What is compelling to me is the lack of something. The abandonment, the purge, the deletion. The burning and the freeing. To watch a need, and by that actually I mean a want, a desire, or a habit, go up in smoke is to take on the weight of said smoke. What is left is only ash and potential.  

I don't do well switching rapidly between multiple tasks. To engage in two things at once is to do each thing with diminished quality, more slowly. This isn't restricted to a particular moment in time - it can apply to longitudinally demanding tasks. This means that the demand of being a good parent and a good photographer are often directly at odds, and the more emphasis that I put on one, the more I have to let go of the other one. I've heard people say that one can inform the other, taking each to new heights. I don't reject that premise, but it is a clean and positive philosophy that does not map well on the day-to-day life of these roles. That benefit may appear in spans of years or decades, but not so much this weekend. While I often photograph my family, they are not my primary project in the medium, and I don't think they ever will be. I’ve photographed family intermittently for about two decades now. Some of my favorite pictures come from this work. But there are limits. These sometimes conflicting roles of parent/husband/photographer can put me into a deeply ambivalent position, and when this happens I need to take breath and let go...of something.  

When I am in a photography project I prefer to be deep into it, and if I have to keep coming back out of the head space I am in when working on it, I can lose the thread that kept me engaged. If I lose that, the return is threatened. I need substantial progress to be made before I can shelve it and bookmark it to be built upon later. Working through projects sometimes feels like trying to interpret a code, and if I don’t have enough pictures, or enough of a sequence, or some other concrete semblance of progress then I have nothing legible to come back to. The initial idea or inspiration may have faded and while that is okay, while grit can push a project forward, it is difficult to grind on a wayward path. The direction must be established in order to channel grit. That takes time - it doesn't happen in a day or a week. And that time - that sort of extended quiet time - is intermittent in its availability, but as my son grows it starts to take on the contours of the school year.

Recognizing this, as his school year started to wind down last spring I decided that I was going to try to pause ambition or intention with my practice for the duration of the summer. I thought that since he's entering a new chapter (kindergarten) so shall I. I didn't make a goal of not photographing at all, that would have defeated the point, it would have been too directive. It was just to let things come, or not, and to try and not worry about it.  

Summers don't tend to be particularly fruitful times anyways. The light just doesn't align with what I want in a picture, it's too hard and too clear for too much of the day (days shrouded in wildfire smoke notwithstanding). The heat is best tolerated in the pool or in the Lake. I do tend to find ways to work on a few ideas anyways, but not as much this year. I don't think I've had a summer where I made less pictures than this one in possibly twenty years. Going into the summer I felt like I was putting aside an old friend, but sitting here now I wonder if my break wasn't long enough. The state of the photograph in today’s world continues to grow more mysterious and its relevance becomes more and more of an urgent a question that some days I have a better answer to than others.

I did not replace every moment that I might have spent on photography with being an involved parent. I just did something else with that time other than worry about making progress in my practice. I walked the dog more and gave her more time to poke around, did yoga, started running a bit more, cooked some, played tennis poorly. Most importantly I tried to enjoy time with others when I could, without worry about what there was to be done next. When your primary boss is yourself it can be tough to convince them they need to let up. It is especially tough when, as I am now, you look at the pictures you've made recently and you see just about nothing at all worth printing, let alone marking as something worth keeping in your catalog. 

Somewhat related, the last time I had any caffeine was on August 14th. Anyone who knows me understands that I enjoy pulling espresso shots in the morning. When I travel I sometimes bring a kit to grind and pull by hand. My wife gifted it to me on Father’s Day a few years ago - an encouragement and acknowledgment of my dependence. I take notes on if a particular bean needs to be ground at setting 24 or 27 on my grinder, and if it takes 5 seconds longer to pull a shot if I grind it too finely. I try to remember Voltaire - perfect being the enemy of good and all and so I will still enjoy a bitter shot that pulled a little too long, but you get the point. With that background, four years ago now I started giving up my espresso for anywhere from 2-8 weeks at a time, twice a year. Once at the end of summer and once around the end of winter. 

