losing a child is an unimaginable grief. when it happens it seems to be against the very rules of the game. we are supposed to be survived by our children. that’s just the way the world works, isn’t it? the things that parents do to come to terms with such a loss are as varied as the ways in which death can take us. for bob, a family practice physician, he tried to cope with his son’s death by getting on a bicycle.

in july of 2009 eric okerblom was riding his bike down a straight, quiet road east of santa maria. a sophomore at berkeley, he was training for the school’s cycling team. a car driven by a young woman who happened to be a former high school classmate of eric’s hit and killed him. the accident was avoidable. it was during the day. the road was straight. there was no traffic. eric was not riding haphazardly. there were no obstructions. subpoenas of the girl’s phone records indicate that she had been sending and receiving text messages shortly before the accident, though she never officially admitted to being distracted while driving. she pled guilty to vehicular manslaughter – a misdemeanor. three years probation and one hundred hours of community service.

it is our nature, in the face of inexplicable awfulness, to try to find a reason for things. pure randomness is sometimes more terrible than even the smallest explanations. faced with losing themselves wholly in grief, bob and his wife, eilene, went on a crusade to bring awareness to the issue of distracted driving. they started a foundation, named after their son. they petitioned lawmakers to enact tougher laws prohibiting texting while driving. of course, setting up a foundation and writing letters will only get you so far. at the end of the day, eric was still gone, and the feelings of loss and powerlessness still had to be dealt with.

not satisfied simply with the activities of his foundation, bob thought he must do something more, something to bring his message to more people, something to possibly help save the lives of others. he decided to take a two month long bike ride, alone, across the country. he started in san diego in february, and finished 54 days later in st. augustine, florida. along the way he did many interviews, met with legislators, gathered supporters, and kept a daily blog. he said the trip is something eric would’ve wanted him to do, something he hoped would make his son proud of him.

at the beginning of the trip bob wrote:

The spirituality, harmony, values, and structure of my former life have been swept away by the killing of my 19 year old son, Eric. I am left adrift on a sea of dark currents and noxious winds. Without direction or destination, I wander the outer circles of hell. Although surrounded by loving family, friends, and community, I am alone in a lonely place. As I begin this journey to honor my son, I hope to also find some way to emerge from this abyss. So from now until the finish, I will pedal for the dead.

meeting bob just a few days before he left on his trip i was struck by how determined he was, by how tough he must be. i doubted the effectiveness of the endeavor he was about to undertake, but i also realized that this was never really about the bike ride. it might not really have been about raising awareness of distracted driving, either. it was about a father feeling like simply doing something must be better than doing nothing. when no other glue will work some men hold themselves together with action. using purpose to provide (promote?) healing.

i dare say we have all made dangers of ourselves on the road in one way or another. we’re more and more connected to our gadgets, moment to moment than ever before – certainly i am no exception to this. have i texted while driving? i surely have. i am as addicted to the beeps and chimes and buzzes of my iphone as anyone could be. now, though, perhaps more than before, if something urgently commands my attention i try to pull over to the side of the road. when i get a text and the red light doesn’t last quite long enough, i think of bob, and eilene, and eric. my pulling over won’t bring eric back, or give any peace to bob’s life, but i think he would be happy to know that his efforts and experiences have had an effect, no matter how small.

if you stop to think about it there are a million little coincidences every day that serve to either keep us safe or put us at risk. i have been involved with death far more in my capacity as a photographer than in my own personal life away from the camera. in this, i suppose, i count myself lucky. still, i find it difficult to photograph someone and not feel some tie to their life, especially to the people for whom i get to visit repeatedly and get to know quite closely. the delineation of making pictures blurs more than slightly after a while.

when i left bob and eilene i worried that his cross country ride would simply be a band-aid on his grief. something to distract him for a while. i worried about what would happen when the ride was done, when he was back home, when the momentum of activism and energy had subsided. i worried for eilene, home alone while bob attempted to pedal his grief away.

on april 22nd bob wrote on his blog:

I conclude this travel unrestored. My God has remained silent and elusive. Completing good works will not adjudicate Eric’s killing. There can be no happy ending to this story. As the many hundreds of roadside memorials stand testament, there can never be harmony after the loss of a child.

