Chris Bickford

Tonight I will be submitting the book files for “After the Storm” to the printer, and if all goes well I will have a limited edition of books arriving by June 10, in time for the Look3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, VA, where “After the Storm” will be showcased among the heady company of some of the most talented emerging photographers on the scene, as well as a number of true icons of the photographic world. If you are interested in obtaining a copy, please contact me either by email or place an order through the button at the bottom of this post, as supplies will be limited, and I am only allowed to bring 20 copies to the festival bookstore. For an overview of the project with the accompanying essay, which has since been revised somewhat, check it out on Burn Magazine

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It was exactly one year ago today (well, tomorrow actually) I took the first picture for “After the Storm”. The night before, my friends Jesse and Michelle had been married in a beautiful ceremony on the beach, and the next day a few close friends were invited up to the Saltaire to hang out by the pool and finish up the leftovers from the reception. It was a perfect Outer Banks day, clear blue skies, yummy food, guitars and mimosas…

To the north, however, the sky was getting dark, then darker, then even darker still. My friend Shane and I had driven up in my old Wrangler, top down, and figured we’d better make a run for it and head back into town before all hell broke loose. We managed to outrun the storm, but when we got to Kitty Hawk pier the sky looked so freakin’ cool that we just had to go out and take a look. It was classic OBX: blue sky to the south; dark, ominous, nearly black sky to the north. We stood out on the pier tasting the wind and just getting down with the electricity in the air. I snapped a few photos of Shane looking out into the ocean, his wild mane of hair flapping in the wind, the crazy black sky behind him, and I knew we had just captured what I needed to start this project. We looked into the LCD, just freaking out at the photos. “Dude, this is it!” I said. “The project has begun!” Seconds later the sky opened and drenched us from head to toe before we made it to the jeep.

The first photo of that quick series has remained the beginning photo of “After the Storm” ever since.

The second photo in the book, appropriately enough, is of Jesse, a few weeks later, riding his longboard in the late afternoon light, a happily married man.

Today is Jesse and Michelle’s first anniversary, and in honor of all of this the Nature gods have given us another classic OBX storm. In the morning it was beautiful; 83 degrees on the beach with clean glassy waist-high waves rolling in, blue skies, a light west wind. By 1:30, however, the sky to the north had turned to black, little drops of rain awoke me from my beach-towel doze, and in half an hour buckets of the stuff were coming down. Now the rain has settled in and I am free to sit here on the computer guilt-free, posting this blog entry and looking back over the last year of this project.

I have been dreaming this project for years, ever since I moved down to the Outer Banks and started surfing–or should I say, trying to surf–some seven or eight years ago. There was something about being in the water and being so intimately connected with the raw and ever-changing moods of the ocean, the wind, and the weather patterns…I don’t know, it did something to me, and before I even started photographing it, I knew I wanted to make some kind of art that conveyed the essence of it. At first I planned a video documentary, but it never really took shape. Then I thought about a book, but the book I first envisioned was much more expository, much more of a “traditional” book, with a lot of history and portraits of influential figures in the local surf world. For a while I wrote down little descriptions of scenes I wanted to re-create, almost like an advertising shoot. In the end, I ended up just going out with a camera and gathering fragments from the spectacle of life all around me, and stitching them together into a little song. Many of the photos in the book are of friends of mine, some are of complete strangers; most are purely grab shots, a few are posed. But as a whole they have come together to achieve what I originally set out to do, which is to give a sense of how it FEELS…and, beyond that, to create the Outer Banks of my imagination, or of our collective imagination: a sepia-toned world of sand fencing, seagrass, weathered cedar, bleached and windblown hair, stormy skies, and thick grains of sand that get dragged into every corner of life. It is not necessarily the Outer Banks that you will find if you come here on vacation, unless you know where to go. If you take the wrong turn, you will end up in a 10-bedroom McMansion with all your aunts and cousins from Ohio and Florida; stuck in a traffic jam that will add three hours to your journey; eating in an air-conditioned “family” restaurant with fake palm trees out front and bad paintings of Key West on the inside; or sitting at a bar with crewcut guys wearing dry-cleaned Tommy Bahama shirts and talking just a little too loud about their golf game…for better or for worse, this is part of the “reality” of the Outer Banks that I have chosen to leave out of my story.

But the further I get along this photographic path, the less I’m concerned with “reality”. Reality is there for all to see, nobody needs me to document it. What I am interested in is imagination, and a way of living and seeing life through the lens of imagination, so that life permeates your dreams, and dreams permeate your life.

