Chris Bickford

СВЕТИ ГЕОРГИ

Yesterday marked the end of an era for myself and my family.   Our dog Mona Lisa, whom I shared with my parents over the last ten years, had to be put down due to a rapidly metastasizing cancer in her bones and lungs.   Those of you who knew Mona in her days of jumping and swimming and making grand entrances and generally being my constant companion knew what a sweet and special spirit she had, and how much she filled the space around her with charm and enthusiasm.   She loved the beach, loved people, loved the water, loved music, loved a good party, loved to swim out and hang with the surfers in the lineup, loved to take trips in the car, loved chasing birds and squirrels and tennis balls, loved cleaning plates and being fed leftovers…and loved, loved, loved, a good butt-scratch.

Mona had a great way with people, and a strong sense of leadership towards other dogs.  She was playful and tender with small dogs, brought out the extravert in shy dogs, and put unruly dogs in their place with subtle growls and a little teeth-flashing.  When occasionally she would get cornered and attacked by the two German shepherds that live down the street, she would stand her ground and fight with pure battle-fury, and we would literally have to tear the dogs away from each other, because once the fight began, there was no way that either side would submit to being called off.   Mona was, in short, a lover and a fighter.

Over the last few years of her life, as I began to travel more and more, my parents re-assumed their role as her caretaker, and Mona became a fixture of the Bickford household.  Along with my dad’s shy little Zelle, she would rush to the door to greet friends and family members with a lot of tail-wagging and hip-shaking, or cock her ears back and bark madly at anyone she didn’t trust.

During this same period, her health began to deteriorate.   My parents, ever-diligent and protective, did what they could, making regular trips to the vet for anti-histamines, anti-inflammatories, cortisone shots…but there was only so much to be done.   The great tragedy about the special relationship that humans have with dogs is that dogs don’t live long enough.  Not nearly long enough.  Mona had ten years in her, and when her time was up, it was up in the blink of an eye.

We all have many many Mona stories, and will continue to tell them to each other for the rest of our lives.  My family has kept pets ever since I was a baby, but none has touched us the way Mona did.  There was something truly special about her, a purity of spirit and an abundance of heart, that remains in the air around us now that she has passed.

Looking back on her life I’m struck by all the events in my own life that she was a part of.   She sat at my feet when I played music at outdoor bars up and down the Outer Banks.  She rode with me on my many trips to Ocracoke, when I was indulging my infatuation with the island.  She suffered through long hours on the beach while I surfed,  and greeted me with little joyful leaps when I came out of the water.   She shared me with my girlfriends, tolerated their dogs, played with their children…She moved with me through no less than five different residences in as many years, until I bought a house in 2006.  She wandered with me up and down the Outer Banks when I first began taking pictures, often making cameo appearances in my photos.  She sat next to me during the long hours I spent on the computer learning my craft and building my business, and would periodically paw at me to suggest that maybe a walk around the block and a little fresh air would do us both some good.   She was there for my breakups and breakdowns, for the good times and bad times.  And when I started traveling and my parents took over, she was always there to greet me when I got home from the airport, always rushing to the door; or, towards the end, sitting up on the couch and wagging her tail, waiting for me to come say hello.

Now that she is gone, I realize that she was one of the angels in my life, sent here to see me through a long period of growth and discovery, pleasure and pain, transformation and maturation.   When she first showed up in my dad’s arms, with a green harness around her forelegs and a head half the size of her body, I was a bit of a lost soul, carrying a bundle of magic sticks I didn’t know how to use.  With Mona at my side, and the island fortress of the Outer Banks protecting us from the clamor and confusion of the maddening crowd, I had the opportunity to unpack that bundle, lay those sticks out on the ground, and take the first tentative steps towards making magic with them.   With Mona, running and jumping and just being a dog, I learned to trust my instincts.  With Mona, ears cocked back and holding position, I learned to face my fears and speak my mind.   With Mona, ever patient and loyal, I survived the most painful, confusing, and transformative breakup of my life.   With Mona, tail-wagging and hips shaking, high-fiving and barking for joy–with every fiber in her body cheering me on–I came into my own.

And she was an angel for my parents as well.  As the financial and housing markets crashed and my dad’s business affairs became stressful and complicated, Mona and Zelle were there at the end of the day to share couch space and watch a little TV.   Mona’s presence was a tonic for my folks, and the sheer pleasure that my dad got out of feeding scraps of beef to her and Zelle always made me smile.  In the midst of the world crashing all around him, my dad could sit with Mona and Zelle and ponder the immensity of the cosmos, and take pleasure in the love of a good wife, a good family, and good dogs.   Somehow, Mona reminded us all what was important, and what was not.

I know that there will never be another dog in my life like Mona.   And it will probably be many years before I even think of getting a dog.  Though she has passed, I still feel her presence, see her shiny red coat and her all-knowing eyes, and know that some part of her will live in me until the day I die.   She will remain a subject of conversation in my family for years to come, her memory kept alive by our mutual affection for her and the ways in which her spirit wove itself through the fabric of our family history.

