Desert

It is hard to think about photography in the desert.  So many have covered this topic, many so successfully.

This surreal landscape, even for those of us who have grown up in a desert (for isn't that what Los Angeles truly is?), fascinates most of us with its alien forms, its unrelenting sun and tones of beige sand reaching out past the horizon.  As opposed to the far-reaching landscape of the marine environment where, yes, there is also the blue prevailing color that is comforting, the desert brings us feelings of unease and a bit of danger.

And for imagery, the desert is about contrast, between the loneliness and the stark landscape beauty.  Between the need to see life and the desolate definition that requires hardship, struggle and lays bare not only our human, but life's need for one of its most basic elements: water.

Is it exotic?  Is it safe when wherever we tread - urban desert like Palm Springs or Tuscon - or foreign of the Sahara - we search out the strange creatures that could attack us?

The American Deserts are where we go for the exotic.  The empty spaces attract those who want to be our but without.  Those who escape, for a time, the harrowing winters, known as the "snowbirds."  Those who seek solace in the silence and in a place where the grand vistas speak to the silence.

In the desert we rarely sit inside to watch TV but venture outdoors, even in the most oppressing heat, to hike, sit on a porch to read and watch the sunset, breathe in the dry air and enter into a quiet moment, often with just ourselves.  With native vegetation mostly untouched, those with holistic or mystical yearnings arrive to discover what is there in the vacant space while at the same times, themselves in a place with few distractions.  The words of the "urban" desert: retreat and nature.

Even when social, the deserts are places of retreat, where one can meet together with like kind and focus.  It is a place of fantasy where someone like the late multimillionaire founder of Avery labels can purchase a swath of land and commission an LA-based sculptor to create a melting pot of mythic and mesozoic and mythologial beings that one drives through like a christmas/disneyland tour, standing silent, occasionally headless due to the high desert winds, to give offerings to some great god of visual perception and tourism

This past weekend, I did exactly that: meeting with children's writer friends in Anza Borrego, one of our nation's largest state parks.  Under the illusion that we were there for the wildflowers, we discovered so much more.

For me, so long now into photography the gathering brought me back to my writing roots.  It returned me to family memories of a visit 20 years past with children not yet even teens, driving off-road with un-licensed children at the wheel - one so small that she had to sit in front of me to gain the proximity to even reach the pedals.  The desert is a place of breaking the codes.

Most essential,  brought me to childhood, from scents of orange blossoms on the highway - no freeway - drives through the inland empire, stopping at the tracks for the trains to race through, to lush manufactured oasis' in Palm Springs where mountains turned obsidian in the night and dry hot air determined one's activities for the day.

Hope, stuff get abandoned in the desert.   We arrive full of hope.  Some of us leave full of despair. The artifacts remain, faded, sun-drenched.  In Southern California we even have a natural 20th Century artifact, the  Salton Sea.  Man-made, if not by design, but achieving a natural state, then subsiding, literally and figuratively, until both commerce and the environment combine to demonstrate its death toll until it, like the dcaying structures that surround it tell what we most wish not to hear: that man and his environment fades, no matter what we do.

I find it ironic that, although there are deserts worldwide and, in fact, we share a large part of our Western deserts  - the Sonoran - with the middle  east and probably elsewhere, there is a true American sensability to the Southwestern desert.

Gun Hay Fat Choy! The Lunar New Year

The Lunar New Year celebration has just ended.

In many Asian countries and communities, it is a fifteen day ceremony that commences the Lunar calendar.   As a part of my long-term project, FINDING CHINATOWN:An American Story, I pay an annual visit to the "chinatowns" in the greater Los Angeles area.

An account of this year's visit, the Year of the Black Water Snake, is posted on my FINDING CHINATOWN Blogspot, http://findingchinatown.blogspot.com/

Holiday Reflection

The last of 2012.   Quiet.  In between the xmas parties and tonight, the last, fittingly at a neighbor's to celebrate the coming of the New Year.

New Years Eve Day seems a quiet day.  The frenzy is gone.  We've eaten quite enough.   In two days, our work year begins, again.  That's ok as for me, a new year is full of challenge and surprise and I would wish that for all of my friends and associates.

Today I am taking down our tree.  It was beautiful even though not as large nor as full as those of latter years when we filled our two story space with the biggest, bestest and freshest ever.

Development has robbed us of the xmas tree stands by the trainyards downtown where we would stand at auction with all of Los Angeles, vying for trees brought down from a mythical Northwest forest where there was actually snow, still caught in some fir branches.  Gone with this holiday trek is the annual breakfast at Vickmans before and, after our leisurely drive with tree atop car from Alameda west along Olympic Boulevard to the sea, watching the slow development of Koreatown, the continuing evolution of our city.

That part of our life, even the larger closer family that used to gather for the holidays, is no more as older friends and family are lost and younger generations ofttimes too fade away into other lives.  There remains a sadness and an ache for once was, yet we count ourselves lucky to remain included in communities that make up so much of the sustenance of life.

There remains throughout a continuous thread that binds all this together.

The year end is a reflective time and, as I remove ornaments from the tree, I am finding glittery mementos from the fabric of my life brightly shining here, permitting me once more some of those moments.