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The irony in all this auspiciousness is that those few days last year, when it finally came together and I started shooting in earnest, and all the days that followed up to now, have been some of the darkest days of my life. I have suffered from debilitating health problems, acute insomnia, emotional fallout from a long and difficult breakup, and a deep existential discomfort with my place in the world. Every day has been a battle to keep the demons of depression from kicking down the door, the specters of loneliness from swarming down from the attic, and the ghosts of old chronic infections from charging through my body and making mincemeat of my mitochondria. I’ve spent nearly everything I’ve earned this year–which hasn’t been much, due to the current world economic crisis–on doctors, therapists, acupuncturists, supplements, medication…I’ve read just about everything there is to read about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the Epstein-Barr virus, Flinders Island Rickettsia, chronic insomnia…I’ve studied tarot cards and recorded my dreams…Most days I’ve been able to get through okay, and hide my state of affairs from all but those closest to me. Some days, especially after a good night of sleep and a rare sense of well-being in my body, I’ve even been able to convince myself for a bit that the storm is over, or that it was all just a bad dream. But inevitably, on a regular basis, a bad night of sleep; a day of cold sweats, dizziness, and lactic acid raging through my body; or just some old memory or nagging feeling, will start to tear out the stitches I’ve so assiduously sewn around the fissures in my body/soul and it will rip open again, revealing a vast, dark, raging emptiness that so consumes me that I can barely keep my attention focused long enough to tend to the basic day-to-day demands of life.

But I kept shooting, and for some shots I paid dearly. A couple of early-morning surf sessions threw my delicate and already taxed-to-the-limit metabolism into a tailspin that took me months to recover from. But I got some KILLER shots to show for my troubles. And somehow, through all that darkness and fatigue, this project has come to fruition, and with it have come other opportunities, and with those opportunities the promise of even greater opportunities. My personal life aside, I know that I’m on to something in my artistic life, and I’ve got a long list of projects and books to start or complete once my health is fully recovered and I get past this little bout I’m having with the dark side.

I have many people to thank for helping me through this strange time, too many to list here, but most of them will be listed in the book. I do, however, want to thank the community of BURN magazine, for providing so much support, enthusiasm, and useful criticism of the project; in particular, Anton Kusters, Tom Hyde, and most of all the inimitable David Alan Harvey, without whom we’d all still be twiddling our thumbs trying to figure out what the hell to do with this vague notion that we want to do something really special with a camera.

Also a big shout out to everyone who weighed in on the cover design. In the end we went with the more classic look, after several modifications and a little advice from Mau Carey. The dogtown-style handwritten look was cool, but we figured it would have to be REALLY cool not to look amateurish or dated in five years. Plus there was something about that splash of red (Tom Hyde’s idea) that really made it sing.

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The temperature has dropped 30 degrees in five hours. It feels like winter all over again.

I called up Shane last night to catch up. Last November he left the OBX on a journey to Kauai, a place he has dreamed of living for a long time. He’s living in a tent on a beautiful piece of land far up in the hills of eastern Kauai. I told him the project was off to the press, and he was, shall we say, stoked. Even more stoked when I told him that while trying to figure out a decent way to make the title page a little more interesting, I dug up a photo of him from this summer, which had somehow fallen through the cracks. “Man, that’s like my favorite picture!” he said. “I kept looking for it on your blog, but I couldn’t find it.” So here it is for you, my brother. Freestylin’ it in Kitty Hawk, after the storm:



raman amplifier

Time and the universe, on one hand, are cyclical. The sun rises and sets, the moon waxes and wanes, seasons repeat the same patterns every year. Birth and death occur across the spectrum of life, civilizations rise and tumble and rise again. To every thing there is a season. Et cetera. Taken in a long view, existence is an infinite circle.

But on the other hand, time and the universe are linear, and the entities within them are finite. There will never be another season like this particular season, and when it is over, it is over for all time. There will never be another individual like you or like me, and when we die–regardless of what happens after death–our life in these particular bodies which we inhabit will be over, forever. The earth itself, and the sun, and even the universe as we know it, are one-offs. Eventually, they will all come to an end, and regardless of whether they are “reborn”, they will not do so as the same entities.

