Hold Your Own: Fav Film School Road Trip Cuba Pics by Jonathan Canlas

Cuba, Cuba, Cuba. You had me up against the wall of the upper limits, feeling desire for togetherness, estimating new thoughts, letting out monster anxieties and god good relief with wherever you are there you are old thoughts, new takes, city with stars showing at night. Something fractal something happy and most things easy.

Viñales had me falling in love with life, Havana you! With your late night glow and me and my sister forgetting anyone else existed at 4 am howling. New and old friends, my Jon brother, film, food, horses! the sun, photography, the sound of laughter.

Aesthetic pics yes, but also the ascetic micro of letting oneself love, rich and dripping like lobster tails in oily red sauce and yucca cooked over pork fat fires, vegetarians salivating. To speak truth through pyramids, to watch and be watched, to let the tobacco bury you- to sing and dance and wear red.

Trip: Film School Road Trip: Havana Cuba February 2025.

Sign up and go see for yourself in November

As seen by, and shared with permission of Jonathan Canlas

Film dev & scan by The Find Lab

Hold Your Own

When time pulls lives apart
Hold your own

When everything is fluid, and when nothing can be known with any certainty
Hold your own

Hold it 'til you feel it there
As dark, and dense, and wet as earth
As vast, and bright, and sweet as air
When all there is
Is knowing that you feel what you are feeling
Hold your own

Ask your hands to know the things they hold
I know the days are reeling past in such squealing blasts
But stop for breath and you will know it's yours
Swaying like an open door when storms are coming
Hold

Time is an onslaught
Love is a mission
We work for vocation until
In remission
We wish we'd had patience and given more time to our children

Feel each decision that you make
Make it, hold it
Hold your own
Hold your lovers
Hold their hands
Hold their breasts in your hands, like your hands were their bras
Hold their face in your palms like a prayer
Hold them all night, feel them hold back
Don't hold back
Hold your own

Every pain
Every grievance
Every stab of shame
Every day spent with a demon in your brain giving chase
Hold it

Know the wolves that hunt you
In time, they will be the dogs that bring your slippers
Love them right and you will feel them kiss you when they come to bite
Hot snouts digging out your cuddles with their bloody muzzles
Hold

Nothing you can buy will ever make you more whole
This whole thing thrives on us feeling always incomplete
And it is why we will search for happiness in whatever thing it is we crave in the moment
And it is why we can never really find it there
It is why you will sit there with the lover that you fought for
In the car you sweated years to buy
Wearing the ring you dreamed of all your life
And some part of you will still be unsure that this is what you really want
Stop craving
Hold your own

But if you're satisfied with where you're at, with who you are
You won't need to buy new make-up, or new outfits, or new pots and pans
To cook new exciting recipes
For new exciting people
To make yourself feel like the new exciting person, you think you're supposed to be

Happiness, the brand, is not happiness
We are smarter than they think we are
They take us all for idiots
But that's their problem
When we behave like idiots
It becomes our problem

So hold your own
Breathe deep on a freezing beach
Taste the salt of friendship
Notice the movement of a stranger
Hold your own
And let it be
Catching

Hold Your Own by Kae Tempest

Rafael San Juan's Primavera in Havana, Cuba

I was obsessed with her, craning my neck as we flew by her. This is “Primavera” by Raphael San Juan. It’s 26’ tall and was made of reclaimed found metal as a tribute to the sensuality and strength of Cuban women.

Film Notes:

During my first 2022 visit to Havana with Jon Canlas and The Film School Road Trip Matthew and I shot a lot of film. Having shot digital images almost exclusively whilst being intrigued and intimidated by film, our trip offered a deep dive into film. 3 days of shooting in the rich visual landscape of Havana and Vinales along with Jon’s break-neck shooting pace offered an opportunity in an inspiring, stimulating set and setting to experiment with film, settings, cameras, lenses, etc.