As my dad and I kissed her forehead for the last time yesterday afternoon, just after the vet put his stethoscope to her heart and pronounced, “she’s gone”, I wondered where exactly “gone” was.   Her body was still there, still warm.  Aside from a disturbing wheeze and  difficulty moving, she had still been alert, still wagged her tail until the very end.  Minutes after we left the animal clinic, as my folks and I drove home in silence, I started thinking, I should have stayed there a little longer, should have been there to say goodbye, to help her spirit leave the room.  In matters concerning life after death and the transmigration of souls, I confess to being wholeheartedly agnostic.  But for now I’m taking comfort in the belief that somehow, in some way unfathomable to human beings with our multitude of religious explanations, some part of her lives on, if only in the hearts of those who knew and loved her.

I think it’s my dad who will miss Mona the most.  She was, first and last, his little girl, from the moment he drove up to Seto’s Texaco in the fall of 2001, against his will, to look at some puppies that my mom had called him to come see.  “Do it for me,” she had said, silencing his protestations.  He took one look at that little red puppy in the cardboard box and she stole his heart.  He instantly christened her Mona Lisa and brought her home, without a second’s hesitation.   He had had no interest in getting a dog, but he just couldn’t resist Mona’s big eyes and those expressive eyebrows.  As time went on we all came to know those eyebrows, always speaking, smiling, worrying, showing eagerness, reluctance, confusion, or sheer joy.  She had such a range of emotions, and communicated them all with her eyes, ears, tail, and voice.

When spring comes, my brother David and I will paddle out and spread Mona’s ashes out over the ocean.  But I’m going to keep a small piece of her, a few specks of dust, to make a talisman.  Because I know, there was magic in that dog, and I will always be grateful that she graced our lives with it.

Богородицаиконопис

(Project Anima #2)

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When the ancient Milesian Celts arrived on the island of Eriu, known today in English as Ireland, they encountered a race of seemingly magical people known as the Tuatha de Danann.   Who exactly the de Danann were or where they came from is uncertain–speculation ranges from Greek adventurers to Atlantean aliens–but according to Irish lore they were a lithe, light-skinned people with brilliant eyes and powers that dazzled and confounded the iron-age Milesians.  In the mythology that has grown up around them, they are depicted as a higher race of beings, even gods, who were able to make themselves disappear and reappear, and could harness the powers of the earth and sky.  They were, however, a peace-loving people, and staunchly determined not to use their powers for destructive purposes.   When they met the Milesians they offered to share the bounty of their island with them, but the Milesians were a warrior people, and wanted the island for themselves.  When they could hold off the Milesian aggression no longer, the de Danann met their would-be conquerors in battle on the hill of Tara, the spiritual center of Eire.  Sworn to use only conventional tools of warfare, the de Danann–whose weapons were made of inferior bronze–lost the epic battle for Ireland on the hill that day, leaving the sons of Milesios to do battle against each other for generations, petty cattle-lords fighting their kin for parsed-out morsels of a land the Tuatha de Danann had ruled in peace for hundreds of years.

The day after the battle, the Milesians returned to the hill of Tara to bury the bodies of their enemies, only to find the hill empty–no bodies, no blood, no sign of warfare.  The Milesians hunted high and low for traces of the de Danann , but there were none to be found.  Irish legend tells that the Tuatha de Danann disappeared into the earth itself, where they live on to this day, in fairy raths, at the foot of waterfalls, under lakes and trees.  They became, so the legend goes, the earth-spirits of Ireland, the “little people”, and they are known to both aid and terrorize their human neighbors.

So goes the legend, anyway.  It makes for a great story, and certainly has its place among the great mythological tales of the world, but it doesn’t take much thought to realize that earth-spirits are much older than a few thousand years; that they are as old as the earth itself; and that carried in the life of seeds, on the pollinated wind, in the quenching rain, in the hunt and flee of the animal kingdom, and in the skyward reaching of tree-leaves, the spirits of earth and sky mingle perpetually in a dance of creation and consumption that animates the world.

As humans we have always personified the mysteries of heaven and earth.  Giving the universe a human face honors our relationship to the world we live in, and gives us a forum for communing and communicating with the mysteries around us.  To see the goddess in the grain, the god in the heavens, the nymph in the woods, even the ghost in the machine–gives name to the universe, sings it into the realm of comprehension.   And though the mysteries are ultimately beyond us, at least we can weave our stories around those names, make our prayers to them, and create openings within our consciousness to let their magic breathe through us.   Whether the fairies exist or not is immaterial.  We give names to phenomena that we cannot explain, just as we cannot explain beauty, or love, or what lies beyond the universe, or inside the tiniest quark, or on the other side of reality.  Naming them gives these mysteries a place to reside within our collective consciousness–and, perhaps more importantly, within our collective unconscious.

