August 24, 2012 

I. Employment Development Office

I am one of the millions collecting unemployment in California. Normally, it all works like clockwork, but a couple of weeks ago I made a mistake on the claim form and I was ushered into the bowels of government for the 99%. After re-submitting the claim incorrectly twice, I received a one sentence letter telling me that the “original claim form was incorrect or incomplete; the duplicate form was also incomplete or incorrect. Please call 1-800-300-5616 immediately.”

Over the course of the next few days I push an endless number of phone buttons. The latest info update is from 2008. No matter what decision tree I follow, I inevitably end up hearing, “No one is available to help you now. Good bye.”

Forget about the EDD website. The link proudly announcing EDD office locations only provides the phone number to nowhere. Finally, I throw myself on the mercy of the closest “One Stop Career Center” which is in Oakland. It turns out that the unemployment division of the Employment Development Department has closed all their field offices but they could help me at the Career Center.

I sign in at the receptionist’s office with a golf scoring pencil onto a half sheet of paper. The receptionist/security guard tells me to see the woman in window #1. There were two windows, labeled “Window #1” and “Window #2” and I will never know what Window #2 does. I sign in again with another golf scoring pencil on a sign-in sheet on a clipboard at Window #1. The woman there is dressed all in white and is basically a blur of motion. She is handling about six different things at once, but flashes a really nice smile at me, which feels good because the rest of the room is really alienating and, well, sad. The entire operation seems to be several decades behind technologically. Blurry flyers and homemade black and white tri-fold brochures about career planning strategies line the walls and tables.  They have a few computers there for people to use for a limited time periods. All are being used; mostly by men and women of color. A constant, though kindly, voice on loudspeaker warns the computer users that they only have ten minutes left and that if they want to continue there is a two-hour wait before they can cycle back in. 

I settle in for a long wait but the woman in white quickly summons me to Window #1. She points to a set of study carrels at the back of the room and says, “go sit there. I’ll be there soon.” Then she is gone. I sit down, sandwiched by two women. The woman on my left is looking for a very industrial type of job --- plate fitter? She explains that the woman in white will come over and dial for me. She points to the phone in my carrel. Meanwhile, the woman on my right is already talking to someone and while I play solitaire on my phone I hear her saying, “Yes, I do have a cutoff notice from PG&E…..no, I don’t have it with me but I can fax it to you when I get home…..you don’t have a fax number to give me? I can only fax it to you from here? …. Can I go home and get it and come back and fax it to you?” 

As I wait, my ancient mauve office chair slips a bit every two minutes. I am getting lower and lower and feeling more and more like a second grader and less and less like an adult in charge of my life. My elbows are almost at shoulder height when the plate fitter finishes her call and leaves. I snag her chair, which is just a normal chair. No two chairs, or desks match. The chairs and desks are all refugees from an old office or a second hand store somewhere. 

The woman in white comes over and picks up the receiver from the tan push button phone, circa 1974. It should be noted that the phones are all the same. I realize that she is calling a secret phone number that no one is allowed to know. I look at her, see the exhaustion behind her eyes and say she looks like she does a lot every day. She smiles and says she sure does, and boy is she tired when she gets home at night. She hands me the phone and flies away. In less than three minutes a woman with a spritely voice picks up, processes my claim and authorizes payment. 

I can’t even begin to formulate words or thoughts about a system that is so dysfunctional and so obviously underfunded and yet is filled with kind and patient people. Maybe something like “Fact is stranger than fiction?” or “Against all odds mankind perseveres?”

Mostly I think about the plate fitters, the dishwashers, and other non-union, low wage people that have to deal with this career center. The employees seem to have a sense of mission as they try to serve the unemployed. I just really, really wish that every voter in America could visit this office and see how much internal strength it takes to maintain one’s dignity and self-esteem in a system that asks you to dance while tying your feet together. 

II. Department of Veteran’s Affairs

Oddly enough, I have to make another field trip into the nether world of government. This time I am following up on an application I made for a benefit for my father, a career Army officer. I submitted the claim and received a letter about a month later stating that they had received the application for benefits but that since they have a great number of claims, action on mine MAY be delayed. They give a phone number to call. After about twelve weeks I remember that I had made the claim and call the number. Guess what?? You can’t get through to a human being on that phone line.

This time I go directly to the nearest building for Veterans Affairs. It is one block away from the secret unemployment office. I walk in and discover there is no public directory of the building inhabitants, but the security guard tells me to go to the 14^th floor. The location of the Veterans’ Affairs Office and all the other federal government offices are a secret, too.

