2011

Brother, what has this year been? This year has been a long climb. Too long. So long in fact I have a hard time determining now which year it is and from which view I stand. Some say I have a failure of patience and move on too quickly. Others say, it is a long life and you are in movement. I tell them I want a silent year, a good one with beautiful happy endings and health and wisdom. And they look back as if I am already arrived, wise and prepared. So what is this life like? This year, for now I say, this one life is like climbing a tall building in the fog. The Fog envelopes the building and gives it a new life, one that extends indefinitely its limits both vertically and towards the horizon. I am scaling the building either in descent or climb but not knowing for sure which at most moments because in each window lay some distraction. On each new story and in each new window I look in and experience a real desire to be content inside or to be held by the space and looking out. Inside each window I may find a warm home or cold flat. Inside looks enticing, like relief, a place to hold onto and breathe with. Inside some windows I see fantasy, sex, desire, hope, family, life, everyday living. And then from time to time an inhabitant will catch my silhouette against the fog and I am invited in. Usually I go and think, this is where I am supposed to be. I stay for a time and describe to my host or hostess what the climb is like and reinvent how and where I started from, having forgotten just why I had left in the first place. I tell of the fog and how each grip of the climb leaves a small trace. How the winters are long and cold. The climb, I imagine, is worth a good story and as a guest I feel obliged to tell one. Then, after a time in some comfort, with a new love, I get the feeling that this is not the place for me, that I have not arrived and that I will need to go back out the way I came and continue on. I fight this impulse and try to stay on anyway; arguments and misunderstandings ensue, then anger until I crawl reluctantly out, or force myself out with a grand gesture or, as has happened on some occasion, I am pushed.

This year, at its end, I have said goodbye to Lord Byron whom took the opportunity to tell me (yet another woman to do this) that I am not a good person and in her state of feeling trapped lashed out in spiteful anger and murderous charge. I am already healing like a god damn wolverine. This year reintroduces Ana, from eight years ago. Ana, one of the few women whom I’ve photographed – whose photograph now sits in a collection at the University of Iowa. Ana, who when we met had recently buried her mother, whose body was eaten by cancer. The woman I brought my wife to and whose home we slept at as 2003 rolled in. Ana and I are survivors but at this point survival may just kill us before our time.

And then there is Kosovo, my new home, fraught with every problem in the book save for the love people here have for one another. Kosovo, the ultimate place to be an outsider, because getting in means being married in and marrying in means to surrendering to the cause of paternity and social dogma. I think 2011 will be a lonely, productive year. I think I should just photograph it. I think.