According to www.tripcuba.org Varadero has, “…its incredible fine sand beach and warm, crystal-clear waters, making it one of the best beaches in the world.” I’ve lived near the ocean almost all of my 74+ years, but have never been much of a beach goer, so I can’t speak to use of the superlative in their description. It was picture postcard perfect though, and I do know something about that. Our group had taken a day trip from Havana, stopping in Matanzas for some education and demonstration of Santeria, and then on to Varadero. I have a vague memory that this woman, a member of our group, was an executive with the World Bank in Washington D.C., but don’t quote me. The older I get, the more memories I have, and the less accurate they are. More importantly, she had some great hats!
Up early, I walked down to the Malecon to watch sunrise over Morro Castle, guarding the entrance to Havana harbor. Just a few months earlier a student asking a technical question at a Nikon School mentioned he was preparing for a trip to Cuba. Asking him more about the trip I found out the total cost for round-trip airfare from Miami, a week’s stay in a tourist hotel in Old Havana, with breakfast, all transfers, and some tour guiding from a professor at the University of Havana, was barely more than it would cost me to stay home. It was a fascinating experience. Walking around at all hours of the day and night, with lots of camera gear (which almost put me over the ridiculous weight limit of 22 lbs. allow to be taken there), I never felt unsafe. or unwelcome. On the contrary, I’ve never been propositioned more. The decades long American embargo seems absurd considering people from anywhere else in the world can go there routinely; lots of contact and communication between people would have to be more productive and beneficial to Cubans and American businesses.
It was Monday morning and I was headed home from a weekend teaching Nikon School in Denver. There was fresh snow on the ground, mostly unmarked by human activity so far, except for how the snow traced and outlined contours. As we were boarding the flight, some crew member mentioned we would not be a full plane because the runway was not long enough for taking off in the cold with a full load. I’m generally an aisle seat guy, but there was an open window seat next to me, and the window pane was essentially clear of smudging and scratches, two things seldom true, especially simultaneously, and the abstract patterns on the ground were intriguing visually; a trifecta.
A few days earlier I had spotted this long, tree-lined drive that rose up into a large stand of trees that likely masked a home and farm buildings; the scene practically yelled at me, “Take My Picture!” At the first opportunity, I took three of my workshop students with me and went back to check it out. We talked about trying not to trespass by staying in what we assumed would be a public right-of-way close alongside the road where the driveway ended. A couple of minutes into walking up and down the roadside looking for the perfect (my perfect) angle, a car pulled over, stopped, and an older gentleman got out. As he approached, I figured we were busted and hoped we could get by with a quick apology. It turned out it was his driveway, his trees, the trees he had planted along the drive when he was a young man. He liked that we found the scene attractive, but did mention that now the trees were bigger and he wished he had planted them farther apart. He invited us up to his home. A hard-packed dirt courtyard, with heavy tree shading, and an assortment of chairs and tables made it clear this was the family hangout. He introduced us to his wife, his brother, his brother’s wife, and his mother. They served us cold drinks and snacks (not prepackaged). He took us on a tour of his beautiful home and art collection. I went through at least three rolls of film photographing this woman, his mother. She said something about a crazy photographer, but she was laughing, and I did not seem able to stop. All of this communication happened even though none of them spoke any English, and only one of us spoke just a basic amount of Italian.
Near the end of the movie “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” Judy Dench’s character says, “Nothing here has worked out quite as I expected.” Maggie Smith’s character replies, “Most things don’t. But, you know, sometimes what happens instead is the good stuff.”
The north end of Tybee Island, at the mouth of the Savannah River, is a very user-friendly place these days, with a parking lot and food service in the summer, plus sandy beaches. In the 1960’s, before beach re-nourishment programs, jetties were used to try to retard erosion. Beach-goers did not go to north Tybee back then; the rusted jetties were ugly and dangerous to swim around. That made it the perfect trysting place for my best friend and his girl when we were finishing up high school (Jenkins HS, Class of 1965). It was a moody atmosphere, with lots of privacy. There was a section of an old sea wall still standing which made a wind-sheltered snuggling place. They called it “Summer Place,” I’m pretty sure referencing the Sandra Dee/Troy Donahue movie, “A Summer Place.” Nothing so attractive as the forbidden. Whether or not Bobby and Joanne did anything more than petting, and only on top of clothes, I do not know, did not know. But I took this young woman I was enamored of to this special place in the hopes something in the air would inspire some of the same amorous notions in her for me. Alas, no, although I suppose it did work in a way. She was also enamored of Bobby.