There is red duct tape on the rug of the office on the 14^th floor to show you where to stand. There is no one in the room at all, but I stand on the red duct tape anyway because I know that with military related things it’s best to just follow all the rules. The receptionist tears himself away from what his is doing and summons me. I sign in with a full sized pencil to a half sheet of paper. He points me toward a bank of chairs, all matching since it is the federal government, I suppose. He delivers my half sheet calling card behind close doors and I wait, rifling through worn issues of the Army Times, the Marine Times and the Air Force Times. Finally, I am ushered in and a very kind man leads me to a customer service station. He gives me a secret phone number to call in Minnesota. I think of all the vets, their families and their wives or widows trying to connect with this office to get their benefits which were offered as a selling point when their partners, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters signed up to fight for the wars which I’m not sure anyone really believes in anymore. In exchange for a young, vital body, people have to go on a scavenger hunt to get the secret phone number and location so they can get their burial costs reimbursed? Really? Is that really OK with anyone?

I call the secret phone number in Minnesota and this time, even though no one is available to help me I am able to schedule a phone appointment for 8:15am several days later. The call comes through an hour early at 5:15am, and it takes me a minute to understand what is going on, but the automated voice repeats its message several times. I groggily press 1 to indicate that I do want to keep the appointment and stumble into my office while on hold. A very kind and cheerful woman logs in to my file and says that nothing has been done. I am concerned that it might have gotten lost but she says that it takes a minimum of 148 working days days to process an application. That's seven months. Mine has only been there for 60 working days. She opens an inquiry for me and I can hear her typing. While I wait I check my email, look at my calendar for the days activity and shuffle paper so long I forget I am on hold. Finally, I ask her if she is still there and she laughs and says, “Yes, there are a lot of forms to fill out. Can’t you hear me typing?” She gives me an official “Inquiry” number that she makes me repeat back to her so she knows I have correctly copied it down. They will now have 10 business days to get back to me. I can call the secret phone number after 10 days but not before. I mark my calendar. 

In the wake of these two encounters I feel dazed and confused on many levels, but also angry. I am perplexed that the government workers can remain sanguine and even cheerful in the middle of such dysfunction. I’m guessing that these offices are so overwhelmed and underfunded that they have to create a ring of fire around their employees to control the flow of people by having secret phone numbers and secret offices where no one can find them unless they really, really try. 

I’m also really trying to see where the pork is in these programs unless it is in the payouts themselves. For those who want to do away with Big Government, I’m thinking it wouldn’t take much at this point to get rid of both the EDD and Veterans Affairs. And then I try to imagine what would happen to the people who use these services. How would the private sector step in and try to help people with few marketable skills? I’m pretty sure the private sector is all about making a profit and there is absolutely no profit in trying to help low skilled, under educated people find work. And what about the veterans and their families? How would the private sector support and help the men and women who carry out Congressional acts of aggression or peacekeeping when they come back, spent, damaged or dead? I’m pretty sure the for-profit sector doesn’t really have an interest in providing benefits to them. I’m pretty sure the suggestion for a vast network of nonprofits to replace the government would be even more inefficient and just as underfunded, if not more so. All those dollars would come out of our pockets anyway and way too much time would be spent trying to raise that money. 

So come on, people!! Let’s just stop this nonsense about getting rid of Big Government. The government does the work that no one else wants to do, but must be done if we are to call ourselves a society at all, let alone the best country in the world. 

VALLEY OF SHADOWS & DREAMS
A Heyday book
Photography by Ken Light and Text by Melanie Light
Forward by Thomas Steinbeck

Reception & Book Signing
Friday, March 16th

Exhibition runs January 17-May 15,2012

Case Study House #22, 1960. Pierre Koenig, architect, 1960. Photo credit (c) J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius Shulman Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. (2004.R.10)

Review by Melanie Light

The perfect gift for those obsessed with Mad Men chic is the small, smartly designed small survey of architectural images by Julius Shulman. The Getty Research Institute has put together this sweet little book from his photography archive in their special collections. Just under 5.5 x 6.5 inches, it is full of beautifully printed black and white images of Los Angeles taken between 1931 and 1986. The buildings were built between 1870 and 1981 and this disparate range of architectural styles is unified by Shulman’s single vision of presenting these achievements in the most ideal manner possible. It includes his most beloved images of the iconic “Case Study House #22” of 1960, in which two women sit inside the floor-to-ceiling window walls of a Pierre Koenig–designed house that seems to float like a spaceship over the light-spangled urban sprawl beyond. Despite the small format, the images are crisp and defined, yet with the depth that a nice block varnish gives black and white photography. The short essay is adequate as a primer to Julius Shulman and Los Angeles architecture, but honestly, this little book could have been so much more.

