Sympathy for the Damned

Hello all. I’m still working on the very serious political article, which keeps growing in complexity. I can feel the life slowly draining out of it with each edit.

I’m from a small town in the midwest, but was not suited for that kind of life when I was younger. My adult life was lived in big and midsize cities on the the coasts and abroad – mostly among well-educated, very liberal or leftist folk. Recently I returned to the small town life, which suits me very well now that I care not a whit for nightlife or socializing with the people around me. Life is easy here, at least if you know how to live well. Unfortunately, most people around here don’t know how to live well. Many, if not most, suffer the tortures of the damned.

My more coastal and international friends wonder why people in places like this are so susceptible to far right politics, and why they support politicians pushing policies that hurt them so much, both socially and economically. That is not something I wonder about. That is something I understand all too well. What I wonder about is how we can reverse the situation, to get people to support politicians and policies that would be good for them, which would be good for the nation and world as well.

I currently work with ‘those’ people, see them close up every day, feel their pain, and try to find insight into how they might be helped. Understanding is something I fancy myself good at. Doing something about it is something I’ve always been uniquely unsuited for. The article I’m working on should help you understand something of what we’re up against, but also give you the opportunity to see these people, a few of whom are close to being your worst caricature of right wing nut cases, as complex humans, fundamentally decent people who are not defined by their politics. I try to get them to see us that way as well.

In the meantime, here are a few of the photos I’ve been working on this week, with a little commentary. Click on the photo to see a larger image.

The Bardo of Dumbass Photo Projects

This is from my Bardos project. When I tell people about it, they typically look at me like I’m crazy and slowly back away. Or they just seem embarrassed for me. Yet I persist.

The Bardo project is a fictional photo story. In Tibetan Buddhism, when a person dies they pass through a series of netherworlds filled with hungry ghosts, or Bardos, in which they have the opportunity to achieve enlightenment and escape the wheel of corporeal existence. The main character in the photo story enters the Bardos and sees a series of fantastic sights. Will he achieve enlightenment, or get spit out the other side to trudge through another cycle of dreary existence?

Much of it is shot at Burning Man, and normally I can’t stress enough that it’s not about Burning Man, just shot there, because if you want to find hungry ghosts, of course you go where they congregate in large numbers. But although it is not about Burning Man, there are a few echoes. A lot of people go there hoping to experience some kind of enlightenment, but it rarely, if ever, works, or certainly doesn’t last, and a week or ten days later they find themselves back in their cubicle, or trendy apartment, or whatever, leading the same life, which may look pretty good on the outside, but is missing something that maybe they were able to glimpse on the playa, but couldn’t quite grasp. And many suffer the tortures of the damned while they are there. The Bardos can be, but are usually not, happy places.

Anyhoo, I always agonize about the ethics of photos like this, which I think is mostly just appropriating someone else’s art. It kind of works as a snapshot of my travels, but I’ve removed it so far from its context to make it questionable even in that regard. And I think the art itself is questionable. A black devil man fucking a white angel? Really? Still, I kind of like it.

The photo is also an example of how mistakes can elevate an otherwise bland picture. In this case I had the lens hood on wrong resulting in the unique vertical framing of the image, which gives it a counter motion that makes it much more interesting than it would be otherwise.

Poison on the Earth, Poison from the Sky

As I mentioned above, I’m from a small, flat, industrial town in the midwest where natural beauty is relatively hard to find. Perhaps because of that I’ve always found heavy industry to be particularly beautiful. We didn’t have mountains, or even very many small hills, so giant oil drums, and other environmental disasters, had to serve as the next best thing.

Can anyone tell what’s happening int his photo?

To Leap Small Buildings

This photo was taken while I was working on my High School Sports project. For the project I desaturated it and gave it a blue tint, but I like the color photo, too.

Out in the political world we hear a lot about the small town way of life and family values as a tactic to bludgeon the liberal city folk. Most of it is hooey. Small working class towns are generally places of great despair filled with unhappy people trying to punish each other, if not the world at large. But there are small pockets here and there where you really do see wonderful family values and a generally positive way of life. The high school sports scene is one of those. It’s not unusual to see families of three, or even four generations at a football game.

Technically, I have mixed feelings about color photos like this that obviously use flash to balance the subject and the background, which is usually a sunset or sunrise. I’ve been able pull off making it look like natural light in my more considered work, but this isn’t that. This project was always monocolor and monocolor is much more forgiving than color.

What do you think?

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