Some injuries heal completely without residual or scar. Others heal without residual, but leave a disfiguring scar as a reminder. A few injuries aren’t fatal, but linger and smolder,never to resolve completely. One must learn to live with them and not to be dominated by them. My challenge is to learn to live with this injury, but not become the injury.

usually on this site i post photos of people with an accompanying caption. something describing in a few words who they are and what they do. i struggled over this with bob. it’s easy to label him as a grieving father, but that does him no service going into the future. in the end, whether it’s his grief that makes him get up in the morning, day after day, that makes him care for the families of others, for his surviving children and his wife, or not, it doesn’t matter. i’m not a parent – not yet -  but i have the notion that once you become a father you are a father in every way, every manner and every aspect of your life. that feeling supersedes everything else. you may also be a doctor, or a husband, but you are a father first and foremost. and if your son is taken from you you no more stop being a father than they stop being your son.

going through some of my mother’s files tonight i found this proof sheet, labeled december 10th, 1963. ten years before i was born. the man in some of the shots with her looks like my uncle howard. i asked my mother who took these pictures, since there isn’t a credit anywhere, and nothing written on the back of the contact sheet. she says they were taken in chicago but she can’t remember exactly who the photographer was, though suspects it could be victor skrebneski. i should try to find victor and see if he’s still got the negatives!

growing up our house was filled with photographs. my mother took endless snapshots herself, most involving my brother and myself, and at least one of our many pets. there were photos scattered around by mary ellen mark, richard avedon, annie leibovitz, albert watson, lynn goldsmith and many others. most of them were of my mother’s clients. most of them i ignored when i was very young, thinking it just another part of my parent’s work, same as the phone calls that used to interrupt us during dinner. i sometimes think that my family sort of set me up to be a photographer – or, at the very least, to be the kind of photographer i am. they were all essentially freelance, there was always a home office. there was never any “going home” from work. your work was part of your life, and vice versa. spillover was absolute. this seemed normal to me, and as i’ve been a professional photographer for almost fifteen years now, it still does. i make that long 25 foot commute to my office every morning and most days i start work (emailing, photoshop, filing, etc) before i even eat breakfast or shower or even really wake up fully. usually i go to sleep late at night because i notice that letterman is over, or i’m falling asleep at my desk. work is life, life is work, photographs are important. these are things my parents taught me, even if they didn’t really mean to.

when i started to take photography seriously my mother stopped taking so many pictures herself (a major left turn for me in college, as someone who was gearing up to be either a professor, a writer, a rock star or a chef – and never displayed any artistic talent whatsoever before a camera was dropped in my hands on a whim). the unspoken agreement was that it was now left up to me. besides, the whole digital thing didn’t jive too well with her. my mother and high technology are uncomfortable with each other.

everyone in my family complains loudly and regularly about the mess of papers and piles of pictures in my mom’s office. but for every complaint there are a dozen thirty-year-old snapshots that not a single one of us would want to throw away. they’re all piled haphazardly in a giant bowl in her living room, the order rearranging every time someone goes through them. there are even old wallet size photos of my great-grandparents in there. this bowl is a family treasure, truly, and every time i look through it i lament that one aspect of digital photography: will anyone have a giant bowl of snapshots in twenty years? with everything being created and archived in pixels, i’m afraid we’re all missing out on the simple analog pleasure (and surprise) of finding out something about our families and the people who matter to us that we otherwise might have forgotten.

this is not a luddite rant. i’m a great believer in the merits of digital photography. i use digital cameras and love computers (while still being wary and uncomfortable with excessive retouching) and am a technophile if anything. but i might feel a bit better about it all still if everyone – or maybe even just me – had the wherewithal to make small prints of everything, too, and just throw them in a bowl somewhere.

images are valuable things – and sometimes they’re most valuable as things you can touch.

thanks, mom.

i’ve lived in pasadena for four and a half years and have managed to always successfully avoid anything having to do with the rose parade. thankfully it’s usually over by noon, the time i drag my sorry ass out of the house to go find food. old town pasadena is always a big trash-strewn mess then, and most of the tourists have cleared out to the rose bowl and all the floats are gone. this year, though, i got talked into going to see the floats the next day. they take them all over to sierra madre blvd in eastern pasadena and charge you $10 to go take a look up close.

i guess after growing up watching the macy’s day thanksgiving parade from my neighbor’s window in new york, overlooking central park west, i arrived early at the conclusion that once you’ve seen one parade float you’ve pretty much seen ‘em all. still, at least a couple old ladies (and one kid in a shark costume) agreed to let me take snapshots of them. thanks, random strangers.