Lacking in this book is any reference to the fascinating and turgid politics of urban and suburban development in Los Angeles. Also lacking is analysis of the impact of the Shulman aesthetic on the marketing of Los Angeles and the California Dream, nor what elements comprised this dream. The messy back-story of the birth of this unique and uniquely modern metropolis is in distinct contrast to these beautiful, but superficial environmental portraits. Shulman’s gift was a pioneering and refined, but commercial vision that really helped his architect friends and clients like Charles Eames, Richard Neutra and John Lautner become the icons of modernity. These portraits are tributes to Man’s mastery over Nature and a hymn to the elegant math of modern engineering. But it is a vision that is mostly divorced from the emotional struggles of “progress”, save a lone image of two old, lonely victorian homes with the monolitic Union Bank rising behind it. One image in particular, “Case Study House #21” illustrates the quintessential fifties dream house with a couple enjoying life, though it actually looks a bit more like a Roy Lichtenstein illustration depicting alienation and could have served as the set model for the 2002 film, “Far from Heaven”, a tale exposing the hypocrisy of the rigid value system of that era. It is an inspiration for Mad Men, if there ever was one.

It does make some sense that this book is more of a marketing piece for Shulman as the publishers are part and parcel of the grand architecture of Los Angeles and the money behind it is old Los Angeles oil money. The Getty Research Institute is housed in the fabulous complex built by Richard Meier. A visit there is quite simply like being on Mount Olympus. One wonders if the staff would have the courage or the intellectual distance needed to really inject substance into a book of this kind. On the other hand, it is clearly not their intention to do so, though it would make this little reference book far more useful. This is a pocket reference book, a jewel one pulls out every now and then to be pet and admire.

Photo credit (c) J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius Shulman Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. (2004.R.10) Publisher: J. Paul Getty Museum; 1 edition (October 29, 2011)

ISBN-13: 978-1606060797

Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches

Review by Melanie Light, 12/5.2011

Henry Wessel creates bodies of photographic images that subtly and effortlessly engage the viewer in a layered experience in a way that many photographers can only dream about accomplishing. His latest book, Waikiki (Steidle, 2011) is a skillful offering. This book chronicles our nostalgia-laden fantasy of paradise in the tropics as it butts up against the reality of Honolulu as a boomtown between the mid-seventies and the mid-eighties. The book was launched with a show in Cologne at the Galerie Thomas Zander last summer. It does not include a section from that exhibition of images taken at night, a longtime favorite practice for Wessel.

The cover invokes the paradise we all hold in our mind from the forties perfectly. A black and white image of palm trees, sand, water with a bit of a hut on the side. The image is smallish, a bit like a snapshot a soldier might send home. It lies on a vast cream background, evocative of the past. And that is the last reference to our collective fantasy about Hawaii. The book tackles very contemporary issues about identity, culture and our relationship to nature.

Wessel's good friend Lewis Baltz sent an email to him about the work, which sums it up best: “I feel an elegiac sense in this work that I never saw before when it was intermingled with other images. I can only agree with your author (SFMOMA photo curator, Cory Keller) that it is far more densely inhabited than your other works, but for me the effect of this is the opposite of one might expect, what I feel is the loneliness and futility of life in this paradise. I thought that maybe I wanted to go to Hawaii after I died, but now, I think maybe not.”

Waikiki is about the individual in the environment, but it is also about the man made environment that is created within the natural environment and how they exist side by side. Wessel does not have a hidden agenda here. He explores this fully by juxtaposing the natural with the built, celebrating light as it falls across the planes of modern architecture. 

Each image is about the light falling across the banal, transforming the interstices of life into the real dynamics of the moment. The prints are so masterfully manipulated – there is a full range of tonality yet the images are infused with light. The viewer recognizes that innate kinesthetic experience immediately while the psychic pain of alienation contradicts that deeply satisfying body memory. What is paradise, then, if not being connected to all the true rhythms of our nature? Is all the hard work we direct to maximizing our vacation for naught if we cannot simply "Be"?