And just as we personify the spirits of the world around them, we have, since the beginnings of human memory, adorned ourselves with symbols of the natural and supernatural world in order to honor that relationship in a reverse direction.  Dragonfly pendants, shark tooth necklaces, crosses and stars, feather earrings and the like,  are all  part of our day-to-day iconography; but in times of celebration and ritual we don everything from horned helmets to butterfly wings to the hollowed-out heads of big cats…we dress as vampires, werewolves, ghosts, angels—and fairies–in order to embody within ourselves that mysterious relationship between our individual human souls and the greater pantheon of souls and spirit that inhabit and create the universe.  We do this as an act of prayer, as an act of possession, in order to feel the magic, in order to experience the savagery and divinity that lies deep within all of us.

When I first spoke to Rachel deGabrielle about posing for me on this project, she said she had always wanted to be a fairy.  One look at Rachel and it’s easy enough to tell that she probably has fairy blood in her: deep green eyes, a wild mane of blonde hair, and an impish quality to her personality that always keeps you guessing.  So it didn’t take much…a pair of costume wings and a pelt around her neck, and suddenly she was transformed into some kind of wood-nymph, a Diana fresh from a night of hunting.  I had originally envisioned shooting in a ripe cornfield, the bold green of the cornstalks contrasting with her bright yellow hair and bringing out the misty green of her eyes.   But now the summer is over, and the stalks are withered and brown, the good corn already harvested, the rest due to be mulched and put back into the ground to feed next year’s crop, the endless life cycle of America’s most famous native grain.  Somehow it all seemed appropriate.

“Corn” is an ancient word, related to the words “germ”, “grain”, and “horn”.  In its original usage it referred do any plant that yielded edible grains–barley, wheat, oats; in short, all European grains–but now it is fairly universally used to describe an American plant.  At its root, however, is the idea of the seed, the source, the germ of an idea from which springs forth all of creation.  It is no wonder that the the Goddess of the Grain was worshipped in ancient cultures.  Not only did she ensure survival through long winters and generation upon generation of re-planting and re-seeding, but at the grain’s very core resides a metaphor for the ineffable source of creation that is at the heart of religion.  And here we are, at summer’s end at the eastern edge of America, when the earth starts its slow retreat into slumber, when Persephone returns to Hades and Demeter weeps until her return in the spring.  There is still corn on the brown, dried-up stalks: corn that will survive the winter as seeds and be reborn in the spring as whole plants, in turn yielding an abundance of new grain….

Rachel, our fairy, is leaving this cornfield.  By the time I post this she will be gone from these Outer Banks, off to a new life, new beginnings, a new world whose possibilities are only vague ideas at this point.   She steps into the unknown, and the unknown waits to greet her.  Farewell, goddess of the grain.  Godspeed, and don’t forget about your wings.

Картини

(Project Anima #1)

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In my dreams, there is a woman.  She is vaguely familiar, but mostly unknown to me.  Sometimes she resembles a woman I know, but not a woman I know well.  I find her upon opening a door into a room I didn’t know existed, or swimming in a lagoon in a far-off country.  Sometimes I see her at the periphery of a crowd of people, beckoning me.  She implores me to come with her, to stay with her, to wait for her.   Sometimes she is just there, a presence: not speaking, not acting, just standing beside me, somehow a part of me, radiating serenity and trust.   Other times she is devious and deceitful.  She steals from me.  She tricks me. She allies herself with men who want to kill me.  She leads me to places I do not want to go.

My dreams repeat themselves, over and over.   There is a city on a hill, overlooking the water.  An old city, but with no fixed geographical location–sometimes Europe, sometimes Australia, sometimes North America, sometimes South America.  The city is always old, and always magnetic, beckoning me to find a way to get to it and explore the riches it has to offer.

I dream of searching for a lost guitar.  Of being without my camera while an incredible scene plays out before my eyes.  Of riding on buses and bicycles, vaguely aware that I have left my bags behind.  I dream of being nearly, but not totally weightless, able to leap tall buildings (and crowds of people) in a single bound.   I dream of the earth crumbling, and myself running towards a road that will take me somewhere safe.

But somewhere on the periphery, she watches me.  And sometimes, she journeys alongside me.  She is my protector, my soul’s mirror, my mother Mary, my sister Rosa, my dark angel.  She is my Anima, the high priestess of my dream-world.

In of one of the most ground-breaking dream studies ever attempted, Carl Jung recorded “over a thousand dreams and visual impressions coming from a young man of excellent scientific education”.   The unfolding of this man’s journey through his unconscious is mysterious and suspenseful.  Not in such a way that it would make a good story or movie, but with Jung’s commentary it sheds light on deep mysteries, uncovers hidden fears and untapped strengths, and provides invaluable analogies for those who wish to adventure into the strange and beautiful world of the Dreaming.

Jung’s dreamer meets his Anima in dream #4, where he is “surrounded by a throng of vague female forms”, and thinks aloud to himself, “First I must get away from my father.”  In subsequent dreams the Anima becomes more real, more powerful.  Jung writes of the various female forms that manifest themselves in dreams, “They are fairies or fascinating sirens and lamias, who infatuate the lonely wanderer and lead him astray.”  Where they are leading the wanderer, it becomes clear, are deeper into his own unconscious, where they will eventually act as “solificati” or “sun-trees”, shining like the sun to shed light on the mysteries that lie there.