In post-processing I realized my Bronica had a focusing problem leading to many many near-misses where in-camera I’d seen sharp, beautifully composed images. Painful learning costs are the way and actually give these fresh, sharp, beauties of this sculpture a BINGO precious feel.

Film: Kodak Gold box rated pushed 1 stop in developing

Development & scanning: Standard Scans via The Find Lab on the Noritsu scanner

The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

-Dylan Thomas

Top Songs 2024

nothing lasts

The bend of arm has never been like this, nor her face. Not your hands holding infinity in the palm, not these language letters making some kind of connected sense in their own kind of never before. Never particular burdens and wishes and desires held in brain or coming from elsewhere. Not you, not me, not us, not them, not any of it ever again, or since.

Ashley Thalman on Tent Talks Podcast

Tent Talks- Part One

Tent Talks- Part Two

Do I miss it? Of course I miss it.

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Thoughts on exile and the things we outgrew by Alex Caldiero. Clipped edit from, “The Sonosopher” by Torben Bernhard and Travis Low. Watch it on YouTube if it resonates.

A poets answer to “Do you miss the fellowship of Mormonism?” Any past things outgrown or excommunicated from by choice or force can take the place of the specifics here and the pain of your loss is justified.

Lidia's Thrust

“Thrust”

Lidia Miles drowned the pages in a tidal wave of body, art, animal, element, futurepast, sex, friendship, and time, my my my my, my. 🌊

August Garden- In the Face of Fuck

I’m v into flash at night in the garden right now. I’d like to invite everyone out in the garden to see- that’s part of my nature. I like to hold microphones up to the thrills and pains in life.

I am so lucky! I know and meet the most interesting people, I feel loved by them, I feel safe to share.

What a thing to feel!

What fortune!

In these most recent years I’ve become a kind of a devotee to “how it feels”, more than “how it looks” or “what I should do”. When I engage should and look, I find it useful to notice which aspects of me are in the drivers seat and where it takes me.

Some of my experience in this process has been unorthodox and strange and I’ve been very worried at times I would hurt people by not being what I thought I was, or what I wanted you to think I was. It’s embarrassing to be a person! So cringy to change! Heavy is the head that crowns itself in hyper-vigilance.

When I look through a technical (stay safe) or pathological (you’re not good enough, yet) lens I am not aware of this other “feel” thing. Feel is a different vibe, so now I am practicing feeling, which is goodhard.

A few weeks ago I was processing a core memory of being hit as a child and you know what I remember most? I most remember feeling in absolute awe that after the first punch you don’t feel it anymore.

What skill!

What a perfect mechanism!

And I was right. On one side of the coin our nervous system does something protective and evolved, but this dissociative state of not-feeling as a way of life got real deep on lack and deep on numb as it worked its programming for the last 40 years.

Learning to paint has taught me that I’ve done technique (stay safe) long enough to be burned out so now I am raising the energy of expression (I am safe, I feel safe). Sometimes “feel” is good looking and smooth but often it ain’t. But then again what the fuck is “good”?

The things about us, the ways we are and were brave in what @lidiamiles calls, “the face of fuck” may be called wounds, but wounds can also be voids, voids can be filled with whatever we put there to be amplified and materialized as our lens and life.

William Black, Staying Awake

“Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep”

– William Blake

stein, god, there there

God, in the form of Gertrude Stein, said “There is no there there.” What a liberating and grief laden burden joy to be a human on earth and what wonderful wonders to frankly forgive “there” and “someday” or “then” and “nostalgia” and see now, now, and now as the only, only, and only.

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

Hand painted backdrops by Ultraviolet Backdrops

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

Muse Magic Music // Bad Girls- M.I.A.