 The work is actually made much stronger because all of these very serious intellectual and spiritual concerns are injected with a quiet sense of humor and irony. We smile at details: a Japanese honeymoon couple walk in the water along the beach with their street sandals on, a young man is caught with a halo of tiki torches around his head, a surfer has carefully placed his surfboard in the shadow of a palm to take a nap in a thin blade of shade.

The final image works so well with the cover image to convey the message of this book. It shows the gritty inside of a public bus with graffiti scrawled all over the seats and sides. Through the window we see a faded, over exposed stretch of beach. After a thorough exploration of heaven on earth we are left with our imperfect selves and the attainment of paradise remains just outside our grasp.

©Waiiki by Henry Wessel, published by Steidl

Price

UK £50.00

US $85.00

EC €58.00

            60 pages

            29.5 cm x 29.5 cm

            Clothbound hardcover with a tipped-in photo

            Steidl

            ISBN: 978-3-86930-300-0

            Publication date: July 2011

© Melanie Light, Self Portrait, 2011.

About a month ago I got a cold call from Debbie, a self-described casting agent in Pasadena. The agent was looking for photographers who had good stories about a photo op they had botched, along with the photo to prove it. Someone, whom she could not name because he was such a big name in the film industry, wanted to re-create that story. “You know, like a sports photographer is taking pictures of a football game and trips on something.” It all seemed a bit dubious to me, but I told her I would try to help.

 As I was driving the very next day, it hit me that I had my own botched photo story…..

 I was straddling the bathtub with a flashlight and my iPhone in my hands, trying to take a picture of the window we had just installed above the tub. The flashlight was on to a) shed a bit more light on a dark area, and b) to highlight the part of the window that was missing, and for which I needed to order a replacement part. As I tried to hit the button to take the picture, the whole precarious setup fell apart. As I tried to grasp the phone falling out of my hands, I slipped. The phone and the flashlight flew out of my hands, and the camera fired off a shot, as you can see above. I think it is a picture of my face as I fall into the bathtub.

So, why did we install a window with a missing part? It all started one morning, which was the start of a very bad week. I was madly trying to meet a deadline for my next book. I had come home from a morning yoga class and had headed straight into my office; only emerging for a snack. As I walked by the bathroom I noticed that the window was broken and the shattered glass was everywhere. It looked like there was enough glass for three or four windows. But it was nothing I needed to clean up immediately and so I headed back to my desk with a snack in hand and wrote for another half hour before it hit me that the broken window was not an accident. I tore myself away, had another look and called the police. I could hardly find the words, “attempted robbery” because we live in such a bucolic neighborhood now. It seems our border collie, previously considered a barking nuisance, had put his instincts to good use scaring away the intruder.

The week went from bad to worse. Several people we knew died, cars broke down, the furnace broke and other stuff happened that I have blocked out of my mind. By Saturday, everyone in the house was whipped. So, Ken and I did what we have done during other overwhelming times. We started a garden project. When fire swept through Berkeley in 1991, Ken’s sister and husband were evacuated to our house. We left them in the house on the phone, talking to everyone they knew and put in a sweet little trellis in our back yard. When the World Trade Center went down in 2001, we built raised vegetable beds in the backyard of our new home. So, this time we headed to our local Ecopark, Urban Ore (urbanore.com) to pick up some recycled lumber for a raised tomato bed. We just love wandering around this lot, imagining how we might use the lavender bidet, the wrought iron fencing, or the old lockers.

On the way out with our $8 load of lumber, we had to pass the window “department” and Ken zeroed in on a Pella window that had the exact dimensions we needed to replace and upgrade the broken window. So, for $100 we had a double-paned window with a screen. Only the screen seemed to be too small on one end. No matter. We had it installed and I happily painted it Chinese red. At some point I realized that one section of trim was missing and that made the screen too small. So, I called Pella and they suggested we send in a photo of the window so they could see it.

I’m still waiting for that casting agent to send me the casting call for photo stories. But when she does, I’ve got mine ready to go.

         Really annoyed when the ringing phone revealed one of my father’s POW buddies. He was rifling through papers on his desk and had found the letter I had sent to him over a year ago that my dad had died. My father’s experience as a Korean War POW had overshadowed his whole life and mine by extension. He had never really recovered and constantly used those years of privation and torture to undermine the legitimacy of any demand I might have of my own. In turn, I was an outspoken pacificist and fought with my father regularly about the military and everything else.