Every time my wife sees this photograph she tells me how handsome this guy is. Every time. We were hanging out in Venice for a few days, after leading a workshop in Tuscany, and having some lunch at one of the cafes that surround San Marco. I was playing with some Black & White slide film Kodak was considering marketing which they had shared with some of us to test. He was serving us lunch and I asked him if I could take his picture; he immediately struck this pose. I do like his jacket.
It’s a pilgrimage I make whenever I can, to Point Lobos. I think I’ve done it now 4 or 5 times. It is a weather, wind, and water tortured stretch of Pacific coast just below Carmel, CA, beautiful in its severities and contortions. One of my Top Five Photographers Ever is Edward Weston, a complicated man, but an inspiring photographer to me during my professional adolescence. For much of his later life he lived in Carmel, photographing often in the Point Lobos area, the tidal pools, beach and rock erosions, twisted tree bark that looks like it was painted by Van Gogh. This shot is from Weston Beach, part of a new Weston Beach Gallery on my website. While in Carmel I also got to stop by the Weston Gallery and geek out talking with the director Richard Gadd, looking at vintage prints from Imogene Cunningham, Brett Weston, Wynn Bullock. Thank you so much, Richard.
We took what must have been a French-era train, overnight, from Hanoi up to Sapa in the northwest highlands of Vietnam; our cabins were mostly bare except for two sets of bunk beds. One of the “trekkers” on our photo trip had bought a bottle of rice wine, which was mainly interesting because inside the bottle was a coiled cobra with a scorpion in his mouth. Of course with that sort of presentation, you have to at least try it. I think there were five of us standing around chatting when we opened the bottle and passed it around. Remember the days when you would pass something around for everyone to take a hit, and did not worry about shared body fluids? In this particular case, it might still be okay; the stuff was so vile it would intimidate any self-respecting germ. I can’t remember what it tasted like, because the smell was so bad even before you got it to your mouth. Being manly men of course, we finished the bottle, and slept soundly in the spartan accommodations. The next morning we arrived, checked into our hotel and at some point walked along a road cut into a hillside from the hotel to the town. A mist was rolling up from the valley on the downside of the hill, making a ghostly forest of the trees on that side of the road. The magical effect at the time may have been enhanced by residual effects of the wine.
My mother would sometimes ask, “What is it?” when I showed her a picture where the subject was not easily recognizable. Contrarian that I am, I replied, “It’s a photograph, Mom.” (Hey, she made me.) Of course, what she wanted to know was what was the original subject I had photographed, and what I was trying to say, inelegantly maybe, was that it did not matter. Either you like a picture, or you don’t. More information might make it more significant in some way, but that’s not the same thing as liking. I remember many years ago, making a print sale from an exhibit, of an image that was just swirls of yellows in varying intensities, and asking the buyer if she wanted to know what I had photographed. She said, “No.” Great answer. Photographs like that one take on an abstract character because some technique has been used to blur the definitions of a recognizable subject or scene. But sometimes the abstraction is created simply by Point of View. The photograph above is a literal landscape shot of Death Valley, made from Dante’s Peak, looking west, down into the valley. The top third or so of the frame, all blue, is the talus slope of the Panamint Range, the western edge of the valley, and the white is the salt flats at Badwater, the lowest point on the North American continent, at 282 feet below sea level.
I am, by training and inclination, an observer, a spectator, voyeur even, and more likely to study people than to strike up a conversation. I firmly believe in the Blanche DuBois philosophy of depending on the kindness of strangers, but struggle to live it, even though when I do it almost always leads to interesting encounters. So when this gentleman called out to me as I was walking down a street in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City if you prefer), my first reaction was to nod and keep walking. Something made me stop, sit, and accept his offer of a coffee. It turned out he was a former South Vietnamese soldier who had worked with Americans there during the “American War.” After the war he and his family had been sent to a re-education camp and while there his young son became ill. With no medicine available, they left the camp and went back to Saigon to get him help. At some point he was caught and asked why he had “escaped.” After hearing the reason, medical attention for his son, the officer simply said, OK, just go back when the boy is better, and released him. A lesson I learn over and over is that no matter what the official government and political circumstances are, people are just people the world over, reminding me of a Mark Twain quote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice.”
