who will survive. I have to spend some time writing out the characters and seeing how they react to their environment before I know how their stories should end. Sometimes they completely surprise me. For example, when I started writing “Swamp City Lament,” I meant it to be a funny exercise to see if I could use arcane curse words, and it turned out to be something much more serious. Fiction is all about exploring change, and death is the ultimate change.

"I rarely know exactly how it will end or who will survive."

DT: What did you want to be when you grew up?

AD: There was definitely a brief period where I wanted to be Princess Leia from Star Wars, but before and after that, I wanted to be a writer. In kindergarten, I used to draw pictures in a journal someone had given me, and then track down the nearest adult so I could dictate what I wanted written on each page. Later on, my elementary school started a program where they took stories we students had written and illustrated, and bound them in book format. (Mine involved murderous animatronic dolls and a haunted house.) I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I was already a huge bookworm, and here was this thing with my name on it that looked more or less like the books I checked out of the library every week.

DT: In spite of enormous commercial success, science fiction has been much maligned by its detractors, giving rise to the term "Speculative Fiction." Conversely, it has been said that all fiction is, at heart, speculative. Where is the line? And, more importantly, why speculate?

AD: I think the whole question of what separates “genre fiction” from “literary fiction” is a semantic game we play, and it’s also a matter of self-definition and marketing. I’ve seen snobbishness on both sides of the line, which is ridiculous. A story about spaceships can enlighten us and comment on our society, just as a realistic novel about someone having an affair can entertain us. The writers whose work I admire most are the ones who refuse to buy into the idea that you can only write in one genre: Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Jasper Fforde, Karen Russell, and Fred Chappell, to name a few.

Over the last decade, we’ve seen a rise in the popularity of young adult fiction across all age groups. I think part of that success has to do with young adult fiction’s willingness to bend genres and tell stories about supernatural creatures, murder, love triangles, space exploration, and dystopian futures, the kinds of things we all want to read about, regardless of our age. For some reason, “genre fiction” hasn’t been ghettoized in Y.A. fiction the way it has in adult fiction. I hope this means we’re raising a generation of readers who are willing to read more widely and not be ashamed to like both Ursula LeGuin and Barbara Kingsolver.

As to the issue of whether all fiction is speculative, I would be willing to bet almost all stories start with the question, “What if?” We can’t help but ask the question. It’s human nature. That said, I don’t have a problem with the term “speculative fiction” as a shorthand term for science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all of their related subgenres. What is steampunk for example? Science fiction? Fantasy? Alternate history? It’s hard to pin down with a single term. I think the popularity of the term “speculative fiction” isn’t simply science fiction writers trying to rebrand themselves, but a reflection of the variety in “genre fiction” as a whole.

New Cameras

I've updated The Firing Squad with pictures of cameras I've inherited from my dad. As near as I can tell he left me about a dozen cameras and twenty or so lenses, some of which are very nice. Others are like the Pentax ZX50: Completely obsolete in this day and age, but it's the camera that I learned on, the one he loaned me when I first went to college. So it's not going anywhere, but I doubt I'll put it to any hard use.

Of course, everyone wants to see the Leica. So here it is:



Now maybe I can finally become Secretary of Photography.

The Box