         Nonetheless, this fellow – I’ll call him Joe – was going to tell me stories about the camp. He asked me a bit about myself and in response to my curt answers said that my father was probably proud of me. With a freedom I never allowed myself while he was alive, I said, “Not really. He didn’t like girls and never really cared to know what I was doing.” “So you were a disappointment to him. Well, that happens.” Undeterred, he went on, “John did not really understand other people, but he was a great soldier. He paid a lot of attention to the little things and he survived a great ordeal. He was really tortured in the camp and we called him Iron John 

         That deal with his finger was really something. First he lost the tip, then the next joint and then the whole finger. He was on the way to losing his hand, his arm and his shoulder, but he walked around the camp and gathered up corn stalks to heat up water to soak his hand. That really saved him. The other men would help him and gather up corn stalks, too. The Chinese didn’t like that and punished the men for that but they kept on helping him. They didn’t like it when we helped each other out.”

         OK. That was a very new spin on an old, tired tale. According to my dad, he had to do it all alone. His family of origin had taught him that no one would help him and he filtered his whole life through that belief.

         “But John could be kind of funny, too. One time, he was mad at some of the men and he started to point. When he realized he was pointing with the finger he had lost, he just raised up his other hand and pointed with that one. 

         Bitter but funny. I knew that about my dad. As I tried to wrap up the conversation, Joe went on.

         “Well, I’ll just let you go. Just wanted to talk to someone really. I lost my wife yesterday.” What? Did you just say that your wife died? 

         “She was born on Armistice Day and died the day before Memorial Day. She was a nurse and she always gave me very good advice.” Do you have family to be with? 

         “I have a son. He’s a retired lieutenant colonel.” It just seemed mean to ask why he wasn’t calling his son. Maybe the son was en route to Florida, where Joe had retired. Or, maybe military culture is not that amenable to creating a warm family life for other families, too.

         This conversation brought me back to my father’s last weeks. He lived in a continuing care community for retired and honorably discharged military officers. He was a retired lieutenant colonel, class of ’49 at West Point. He had passed on an almost ridiculously single minded passion for the military to my brother, who in turn had starting calling his own son “soldier” from the minute he was born. Now eight, Johnny the Third had been wearing fatigues since he was six months old and had a vast collection of toy soldiers, guns and other military toys.

         My father demanded that I be his care-giving supervisor in the last weeks of his life - a task suitable only for a girl. So, I spent a lot of time taking him to the hospital at Travis Air Force Base. I had many flashbacks of life on military bases in Germany, Fort Bragg, Korea and Fort Mason. So much was still the same as the days of my childhood when we got to ride to school in the back of a jeep. One late afternoon, I was pulled over by the military police as I unknowingly sped through the main gate after a visit to my dad. One positioned himself in front of the car door, flashing a light in my face while the other kept a rear guard position. The aggressive energy was about 15 times higher than I had experienced from civilian police. I was being treated as a dangerous and potentially violent person with no exceptions to protocol. With my heart racing, I said I was visiting my dad in the hospital; I was upset, anxious and unaware that I was speeding. He actually called the unit where my dad was and confirmed my story before exercising mercy and letting me go with a stern lecture but without a ticket.

         After this re-introduction to military life, I started to actually like going to the base and the hospital. The degree of efficiency, courtesy and friendliness was like a dream come true. When people said they would call, they called. If you needed tissues, someone would bring you tissues within 5 minutes. The doctors were smart, available and spent lots of time explaining things. My father’s cardiologist, like all the staff, had to stay in great shape. He bragged to me that he was beating all the younger guys in the training runs. The ICU attending doctor told me about the cutting edge medicine he had practiced and developed in the field and some times under fire in Iraq and Afghanistan. The nurses in the ICU were like androids – totally responsive, alert, attentive and excellent. Not to mention that they literally brought my father back from the dead in one short week. 

         After a while I got to talking with the staff on my father’s unit. They told me about their service. In fact, practically the whole hospital was going to be deployed to Afghanistan in about two weeks. President Obama had just announced a surge on TV and here they were, responding in real time. I spoke with a respiratory therapist whose husband was stationed in Alaska. They had two kids and had been stationed far apart for about 6 years. They liked their jobs, but not the separation. She was going to retire after this next stint in Afghanistan just so they could be together as a family.