happy new year, everyone. let’s hear it for the collapsing economy!

last week i had a shoot that took place in a zoological laboratory. i’m not sure if the place was really appropriate to the subject, or if it was just available and really cool to be in. maybe a mix of the two. it was more interesting than any of our other options at the time, that’s for sure. i’d never been in a zoology lab before so it was kind of fascinating. as usual i’m impressed and amazed at the level of organization that goes on in places like this. i wish scientists could come and organize my office, but with less dead things or radiation or advanced mathematics.

my deepest sincere thanks to dr. john hafner who runs this lab for being so gracious in allowing us inside. i hope no permanent damage was caused. i really love listening to scientists talk about what they do, and to some extent i really love listening to anyone who’s passionate about their work. i think i sometimes confuse scientists because i tend to fixate on elements that are, to them, somewhat incidental. for example in this zoology lab i was really taken with the little tags used to mark all the specimens. they’re all written out by hand in felt tip permanent marker, even in this age of printers and computers. everything written out by hand, and it lends an old-time sort of aesthetic that’s really appealing. also it makes it sometimes difficult to distinguish immediately between specimens collected recently and those that are eighty years old.

paul was very impressed by a different thing. this involved pointing and exclaiming the following phrase like a little girl: “pickled bats!” (see above).

here’s corporal bennett, sitting in for a test shot that isn’t anything like what we ended up doing. sometimes it’s a drag to have a great location that’s wrong for the subject.

i have a different sort of relationship with doctors than most of my friends. doctors have always been a part of my life, as long as i can remember, though admittedly much less so now that i’m an adult. maybe my parents were nervous when i was a kid, maybe things were more precarious, maybe technology has just gotten better. i’m rarely sick now, i go to the doctor less than most people i know. really, in the past few years it’s been mostly emergency room visits due to me being careless and slicing my fingers up.

when i do go to the doctor, it’s always peter guzy at UCLA. and jane has been there as long as i can remember; there to answer my stupid questions, there to hook me up to the machines. when i was younger she used to give me a hard time about being squeamish with needles, now, after more than a decade on coumadin blood tests don’t faze me in the slightest. i can’t really tell, but i always thought jane was kind of proud of me for this transformation. and i actually think i got her to admit that she was a bit squeamish herself, but i’m not sure. every couple months for the past 27 years or so jane would call me up, and i’d attach special sensors to my wrists and get an EKG over the phone. this makes sure everything is still operating properly, and most importantly it tells me that batteries are still charged and working. now it’s been six years or so since my last surgery and every call makes me a bit nervous. it’s a weird feeling to know that you’ve just bypassed the official warranty on the thing inside your chest that keeps you alive.

(everytime i mention this sort of thing on this site i stop and wonder to myself if it’s a good idea. i’ve been struggling with people’s perceptions of my physical capabilities all my life, and the truth is i’m not even the least bit unhealthy. i’m probably healthier than most guys in their mid-30s. thanks to my father i have a metabolism like a blast furnace and will likely never be overweight. my activities aren’t restricted hardly at all. most days i don’t even consider the pacer too much. you’d never know it if you didn’t see the scars. working as a freelancer i sometimes feel like i should play this one closer to the chest (so to speak), not reveal things that might scare away potential clients. i can’t really imagine how this might do that, although i once had to turn down an assignment for TIME magazine that involved being very close to an MRI machine. it sounded like a good gig, too, i was sad to have to turn it down. i guess i figure that now that i’ve gone and published a book about having a heart defect the cat’s out of the bag, right?)

anyway, jane is retiring next week and moving to montana. i get the feeling that she doesn’t really want to leave. i know that nobody else wants her to. it’s hard for me to imagine not having her on the other end of the line when things go wrong. it’s hard for me to imagine not having her there when things go right, too. i’m happy to have had the opportunity, finally, to take a proper picture of jane, and grateful for all the times she’s been there for me for almost three decades. i don’t make it out to montana much, so i’m hoping she’ll still visit every once in a while. some people you meet in life are just essential. even if you don’t see them enough, you know they’re there and it means the world. so thanks, jane, for everything. for being a calming and reassuring voice when i was a scared kid, for being a familiar and friendly face when i started taking responsibility for my own healthcare as a young adult, and for being a good friend throughout. don’t worry, montana won’t be that bad. we’ll all miss you.

