Hunting Garry
I've been sliding back and forth between this trip and the past.
I just spent ten years recovering from my last "big" photography project. What had happened was....
I applied to grad school just after college. Tod Papageorge, one of my HUGE photo heroes, chuckled at a few things I said during the interview, then looked me in the eye... "You realize that if we let you in, you'll be the youngest person we ever accepted into this program?" I had not.
Tod's the shadow in this picture:
It was taken with Tod's camera. Garry Winogrand, one of his best buddies, and one of my SUPER HEROES in life, grabbed the camera and made this picture. Garry was gone by the time I realized that my one true passion was photography, but being around Tod, in the program that freakin' Walker Evans (!) started, well, that would all be tooooo much. I'd be one degree of separation from Garry. It was basically... my dream of life.
Garry was course, wild, relentless. He made hundreds of thousands of images during the civil rights movement. Beautiful black and white street photography, a lot of it in NYC, but you'll come across some rodeos and zoos if you dig into him.
When I tell people I'm a photographer:
"Oh! Ansel Adams! Oh! sunsets, waterfalls, gushy colors, kittens in baskets, babies in any number of adorable situations!"
Me: "Noooooooooo. Garry Winogrand. Walker Evans. The freakin' MAYOR OF MEMPHIS, Wild Bill Eggleston. Dorothea Lange. August Sander."
It's sorta the difference between pop country and Guy Clark. Not better or worse, everyone has their own taste and taste is subjective. But the stuff I loooooove, is highly emotional, political, personal, thinky pictures. Pictures that expand your brain. A whole world inside of a frame.
SO. Tod says, "If you don't get in, will you reapply when you're a little older?"
"Yes."
"What will you do in the meantime?"
"I'm going to Las Vegas! Find Hoffa and make pictures!"
He chuckled again, so I went. I created a whole new body of work or twelve while working at Paris, Bellagio, Mandalay Bay. I was also a substitute teacher some days, worked for an interior designer who did palaces in the middle east on other days. I had to grab onto the essence of Las Vegas. Grab it by the balls. No sunsets behind the casinos or other postcard fodder. I had to nail it so I could go be around Tod Papageorge.
I photographed day and night, was fired for shooting the back areas of Paris (specifically my boss while he was throwing a tantrum). Somewhere between 10-50 rolls of film per week. I spent all my damn casino earnings on film. If I was going to ever be GARRY, I'd have to shoot. And it was my release, my safe place. Being behind the camera gave me comfort. Seeing the perfect light or the perfect place, the perfect scenario, that was my jam. It's all I did. Besides work a whole bunch of jobs.
Sideline into a clip from an Annie Dillard essay:
---------------------------------------------------------------
I missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for
that streak of white under the weasel's chin and held on, held on through mud and into the
wild rose, held on for a dearer life. We could live under the wild rose wild as weasels,
mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild. I could live two days in the
den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk,
my hair tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is
single. Down is out, out of your ever-loving mind and back to your careless senses. I
remember muteness as a prolonged and giddy fast, where every moment is a feast of
utterance received. Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested
directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein. Could two live that way?
Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of
each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling
snow?
We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty,
chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a
certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that
pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as
he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one
necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death,
where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you
up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and
let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods,
lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
-Annie Dillard
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I guess I'll take nearly any opportunity to quote Annie Dillard. She's maybe the greatest putter togetherer of words who ever lived. And this idea of hanging from your "one thing" limp, wherever it takes you, that really stuck to me. So I dangled from photography. I got into the Yale program. I was elated.
I don't know what happened. I got there and was too flummoxed to speak in sentences. Sometimes your heroes have been put on too big of pedestal. You can't let them come back down from it. I could barely speak to those heroes. I should have gone the first time, when I was so very brave. But I'd let this idea of doing this thing take over. It took on its own life. I started randomly fainting and all kinds of bizarre shit. I bombed. There were people who wouldn't let me forget that I was the "first Vegas cocktail waitress" to get into the program, rather than the youngest. Some of that was fierce judgment. In hindsight, I don't know-- I think I can really attract a bully or two, especially in a place so competitive. Instead of doing what I always do, I took this to heart, thought I must be trash compared to these incredibly cultured and fancy types, and maybe I gave up a little.
So, I picked my dumb ass back up, packed up, and headed back to Las Vegas, where being trashy is awesome.
