Clint

We had been on the road for about a month, slowed by an epic drug-fueled night in Southern Oregon that damaged everything around us and had us needing recovery time. I learned the linchpin story that changed the way I viewed an unknowable past, something so dark that it was hard to discern without recoiling.

On a bit of a whim, we detoured into the charming town of Ferndale, CA -- a three-block strip of Victorian facades and old-timey kitsch surrounded by rich river-bottom meadows and redolent with the scent of cattle. An excellent dinner and a few bottles of wine had us in a giggly-yet-conspiratorial mood when we returned to the Gingerbread House to have our young hostess hand us her home phone number. There was another set of guests in the room across from ours but no staff onsite overnight. She left with a cheery wave and we scampered out to the car to snag a couple bottles of Japanese whiskey. The other guests were a young couple and they had returned from THEIR dinner and promptly turned on a television. Funny, I don't even remember seeing one in our room. The common areas were our first thought for playing but we quickly discovered that every bedroom in the rambling mansion was unlocked and we drank our way from room to room looking for interesting corners.

Jess was hurtling down the hallway back to our room, green negligee and heels a fitting complement to her wild red hair and an empty whiskey bottle in each hand, when the door across from ours opened. I was further back in the shadows but caught the boy's face peer out at the commotion and grow pale as if some sort of wraith were assaulting him. The door closed abruptly and several locks were latched firmly. The boy had more sense than I in that moment but I have always wondered what he told his partner?

I had first seen Kay, an outdoorsy blonde from Southern Oregon, when her boyfriend began taking pictures of her and she started making forays into the modeling scene. Their pictures were intimate in the way of partners and were immediately striking. We made our acquaintance online and the two of them came up to shoot with me. In a funny coincidence, when they finally excused themselves to meet the aunt who was putting them up I got a note from an old friend exclaiming "you just shot with my nephew and his girlfriend!" It's a small world!

Sarah, on the other hand, had never modeled until reaching out to me online. She, too, was staying with an aunt but it was to escape and she was looking to shake off a religious upbringing by exploring herself. We shot a few times in the studio as we got into autumn that year and her playfulness and intense delight in her body was obvious. She began shooting with other photographers and was flooded with offers, honest and otherwise, almost immediately. Her beauty was a physical thing -- seeing her naked for the first time took my breath away. I don't believe I ever managed a picture of her that really caught the force of that beauty.

The holiday season began with unseasonable sunny days and Sarah was coming over to my house to shoot when Kay dropped me a line that she was in town and at loose ends. I quickly invited her and we spent the day playing with lace curtains, the sunlight alternately exploding off Sarah's intensely pale skin or disappearing Kay from the image when a cloud would interfere. I remember it mostly as a frustrating day of "too bright! too dark!" LOL.

The girls both ate as if no-one ever fed them and then broke out my Dad-bong (as a friend referred to the tall glass smoker). They were dedicated stoners and could smoke quantities that would leave me incapacitated. I did not join them. Later in the afternoon, another younger friend showed up to join in and by mid-afternoon the girls were into my wine cellar. At various points each of them felt comfortable enough to hit on me, which I gently refused. While they were all adults, technically, the age difference was far too great. And I recognized that they were feeling safe to be flirty, probably knowing that I wouldn't actually pursue them.

This period, in particular, has given me some food for thought in the matter of young women and photography. Certainly we chase youth in many ways -- our entire commercial/advertising realm is built upon it. I won't say it's WRONG. But there is a fine line between the power imbalances of older men and younger women and the sort of exploitation that results in abuse. I was terribly fond of a group of young women who spent time with me during those years -- they were experimental, exploring new parts of themselves, each gorgeous in their own way and I certainly adored each of them. But they were young enough to be daughters. I take pride in having provided a safe place for them to BE something that they wanted to be in that moment and keep my teenage-self crushes in my own head. They were all remarkable young women and deserved that respect. I ran into one of them, for about a year a weekly visitor, coming out of a coffee shop with her mother one day. She gave me a hug and then turned to her companion and said, "Mom, this is the photographer I was telling you about!" and I saw the look in her mothers eyes of "oh REALLY" as she evaluated whether I was a danger to her daughter. I must have passed because our sessions continued, my model often calling me to say that she had bought a bag of oranges or some other random item and was on her way to the studio with an idea.