happy election day, everyone. at least, i hope it’s a happy one. we’ll know in several hours, right? hey, at least i live in a very blue state. that is, if you can overlook orange county, which most people can.

they won’t let you take pictures at the polling place (i wanted to get a pic of the empty voting booth just for kicks, but no dice). the sign outside didn’t even say “polling” – i guess that’s sort of a given today.

when kenny maestas was in his early twenties he was riding shotgun in a truck driven by a buddy of his. this buddy was agitated. he had just had a fight with his girlfriend. kenny was only trying to get a ride to work, but his buddy was driving erratically. the truck crashed. the friend walked away, mostly uninjured. kenny wasn’t so lucky. he was paralyzed, a quadriplegic. he can move his arms somewhat, enough to grip a pencil, and drive his (highly modified) van, where he controls the gas and brake with levers coming off the steering wheel.

now kenny manages the walmart in the small town of la junta, colorado. he works sixteen, seventeen hour days sometimes. he’s married and supports his wife and kid. he takes tremendous pride in being able to manage the store, and it’s a big operation, with several hundred people to oversee. wheeling around his house he points out things, saying “that’s from walmart.” and “that too, got that at walmart”. he remains remarkably calm when talking to his hyperactive two year old son, kristopher. kristopher begrudgingly sits for a couple pictures, mostly making silly faces and sticking his tongue out at his mom. like most shoots involving kids, kristopher’s parents obtain his minimal cooperation by promising to get him a toy at walmart when we’re done. “he’s a walmart baby”, says kenny.

when kristopher gets too rowdy cpl. bennett attempts to calm him down by playing with giant squirt guns. when paul sits kristopher down and starts teaching him how to disassemble an automatic weapon i have to stop and ask kenny “is this okay?” kristopher seems riveted. at least he stays quiet for a few minutes. thanks paul, for corrupting one more kid.

maggie produced the shoot, and she’s worth her weight in just about anything in the world. she also provided me with an opportunity to watch someone actually get out of getting a speeding ticket. i’m still not sure how she did it. it didn’t even seem like she was trying. i’m pretty sure hypnosis was involved.

everything was smooth except for the fact that we had the misfortune of being on US airways. never again. just before we left i noticed US airways was #1 on some list of the worst airlines to fly. they’ve started charging for everything. no beverage service. no free checked bags. paul and i spent a lot of time juggling things around to get all our bags under the 50 lb weight limit. we bought a 5-pack of t-shirts at kenny’s walmart and wrapped lenses in them. i had to trick them into checking a bag at the gate (which was free). i did this three times.

we raced to make the last flight out of colorado springs after the shoot, but our plane was coming from denver and apparently US airways can’t fly in the rain at all. things were delayed. then delayed further. it got to a point where we had no chance of making our connecting flight, but we opted anyway to go to phoenix for the night, just to get a little closer to home. however once in flight it seems there were thunderstorms in phoenix and we were rerouted to flagstaff. i mean, really, since when does it rain in phoenix in august? in flagstaff we sat on the tarmac for two and a half hours.

the flagstaff airport had already closed for the night and since there were no TSA agents there they couldn’t let anyone off the plane. this became problematic when people in the back of the plane started having trouble with the bathroom. there was no water in it, no soap, and the flush wasn’t working. the poor harried flight attendant tried to help a little bit by putting his own personal travel size bottle of purell in the bathroom, but it was an uphill battle. a girl sitting in the back of the plane threw up from the smell of the bathroom, and they let her sit on the steps of the plane. they wouldn’t let her down to the tarmac or let her use a bathroom inside the terminal. she was on her way to vegas to get married.

at one point the flight attendant was actually reading the employee manual to figure out what to do, and i even saw the pilots looking at a map trying to figure out where to go. luckily we were in the front of the plane so we got some air from the open door and the bathroom didn’t affect us.

the flight attendant kept getting on the PA and half-heartedly saying “we apologize for the inconvenience.”

as pissed as we were at the airline, i couldn’t help but think of kenny. i couldn’t help but think of kenny lying in the hospital after being in a car crash he had no responsibility for, and probably felt he shouldn’t even have been anywhere near. i thought of his buddy just walking away. i thought of how kenny told me that the first few years after the accident “drinking helped”. i wondered if anyone had apologized to kenny for the inconvenience he has to live with every single day of his life, just because of circumstance. just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

i guess the moral of the story, like most morals, is to try your damnedest not to take little things for granted. that, and don’t fly US airways.

