Reading is Sexy!

And looking at photo books is sexier!

If I haven’t been posting as much lately, it isn’t because I haven’t been creating new work. The Portland Gig has now been published and is available on the The Portland Gig page.

The newer book, I Will Not Hurt Myself/I Will Not Hurt Others is coming out later in the year and is the culmination of roughly ten years of very slow work. In it, I talk about being in what feels like a center point in my life, looking backward to my past and forward to an uncertain future.

To keep myself on track, I’ll be posting paired photos from the book over the next few weeks. To get it started, let’s start with the Stone pair:

My mother loved me, unambiguously. But she had that Native American stoicism thing going on, an immovable quality, like stone. It kept her from speaking the words aloud and held her back from being physically affectionate. I believe she inherited that from her mother who kept her own secret council and one day just left her husband and my mother and went away. Only when grandma was dying did she and mom reestablish a relationship. She loved, but never bothered to explain herself. I think they built walls around themselves and I found myself having followed that pattern. Support, admiration, affection – felt, but unspoken. That wall protects; it gives one a lonely sort of power. So I have spent years trying to break down that wall. I want to give up a little of that security, that control. I can honor where that stoicism comes from; I understand it now but I don’t want to be that. Love, praise, honesty, even anger, should not be a secret.