I’ve thought often of exploring these dream archetypes through photographic projects.   A year or so ago, while covering the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico for my friends at the New York Times, I had a dream of an angel, rising out of the water, covered in oil like the oil-soaked pelicans which became the iconic images of the spill.   When I returned home, I ordered the most interesting pair of angel wings I could find from a costume distributor, and started thinking of images to create around them.  The one that stuck in my mind the most was an image of a “fallen angel”, half-buried in the blowing sand on an oceanfront dune in the Pea Island National Seashore.    But work and other projects distracted me from the idea, and the wings sat on top of my television for over a year, a constant reminder of unfinished work.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was on the beach with my friend Lauren Martinez.  It was an overcast day, late in the afternoon, very few people left on the beach.  almost a little too cool for laying on the beach; but a perfect time for conversation.  Lauren was leaving to go back to school in a couple of days, and it suddenly occurred to me that she would be the perfect “angel” for my shoot.   Young, precocious, beautiful, with a strong faith and an adventurous heart and a  personality that alternates between innocence and rebelliousness.   I asked her if she had time to model for me before she left, and lo and behold, an angel was born.

The day of the shoot was one of those Outer Banks summer days, rare this year due to drought, where giant stormclouds covered the sky in one direction, and clear blues dominated in the opposite direction.  I met Lauren and our friend Rachel DeGabrielle at the coffeeshop and we made a last-minute decision to chase the clouds and re-locate our shoot to Jockey’s Ridge, where we had a better chance of some interesting sky.  Little did we know at the time just how interesting.

For the next couple of hours we shot until dark, working through rain, wind, a rainbow, and a magnificent sunset.   Lauren brought her A-game supermodel mojo with her, and Rachel was the perfect assistant.  Aside from the gear getting wet and sandy (just keeping my friends at Canon Professional Service employed), and all three of us getting soaked to the bone, the shoot was magic.  What better way to spend a rainy afternoon than getting soaked on a sand dune with two beautiful women?  I could probably think of some if I tried, but let’s just say for the purposes of this post, that I can’t think of any.   It was, pardon the obviousness of the expression, like a dream.

As far as the significance of any of these images in any meaningful sense, I’m not sure I’ve bridged that gap, nor do I necessarily think it is my intention to.   At this point, this is just an experiment, merely an attempt to bring more of a sense of dream-consciousness into my work.   I’ve had grand designs to do an entire series based on archetypes and mythological figures, but for now, I think I am going to limit this project to the simple title of “Anima”.   Rachel was kind enough to model for the second installation of the series, which we began yesterday.  Due to time constraints, we did not get a lot of variety, but we got some amazing shots nonetheless.   Stay tuned to see Rachel as the incarnation of Demeter, the goddess of the grain.  Or maybe she is Diana, the huntress.  Lack of hunting props and the seasonal availability of a dried-up cornfield made the execution different from the concept.  That, however, is the beauty of shooting for the sake of pure art.  Letting circumstances dictate your decisions rather than trying to control every aspect of a shoot allows for  a little magic to creep through, as the gods breathe into the spaces you leave for them.

While processing the images, I felt they needed more of an “otherworldly” quality to them, and thus got a little carried away with layering compositing from my robust library of Outer Banks skies…in some cases I was successful, in others not.   The successful ones were so good they made me want to keep going in that direction, but I have come up solidly against the wall of my Photoshop limitations; thus, I can only offer these photos as studies and not as final products, until such time as I either learn more skills, develop more patience or get John Paul Caponigro or Tom Chambers to help me out.  Until then, I hope you enjoy these images and the ideas behind them as much as I’ve had working on them.

иконографияikoni

Last December I had the pleasure  of shooting an assignment  for National Geographic Traveler on the Big Island of Hawaii.  The story was written by novelist Elizabeth Berg, and centered around her reunion with her brother Jeffrey Hoff, who moved to Hawaii over 20 years ago and built a new life for himself there.  You can read the story here: http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/hawaiian-reunion-traveler/; and if you want to support the wonderful world of print magazines, go to your newsstand and pick up a copy or two of the September issue, it’s out right now.  It’s the one with “Hawaii” written in big letters on the cover.   Rather than rehashing what Elizabeth has already written so eloquently in the article, I’ve decided to focus this post on the valley down the road from Jeff’s house, a magical, wet, ancient piece of land on the northeast corner of the island, known to natives and non-natives alike as Waipi’o.

There is only one road into the Valley of Kings, and it is a treacherous 4WD track with grades up to 30 degrees and paving (if you can call it that) that gets slick as river-rocks when it rains.  You can walk it, as many people do, with trepidation; or you can drive down in your shiny rental and hope for the best.  I was on a short assignment, so I drove. In and out, at least once a day, sometimes twice a day.   By the end of the week the park ranger who manned the entrance to the valley started joking that today might be the day I don’t come back.  He meant, of course, that I had fallen under the spell of the valley and might just stay down there, but I took his double meaning as well.  Beauty is best savored with a splash of danger.