All the cool kids were going to India, discovering themselves, getting gurus. I decided to do the white trash version of that. I started working at a small music venue as a bartender. Then I started noticing "the girls," the women who'd poke their head in your car if you stopped long enough. Just to see. Just to see if you needed anything they might be able to give you. For a small fee of course.
I got enchanted with the idea that they could be gurus. Like, maybe this idea of going into a completely other culture and trying to get a grip on what life is all about, maybe that's sort of more stupid than thinking that hookers might hold the answers to many esoteric quandaries. You have to admit, if Jesus and Andy Kaufman both found value in it, there must be something to it.
It took months to get anyone to agree to be photographed. Then for several years it was a landslide of women seeking me out to photograph them. They loved it. It felt special for them. They'd all lost everything, here or there. Every photograph of themselves. All connections to family, old friends, and a photograph always feels like a connection. Evidence. That we ever existed at all.
They came to me at the bar, asking to be photographed. Then I'd see them here or there and maybe we'd go for lunch. Or a beer. Or wherever. Just hang out. One time Diana even came over to my place and I cracked up that she loved watching 'Everyone Loves Raymond.' She took a bath. We sang songs and drank.
Why it took so long to recover from these friendships is still something I think about. Maybe I tried to save them from their lives. Maybe I was unprepared. I hadn't taken courses in counseling-- they teach you some level of separation. You have to. If you fully put yourself in someone else's shoes, fully empathize with a horrifying situation, it's apparently really awful for you. That's what I think now.
The biggest thing, the most profound thing was finding Ruby. She wasn't like the other girls. They were resilient, very funny. She was fragile, sweet, dainty. I found her one day, green bruised with cigarette burns all over her arms from having been attacked. I don't like to think about it. I think I'll stop talking about it. Please don't ever ask me in person about her, because it will surely wreck my day.
What I found out in this process, is that the thing they most commonly shared was an incredible sense of humor. No boundaries humor, you could make jokes about anything, no matter how gross, vile, disturbing. That's the sort of people I like to be around, people who can laugh about anything.
The photos are funny. They're a bit silly. They're awkward and hopefully, kind. Here are just a few, from the project I called, The Little Chapel of Esoteric Cosmetology:
I just spent ten years recovering from my last "big" photography project. What had happened was....
I applied to grad school just after college. Tod Papageorge, one of my HUGE photo heroes, chuckled at a few things I said during the interview, then looked me in the eye... "You realize that if we let you in, you'll be the youngest person we ever accepted into this program?" I had not.
Tod's the shadow in this picture:
It was taken with Tod's camera. Garry Winogrand, one of his best buddies, and one of my SUPER HEROES in life, grabbed the camera and made this picture. Garry was gone by the time I realized that my one true passion was photography, but being around Tod, in the program that freakin' Walker Evans (!) started, well, that would all be tooooo much. I'd be one degree of separation from Garry. It was basically... my dream of life.
Garry was course, wild, relentless. He made hundreds of thousands of images during the civil rights movement. Beautiful black and white street photography, a lot of it in NYC, but you'll come across some rodeos and zoos if you dig into him.
When I tell people I'm a photographer:
"Oh! Ansel Adams! Oh! sunsets, waterfalls, gushy colors, kittens in baskets, babies in any number of adorable situations!"
Me: "Noooooooooo. Garry Winogrand. Walker Evans. The freakin' MAYOR OF MEMPHIS, Wild Bill Eggleston. Dorothea Lange. August Sander."
It's sorta the difference between pop country and Guy Clark. Not better or worse, everyone has their own taste and taste is subjective. But the stuff I loooooove, is highly emotional, political, personal, thinky pictures. Pictures that expand your brain. A whole world inside of a frame.
SO. Tod says, "If you don't get in, will you reapply when you're a little older?"
"Yes."
"What will you do in the meantime?"
"I'm going to Las Vegas! Find Hoffa and make pictures!"
He chuckled again, so I went. I created a whole new body of work or twelve while working at Paris, Bellagio, Mandalay Bay. I was also a substitute teacher some days, worked for an interior designer who did palaces in the middle east on other days. I had to grab onto the essence of Las Vegas. Grab it by the balls. No sunsets behind the casinos or other postcard fodder. I had to nail it so I could go be around Tod Papageorge.
