Shutter Sisters

Look Out 2010

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2010 is fast upon us.  Time to put 2009 to bed and look out into the wide expanse of possibility the new year always brings.  So far in my short career as a photographer, I’ve been on the look out for the shots that are tight and close, revealing a certain kind of tenderness or connection.  This year, I intend to do the same, but maybe from a few steps back.   I wonder what I’ll notice about the ways we long for one another with something (anything!) other than my trusty 50mm on my camera.  I wonder what I’ll see up close this year with the point of view that the frame can say just as much a little bit more empty, a little bit more wide.

What would happen if you were on the look out for something slightly different for the coming new year?  What would you see through that lens?  What would you explore that’s brand new to you?

Show us “the classic” picture you always love to shoot–the vintage you 2009.  Then share something new you’d like to do with that camera as we look out to 2010.

As Sweet a Child As This

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I remember one Christmas when my son was still a baby, we decided to go to a Christmas Eve service with friends who were out of town.  At the time, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about going to church, but it seemed like the thing to do.  I’ll never forget standing in the aisle in the standing room only crowd, my baby in my arms and thinking, “Surely Jesus Christ himself was not as sweet a child as this.”

I’m sure it didn’t hurt that my ear-piercing screamer was also completely and totally asleep. 

Now my sweet boy is eight years old, and while he’s completely disabused me of any notion I might have about his divinity, he can still melt me just like butter.  Especially when I remember him as a baby dozing, so many Christmases ago.

If a sweet child in your life is making your heart beat a little bit faster this Christmas, go ahead and share.  Show us your angels sound asleep (like this sweet Josephine above) or in your arms or full of wonder under the tree.  Merry Christmas, everyone!

 

The Place Where You Stand

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“What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing” –C.S. Lewis

 

I didn’t think much of it the day I snapped this picture.  My sage guide wanted his feet photographed, and I obliged, not knowing at the time that in less than a week this holy man would take me on a trek to the top of a mountain where I would see my longings, my failures, my hopes and dreams in a whole new light.  Epiphanies are like that–unexpected, otherworldly, startling for reasons you can never quite understand.  Thank God, I had Stephanie with me that day to help me recognize the place where I found myself standing–the very center of a miraculous circle of divine support and Love.  I imagine I will never have a moment in my life like that ever again.

Maybe one of the reasons why I love to photograph feet so much is because I like to examine what grounds us and how our feet touch the earth–this same earth that continues to uphold and support us wherever we are, wherever we go.  You can be confused, light-hearted, shaken or full of joy–no matter.  It’s always good to be aware of the place where you stand and who it is that stands with you.

Today I’d like to invite you to replicate this photograph either on your own, with someone you live with or with someone you trust.  Show us who stands with you and where you stand–whether it be the linoleum of your kitchen or the macadame of your driveway.  Let us see you standing in your home or on the earth, acknowledging in a new way that you are not alone.

Those Ladies

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Odette tells the story of selling chickens and eggs as a child in order to care for the needs of herself and her friends in the refugee camps of Uganda.  By the time we finished, she likes to say.  We felt like those ladies from the big organizations who lend people money.

I always loved that part of the story–little girls feeling as powerful as grownups who were committed to making a change–but I didn’t really know what she meant.  Until Tanzania.

In Tanzania, I met those ladies and immediately fell under their spell.  They are quiet, they are wise.  They are measured in their energy and fierce in their focus.  They are staring down poverty–its ravages, its sources, its brutal effects–and they know what to do.  They are executing their own particular brand of justice–passing over the one they are supposed to favor for that girl in the back with fire in her eyes.  They are placing their bets on that live wire, even as they readjust their enormous handbags and stamp the dust out of their fashionable shoes. 

They are believing the girls they choose can show the rest how to escape the bowels of hell. 

Meet Juliet, the program trainer for BEST (Business and Entrepreneurship Support Tanzania).  It is her job to teach the entrepreneurial skills the poorest of the poor need to enter the market.  I watched as she checked in on the women she serves, questioning them like your favorite aunt–the one who believes in you and at the same time won’t mince words if you need to hear the truth.  She is tending them like a garden of possibility, one promising seedling at a time.

I don’t always take a good picture, she told me. But I doubted it could possibly be true.  How could the camera not love this radiance?  How could the lens turn away from this bedrock determination that everything is going to be just fine?

 

spirit carries

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We are walking on a thin muddy path that borders her rice patty.  This is the land she works with her husband in order to feed her children.  Before she obtained the loan from BEST, a locally founded NGO, she barely had enough to survive.  Her house was nothing more than pieces of sheet metal rigged together with scrap wood and rope.  Now she works this land and sleeps in a simple bed in a solid house with the profits of her own labor.

She is the tiniest slip of a woman, but her smile is wide and her steps are strong.  She is proud to show us what she has wrought with her own hands.  Her pleasure in this task radiates off her body, though she keeps her gaze to the ground and hardly says a word.

I try to wrap my mind around what it takes to keep this field, this family, alive and thriving.  I know I should be watching her hopeful eyes and capable hands for a sign, but all I can see is her feet.  How she carefully picks her way through the muddy field, how she knows where to step, how to walk, where to stand.  How the immense strength of her spirit carries her, even as the frailty of her body dares her destiny and expands her hope.

 

Teacher Johnson Goes to School

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It is the last day before everyone leaves.  The internet lab–the first of its kind in Arusha and maybe even Tanzania–is humming as the kids type their tweets back and forth to one another and then their new counterparts around the world.  Teacher Johnson, handsome as always in his dress shirt and freshly polished shoes, logs on–could it be?–on the last day, for the first time?