The innate knowledge of this second fundamental fact of the universe is, I think, the source of all of our greatest fears. Although we see and experience rebirth all the time, we know that it is not a guarantee, and we know that we are not necessarily going to be its beneficiaries. Anyone suffering from a chronic illness, or living in a world of abject poverty and hunger, or standing at death’s door, knows all too well that things don’t always get better.

We are living in difficult times. Hope, faith, and a penchant for adaptability will probably see us through; the economy, just like the universe, has its cycles. In any case, optimism is generally a better tool for survival than pessimism. But what tears at the gut is the uncertainty as to what is cyclical about the current crisis and what is linear. Are we merely experiencing a “waning” of our fortunes, one which will, by definition, eventually reach its nadir and then transform into a “waxing”? Most likely, yes. But how long can we play a game of boom and bust with an economic system–nay, an entire civilization–that is built, not on a philosophy of expansion and contraction, but on a philosophy of expansion, expansion, expansion? Eventually, we will hit a bust from which we cannot recover. Our resources will be tapped out, our currency will have lost its value, our basic skills for living will have been long-forgotten in the byzantine network of goods and services that act as a life-support system for 99% of humanity. Eventually the human population will reach a point at which it can no longer sustain itself.

I hate to be a downer, but we all know that there is a good chance that the future of civilization may indeed look something like that. Perhaps we will revamp our entire infrastructure, change our economic model, learn to harness and use renewable energy on a global scale, end war and poverty, and live happily ever after. But it’s not likely. What progress we make will most likely slow our decline moreso than guarantee our survival.

So what’s the point of this mental exercise in doom and gloom? I don’t know really; it’s just something I’ve been thinking about lately. Maybe the point is to cherish the moment, kiss the joy as it flies. Maybe it’s about slowing down, tightening up the ship, learning to live within our means. Maybe it’s about appreciating life in all its tragic complexity, seeing the beauty in the great epic tale in which we are all privileged to participate. Or maybe there is no point at all, just an awareness that our place in it all is fragile, temporary, ephemeral. And with that knowledge, a kiss, a stimulating conversation, a kind word from a stranger, a precious moment spent with a loved one, a moment of communion with nature–all these things take on new and urgent meanings. For in the end, these fleeting moments are all we have, and they are often past before we have the opportunity to relish them. Which is why we relive them in story, song and memory, make and archive images about them, commemorate them in ceremony. The human mind is a complex coping mechanism, to be sure.

These are, of course, the musings of one who has survived too long a winter, in both real and metaphorical terms. Perhaps the spring will bring a new perspective. If anyone would like to offer a different way of approaching this train of thought I’ve been riding lately, feel free to make yourself heard. I’m all ears.

It was a historic day for the world; perhaps the largest planned historical event ever. Nearly two million people in attendance, billions more watching on television sets around the world, or tuning in on radios and computers…It was a day of a dream coming to fruition, of a nation re-asserting to the world that it still has the potential to be that shining beacon of nations it has been for so long, a magnificent experiment in democracy and progress that somehow continues to survive and lead the world.

I wanted to be there. I wanted to be part of that happy multitude of supporters and celebrants; I wanted to feel that I was among like-minded people, to feel for once that I was not on the outside, to wave an American flag amidst the throng and feel that doing so was an act of pride and unity, not a veiled act of hatred and aggression towards the “other”…I wanted to hear that change has come, that yes we can take this country back and be once again a nation of ethics and principles, a nation of good will, a nation of innovation and cooperation; a nation of true democracy.

Unfortunately, I had matters to attend to at home, and so January 20 found me driving the quiet roads of the Outer Banks as a snowstorm descended on our little community. It was a beautiful omen, and some small consolation for not making it up to Washington. A good snowstorm on the Outer Banks is a once-every-five-year occurrence, and what it does to the dunes and beaches here is marvelous to see.

There was another inauguration happening as well, on the OBX. David Alan Harvey, a photographer who needs no introduction, had just moved into his new house, a beautiful old-school Nags Head style Cottage Row house from the turn of the century. Just across the street from the dunes pictured below, three doors down from his son Bryan and Bryan’s girlfriend Michelle. David and a small group of friends and family spent the weekend hanging out by the fire, smudging the rooms, doing our best to impart the new space with good juju, while Bryan and his longtime friend Scooter worked to put in new windows, plug up holes, tear down walls, and insulate wherever possible.

