Artist's Statement

(January 11 I'm having my first photography show, at St. Gregory's in San Francisco. One of the things I have to do is write an artist's statement. This is the draft I've submitted to Paul Mahder, my curator and friend.)

I live in San Leandro with a strong-willed calico cat, too many books I rarely read any more, and almost 9000 pictures on my hard drive. I wore out my first good camera in the 1970s, took pictures at a fledgling country club in the early 1980s, and then money (the lack thereof) and life diverted my attention from photography.

July 2006 I was gifted with a Nikon digital point-and-shoot, and I had the feeling that I had come home. As good as the intervening years had been—writing and editing, painting and making collages (though making collages was sweet indeed)—I had the sense that this was what I was meant to do. The hard work felt easy and exercising my eye rejuvenated my soul. In a very real sense I came back to life.

January 2008 I was gifted with a Nikon digital single lens reflex that I carry with me almost everywhere. I take pictures of everything that crosses my vision—at a height of 44 inches, my height sitting in a chair. I am particularly fond of the homely detail, the ironic (or iconic) inconsistency, the wear and tear of urban life I can see and reach from the sidewalk or through the window of a Paratransit bus.

Throughout I try to shoot with a “benign eye” that reveals the beauty in what may not be conventionally pretty or generally noticed. Formal values—color and composition—are crucial, though I’ve never met a rule I’m unwilling to challenge. My earliest visual mentors were the Northern Renaissance painters who held everything they saw in the same pristine clarity, which I take to be a kind of love.



Note: "3808" and "Wild Bunch" appear on my photostream at Flickr.com.

Shrink-Wrapped Glory

Old rock and roll is one of my best teachers. “To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him—and I do.” The kind of photography I do is often a contemplation. “To see, see, see it is to know, know, know it,” which often brings something very like love in its wake and can unleash a surge of gratitude where the world is seen to be “charged with the glory of God’s grandeur, like shining from shook foil, like the ooze of oil,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins knew so well.



Note: "Shrink-Wrap" and "Shrink-Wrap, Take Two" appear in my photostream at Flickr.com on November 18, 2008.

Writer's Block--and International Acclaim

Floating
Originally uploaded by Lynn Park : See profile re 1-11 SF show

"International acclaim" may be putting it a bit strongly--but when an Italian psychotherapist on Flickr asked if she could use some of my pictures on her own blog, it got me thinking. She doesn't go on and on; instead, there is a photograph and a brief passage of text. She makes me wish I read Italian, which I don't.

Today she used this photograph. I call it "Floating"; she calls it "Musica," which lets me find something new in it. http://www.pagineblupsicologia.eu/monica.anoja/

Maybe I'll try brevity and see if I can recover the soul of wit--or at least my writer's voice.

"Floating" can be found on my Flickr photostream on October 31, 2008.

Dinner with the Governor

Almost monochrome
Originally uploaded by Lynn Park

In the spring of 1989 I read in the paper that George Wallace finished his last term as governor of Alabama to generally high approval ratings from both black and white voters. The writer cited substantially improved health and education indices as a cause. Hmm, I thought. Months later, on August 20 (I know the date because it was Mama’s birthday), I read in the paper that Jesse Jackson had gone to Montgomery to meet with the Governor. What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall, I thought. Wily young populist fox meets with wily old populist fox.

Talking to Mama later that day (she was in Tennessee, I was in Arizona), I told her what I’d seen and said, “You know, I ought to write a letter to Wallace before I wake up some morning and find out he’s dead.”

“Well, why don’t you do it?” she asked. “What do you want to tell him?”

“That I think he’s made good use of the shooting that put him in that chair, that he’s helped people and turned his life around—and that I’m not just blowing smoke, that I have a right to say so, because of my being in a chair too.”

I wrote the letter that night. I can’t remember what I made explicit and what remained unsaid, but I remembered his having gone to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the church of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his father, and having asked forgiveness of the congregation. I thought about what being brought low can do to a person. I know I expressed my appreciation and good wishes and thanks for his good work. The next day I called the library and got an address.

When I was home for Christmas, Mama asked me if I’d heard from the Governor.

“No. Maybe it didn’t get to him, or maybe it was too personal and he took offense.” We went on to other things.

I went back to Arizona, and graduate school. The end of February I had a lot on my mind: my final exams in the middle of the week and going home to see Mama on Saturday. So, Monday when I got my mail and saw a return address from “Wallace, Troy State University, Montgomery,” at first I thought it had to do with some inquiry I’d made in regard to my research. THEN I opened it.

“Dear Miss Park,” Wallace began, “Please accept my apologies for the delay in answering your letter. I have been under the weather and have fallen behind in my correspondence.” He went on to express thanks for my “kind sentiments” and acknowledged “the situation we both share.” The ending was simple. “Please know that I am sincerely yours, George C. Wallace.”

The first time I read the letter I could barely see it for tears. Somehow he conveyed to me a courtliness that spoke of more than manners, something that touched me to the heart.

As it happened I went home early to see Mama that week. She had a stroke on Wednesday and died on Saturday. In the months and weeks that followed more than once I thought about calling Troy State University, getting the Governor’s secretary, and flying to Montgomery to take the Governor to dinner. I could have done it. Mama left me enough money that I could indulge the occasional grand gesture. I didn’t do it. I wish I had.

Note: The photo "Almost Monochrome" appears in my photostream at Flickr.com.