         But, the craziest part was that the power and the allure of the military started to work on me. Even though I had lived with the dark side of war, I became fascinated by military life. Everyone, even the lowest ranked, walked with a brisk sense of purpose. No one had to figure out their life; their immediate mission and their career paths were clear. It seemed like an enormous burden was offloaded from their shoulders. That was tantalizing to someone like me, for whom each morning is a blank slate to be created anew. I even went so far as to wander over to the social services unit and left a message for the head therapist. Maybe I could resuscitate my old family therapy license and work with the military in some way; be vicariously connected to this powerful and beguiling culture in which the will of the individual was in submission to the greater whole. That part of the military is just amazing. The act of giving yourself to a greater cause really seems to be a deep human need. And, I had to admit, I wanted to be part of a greater purpose and, if I didn’t think about the purpose being to kill and destroy the “enemy”, this deal sounded pretty good.

         Iron John let down his guard in the last weeks of his life. He had stoically hoisted himself up from his easy chair to walk to the community dining room for about a year before he finally gave in to my ongoing suggestions that he get either a walker or an electric scooter. Once he started using a walker, it was like a house of cards collapsed. He became instantly utterly dependent on people to help him with every detail of life: “can you please hand me the box of Kleenex?” which was about 6 inches from his hand. It was astonishing, actually, to see him give in to an endless well of need that had been walled off behind his self-sufficient facade. After his last hospitalization, he wanted me to stay and feed him ice cream out of a Dixie cup, hold the straw to his lips while he drank and make endless, minute adjustments with his pillows.

         A couple of days before my father died, I called my brother so he and his family could fly in from Las Vegas to say good-bye. After a day of visiting, a jolt of energy suddenly gripped his body and he pulled my brother close and said carefully and loudly, just to be sure he would understand, “I’ve been thinking about my life and the Army a lot. It’s no good. Don’t let Johnny go into the Army.” My brother was stunned and speechless. My dad repeated it and said, “The Army is too risky. If Johnny doesn’t get killed, he could get maimed and that is no way to go through life. It’s not worth it. Don’t let Johnny go into the Army. Promise me.” He started getting agitated, pulling on my brother’s shirt and I think he mumbled something to make my father stop, but clearly he thought my father had lost his mind. My father went on saying that his time as a POW had harmed him psychologically and that it had affected him for the rest of his life.

         My brother never mentioned it to me and I am sure he made himself instantly forget that episode. But it echoes in my mind and I can only sigh and shake my head. Why is that only Death lifts the veil to reveal Truth?

May 24, 2011

     Tim Hetherington was remembered in New York City on May 24th by hundreds of friends and colleagues. The death of this gifted man has sent a bolt of lightning through the media world and beyond. Many photographers are swearing off conflict photography forever, now, though. As Capa said, “War is like an aging actress, more and more dangerous and less and less photogenic.”

         I am not a member of this tribe, but I have observed them for many years, most recently as the executive director of Fotovision, an organization I created with Ken Light to create a forum for documentary photographers. In 2004, we were invited to show our work "Coal Hollow" at Visa Pour L'image in Perpignan. It was really the first time I had been in the center of the photojournalism culture. We met Tim there at a private lunch for exhibition participants. He was showing work about Liberia. He was absolutely one of those people that you know they are gifted the minute you meet them. As a bonus, Tim was also very real, engaging, interested in others, tall and handsome. In addition, he bore a frightening similarity to my own brother both physically and with his mannerisms.  Except my brother was like the dark twin of Tim -- a jingoist Republican who wanted nothing more in his youth than to emulate my West Point, warrior father. So I kept watching him - perhaps a bit obsessively. In any case, I invited him to let us know if he was ever in the San Francisco Bay Area.

         In the warm summer evenings at Perpignan, we attended slide shows in the magnificent ruins of churches and Roman amphitheaters. Given that it was the “professional week”, most of the audience were photographers, editors or agents, so it was like a religious experience. All of us together watching a fifty-foot wide screen showing tales of horror set to music.

         As we walked the streets, I noticed a certain type of photographer that stood in contrast to the sophisticated, mature practioners like Tim or our other luncheon mates, John Stanmeyer, Ami Vitale, David Strick, Jack Picone and others. It seemed to me this group was like a pack of roving jackals. There was a certain aggressive energy, wildness and a willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done. This subset of photographers spoke about wanting to change the world, but their words sounded somewhat disingenuous. They wanted the thrill of danger, the clarity that comes when Life faces Death; the hunt, the kill. Their giant cameras slung around their necks while strolling around the peaceful streets of this French city were like bazookas, and shooting was an act of aggression for them.

