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.

Portraits with Maddie Beeton

I remember the first time I met her. The women crowded around the pine cabin table set off-center of the room. She wore a tank top. Hair pulled back, rings, earrings, jeans, whatever. The soul showed. I held back my feeling of recognition because I was the host this go around and she the attendee but, I knew I had found a friend.

Maddie Beeton is filled with insight and poetry. She is soul wise, curious, brave and adventuresome. We’ve consumed so much coffee and cried and laughed knowing they are the same thing. I like to cook for her, she likes to listen. We like to rip the world apart and put it back together again with time and the time we chose to spend together.

A few weeks after my ex-husband moved out I had a stem cell transplant in my eyes and she was there. She knew the divorce was long-coming. She had been there, she knew.

I wish every woman had the blessing of someone who had been there, and could understand. She knew the pattern that came of sobbing sorrow and the way that good memories come back for seconds, dipping into regret. She was there day after day, tending to my home, my dog, my heart, my strange and specific needs for darkness. She knew that I was recovering from a binge of bravery that only time would sort. And it’s sorted. And Maddie has been that rare friend that cheers me. She loves when I’m doing well, she foresaw a lot of the good that I’ve found and she reflects that back to me with kindness.

Maddie isn’t afraid of being in the middle of life, on the frays of the uncomfortable, uncommon, or wild. We go together like that. She is one of the most dear people to me and I love her without end.

I photographed Maddie at Ultraviolet Studios and we followed the session up with food and talking about aliens and the soul. As we do. You can find Maddie and her adventures on Instagram at @madelinebeeton and at her website HERE.

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.

Lake Washington Portraits with Priscilla Strauss

I remember the first time I saw a photograph of Priscilla Strauss. The photo was a perfectly toned black and white image taken on Priscilla’s wedding day by my friend Kiera. I wanted to know her and talk to her. I called her in.

Over the years the concentric circles of life, interests, and the collective evolution of the women in my life who feel the charge of, “It’s time” circumstance drew Priscilla into my life.

Priscilla Bingham is deeply creative. Her work as a Kundalini Yoga instructor and student, jewelry alchemist, sound medication and conscious eating guide provide an invitation for slow, deliberate and powerful healing.

I have been lucky to have a friendship of sharing insights, discussing the need for deepening morality, shared movement, conscious parenthood, and of course, and above all, the art with which all of these tender things need to be handled. I learn so much from Priscilla. She has helped empower me with tools to be a better, more free version of myself; from white tantric and golden milk to the energetic power behind chanting and laughter this woman has a mission and to know her uncommon outlook is to know power.

Priscilla has heard the call to rise and share her voice, her experiences, her humor and her strength with the world and I am so lucky to support her, witness her and feel the power of her immense artistry and compassion as it is shared with the world.

Portraits taken on at the shore of Seattle’s Lake Washington.

Portraits with Erika Eddington

I have been photographing Erika for seven years. I have images of her hunched over a table, fiddling with petals in her early 20’s with old-soul fashion. She wore a striking white lace top tucked into something perfect.

Once we images of her precariously teetering on a wooden ladder while wearing woven wedges. Sweaty and determined we set a scene in an overgrown field, both of us pushing away stalky sunflowers, hoping the ladder would hold. We needed her high, we needed her caught in the late fertile light of September. Like yesterday I see her straw hat angled in picturesque style on her curl-topped head, surrounded by sunflowers.

We made photos on her wedding day, standing on a carpet of summer grass with perfect Claudia Dell contrapposto. She wore a classic cream dress, a peach in hand, wearing a bemused smile.

I have behind the scenes images from my Provo studio where she arranged flowers to top my Dotter’s tiny head and later atop Carol Lambert’s elderly one.

Mrs Lambert’s granddaughter hired me to photograph her purple-obsessed grandmother and I hired Erika to make floral crowns. We worked together to make images that captured Carol in her aged glory; crone, mother, maiden, girl- all the parts of a woman there and gone, rising to old age in the white-haired woman who sat regal, in flowers. Carol died a few days after that session of royal purple and flowers. We caught that image just in time.

As women and creatives, Erika and I have seen things, life has intersected over us and we’ve witnessed it together and apart; a confluence of witnessing and documenting, sharing and showing.

Erika has allowed me to chronicle her majestic life unfolding; here a little, there a little while mine unfolded unseen behind the camera. Totally comfortable and trusting, our relationship has always been fed by apertures and flowers. Each time we’ve worked together we basked, created and remembered while I attempted to understand the ethereal spaciousness of the archetypal woman in myself, in her, in Carol, in us all.

And so it is.

Here are some images from last Spring when we celebrated Erika. I hope to make photos like this again.

And so it shall be.