I photographed day and night, was fired for shooting the back areas of Paris (specifically my boss while he was throwing a tantrum). Somewhere between 10-50 rolls of film per week. I spent all my damn casino earnings on film. If I was going to ever be GARRY, I'd have to shoot. And it was my release, my safe place. Being behind the camera gave me comfort. Seeing the perfect light or the perfect place, the perfect scenario, that was my jam. It's all I did. Besides work a whole bunch of jobs.
Sideline into a clip from an Annie Dillard essay:
---------------------------------------------------------------
I missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for
that streak of white under the weasel's chin and held on, held on through mud and into the
wild rose, held on for a dearer life. We could live under the wild rose wild as weasels,
mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild. I could live two days in the
den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk,
my hair tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is
single. Down is out, out of your ever-loving mind and back to your careless senses. I
remember muteness as a prolonged and giddy fast, where every moment is a feast of
utterance received. Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested
directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein. Could two live that way?
Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of
each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling
snow?
We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty,
chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a
certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that
pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as
he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one
necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death,
where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you
up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and
let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods,
lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
-Annie Dillard
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I guess I'll take nearly any opportunity to quote Annie Dillard. She's maybe the greatest putter togetherer of words who ever lived. And this idea of hanging from your "one thing" limp, wherever it takes you, that really stuck to me. So I dangled from photography. I got into the Yale program. I was elated.
I don't know what happened. I got there and was too flummoxed to speak in sentences. Sometimes your heroes have been put on too big of pedestal. You can't let them come back down from it. I could barely speak to those heroes. I should have gone the first time, when I was so very brave. But I'd let this idea of doing this thing take over. It took on its own life. I started randomly fainting and all kinds of bizarre shit. I bombed. There were people who wouldn't let me forget that I was the "first Vegas cocktail waitress" to get into the program, rather than the youngest. Some of that was fierce judgment. In hindsight, I don't know-- I think I can really attract a bully or two, especially in a place so competitive. Instead of doing what I always do, I took this to heart, thought I must be trash compared to these incredibly cultured and fancy types, and maybe I gave up a little.
So, I picked my dumb ass back up, packed up, and headed back to Las Vegas, where being trashy is awesome.
All the cool kids were going to India, discovering themselves, getting gurus. I decided to do the white trash version of that. I started working at a small music venue as a bartender. Then I started noticing "the girls," the women who'd poke their head in your car if you stopped long enough. Just to see. Just to see if you needed anything they might be able to give you. For a small fee of course.
I got enchanted with the idea that they could be gurus. Like, maybe this idea of going into a completely other culture and trying to get a grip on what life is all about, maybe that's sort of more stupid than thinking that hookers might hold the answers to many esoteric quandaries. You have to admit, if Jesus and Andy Kaufman both found value in it, there must be something to it.
It took months to get anyone to agree to be photographed. Then for several years it was a landslide of women seeking me out to photograph them. They loved it. It felt special for them. They'd all lost everything, here or there. Every photograph of themselves. All connections to family, old friends, and a photograph always feels like a connection. Evidence. That we ever existed at all.
They came to me at the bar, asking to be photographed. Then I'd see them here or there and maybe we'd go for lunch. Or a beer. Or wherever. Just hang out. One time Diana even came over to my place and I cracked up that she loved watching 'Everyone Loves Raymond.' She took a bath. We sang songs and drank.
Why it took so long to recover from these friendships is still something I think about. Maybe I tried to save them from their lives. Maybe I was unprepared. I hadn't taken courses in counseling-- they teach you some level of separation. You have to. If you fully put yourself in someone else's shoes, fully empathize with a horrifying situation, it's apparently really awful for you. That's what I think now.
The biggest thing, the most profound thing was finding Ruby. She wasn't like the other girls. They were resilient, very funny. She was fragile, sweet, dainty. I found her one day, green bruised with cigarette burns all over her arms from having been attacked. I don't like to think about it. I think I'll stop talking about it. Please don't ever ask me in person about her, because it will surely wreck my day.
What I found out in this process, is that the thing they most commonly shared was an incredible sense of humor. No boundaries humor, you could make jokes about anything, no matter how gross, vile, disturbing. That's the sort of people I like to be around, people who can laugh about anything.
The photos are funny. They're a bit silly. They're awkward and hopefully, kind. Here are just a few, from the project I called, The Little Chapel of Esoteric Cosmetology:
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