i was very sad to hear today that william claxton died over the weekend of congestive heart failure. he was eighty years old. claxton took one of my favorite photos of all time (above), of chet baker and helima in 1955. i’ve always loved this picture, have seen it in galleries from time to time, and it’s the only photo i have ever seriously considered purchasing. every time, though, i made some excuse not to do it. when i first fell in love with the picture over a decade ago, i think it was $1500. at the time i was just unable to do it. hell, i couldn’t even afford to have a photo framed, let alone blow fifteen hundred bucks on one. i saw it again recently, not six months ago, and the price had shot up to around ten grand. i was kicking myself then for not getting it at $1500.

i’ve actually met claxton on two separate occasions. the first time was at a jon brion show at cafe largo on fairfax. i was sitting with marvin etzioni and some guy who looked kind of like colonel sanders came over to say hello and marvin introduced me. it was loud in the club and i couldn’t hear a word anyone said, so i just smiled and shook his hand. later on i realized it was william claxton.

the second time was at an american heart association fundraiser at UCLA. claxton was there and this time i got to talk to him for a few minutes. he had an implanted defibrillator and he told me about how it scared the hell out of his assistants. apparently the defib went off one day when he was helping them move cases around, and after that they wouldn’t let him lift anything heavy. he seemed to find it all funny. he was warm and personable, and i was really glad to meet him officially even though i’m sure he’d never remember it.

i remember, also, living in echo park and seeing claxton’s photo of art pepper from 1956. pepper was standing on a steep hill that cratered and went back up in the distance. i have no direct confirmation of this, but i’m pretty sure that was baxter street, right around the corner from the bungalow where i lived, and i felt good driving up and down that street everyday, knowing a piece of photographic and jazz history took place there.

in the 60s claxton really defined the visual look of west coast cool jazz. his pictures of chet baker not only made claxton famous, i think they made chet even bigger than he could’ve become otherwise. claxton’s photos were always flooded with window light and felt soft and vulnerable and cool. he even made steve mcqueen look vulnerable sometimes, and that must’ve taken some doing.

here’s an LA times article from today, talking about claxton.

growing up i would’ve said i was a dog person. really. but winona is the cat of my life. amazing to think i got her seventeen years ago, at the beginning of my senior year of high school. she’s lived with me the past twelve years straight, through dog attacks, unfriendly room-mates, two lovely girlfriends (one allergic, one as smitten with ‘nona as she was with me)  and several different apartments. once long ago, when i had a darkroom, i could’ve sworn that winona was addicted to fixer. those who know me know that i’m irrationally devoted to her, and i like her more than most people i meet. also, she depends on me for survival, which most people i meet don’t do. that kind of helps with the attachment.

now, at seventeen, winona is hanging on, in a pretty advanced stage of kidney failure. i give her 100 cc’s of saline through an IV every other day. she’s surprisingly patient with this, and i’ve been doing it for over a year. so far the veterinarian seems amazed she’s still alive and kicking. every day she makes me smile, especially on days when nothing else does. happy birthday, kiddo.

the above pic was taken with the glorious iphone 1.0, in mid august. the pictures below were taken today, on her birthday, in an attempt to do something more formal. cats are not terribly into being cooperative for studio pictures. thanks to mark miller for cat wrangling, even though it was an uphill battle. these aren’t quite what i was hoping for but i was afraid we were starting to stress her out, which is bad on the kidneys.

and my thanks, also, to the james watson bobble head doll for standing in.

last week our fair city of angels was graced with the presence of jonathan saunders, who brought a shotgun with him. ignoring the fact that we’re a bunch of bleeding heart liberals out here, he somehow managed to convince a few of his photographer friends to travel to sylmar and shoot at fluorescent pink clay targets. i abstained from handling shotguns, but was happy to watch jonathan and joe toreno have at it (below).

not typically known for his good cheer, jonathan was downright gleeful handling a shotgun, so that was nice to see. he hit the first two targets he shot at which is good enough for me to remain impressed. really, the best angle to photograph from would be right in front while he’s shooting but i’m not that brave yet. maybe next time. i managed to pocket one of the empty shells as a souvenir, though.

later in the week we went bowling. i haven’t bowled that badly in twenty five years. but thanks to jonathan for hanging out, and for providing entertaining stories about people i kind of know. it’s a weird world out there.