keep the wild inside

a correspondence about wilderness and art

BLUE WORLD

My parents were a mess and split when I was ten when the CIA started questioning the invoices my parents submitted as part-time spies in Beirut, Lebanon. I ended up with my father driving aimlessly around Asia and Europe for three years while both my mother and the CIA looked for us. I learned to make friends quickly, and to always ask questions. I had to accept other cultures and learned that everyone in every language is willing to talk about themselves, or to show you how they live even if you cannot speak their language.

Taking pictures of what I saw made sense to me long before I could afford a camera. I made mental images of my memory, and have spent the past twenty years revisiting everywhere I've been. And now wherever I go I make images to see if I can match what I saw then. The beautiful thing about trying to examine past experiences is that you keep making beautiful new past experiences.

The pictures below were taken by Seanie Blue. You can click directly on them (or on their accompanying links) for large size viewing. If you take any of them for your own use, please give the proper credit and a link back to this site.

Pictures of PEOPLE

CAT LANGLEY . . . . So much life already packed into such a small time. Cat is a misunderstood pornstar. Her phone rings every two minutes, of course, but she has ideas in her head clanging like bells every two minutes, too. To which does she listen? She assimilates so much information in such little time, but I think that what she really wants to think about is a whole range of emotions she cannot allow herself to talk about. Woman is tectonic, shifting beneath her surface.

EDDIE BECKER . . . . Shot at by gunships. Interviewing revolutionaries in underground tunnels. Fighting zoos, uncovering slavery stories in yuppie neighborhoods, ready for action. Becker is a tide of justice in a world of whirligig profiteering. Here he is posing as a pretty face. "Take my picture he says, so I can learn how to have some gigs like Abbi has," he says. "Look, don't I look nice, too? I'll bat my eyes, look --"

McQUEEN . . . I call my friend Steve "McQueen." He has no idea why. I do it because he is loaded with charm, and he's got the right genes: Palestinian father and Finnish mum. I ask him to pose in front of a TV set, and I get this picture when he kisses himself. McQueen tells me: “In Marseilles I run into some boys from Algeria, and they’re looking me up and down and talking in Arabic about how they’re going to fuck me up. Until I break out the Arabic myself and say, Who you talking about like that when I’m your brother, Motherfuckers, and then they’re all Hey, slapping hands and kissing me and saying We thought you was a French punk, Man. And as I’m chilling with them I can’t help thinking, This isn’t right. If I wasn’t part of the brotherhood, I would have had a broken jaw or worse, and that’s crazy.”

  
Pictures of PLACES

As shown in other places on this site, I have an affinity for Iceland. Not sure if it's the 12% Viking blood in me, perhaps longing for the westward drift that propelled the hardiest outlaws out of Norway toward Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland one thousand years ago. Maybe it's just the Borealis and the blizzards, since I'm not interested in Iceland during the summer months. Perhaps it's the golden twilight which lasts all day. It took me almost 50 shots of a group of ponies to get one I liked, and that was after I spend half an hour feeding them the fresh grass shoots from my side of the fence. What an education: the grass gathered for the ponies was stale, yellowed, and the grass I offered was fresh and sweet, but only if I kept the dirty roots in my hand and splayed the fresh shoots under the noses. They became my friends and battled for my breakfast gifts. I finally got the picture to the left.

The photo of the bay filled with ice floes I got in three shots. It was freezing, perhaps 20 degrees below zero with the wind factored in, and we were on a shoot with a model we seemed intent on killing in the wind. She hung in because of the lovely setting, and I took three shots to get what I wanted from the floe-specked bay. I remember thinking that this was the image I wanted to for the Arctic Circle, to convey the slow change in evidence in every direction. The glacial melt, the geothermal cooking, the tides, the volcanic black rock and the constant snow drift; the world is always changing. This was once what the Mediterranean Sea looked like, and it is probably what it will look like again.

Pictures for Prose & Projects

The next addition to this site is a piece called Supernova which comes from the Burn & Scar, a multifaceted project which has absorbed almost a year of my life. The picture I've included here is a collage of Abbi Hendrix fleeing the realities of George Gamow's book "The Creation of the Universe." More of this project will be shown here by August 25. Supernova is one chapter of a lengthy PDF presented in a comicbook-panel style. The story relates a secondary plot regarding the projects undertaken by Blue and Hendrix, who plays the part of Ananda Shields in the movie included as part of "The Burn & Scar." The picture of Abbi in the snow was taken by Blue, but the nebula photo is courtesy of NASA.

More coming August 25.