         But the day-to-day world of these people who endlessly circle the globe is hard. They attach themselves to the UN, Medicin sans Frontiers, and other NGOs but never really belong to anyone or anything but their own kind. It is hard for them to be in a long-term relationship, be married, have kids, or pension plans. As the media industry disintegrated, most have become freelance and travel to these god forbidden places on their own dime. In his online piece inspired by the deaths of Tim and Chris Hondros, Teru Kuwayama describes this ragged bunch:

"I wonder which one of us dies first?"

It was 2003, and a stray, morbid thought crossed my mind one night in a hotel in Iraq. I was in a room full of twenty and thirty-something photographers and journalists, in the Al-Hamra hotel in Baghdad. A few miles away, the grown-ups from major label news organizations had filled the Sheraton-Palestine hotel - the Al-Hamra was the low-rent downtown spill over tent. I used to call it Melrose Place Baghdad, and in the evenings, after day trips to bombsites and mass graves, the pack would convene at the poolside for blurry nights fueled by bad Lebanese wine. In retrospect, those days felt like the proverbial fun and games that preceded the losing of eyes.

As it turned out, the first to die from the Al-Hamra scene was Marla Ruzicka, a 28-year-old aid worker-activist. I'd first met her on another drunken bender in Kabul, a year earlier. She was killed in Baghdad by a vehicle-borne suicide bomber who plowed into the military convoy she was driving with. 

Many more died in the years that followed.

         From the outside looking in, it looks like the career path of a crazy person. How do these gifted, intelligent, artists and journalists end up making so many sacrifices for their work? It's not clear if they are people who have come to this job because they have wounds of some sort that have moved them to the outside of mainstream society or that being in a conflict situation is their path to experience all the horror, humor, love, hate and mystery that the rest of us accrue through our mundane lives. Or, perhaps they start out with a full emotional repertoire but are seduced by the intensity of being the only person to witness, and thereby own, a given atrocity or battle. For independent photographers, bringing back images of violence, atrocity and war is a way to get paid, and that hyper-real quality of life in extreme danger is attractive; people find God in foxholes. The regular world is so boring after war, and no one understands you anymore, except your colleagues. It makes sense to go again and before you know it, you're a conflict photographer. 

         All together, between the young Turks, the sincere and mature master storytellers and the hardboiled journalists, the practice of war photography is celebrated as a noble and glamorous undertaking. And it is pretty cool -- people taking risks for a higher purpose. This has been true all the way back to Capa, the granddaddy of glamorous war photographers. And, in fact, there is nothing wrong with noble glamour - I love it too. But over the years I have observed this culture, the glamour has been like a pair of dark sunglasses that is preventing certain very unglamorous aspects from being discussed within the industry. And, most are working all the time to make it in this harsh and unforgiving business. No one really has time to step back.

         As it happened that year in Perpignan, Medicin sans Frontiers had a trailer with a fabulous, experiential exhibition that described the work they do. I joked to Ken that they should have a trailer to treat the conflict photographers who all seemed to have PTSD. I asked photographers I met about their experiences in violence and what it was like to come back home. Tim said he didn't really have any problems with it then, but I suspect he, like so many of them, had a difficult time processing what they witnessed. I remember Ami Vitale said that when she was home, sometimes images of violence would flash when she would be brushing her teeth. Let's face it, when it is your job to SEE the horrific parts of humanity, you are going to be affected. And to really get the shot that an editor will pay you for, you've really got to be vulnerable. And to go out there and be that vulnerable you have to make a pact with yourself that it's OK if you die and you've got to embrace danger. And when you come back you've got to face your demons alone because there is precious little support for journalists with PTSD.

         There is a huge irony, though. The reason most photojournalists give for going to conflict zones is that they want to bring back these stories so that those of us back at home will be inspired to do something to stop the unjust violence. The media pays for and publishes what sells: celebrity nonsense and images of horror. Photographers make their careers based on a single image of horror or violence that articulates any given event. So, that means all of us at home are complicit in sending these men and women into danger. And yet, all of us are so media saturated that we are not inspired to do much of anything. We are entertained by the horror, the shock of it, but very few of us do anything to stop the violence. In an odd way the horror of war and Snookie’s latest antics are just one giant blur. And really, what is there to do? War has been a constant of the human condition for millennia. Sadly, these stories might mitigate the carnage of war but they will not stop current conflicts or prevent more in the future. True, the stories do become the record of our time on the planet and I believe they serve as a reminder and mirror to the governments and their corporate supporters the governments not to let things get too out of hand.