There are the beaded eggs - some now shattered, others faded - I so patiently threaded and carefully wrapped around blown shells over three decades ago, sitting in the "women's lounge" - hard to believe such a lounge would still exist - of my law school. And the next year there: the styrofoam covered balls, with long straight pins dangerously falling on the floor.  All so much more fun than law school... and definitely part of the reason I became a writer and photographer.

My handmade sachets and hand-sewn whimsical Marimekko-fabric'd animals that we hung on the tree or gave to friends in those years with little money to spend on presents.

In the halcyon music industry years, the time I used album label cutouts to decorate the tree.

Soon, the tree was filled with my children's art and photos, hung proudly year by happy year.

Throughout there were the holiday gift from friends, wonderful imaginative objets d'art, including delights from those with whom I worked, like the handmade crocheted stars from a co-worker at United Artists. 

A few of the lovely silk animal ornaments that would decorate Mom's little tree the years before she died remain for me to hang, a vivid simple reminder of her interests in Asian art and order.

Felt ornaments of Sesame Street & other characters found so long ago in New England craft fairs, traditional German glass decorations, and other beautiful or strange stuff that it just doesn't hurt to hang up there once more.

And always ribbons, some historic like the red decorative ones with gold threads that I grabbed when I. Magnin, a historic San Francisco and then Southern California retail chain, went out of business.  And the others, like the ones that my Aunt Lillian always scooped up to use for the next year.   My aunt is also gone and today I am the one saving ribbons, but not the used wrapping paper!

 

Opened up in the frenzy of holiday preparation, then more leisurely wrapped away in the same boxes, year to year, the ornaments return me to family and friends; lives, loves and experiences from year to year, many as tarnished and ragged as the boxes themselves, taped and re-taped but holding still.

Christmas and the start of the New Year gift us with the opportunity to remind ourselves what is the best of us, both when we reach out to others in support and good wishes and when we turn into ourselves to hold dear and strong what we have lived and learned and then, go forward to use those memories and actions to make our lives and those of others glitter throughout the next year.

A HAPPY NEW YEAR to all.

Best for the Holidays

It has been a busy year, filled with some fascinating photographic activity, participation in several terrific exhibitions and seeing others - Paris Photo, FIAC, Art Platform, PhotoLA among the biggies and local and friend's work and exhibitions among the even more important -  PLUS two very positive review sessions: Palm Springs Photo Festival and Lens/Culture/FotoFest/Paris.

Loved being in the community of photographers, curators, gallerists, writers and making new friends and loved doing the work.  Stay tuned for my Winter Update, reports from the Detroit:Definition project when I return to Detroit in the Spring and for some other exciting news!

Loved as well enjoying my friends and family as yet another year passes that has brought me memories to cherish and a future to look forward to.

Happy Holidays to All.

Sara Jane Boyers

Fall at Schloss Neuhaus, Austria  ©Copyright2012 Sara Jane Boyers

Traffic Jams, Solved

 While it is true I seem to be looking for traffic for my GRIDLOCK series, at the same time I am keenly intrigued by the many solutions to be found for this more than annoying issue, especially in my home city of Los Angeles where, depending upon the time of day and circumstances, a drive from the beach to downtown can take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours....

Here, from a TEDx TALK about Stockholm:   Traffic Jams, Solved  http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/12/traffic-jams-solved/4160/

and the full TEDx Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/jonas_eliasson_how_to_solve_traffic_jams.html

The comments are also quite good.

In the end though, it is worth reading the Los Angeles Times architectural critic, Christopher Hawthorne for his comparison of our parade events - the Rock to LACMA and the Shuttle to the Science Center - to Rome.

Something to think about and, without even knowing about the article, echoed by many today.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-shuttle-rock-parades-20121007,0,6348873.story

Let us hope that these two events, to which I add the spectacle of light, planning and engineering of the Mulholland Bridge takedown, will inspire a new generation to be the creative element that sparks all the rest.

Gridlock, Bridges & Shuttles, oh my... PartTwo

Yesterday, with a friend who had to get somewhere in the evening, we waited until the last moment but the Shuttle never came.  A tire breakdown, a tree to be cut.  I didn't understand how much this could delay until this morning when I parked on Gramercy, a few blocks west of Western and a few blocks north of Martin Luther King.

Although it was just 7:45 am when I arrived, people were already there or walking toward MLK, watching the overhead helicopters to position themselves to see it.

A tremendous behemoth was ensconsed on our paltry boulevards, shifting right then left, almost never straight ahead to avoid the trees, especially on Martin Luther King Boulevard where the pines were planted in the Reverend's memory and could not be cut down.   The light was extremely direct and the photos contrasty, trying to catch detail in the large white space of the shuttle while at the same time trying to preserve the fascinating tiles of so much of its surface.  All one could think about was the engineering, of this object itself - and a clearer understanding of the Challenger tragedy when the tiles fell off - and then today, of just getting this down the street.

 

 

 

 

 

Great to be there, but also love watching this timelapse video of Endeavor's LA journey on the LA Times site:  http://framework.latimes.com/2012/10/15/time-lapse-video-space-shuttle-endeavours-trek-across-l-a/