The name “Waipi’o” means “curved water”, named for the river which forms from waterfalls running down the high mountains and meanders back and forth across the plain of the valley as it makes its way to the ocean.  According to traditional lore, the Valley was the seat of many of the great Hawaiian kings, and was also a place of healing and redemption.  Some of the most numinous legends and songs in the Hawaiian oral tradition take place at Waipi’o, from great battles between gods of fire and water, to tales of love and deception between sky gods and waterfall goddesses.  Because so many kings were buried in the Valley, it is believed that the place holds great “mana”, a Hawaiian term loosely translated as “earth-power”, and that no harm will come to those living there.  Keepers of this lore will point to the great tsunami of 1946 and the great flood of 1979, which completely destroyed the crops and houses in the valley, but which took no human life.

After the tsuinami of ‘46 the residents of the valley moved to higher ground, and the Waipi’o went feral.  In the ’60’s adn ’70’s the hippies moved in, and a number of permaculture projects and communal living efforts were started, and then abandoned.   There are still a few holdouts from those days living in the valley, and because of the early permaculture efforts, the entire watershed is bursting with edible vegetation.  You walk over stevia and mint, bananas and star fruit hang from the trees, wild horses roam and graze.  Add Eve, subtract shorts and flip-flops…and presto, Eden with an escape vehicle…

But we are not alone here.  There are probably 30 or so small houses in the valley, all off the grid, occupied mainly by Native Hawaiians, who have small taro patches that they cultivate on the weekends.  Some of them have signs in their yards that read, “Native Hawaiians Only”.   There are hikers of all nationalities walking the road and climbing the steep Z-trail that leads over the mountain and into the next valley.  There are stables that give horseback tours of the valley.   There is an old woman living way back in the valley who used to be a big TV star in Japan.  Now she is in her eighties and lives alone in a small cabin, next to a dilapidated tree house that used to be a somewhat famous place to stay.

There’s an old guy named Whiskey who lives in a tent on the north side of the valley, and has lived there for well over 20 years.  He kayaks across the river and hitch-hikes into town for his provisions.  He’s one of the last of the old hippie holdouts, from an earlier time when everybody had names like Sage and Moonrise…

And then there is Chris Carter, or “Coconut Chris” as the locals have nicknamed him, who can be seen most days walking barefoot through the valley, harvesting exotic fruits, planting exotic fruits, climbing palm trees to harvest coconuts.  Sometimes he has a friend or two with him, as he did the day we picked him up and gave him a ride back up the mountain with bags full of bananas, star fruit, and plants I’d never heard of before.   Chris is a young and passionate back-to-the-land evangelist, a raw food vegan who literally lives off the fruits of his labors.   Other than a couple of Columbia shirts, a raincoat, some boardshorts, and a knife, I don’t think he has any worldly possessions.  He spends his days harvesting, planting, cultivating, walking, and talking to folks along the way.  Oh, and eating.  He has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of edible plants, which is good, because there is an encyclopedia’s worth of varieties in the valley and the surrounding countryside, and Chris has planted a lot of them.  Occasionally he travels to far-off islands to buy exotic seeds.   He dreams of a strange fruit that grows in the Seychelles, which he is determined to bring back to  Hawaii.   They call him the “Johnny Appleseed of the Waipi’o Valley.”   In the world of radical sustainable living, he’s a bit of a star.  Articles have been written about him in Japanese magazines, and people who have heard of him come from around the world to live and learn with him.

I met plenty of other folks in my sporadic romps through the valley; a drunken hitch-hiking self-proclaimed bodhisattva from somewhere on the mainland; a beautiful Hawaiian trail guide who has lived her entire life in the valley; a pair of professional standup paddleboarders from Oahu; German hikers making the arduous journey into the valleys beyond to the north, two young lovers on the kind of open-ended journey that everyone wishes to take but only few manage to pull off…everyone had a different story, a unique identity.  For a place so small, it was packed with story.

The river empties cool fresh water into the ocean at the dead center of the beach, splitting the valley into a north side and a south side.  Both sides are framed by massive cliffs that rise up almost 2,000  feet, cradling the valley and funneling the swells into beachbreak surf near the rivermouth.   A close-knit local community keeps the beach safe and clean, and the vibe there is so peaceful and relaxing, you feel like you could spend your life there.   I thought to myself, while hanging out there, this could be my Brigadoon.  I really might just stay here for a few more days and end up home 20 years later, with a strange nickname, wondering what happened to the time.

I have had dreams about the place ever since.

The closest town to the valley is a little strip of roadside shops called Honoka’a, which looks like something out of a Wild West set.   Word is that back in the day, it truly was a cowboy town, a place where ranchers would come to trade, visit the brothels, see shows at the theater, and get in fights at the bars.  Now it’s a fairly sleepy town populated by retirees, hippies, natives, and ex-military pensioners, but still there is a numinous feel about the place, as if ghosts walk the streets and strange happenings would not be unexpected.