Teacher Johnson!  You don’t have any followers!  Where are all your tweets?  I don’t know what he’ll do on Monday when everyone is gone.  Did you go to the class for the teachers?  He feels my panic and flashes me that sheepish, worried smile. We both know how hard the volunteers worked; how insistent they were this could happen, that it would be easy, even if we both had our secret, silent doubts.

I’ll get it.  I’m getting it, he says, as he hunts and pecks his way forward into his new responsibility as internet advocate extraordinaire. 

This is how it is when we bring new things halfway around the world.  We have no idea how foreign things  feel.  We glide right over how strange it is to trust that we’ll still be together when we’ve always been so far apart.  We have no comprehension of what it means to be over and over again left behind and then in one instant, forever included.

I promise to retweet him religiously.  To help him get the most followers of any tweeter in the school.  His eyes flash with the spark of competition.  His fingers move a little faster as we joke and smile.  He is deciding to believe it might stay, this tiny thread connecting divergent worlds.  He is deciding to put a sliver of hope in it.  He is deciding to try.

You can follow Teacher Johnson’s clever quotes and honest questions at @teacherjohnson1 on Twitter.

 

 

Kiss and Tell

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Greetings in Rwanda are warm and lingering.  Men in Rwanda, for example, have a custom of gently letting temples touch, first left, then right, then left, when they first see each other.  Women and children extend not just a hand but their whole arm for the other to clasp for as long as a minute before letting go.  It’s not uncommon to see two people draped around each other, simply as a way of saying hello.  Still, for all the endless displays of cozy affection, kissing each other–even on the cheek–really isn’t very common, and kissing with a big smoochy, smacking sound?  Never.

All cross-cultural correctness taken into account, I still couldn’t bring myself to get with the no kissing program.  The babies were too delicious.  The children were too sweet.  The old people were just too loveable for me to keep those kisses to myself.

Thankfully, this unheard of practice of covering someone’s cheeks or face in loud smoochy kisses was met with laughter and much delight.  I think everyone was glad I didn’t hold back—-those old ladies most especially.  What can possibly make you feel more loved than a spontaneous smack delivered with enthusiasm and so much love?

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Do you have any kissing pictures that make your heart take a little leap?  A little moment there of unbridled affection?  Show us your kisses.  We promise not to tell.

 

Everything is Going to Be A-Okay

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Just one stop, Innocent said, as a very sluggish Mutoni slid into the backseat next to me.  Two stops, it turns out, to find out if this kid has malaria (she did), and then fifteen more to run our errands before our friend and driver William would turn around and bring us back home again.

To our credit, we didn’t know she had malaria until we got the second malaria test back and the day was almost finished.  Still.  We dragged that kid from shop to shop looking for the converter we needed and then from bank to bank looking for a Western Union so we could get more cash.  She spent the entire afternoon sweltering in the car, playing with my camera, taking pictures of her feet, the upholstery, people walking by, without one complaint or the slightest concern.  When was the last time that happened at your house?

Of all the photos from our trip, this one is one of my favorites.  Mutoni in the foreground, taking whatever comes.  The doctor, accomplished and confident, knowing just how to treat her.  President Kagame, the darling of Africa, looking on from the poster in the background, telling you every five seconds on television or the radio that with hard work and faith and love, everything is going to be a-okay.

I have less complicated challenges and I’m not always sure of such things, but being with Mutoni that day, I believed.  There’s just something about faith.  Something about trust.  Something about believing it’s all going to work out, that blows everything else away.

 

 

Picture Hope: The Truth of the Matter

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“I don’t think there’s anything wrong,” my friend tells me after the tenth hour of hashing things out at a weekend long planning meeting where I was less engaged than usual.  “I just think you’re not on this continent anymore.  You’re there.”

I start to object, make my case for why it’s not true and then I come across this picture, taken by one of the kids running around in the yard with the Rebel XTi I can hardly keep track of the second we get to the village.  I can’t tell if it’s 1950 or 2010.  The only thing that makes sense is the ease and peace of mind I feel looking back on myself in this scene and the hope that stirs in my heart whenever I think about my future.

Embedded was one of the words Stephanie used to describe me in Rwanda.  Seamless was another.  Merged.

Whatever the term, I think my friend got it right.  Something deep in me has made the move.  I know what I’m meant for now.  I know what I need to do.

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How about you?  Do you have a photo that reminds you of a defining moment?  A version of you that helps you know who you are and what matters to you?  Share your favorite self-defining portraits in the comments below.

Fanta = Love

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It’s not a minute over 10AM and there he is sending the girls out for a treat.  In Rwanda, there’s no greater privilege than when someone serves you Fanta.  It doesn’t matter if it’s really coca-cola or Sprite or orange soda, the word for this treat is Fanta, and for momentous occasions, nothing else will do.

So go ahead, take the cap off that warm soft drink and sling it back like it’s champagne on New Year’s Eve, even if it’s bright and early on a Wednesday morning.  Fanta says someone is happy to see you.  Fanta says you’re an honored guest.  Fanta says you’re presence is a moment to remember.

We sat in silence and drank our fair share and then some–our host’s eyes shining with happiness.  A houseful of girls giddy from a sugar buzz.  How is it that the simplest things can tell you that you matter?  How is it that the magical appearance of a lukewarm soda can let you know you’re loved?

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What simple thing is making your eyes shine with happiness today?  Lend us a look in the comments below.