this is a weblog entry about pictures which, ironically enough, contains none. this is about Kati and Trev, and why i love them anyway even if they are so resistant to the idea of me fixing their images on photographic emulsion... er, the ones and zeroes of cyberspace.

i do resonate very strongly with Trev's notion that having his photograph taken is like having his soul captured. this is an old Native American belief, and as far as that goes, i'm a Native American at heart... tribal to the core. doesn't matter which. Hopi, Navajo, Oglala Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne. sometimes i wish i was living in ancient North America, when those peoples lived on this land, in harmony with it, and in harmony with the universe. sure, there was death and pain and jealousy and bitterness, but these darker things will always be with us, alongside the good. what they did have, and what we are lacking now, is a sublime oneness with nature.

long ago, i was Lloyd Running Shadow. my friend and long-distance running pal in Hawaii, Tim Nakamura, christened me that. as i in turn had come to call him Tim Lone Hawk. we had long, long hair. we wore red bandanas a lot. we looked the part of these people in whom we believed with our lives. we ran, sometimes forever. we tried to become one with nature by reading up on the real natives of this land, and by being runners. so, you see, i take the idea of this soul-capturing seriously.

which begs the question... why then do i take pictures of you?

for the simple reason that memory is mutable. one can say that we are the sum of our memories. every nanosecond that flies past flies back into the realm of memory. so, we are dense with memories. everything gets filed away in some indecipherable neuronal system. maybe the frame of an image breaks apart inside our mind, and certain fragments of an image go here, others there, and eventually some mechanism puts it all together when called for. but i don't trust this! powerful as the brain is, i would rather trust the past as activated by the mechanism of using one's senses in the present... i.e., to use my eyes and gaze at a photograph or an image, and let the fragments gather in exactly the way i want them to. and no, the issue of being or not being 'photogenic' isn't relevant here. photogeneity has nothing to do with the emotional significance any given image or picture has for me.

and that right there, dear Trev and Kati, is the bottom line. the emotional content my images have for me. and as for the issue of privacy and the meta-reach of cyberspace, who, really, is going to look at these particular weblogs or course websites on which your images reside? certainly not the entire world. only a vanishingly small subset of it. and mostly, people we know. and mostly, me, for whom this unorthodox idea of family has blossomed into an incredible, deep reality... and whenever i will look at these pictures, and you can count on the fact that i will treasure these images for always, because they say to me: here i am, there you were, here we are now again.

it's the simple things in life that make me happiest: an image. a memory. a feeling.

the camera catches him often in air...
he seems weightless always, like Icarus
headed sunwards. and i, worrying Daedalus,
urge him onwards heedless of heat and fire.

she throws up an arm, flinches, head flailing away
as the bright bulb flashes, a mini bigbang
intruding in her space, the gravity of it
curving inwards in a solemn privacy:

do not capture our souls. it is said in smiles
and wry grins, but behind the obsidian hair
and the green eyes, a veiled request:
respect these images, and keep them safe.

so i, my digital eye in hand, take the flash
back in time, run the film backwards,
unfix the ones and zeroes... and encode them
into the fleeting frames of my mutable memory.

{ net.casting }
^