On rainy afternoons I would go into Honoka’a and wander the main street, looking for interesting things.  I didn’t have to walk far.  At the local youth center, I met a young man named Lanakila who was giving hula lessons to a mixed group of women, mostly native but some haoles as well, ranging in age from about 10 to 65.  As they practiced the dances, Lanakila would sing the Hawai’ian verses in a rich, liquid voice that contained the wisdom and beauty of countless generations of oral history and legend.  He explained the meaning of every movement in the dances, each of them corresponding to the forces that animate the natural world–stars, wind, waves, light, day and night, the trees swaying in the wind…I had never seen hula explained in such rich detail and with such passion.  Never been to a luau, never been much interested in what always seemed to me to be a tired tourist cliché.  But here, in this flourescent-lit studio on a broken-down street in a little Hawaiian outpost of a town, I felt like somebody was whispering little secrets of the universe into my ear.

I asked Lanakila if he would sit for an interview for me.  It wasn’t part of the assignment and I wasn’t sure if NatGeo could use it for anything, but I knew this guy was full of knowledge, so we hung out for an hour in the back room of the youth center and I rolled the recorder while he talked story and the local insect population made background music.  He sang a song for me about the Waipi’o Valley, an ancient song from before the time of British sailors and American missionaries.  It told the story of a woman who went to the north side of the valley to atone for her transgressions.  Lanakila explained that in the old days the north side of the island was a place of sanctuary, where those who found themselves on the wrong side of the law could go and be safe from punishment.  By making the proper sacrifices, by making amends with the people they had crossed, and by reflecting upon their wrongdoings, they could eventually find forgiveness and  be welcomed back into their community.

Lanakila spoke plainly of the fact that most of the old keepers of the oral tradition of the area–and of all the Hawaiian islands in general–are dying out.  The tradition is in the language, he said, and there are very few Hawaiians left that speak their native language on a regular basis.  The only place where a Hawaiian language continues as a living tradition, he told me, is on Ni’ihau, a tiny island to the west of Kauai.  Ironically, however, the native religion and lore were stamped out many years ago on Ni’ihau by Christian missionaries, and Ni’ihau remains to this day a fervently Christian, Hawai’ian speaking community.

It was one of those times that I wished I had more power than I have.  I wanted to get someone interested in a story on Lanakila and his efforts to preserve Hawai’an culture.  I wanted to get someone to fund the school he is trying to develop with other like-minded locals.  I wanted this container of centuries, even millennia, of wisdom and lore and culture–to be recognized, to be re-seeded, to somehow be able to re-invigorate a world in dire need of new ways of perceiving and living upon the earth.   You listen to someone like Lanakila who understands the old Hawai’ian ways, and you realize, they got it.  They really got it.  And now it’s almost gone, save for a few young guys fighting the current of technological teleology, trying to hold on to the old ways.

One of Lanakila’s students, a beautiful dancer named Alohi, introduced me to her husband Hualalai, a musician and teacher who has partnered with Lanakila to charter a school in the Valley to teach traditional Hawai’ian culture.  Hualalai has a big vision: he wants to see camps in the Valley where people actually live the old ways–from singing the sun up in the morning to spearfishing and surfing, to telling the old stories and speaking the old language, to building outrigger canoes and thatched houses–and these camps could become educational resources for outsiders to come and learn more sustainable ways of living, and get a glimpse into the spirit of traditional Hawaiian Culture.  Not like the luaus and hula dancers at the resorts, but the real deal.  The work is slow going, partly because Hualalai enjoys his life, and when the surf is up, he surfs.  When the fishing is good, he fishes.  He’s working hard to get a program going, but the lesson would be lost on him if he didn’t practice what he hopes to preach.

My time with my friends on the Big Island was all too brief, and I tried, when I got home, to drum up some interest in doing some kind of further documentation of the area.  But nobody seemed all that interested in Hawai’i from a cultural viewpoint.  As a tourist destination, certainly.  But due to bad relations between natives and non-natives, especially on other islands such as Oahu and Molokai,  there seems to be a disconnect between conservationists and the actual natives whose traditions are inherently conservationist.  And it seems as far as most people are concerned, Native Hawaiian culture is already extinct.  Anyway, there didn’t seem to be much interest for what to me seemed a very interesting and worthwhile story.   I suppose I could have tried harder, or gone back and made it my own mission.  But I’ve got too many irons in too many fires, and I was headed to Rio to work on my Carnival series, and, unfortunately, money and time are two things I don’t have a lot of…

On my last day, as I was packing up my gear and bracing for the long journey back to the East Coast, I got a call from Hualalai.   “You want to go riding on an outrigger with my teacher?”

How could I say no?  We drove down to Hilo, with the fullest intention of getting me out of the water by 6 PM, in time to catch my 7:30 flight.   We sailed through Hilo harbor to a waterfall that ran over an abandoned railroad track, where we took our turns standing under the waterfall and getting a natural massage.  As we headed back to Hilo, the light started to fade, and I knew there was a serious chance I might miss my flight.  But the sky was beautiful and the reflection of the red sails on the water was doing all sorts of things in my mind, so I just went with it.  I held my camera low to the water, cranked the shutter speed down to about a half or a quarter of a second, and ended up with one of the best shots of the trip, which ran full-page in the magazine.