As you might imagine, the first week is harder. I have learned to schedule it during times of planned routine disruption, for instance during travel, if at all possible. This helps because the withdrawal falls into the background. After that first week or so, everything in me relaxes, every time. Whatever is urgent is less so. Whatever is irritating is less so. I am not less creative, and I am not less productive. I may feel less productive, but the evidence says nothing less than usual has been accomplished. More often it is the opposite. 

It is a useful counterpoint to the caffeinated feeling of bouncing from one thought to the next. It almost makes me feel as if I might actually be able to multitask, if I would just leave the espresso aside permanently. But I am not ready for that. It's not even the high from the caffeine - it is the espresso itself, for me. The high is almost the price to pay for the enjoyment of a good shot (which is - thus far - impossible with decaf, I've tried) and so I willingly pay it for 3-4 months in a row, every time. Until I cannot anymore. Until the price becomes too high, until I am a little too anxious a little too often. If this sounds like the musings of someone with a dependency problem, so be it. I am not alone. It is socially acceptable, it is culturally encouraged, even!

I never have any difficulty diving back into an espresso habit, despite its negative and cumulative impacts that arise after a few months of consistent use. It's fair to say I never really break it. I do abstain long enough to appreciate life without it - to see and to feel the difference, to understand that the energy that it gives me is mostly of the nervous and shallow kind, just getting me back to a baseline from withdrawal. The difference is significant and I prefer how I feel without it. 

With photography, it is different. I try to be active in my reflections about the medium but I am always more or less in it at the same time. Accessing a certain distance from it has never been consistently built into my practice, and without that distance some levels and types of insight are probably inaccessible. I've gone short spurts without the camera - the last intentional one for a few weeks a few years ago as I tended to the spring garden, but I wonder if it wasn't enough. 

I've always imagined that one price I would pay (if you would call it that) for choosing to pursue this is that I would never retire until I was physically incapable of making a picture. Besides the fact that my social security contributions were less than optimal, the prospect of having nothing to work on scares me straight. What is it to live without making work? An artist who is lucky to be able to keep working almost always would want to, right? 

But maybe the medium changes, maybe the form changes, maybe the practice changes. It's difficult to see these things as they happen, they tend to reveal themselves in time. Sometimes words have no place compared to what a picture can do, but the picture and the time have to be the right sort. How much time is there for photographs these days?

Sometimes I feel as if I am writing myself out of photography. It is no doubt partially related to the technological upheaval we are living through. Any photographer should pause and consider the relevance of the medium and their relationship to it in this time of change. There are new questions that need to be answered about the medium and to keep practicing it without forming updated answers feels perilous. The response may be that the photographer keeps going just as they had before, but that's not the point.

This past summer notwithstanding - I am making pictures now that might not be so different than what I did fifteen years ago. I am not trying to reinvent anything, not trying to push boundaries, only to trying to do the best version of the pictures that feel intrinsic to me, that engage in some dialogue with what I see as a social landscape, always my first love. 

Rather than drastic change I favor incremental and marginal improvements. Perhaps a lifetime of fine tuning could get me somewhere. At the moment I am not interested in what it means to push photography forward. It has gone so far that it seems to have fallen off a cliff. I’ve not been taken in by any art “deconstructing” the photograph in years. The word itself has lost much of it's widely understood meaning.

I am interested in channeling what the medium of photography can do that other mediums explicitly cannot do, and in doing that to the best of my ability and to the best ability of the medium. So many pictures - not necessarily photographs, but pictures that resemble photographs - now function as agents of alienation. I want to make photographs that foster a sense of closeness, being, presence, togetherness...an appreciation for life, even if that is through images that show how difficult and troubled the world can be. Photography at its best is capable of that, of bringing a viewer closer to home, wherever that is, even if home is unpleasant, and even if only in the mind.

There is a sense of calm in me now that I haven't had for awhile. I don't know if it's because I haven't picked up a camera much lately, or it's because I haven't picked up an espresso for a few weeks, or a bit of both. The new season is part of it, but the world doesn't feel calm at all, so why am I light right now? Why am I a wisp of smoke?