the west

We are having such a spring here on the steppe, I’ve never seen anything like it in this part of the country and the old timers are saying the same. The desert is luminous with green growth for the first time in forever. I’m seeing incredible lupin displays where I’ve never seen a single lupin before. It worries me for this summer and fall since all this tall grass will become fuel load that will lay as tinder until someone or something sparks it up and we’ll find ourselves contending with ripper sagebrush fires. I always have fire on my mind. It’s an old habit.

We’re working long days — 8am-5pm in the studio for me, Robbie outside running errands, fixing things, building things, moving water, tending critters, seeding hay, planting our garden. Then a run and/or horse work, then dinner, then to sleep at 10pm. Like clockwork. It’s amazing how much more I can milk out of a day with a little commitment to discipline and routine.

I’m waking up every morning right before the rooster crows. I love to beat the roosters. My bed is warm and cozy but I’m excited to begin the day, to live the day. I wake Robbie up and I tell him, “I’m so excited to live this day. I must get up!”

It’s hard to say what the best part of my day is. I’m having so much fun in my studio right now and running the steppe with the dogs has been magnificent but being on the back of a horse under this big Western sky and riding through this sagebrush sea where I can fall in love with a landscape and feel my sense of home and my sense of belonging and tether my mind and heart to gratitude for my good fortune and my ability to work hard with passion — to live here in this wide open, liberating space, to be gleaning my inspiration from a well crafted and well lived life, to be living in reciprocity with land and animals so that there is balance in my life (I take but I also give)…to be in my own mind thinking about all of that while I ride a horse through the wind in this special place…it can’t be beat. It’s the best. It’s transformational.

This is the first spring in years that I am not on contract with any companies for modeling jobs or catalogue shoots or influencer/ambassador work and it’s been great. I’ve been torn for some time now over working for these companies, lending them my name and my story to represent goods that are being manufactured overseas. It’s something I’ve struggled to reconcile with my personal values. A “Made in China” label seems like such a badge of shame to me these days for so many reasons I’m not going to get into here. I’ve been tapering off my work in this realm for years, saying no to all the projects and jobs that came my way, until finally everyone stopped asking. This spring I am totally free to do my own thing and it comes as a relief to me to immerse myself in this season, to be traveling on my own terms, to be fishing and hunting just to fish and hunt (and maybe write about it), to be pouring myself into my studio work and other creative efforts, to be using my cameras for the joy of it…to have realized that I do not need to monetize everything I do. What a great transition out of one thing and into another. I’m thankful for all the experiences I had, good and bad, while working in the outdoor industry and now I’m thankful to be out of it and focusing on simply developing my own crafts, growing and hunting my food, and having more energy to spend on my friendships, my horses, and my burgeoning interests.

Anyway, I’m just thinking aloud this morning. I mostly wanted to say howdy to you and tell you I’m thinking of you. Have an amazing day where you are. Eat great food, hug all the people you love, spend some time breathing fresh air and moving your body, smile at lotsa strangers.

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2022/05/10/16518/

In a fit of inspiration this morning, though I had about one hundred other things I needed to be doing, I went back to this batch of pictures I made at a pow wow this summer and re-worked them into slightly sepia toned black and white shots with heavy grain and muddy contrast — an obvious nod to the incredible work of Ed Curtis.

I posted one of these images in color on my Instagram account, weeks ago, and was attacked for it by what I assume was an angry, native american woman. She accused me of appropriation via photography which is perfectly absurd. At least, I think that’s what she was accusing me of, her comment was ridiculous and muddled with rage. Admittedly, I resented it. Her words were a slap in the face of what I felt and still feel is honest photography work that serves its subject in a beautiful way. I am in the business of illumination. I am not a new age, urban white girl playing at Indian — this is not the root of any of my work. I didn’t bother responding to her comment. I couldn’t come up with a response that voiced my indignation in a gracious way.

The truth is this, I photograph pow wows because it feels like a tiny, tender way for me to offer up some kind of restitution…to capture the gritty heart of native culture here in the West with wide open eyes and to feel a sense of healing with regards to the wounds and fractures I feel in my own heart. I am one more human who comes from a brilliant family tree that is full of brokenness, beauty, secrets, violence, romance and ruin. When I see the dancers dance, when I photograph them, I feel what it means to be broken and smashed and to still rise up on fragments of wings. I know what it is to seek freedom, to break a curse, to fail to rise, and to try to rise again.

We are the same. I grow weary of constant cultural polarization in society. There is no way to measure suffering or the crisis of the human heart. There is no teaspoon that can quantify the oscillating swirl of darkness and light that is in every single human being on the face of this planet — past, present and future. One of us might be missing a leg, another plagued by the physical memory of rape, and yet another haunted by the injustice and mass murder of the “Battle” at Wounded Knee.

We are all the same. We are broken and healing. I might be white with flaxen hair, you might be brown with raven tresses, but we are fundamentally the same.

And so I will photograph you and find the light and beauty in you because finding the light and beauty in you reveals for us all what is possible for humanity, what is possible for me, what is possible for all individual souls.

Dancer, move with joy, uplift us, raise us from our sorrows.

The Same

Wapiti