max s. gerber(the latest shot)

last week kim and tashena visited me. tashena lives in san diego now, where she takes amazingly lovely, ethereal and poetic pictures. kim was visiting from tucson.

kim is micah’s father. tashena is micah’s sister.

it’s hard to believe it’s been almost ten years since the last time i saw micah, almost ten years since he died. it suddenly struck me that micah would’ve been twenty-one years old this past summer. somehow this realization hit me kind of hard. maybe it’s the fact that we’re passing into a new decade in a couple of weeks, maybe just a realization that all these kids don’t stay kids for very long. in my head micah will forever be 11 years old, the only age at which i knew him. i wonder what he’s like in the memories of tashena and kim?

photographing micah was one of the first times i remember thinking to myself that a picture i took could actually be good for something, could actually mean more than it seemed. in the picture that kim is holding above i remember being especially struck by this. micah was home from school that day with a respiratory infection. at the time this photo was taken it was just micah and me in the house. he was sleeping most of the time, and i remember listening to the sound of his breathing, which was more deliberate and more labored than anything i had ever heard before. every so often he’d wake up and we’d talk for a bit, or take a few pictures, and then he would doze off again.

micah passed away on april 16th of 2000. he was always the coolest guy in the room.