Call and Response

I have felt the calling from something deep and wild inside of me from childhood. If I look back at my first real photo session which was made in a classroom at Provo high with Milmaliisa Loeskow as my subject, I can see that I was always coming back to this. I don’t know about you, but everything I wanted and valued deeply in the discovering years of high school are still the very things that I love and want. I don’t think we really change all that much in life, rather we return to ourselves if we are lucky enough and brave enough to do it.

I believe that we each feel a life-long series of magnetic aches, a train at night shaking the walls, a buzz that signals us. The volume of my signal has increased exponentially since opening Ultraviolet. Through conversation, songs, posts, books, texts, sex. I’ve been connecting and returning to myself through these dots, these crumbs.

”Do what you know.” - An early morning whisper while laying in Andi’s cabin.

“You set your intention and go.”- Errin

”Niches bring riches” from Amanda at A.&.Co

“Go with your gut.” From “Backdrop Stock”’s instagram story.

“We cannot see you. Who are you?”- D’Arcy Bennincosa

And lastly, “women women women”- like a spell that rose from what I could see. I scrolled through my Instagram feed and asked myself what messages I was visually sharing with my followers. I visited my website, a collection of my own decade-long work and I saw it- it’s always women. Women sit at the center of everything I see, every story I tell. And creative women are the heart of my very best work.

Creative women are the clients I would shoot with pleasure and excitement if I were fantastically rich and had no need for money.

The dots began to connect, igniting me with the tears and laughter of finally finding something. This is demanding as much as it is exciting. I have to change everything from pricing sheets to marketing to, everything else. But I’ve been reunited with an old friend in myself. The friend that reminds me that I deserve to do the things that make me lose track of time, that spill my heart over with excitement.

Photography is work and I know how to work. I know how to risk, I know about time and writing and pricing. I know how to show up, communicate, make, deliver, invest in my gear, network, write and collect reviews. I know. I know and I can do it over and over.

Yesterday during my tarot reading with Zina Bennion she told a story of her father, Joe Bennion, a legendary potter who once-upon-a-time made a bowl that he could reproduce over and over and over. It sold, it was beautiful and valuable and he was becoming known for the shape and glaze of his palatable offering, but one day he realized that the latest batch readied from the kill/kiln had been sitting for days unseen. No spark, no excitement no drive to decend to the basement and see. So he stopped there to return to, or to find the things that ignited him- the work that got his fingers hot.

In the upheaval of the last few years of my divorce, extreme haircuts, hard and long runs, surgeries, resigning from my formerly beloved religion, selling my house, finding the love of my life, partnering with him, learning self-love, becoming a mother and again a bonus adult to two children, taking 3 van loads of old things to the thrift store after sitting with old life relics and my drawing attachments. A year of sifting through my old mission stuff in bins, letting go of friendships, throwing away journals, changing schools, building and opening a new studio- I’ve learned this: my magic is found in doing the unknown, unreserved thing that calls, that has always called. “Do what you know” is the best and most honest thing. A depth living comes alive in the space of responding to what calls us. Clarissa Pinkola Estés said,

“If we were to name only one thing that makes the Wild Woman what she is it would be her responsiveness. The word response comes from the Latin word, “to pledge, to promise” and that is her strong suit. Her perception and deft responses are a consistent promise and pledge to the creative forces.”

I have been patient in waiting to hear the magnet call clarify. I hear it now and I’m responding to it. Steve Jobs said, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

I knew Ultraviolet was a piece of my story but I didn’t know exactly how it would spark me, heal me, break me down, and require literally every dime, every piece of energy, every tear and every bit of moisture from my hands. I’ve been through weird emotional hell with it. But I knew that it would be part of my story- I just didn’t know what part. And now a piece of that has been illuminated, the call is clear.

My work is to collaborate with strong women who have a distinct artistic voice. Women who are ready to be seen, who make a wild go of their lives, who are drawn to honest images, women who share their nuanced stories. My work is to make those images with women who have heard the call to share their soul’s work like I have heard mine.

Taken by my sister, Shawna on the highest peak of Antelope Island.