         Don McCullin sat in our living room a few years back talking at length about his career as a war photographer. He suffered for many years from the trauma of following conflict around the globe: Congo, Cyprus, Israel, Egypt, Vietnam, Biafra, Guatemala, Pakistan and so on to report on the wars and violence of his generation.   He said, in the end, it had been a waste of time because those images he took didn't do a damn thing. In his book, Unreasonable Behavior, he concludes with this on the battle of Hue, "Those men who died, and those men who were maimed for life, went through all that, and it was totally futile, as all wars are known to be. Without profit, without horizons, without joy. I remember there was a street in Da Nang called the Street without Joy. They could have called the whole country after that street."

         Actually, Don was wrong. His images and those of the other greats that came out of Vietnam did propel a generation to stand up to the government. Those images did have a role in ending that travesty. It was an exception that occurred in an exceptional time, but it’s the outcome that many fantasize will happen again with their own images of war and atrocity. Peter Magubane and his peers were also instrumental in ending Apartheid in South Africa. When the Bang Bang Club appeared a bit later in the process, that racist system was being actively challenged, so while that group provided a critical record, it’s not clear their images really were pivotal in ending Apartheid. You really have to wonder -- do good men like Tim, or Chris Hondros or Joao Silva have to be on the very edge of the front lines when there is heavy shelling and no military support like the day that Tim and Chris died? You have to wonder, for both the staffers and the freelancers, shouldn't someone in the industry bear some responsibility for preventing excessive risk taking? What is excessive risk?

         Kuwayama's piece, mentioned above, points out that the industry is not only negligent toward the journalists, but completely irresponsible to the all important "fixers" that are the key to getting a story: Those people constitute a vast, grey, undocumented labor force that the international news industry is 100% dependent on. They face the highest risks, and almost invariably, they pay the highest price...I have yet to find a major news organization with a clearly articulated policy on what happens in the worst case scenarios - when the people it hires are killed, wounded or abducted. I don't believe that's an accident. Until this black hole is confronted, more people will disappear in the grey area.

         When photographer Lori Grinker emailed us that Tim and Chris had been injured in Misrata, both Ken and I were distraught. We had been communicating with Lori that morning about donating to a fundraiser for The Dart Society, which is dedicated to addressing the issue of trauma induced through reportage. We didn’t know Chris, but we both instantly conjured our memories of Tim’s visit to Berkeley when he stayed at our home. We spoke about everything and certainly the atrocities of war, the difficulties involved in creating and getting the work out. I arranged for a screening of his film about Liberia, "An Uncivil War." He was so vehemently opposed to war and really wanted to make the world less violent by helping people to see and understand the cost and waste. He was a fully committed man.

         Most disturbing to me is that I think this media cycle actually perpetuates the culture and cult of war among both the military and journalists. No matter what a photographer's intention may be, young men are bound to read war photos as beckoning them to valor, status, and the military as a certain path to manhood and a meaningful life.

         As I reflected on Tim, I reached for his book, Infidel. It is designed to look and feel like a Bible, and I'm sure the symbology of the title and the book design can be discussed at length. The idea was to illustrate the multi-faceted world of a soldier in the field, but honestly, it is more of a Rorschach to be interpreted variously. On the one hand, it is a powerful way to bring home the intensity and suffering that we ask of our young soldiers and the vibrant, contextual culture they create in a barren outpost. Though it feels sacrilegious to say this at a time when people are filled with love and mourning for this beautiful man, it can easily come off like a memory book of Camp Rambo. This book can be an inadvertent recruiting tool for young men across America. I know that's not what you wanted, Tim, but that's how my brother would read it and he is legion. 

         War is troubling. Reporting on war is equally troubling. Is there any sane way to report on insanity?

In May of 2012, Heyday Books will publish my next book with a working title of "Valley of Shadows and Dreams." I am partnering with my husband, Ken Light again for our second book together - very exciting. The book explores the dynamic and important Great Central Valley of California. It is difficult to capture because of its size, complexity and heterogeneous nature. We know we are on the right track, though. Thomas Steinbeck (yes, the son of John Steinbeck) has been supportive of tout vision and has contributed a piece of his own to the book. He shares his father’s sentiment that the role of a writer is to reconnect people with their own sense of humanity. This book, in its own way, aims to do just that. 

I am also proud to announce that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has acquired nine of the photographs Ken made for this body of work, in part through the generosity of Suzie Katz and her nonprofit, Photowings (photowings.org). Ms. Katz has been a major supporter of the publication of this book, which we hope becomes a lasting documentation of the quickly changing early twenty-first century valley.