The downside to amateur models, of course, is that they are not invested in the thing and eventually they succumb to the larger world -- boyfriends, parents, jobs, travel. Life begins to happen and they disappear. The worst outcome is hearing about bad experiences -- one young friend was attacked by a photographer and cloistered herself away (not unreasonably, but leaving a number of us missing her and saddened at her experience). Another was flooding by offers from pornographers who saw the innocence as something to package in stages of degradation. No, not all porn is degrading but the vast majority is. One unique and remarkable young model seized the whole concept and began a process of body-modification that took her from a lithe and playful beauty to a duck-lipped, over-breasted caricature with hair extensions and a fake butt. Also a lot of popularity but horrifying to those who enjoy natural beauty. And Sarah, whose story and beauty still haunt my memory, was reigned in by a controlling boyfriend and disappeared into obscurity.

Perhaps something I see in each of them, captured in photographs, is the potential they had to be special. Sometimes that moment is fleeting, as quick as a glance over the shoulder and a particular light. Sometimes it burns so brightly that it consumes everything and everyone who sees it.

Patches of winter sun became moments captured. Lessons learned.

I write to you from the Upper Left Corner of America, the city of Portland Oregon which is famous as a bastion of resistance to Fascism.

Today I'd like to be watching the college football game with a friend and planning for an upcoming model shoot that I've put a lot of resources into -- gathering some of my favorite models for what should be a creative romp. I wanted it to be fun and whimsical and beautiful.

Instead I am watching my government threaten the world, suck the ego-dick of the Russian dictator and brutalize my fellow citizens. We cannot tolerate it. We ARE NOT tolerating it. In Minneapolis there are cars in the roads that have been rammed by masked men, windows broken, occupants taken. My friends there say that the signs of disappearance are everywhere. Teargas thrown at any group of people on the street. Flash-bang grenades tossed at children.

The men doing this are afraid. They are afraid of beauty and engagement and difference and life. They are afraid of art and skin color and music. They are afraid of women. They are afraid of us. This isn't just one man, I'm afraid. It's a collection of malevolent souls that each have their own hatreds and fears and jealousies. It is a slithering-together of every evil thing sensing their own kind. On the bright side, we know where they are now.

America has lived with this. Slavery, Jim Crow, the Yellow Peril. We hated the Irish, the Italians and Catholics in general. We hated Asians, Mexicans and Pakistanis. But I am now 60 years old and I grew up believing that our hatred was waning and we were learning to move past our fear. And by my count, THAT is the attitude of MOST of my fellow Americans. We are not afraid of difference. We are not afraid that accepting gays will make us gay. We are not afraid that hearing another point of view will destroy our own. We are not afraid to love our neighbor and do what is necessary to protect them.

We are not afraid of our government.

So to the rest of the world. Sorry. We're going to have to reset the country and it's gonna be hard. But stick with us. We're going to win. These evil bastards are going to lose. Don't give up on us.

She arrived via a friend with an interest in art modeling as therapy. Looking through the archive I can see the scars from her teenage cutting addiction and hear her protestation that she wasn't "beautiful enough" to have her picture taken. Over the course of a year we worked together repeatedly and her quirky take on physicality and her joy in being naked in the environment made her absolutely wonderful as a model.

I don't know whether the enthusiasm waned or if Real Life reared its head. She and her partner were starting a restaurant and her obsession with modeling might have run its course. I had seen her work with others in the community but one day her social media profiles were gone and the days stretched out after that and it turns out that was seven years ago. I went back to try to find a trace of her and she seems to have vanished into a physical reality that the internet cannot touch. I'm having dinner with the mutual friend who introduced us this weekend and perhaps she knows something.

I remember a girl from Banff whom I met one summer in Seattle. She was beautiful and we were young and we hung out for a week and she told me that she believed she was the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix but she didn't know how to play guitar. We fell in love for five days and then she was gone, saying "come visit me in Canada" and that was all the information I ever had to find her. A slim brunette in Banff. I'm sure I knew her first name at the time but not her last. I never went to Banff but I did go to Boulder CO at the end of that summer and was introduced to a friend of a friend who I found just as irresistible and was just as in love with for the week we had together and then I got back on a train headed for California and we never spoke again. We were young and our parents had phone numbers. I never got hers. I didn't have one to offer.