It was pitch dark when we got back to land.  My flight was leaving in 35 minutes.  I made hasty good-byes to my new friends and gunned my rental Cherokee towards the airport.  Miraculously I made it on the plane, stressed out and sweaty, with a good 24 hours of travel ahead of me before getting home to the Outer Banks, all the while thinking, what’s the rush?  Maybe I could just stay a few more days on my own…

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I’ve been putting off this post for some time now.  It’s been almost two months since I returned from Rio de Janeiro, and I had already edited and processed my photos before leaving.   I could have posted most of this in real time, were it not for a certain uncertainty about how to tell the tale, and more importantly were it not for other events going on globally that by comparison made our little buddy trip to Rio seem trivial.  Japan was rocked by an earthquake and nearly drowned by a tsunami.  The “Arab Spring” that had Egyptians dancing in the streets, and the whole world celebrating the rising power of social media as a vehicle for political change, was segueing into news of the Libyan uprising and a nasty civil war.  And friends and colleagues were getting caught in the crossfire.  Veteran New York Times war correspondent Tyler Hicks was kidnapped.  Rising star Michael Christopher Brown was shot in the leg.  And then, most tragically of all, two of the field’s greatest talents, Oscar-nominated Tim Hetherington and Pulitzer-prize nominated (and NC State grad) Chris Hondros were both killed in a firefight in Misrata.

Before all this went down, we were getting reports that these and other intrepid photographers were making their way into Libya, pooling funds and joining forces to make the overland desert trek from Egypt to cover what began as a peaceful demonstration but was rapidly escalating into an armed insurrection.  For conflict photographers the anarchy of the situation meant unprecedented access to the heart of the story, if they were brave or foolhardy enough to jump into the fray without the luxury or protection of “embedded” status.   Now that the fighting in Libya has reached somewhat of a stalemate, we are left only with the tragedy.  That, and the hope that something good comes out of it all.

I have always had a hard time with the way that the photography community celebrates war photography, but, like war itself, it’s a very thorny conundrum. It’s often necessary, sometimes noble, sometimes insidious, and always tragic.   And it always seems like tragedy trumps everything else; so I suppose the most appropriate reaction, for the time being, is to offer a prayer for the loved ones of those lost, and for a speedy end to the bloodshed.

Anyway, with all of this going down, I haven’t felt much like writing about my little trip to Rio with the boys…

But now spring is here, and Bin Laden is dead, and Animal Kingdom has won the Kentucky Derby, and Donald Trump is making a fool of himself again…so I guess now is as good a time as ever to tell the tale of Rio.   Only, what to say?

The dilemma with the telling is that I could spin the story in a number of different ways, and they would all be true.   I could talk about it in terms of the big adventure, the “buddy trip” with Lance Rosenfield, Anthony “Tony Skater” Smallwood, and David Alan Harvey. “Spring break in Rio”, as Harvey put it.   I could talk about Carnaval: the wild street parties and parades, the energy of samba pulsing through the city, the street-corner bandas that danced and sang in their local cafes and gave me t-shirts and kisses.  About the river of bodies in Santa Teresa, the dark streets of Lapa, the people cruising down the strip in Ipanema hanging out the sides of their cars with their stereos blaring reggeaton…I could tell of our photographic exploits–about me and Lance bluffing our way into the no-access-without major-credentials ground floor of the Sambadrome; or me sneaking into the $1000-a-head Copacabana Palace Magic Ball at 4 AM dressed in a black suit like I’d just popped out for a cigarette.  And of course I could wax poetically about our guardian angels Roberta and Renata Tavares, a double-the-pleasure-double-the-fun pair of beautiful Brazilian twin sisters who shepherded us through their city with laughter and genuine care.  Or I could talk about the crew themselves:  about Lance, who kept having girls come up to him asking if they could make out with him, and how he managed to be super-focused on photography while being a total gigolo at the same time.  About Tony Skater, who rolled in like a rock star for all of three or four days and hooked us up with the Rastas in Lapa just because coolness emanates from him like a purple-colored aura.  About the man, the myth, the legend David Alan Harvey, who somehow manages to be one of the most talented, most famous, most successful and most hard-working photographers in the business while still acting like the fraternity brother who’s always in trouble with the authorities–always the life of the party, and always egging everybody else on to do outrageous shit.