Little Things Mean a Lot

One Step
Originally uploaded by Lynn Park

I have a pain in my right side. At first I thought it was a pulled muscle, but now I don’t think so. I think it may be a tiny hair-line crack in a rib, acquired I know not how, which is possible because I have osteoporosis as well as the osteogenesis that is the reason I use a wheelchair. “But I’m too young for little cracks like that,” I think. “That’s for old women; I’m only 63. I can’t start falling apart yet.”

It’s not a bad pain, nothing I can’t live with, mostly a wince when I turn or lift my arm in certain ways. But it’s there, in the background. I have an appointment with my orthopedist Tuesday, to see what he thinks. Maybe it’s time to go on Calcitonin, a medication to aid bone healing and reduce pain, that’s supposed to be good for the small fractures associated with aging.

I could have called my medical doctor but it would probably have taken longer to get in to see him and he’s rather dour, whereas I always feel supported when I see Dr. W. He’ll tell me if I need to see Dr. D, who might know more about the latest medications. I’m just not as comfortable with him. But at least I’m not playing ostrich. I’m doing something.

While I want to convince myself that this pain, and my concern about it, is a “little thing,” my own words come back to me:

FOURTH POEM AFTER RUMI

Get full value.
Don't cheat yourself.
You are being called
to spend everything
for a moment's bliss--
with no guarantee
that payment will ever come through.

Only fools hoard their heart.
You are no fool.
This grief and this longing agree on that.

Your love yearns to cry "yes."
What option is caution
for the soul that would be free?

Finally the oyster knows itself
to be not different from the pearl:
soft flesh made precious in pain,
all a jewel in God's fiery sea.

Note: The photo "One Step" appears in my photostream at Flickr.com.

Renascence

Early Sky
Originally uploaded by Lynn Park

Several years ago, on a cold, gray Sunday afternoon, I went to Border's. I may have gotten a latte, a magazine or a book, but I was by myself, enjoying it, and not paying much attention to anyone else. When it was time to go home, I went back to the car.

Getting in took a while. First I positioned the chair by the driver's side seat and placed a slide board under my bottom and on the seat so I could make the transition without having to stress my arms or shoulders. Once in, I put the slide board in. Then I reached to take out the seat cushion and remove the back pack from the chair.

Now "the contraption," otherwise known as a car-top carrier, came into play. I pushed a button that opened the box on top and let down a chain with a hooked arm on the end. I manuevered this hook under the wheelchair seat, pushed the button again, and--ta dum, the chain rolled back up, folding the chair as it went and then slid the folded chair into the box on top, which then closed. All I had to do was close the door, put the key in the ignition, and--using the hand controls--drive off.

But before I could do that, a young man who'd been standing off a ways came up to me and said, "You demonstrate the indomitability of the human spirit." I may have thanked him, I'm pretty sure I nodded (I hope I looked gracious), but I was not glad. I didn't want to be an example of the imdomitability of the human spirit. How did that young man see me if that's what he saw? I didn't want to consider that.

And something is shifting, something I find myself investigating in these blogs as I explore the interface between photographs that have quickened new aliveness and the experience of living in this body of mine. I revisit that Sunday afternoon and have a better sense of what the young man observed.

Edna St. Vincent Millay burst on the literary landscape in the 1930s with "Renascence," which contains these lines: "The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide." I'd add the eye that opens and the body that may have been misread. At least that's how it's coming to seem to me.

Note: "Early Sky" can be found in my photostream at Flickr.com.

Things Change

Change of Focus
Originally uploaded by Lynn Park

Things change, especially the things I take as rock-solid certainties. When I wrote my blog profile, I referred to my power chair as both central and peripheral to my existence—and thought I’d summed the matter up succinctly. But no. Behind a simple statement about my means of conveyance lies the whole issue of my disability, something that gets more complex as I get older and as I get more able to be with the nuances of my own experience.

When I was a little girl, we didn’t talk about “it” because there was nothing that talking could change. Somehow I got the idea I wasn’t supposed to have feelings about living in a body that would sometimes fracture of its own volition, about looking different, about being unable to do so many things that other children did. It wasn’t supposed to bother me that some people on the street would stare and some people would avert their eyes and refuse to look at me. I had good manners and made good grades and my parents gave me nice presents, so there was nothing to say.

As a young adult I concentrated on Good Grooming, perfect makeup, never a hair out of place, had long red fingernails, and bristled if people mentioned my being disabled. After all, I could do almost everything but walk so why did they need to say anything? I lived alone, I drove across country, I had a full-time job, I even moved the furniture in my studio apartment (the hardwood floor meant I could slide things). I could get out of the chair, scoot up a flight of stairs on my bottom bringing the chair with me, and get back in it at the top.

Then in my thirties, after a bad accident, I couldn’t go from the chair to the ground any more, was limited to horizontal transfers. Fast forward to the present: more accidents, weight gain, a brace to prevent a vulnerable lower leg from fracturing, an arm that doesn’t rotate properly, and I have become what I thought I would never be: a Disabled Person, someone for whom being disabled affects most activities of daily life.

I don’t drive any more. I use a bedside commode instead of a toilet because the transfer is safer (and it’s still difficult). I use a slide board to get in and out of bed. I can’t turn on my side in bed without deliberate and difficult maneuvering. I have a harder time than I used to reaching things in the kitchen. I, who used to be pain-free, know about frequent aches. I, who used to go longer and harder than just about anyone else, generally lie down in the afternoon. Along with the changed visage of middle age, I have a new body, one that I don’t yet identify with, one that is not yet entirely my friend. And still, with all of this, the I who investigates, who takes these pictures, whose eye and heart still finds newness and beauty along the sidewalks I travel, is both able and grateful.

This photograph "Change of Focus" appears in my photostream at Flickr.com.