Portraits of Didi Von Boch at Point Reyes Beach, California

The first time Didi made portraits of me in Sedona for the Memory Cult gathering last year she hummed a song- over and over it was our soundtrack.

A year later she was still humming the same tune with her lens in my face, finger poking my nose to arranging our gestures to get the perfect spin on the way she sees it. A scratchy melody over and over.

“What song is that?”

It’s the chorus and she’s humming the words,

“I wanna see you again”.

Of course.

So we summoned the song out of satellite air and sang blasted it on repeat. I got the lyric order wrong and she sang it right all that much louder and we took turns driving.

Cypress and foggy greens turned to sand and succulent and shore where I made these portraits with her.

SESSION NOTES

Portraits of Didi Von Boch at Point Reyes

Camera: Rolleiflex 6001

Film: Kodak Gold 200, a medium format film shot at box speed (200 ISO) pushed 1 stop (+1) in developing.

Development: Dev and scan at The Find Lab

the arrow goes where it will go

I’ve had some pretty cool experiences in my life but this one really stands out.

A group of close friends hired me, met me out at the Salt Flats and when we got there do you know what the Salt Flats looked like? Flooded. Water everywhere. One of our cars got stuck, we had to get towed. We pivoted together, making something out of the unexpected- beyond original vision.

I hold the ideas that initiate a creative work very lightly. Creative results aren’t beholden to the initiations that bring them into life, anymore than we live genuinely when beholden to what our parents think we should be.

We
steady the bow
and the arrow goes
where it will go.

And that’s good enough.

A Bead of Milk and Collaborative Portraiture with Steph

I don’t know where she gathered the strength and bravery to stand for this portrait, but I suspect it came from the same place that brought me reverence in making it.

This is collaborative portraiture.

This is femininity embodied, in one of the myriad ways it takes shape as exploration.

This is a peek into the world of this mother.

This is a phase, a phrase, a holy blip of a consequential ritual with tethers that bind us from ancestor to far-flung successors.

Thank you Stephanie for letting me see and share.

Note: that tiny anything-but-a-let-down bead of let-down milk.

Photo of Stephanie Hawkes. Find Stephanie HERE

Portraits with Errin Julkunen Pedersen

Errin and I have created beautiful love story that involves a cast of colleges, children, poets, parents, bishops, prophets, and partners. It is a story set in early morning apartments with positive pregnancy tests, late afternoon hikes in rocky canyons, memorable and terrible concerts and their crowds, drinks and laughter, sobbing seriousness, pomogranates in post op, churches filled with hymns.

How can you measure the depth of a decade long sisterhood where honesty, fear, triumph, career, motherhood, partnership, divorce, dancing and indelible encouragement has cheered you both on? You receive the gift, you witness it mature.

Last month as part of my Portrait Woman:: Mother event I hosted Errin as my honorary mother at my space, Ultraviolet Studios. This session gave me an intimate and new vision of a woman I already know so well. I know her goodness. I know her fear. I know her aims but mostly, I know her work. I know the texture of a life she has decided. I have witnessed her move from a university mainstay to a tenured and widely appreciated professional, from a wanting mother to a seasoned one, from wise to wiser.

There are few people in this world who carry poetics and purpose into the soul like she does. She is deeply moral, hysterically witty, and is smarter than any mother fucker in any room, and by god- the most stylish.

Errin recently shared the following regarding her work, to both understand and become increasingly empowered, by her journey with bipolar disorder. It’s this kind of openness with encouragement that Errin does so perfectly.

“You will think you can do it all. You will be wrong. You will try so hard and fail miserably. You will lose your shit when you can’t control everything. Your greatest challenge will be recognizing that you don’t control anything. You will punch things until your hands bleed, trying to find some respite. You’ll feel like a shitty mom, a bad friend, a failing spouse, and worse. But. You’ll remember. That it passes. That every bad thing as much as every good thing brought you to where you are. That no matter where you are, it’s where you are supposed to be. I’m always trying to remember.”

Like attracts like, our matches in soul and system find and refine us. Whatever goodness I hold that pulled this brilliant woman and me together in this incarnation makes both of us lucky indeed. I love you Errin sister.

You can find Errin on Instagram at @incrediblejulk

Errin Julkunen Pedersen photographed by Ashley Thalman at Ultraviolet Studios Utah.

To the "Too Much" Woman

What hides away when we show one side?

What parts have we divorced, and where did those parts go?

What does it mean to make a welcome home for self, after we sent her away?

Where does she wait until we’re ready?

Woman, you do not fit into narrow prescriptions.

You are an endless landscape, an ecosystem entire of light and dark, rot and flowering.

You are the seed breaking forth, angry and determined.

You are the dark soil parting and nourishing.

You are the gift that the world called forth, you are whole and holy, you don’t need what you don’t already have.

You are sprout and root, stem and leaf, not a mere flowering part.

You are all the death that hides and the life that brings you back, again and again.

This is the true story of woman.

I'll Be Damned

My daughter took this photo of me at Andi Pitcher’s cabin. No bra, lounging around, yesterday’s makeup, wild hair. It was a lazy morning, the kind that I’ve given myself permission to have. The sun was so warm there. Dotter raised the camera and I had a choice to make. I could have silently protested the portrait by letting her take it overexposed or by shewing her away, “Not until I’m dressed” or “No, let me take some of you.” But I didn’t, I set her exposure and let her see me.

My daughter is 10, the age so many of us began to pull at our skin, to notice lines in the abdomen when twisting, the way thighs pucker, the way we didn’t measure “right”. We inherited this from the work not done before us and I’ll be damned. I’ll be damned to be another woman pulling at puckers and hating my body, demonstrating this for my children and friends. I will not pass this on. I will let her take the photo and I will take hers, and yours, and again and again.