Or I could talk about the trip in terms of the challenges and logistical nightmares that kept obstructing my forward movement; how at some point it started to feel like the photo gods were against me on this one.   About the last-minute scramble to secure a visa to Brazil involving a long drive up to Washington, DC and the aid and hospitality of Gina Martin, guardian angel of the photo world.   About my flight out of Norfolk being canceled due to weather and my losing a precious day of boots on the ground in Rio before Carnaval weekend.   About the “one bedroom” apartment I had rented on craigslist turning out to be an efficiency about the size of my kitchen and the advertised wi-fi being nonextistent.  About the bills I rang up arguing with the “landlord” who lived in San Francisco and who, aside from never getting the wi-fi fixed, didn’t offer me a dime of compensation for the inconvenience and false advertising.  About how it rained the entire time.  About how my 40 cent texts would go through anywhere between and hour and twelve hours after they were sent, making communication with the rest of the party well nigh impossible at times.  About how after the longest, rainiest, most tiring day of shooting I found myself abandoned by the rest of the crew in a not-so-safe part of town, forced to overpay for a long cab ride home, only to find I’d left my keys in the cab once the driver had sped off.  About how I had to wait three hours for the boys to come back and rescue me because they had to make a quick pit stop to chat with the Rastas in Lapa–one that turned out taking longer than expected due to the immense crowds and the informal formalities of making friends with Rastas.   About the three hours I spent wandering the rainy early-AM streets of Copacabana waiting for them to come back, with a full day’s worth of shooting on my cards, my gear in my bag, and suspicious characters lurking in the shadows.  I can talk about my multiple equipment malfunctions: how two of my lenses were dropped on the ground in unrelated incidents; how the lamp in my main flash was damaged in the flight making the unit inoperable; and how my backup flash started having intermittent issues as well.  How my main camera stopped operating in the rain and I had to wait until I got home to North Carolina and dry it out before I dared trying to operate it and risk further shorting or damage.   How I was too paranoid to even use my water housing for fear I might further compromise my equipment, as I have in the past made careless and fatal mistakes with my housings.   About how our hostess Roberta was nearly robbed of her purse on the night of Fat Tuesday–an event that was chronicled on the front page of local newspaper, since Harvey was with us at the time and anything that happened to him was front page news in Rio since he was shooting a big NatGeo article on the city.   About all that, and the insane cost of living in Rio, which had me living on cheap cheese and bad lunchmeat and forsaking many simple tourist pleasures due to extreme expense.    About how finally I’d had enough of swimming against the tide and left three days earlier than I had planned; and about how Harvey made me feel even worse after coming home by showing me pics of all the cool stuff that happened after I left.   Like it got sunny again.  And a whole new crew of people came around.  And there were a lot of great parties, always great parties.

Or I could go into academic mode and talk about the history of Carnival in Brazil, about the complex mix of race, class, and crime in Rio, and how the city, as carnival towns often do, has gone to great lengths to absorb the Carnival into “official” and contained events such as the Sambadrome parades and Samba school competitions, while every year more and more “blocos” or street parties are held, mainly comprising hordes of young people with cheap costumes, bands playing on the street, and lots of making out with strangers, drugs, alcohol, and general mayem…in short, a return to the Dionysian spirit of Carnival.  I could get mythological, historical, musicological, racial…but unfortunately I hadn’t had the opportunity to get as steeped in the history and culture of Rio’s Carnival as I have done with New Orleans and Venice.   It was a last minute trip, and I was pretty much flying blind, the only Portuguese I knew being “Por favor” and “Obrigado”…And now that Carnival has come and gone in a blur, I’m left with the sense that I was air-dropped in and evacuated out, without really understanding what the mission was.

I came home to two weeks of solid OBX winter weather, dark and windy and rainy and cold. Somehow the whole experience, with all its ups and downs, had shaken something loose inside, and I was left to ponder my situation in the dark days of late winter.  While I had gotten a few spectacular photos, I hadn’t gotten enough, didn’t feel like I had a well-rounded “story”, and knew that I was going to eventually have to decide whether to go back and finish what I’d started in Rio, get deeper into what the city is all about, and make closer connections with the friends I’d made there; or I’d have to just chalk it up to one more stop along the Carnival tour and be content with the photos I got to be representative of the particular expression of Carnival that Rio has developed over the last couple hundred years.   If only I had the energy of ten men and the ability to be in multiple places at once.

So with all that and numerous other aspects to the trip to think about, it has taken me a while to get a clear perspective on it all.  In the end, I suppose, I’m left with some really great stories, four or five “home run” photos, and enough high-quality filler to make for a decent photo essay, or a short chapter in a future book.  And, of course, some new friends; notably Roberta and Renata, who were truly angels to all of us, and whose constant cheerfulness and ever-changing, ever-tantalizing wardrobe selections kept us all in a good mood.   Already there is talk of a return trip, and if I have the time and money, how could I refuse?  I’ve only scratched the surface of Rio, and it is, to be sure, a fascinating place. And there are Cariocas there that I met only for a brief who that have stayed in my mind, who have contacted me on facebook, and who have me believing that my own personal Rio has yet to be fully revealed.  I received only glimpses of it this time around.  But spectacular glimpses they were, moments of a strange, savage, refined, sexy beauty and depth…light and darkness dancing with each other on the streets, swaying to the sultry syncopations of samba, waiting to take off the shackles of the “face” of Brazil and show the heart and soul that lie beneath the masks and the costumes.  The pure, naked, dangerous, loving heart of Brazil.   Next time, next time.