So in honor of new beginnings, of beauty and hope in the depths of darkness, here are a few mementos of Inauguration Day, OBX style. Despite the wintry chill of these times we face, there is still light and life, still hope, and still opportunity. We just have to dress warmly and stay close to the people that matter to us. Spring will come, it always does.

Autumn is drawing to a close, and with it the convergence of warm water, tropical storms, and nor-easters that make it the best surf season on the Outer Banks. The long Indian Summer has faded, the winds are getting stronger and more biting, the long afternoons of surfing after work have ended with Daylight Savings Time. The committed are stepping into wetsuits, still damp and cold from the last session, and bracing for the first duck-dive into burly waves for the punishing paddle-out. It only gets colder from here on out, and the faster you get used to it, the less time you’ll lose procrastinating. Now’s the time of year when that old wetsuit you’ve been meaning to replace really starts to show its age and you have to ponder whether or not to spend a few hundred bucks on a new one that will keep you warm all winter, or keep wearing that same ripped-up, water-swallowing sack of rubber. A smart investor would put the money on the new suit, knowing that the payback will be more time spent in the water; still, facing a long winter of no money coming in, on the heels of a slow summer and an abysmal economy, it may mean the difference between surfing and eating…or at least drinking…

Still, it’s been a good season. A little windy perhaps–okay, REALLY f-ing windy–but there have been some fine swells coming through and a lot of great fall weather. Who knows what kind of winter we will have. Bets are on it being a cold one, since we’re due for one. Hopefully, though, the cold snaps will be broken with a few of those sublime winter warm-spells, where it gets up into the ’70s and the winds lay back and the beaches fill with locals walking dogs, collecting sea-shells, and just enjoying a little bit of respite before the next nor-easter drives them off the beach again.

All Hallow’s, The Day of the Dead, The Night of the Living Dead, Samhain, All Soul’s Eve…Celebrations for those who have lived and died on this earth are as old as human memory. Whether they ascend to heaven, descend into hell, live in limbo among the shadows of our earthly existence, or are reborn into new bodies, the fate of those who have gone before us will always remain a mystery to the living. Their absence haunts us; evidence of their existence lives on in written records, artifacts, individual and cultural memories…We are who we are because of those who have lived, died, fought, discovered, loved, given birth, raised families, developed languages, sciences, religions, and paved the way of human development for us, their descendants. Yet, they are all, without exception, gone. Dead. Vanished. Never to be upon this earth again. Never to be heard from, spoken to, touched, loved again.

Or are they?

We may ponder the question until we also die; we may build religions and cults around our feeble guesses as to what happens to the dead; we can conduct scientific experiments, though they are of little use beyond the world of energy and matter. But there is one thing for sure, the dead live on in the souls of the living. Perhaps only as mere memory, myth, history, the accumulation of culture; or perhaps in a more supernatural collective consciousness. Regardless of how, in what form, or to what degree, something lingers; and it is only fitting that we celebrate that “lingering” in ritual and festivity.

My very first memory is of Halloween. I was three years old, dressed in a Superman costume with a plastic pumpkin, standing at the top of the stairs urging my mom to hurry up and change my younger brother’s diapers so she could take me trick-or-treating. For a child, Halloween is certainly the most numinous of all holidays. And not just for the candy or the cool costumes; there is something strange and magical that children see in this night–a magic that is often lost as we enter adulthood and are confronted with the fact that the ancient holy holiday has become little more than an excuse for kids to eat sugar, and young adults to dress up like vampires and whores, get drunk, and with any luck, get laid.

But perhaps this is not so far from the point of Halloween after all. To dance, drink, eat, indulge in the pleasures of the flesh: is this not what the dead would have us do to celebrate them? Perhaps by donning strange costumes–of ghosts, skeletons, vampires, angels–we are inviting the dead to live through us, just one night; to experience all the magic and sensuousness of life. And perhaps we too enter into their world, just a little, by losing ourselves in the “little deaths” of intoxication and abandonment. And so the ancient idea of a night where the space between the living and dead is open and permeable, if only briefly…

Well, it’s a nice idea at least, and without a doubt a great excuse for a party.

This year I spent Halloween in New York City, where the living and dead are stacked high one on top of the other. I walked the famous Halloween Parade, New York’s only night-time parade; and followed the crowd to the after party at Webster Hall (ahem), I mean “Webster Hell”. It was a warm night, just days before a historic election, and the energy was high; crowds were unprecedented, as it was also a Friday night. Here are a few keepers culled from a ridiculous amount of crap. Enjoy.