The Productive Times

I had a dream I was changing clothes in Johnny Carson's modest bathroom, whose house I was staying at while I rode out the quarantine.  The clothes were someone else's, and I put on two mismatched dresses, and looked at myself in the mirror above the sink.  The outfit looked awful, but I didn't know what else I could do.  I had no other options.  I looked at Johnny's belongings—his hair brush poking out of an open drawer, the towel on the rack that had another towel hanging on top of it.  I'd switched their order on the hook, and then switched them back before I left the room; I didn't want him to notice anything being out of place in his space.  

There is a palpable shift that's happened seemingly among us with the shift to self-isolation.  It's even sprung up a new vocabulary—shelter in place, self-quarantine, social distancing.  Though in many ways, my daily life hasn't changed at all.  As an artist living here in San Miguel, and as an introvert, I spend most of my time alone, anyhow.  But I suppose the shift is in the ability or freedom to make other choices.  With that restriction, suddenly that's what we want to do—to go to the cafe, be with friends, go to the party.  In a way, it gives me the excuse to do what I should likely be doing anyway—staying home to paint, work on photographs, to produce. 

Me, in my home studio in St. Louis, Missouri. Photo by Kristy Stephens.

I remember learning of a study that was done about how the customers who had five varieties of jelly to choose between to sample at a grocery store, instead of the group that had nine options, were more likely to buy a jar.  Why?  Their conclusion was that people are overwhelmed with too much choice.  I've thought of his idea often because I think it relates to life in many situations.   In our current one, our lack of choice can be a wonderful way to crystallize what really matters, and where we truly want to invest ourselves.  And like the limited choices I had of clothes to put on in the legendary comedian's bathroom—it requires us to get creative.  For an artist, it would seem that more ideas, more materials, more variables would be a good thing, but, in fact, having restrictions—like you can only use cardboard (because you have nothing else), or you can only have three colors, for instance—means that you have a well-defined structure from which to grow from.  It's like a child-sized chair for a child.  It's comfortable.  It's perfect. 

I like thinking that this is a time to work on my projects without feeling bad or guilty for not engaging with the wider world.  I think of it like a series of snow days—it's a gift where I can hunker down, concentrate, and work, while still being able to engage with friends and loved ones through the incredible technology that we still have available to us. 

Self-Quarantined in the Sunshine

I've got a cupboard with cans of food,
filtered water, and pictures of you
And I'm not coming out until this is all over

- “We Will Become Silhouettes” by The Postal Service

The album Give Up (2002) by the Postal Service is about surviving the end of a relationship, but this song is a perfect fit for our collective situation — "I wanted to walk through the empty streets / And feel something constant under my feet / But all the news reports recommended that I stay indoors.” I had the ah-ha feeling a few minutes ago applying the meaning in a fresh way.

Living here in Mexico, I feel like most of the time I’m self-quarantining anyhow! I work, work here in my studio apartment, and I usually advance my projects a bit further each day, but many times it can be a struggle to feel that progress. Momentum is the key. I see this as an opportunity to focus my energies and to make the progress I want and need.

The question is how long we will be shutting ourselves indoors. I was talking with my former neighbor and friend, Mike, last night. Today’s his 86th birthday, and he has a love of words. He’d gotten interested in the etymology of the word quarantine, and when he researched it, found out that the Italian “quaranta” or “forty” in the word refers to the amount of days that a widow was allowed to stay in her house before she had to leave after her husband had died.

Could we stay in for forty days? If not, how many could we handle? How well will we stick with the strictness of the directive? In Mexico my friends are self-quarantining as a precaution, though I am not aware of any government policy. I do have a coffee date with friends in a few days, and the carpenter is coming this afternoon for a deposit, and I plan on going to stock up on groceries in the evening. Is limiting our exposure to others enough?

Avocados

Pear Portrait

Fresh Pear

Baby Clementine

Pear Friends

Mandarin with Leafy Flair

Pink Lady Apple

Today's my birthday!  I'm celebrating it with a crisp apple.

A Granny Smith

Sliced Lime

Abstract Bell Pepper

Crimini Mushrooms

For Day Two of my painting challenge, I decided to paint three crimini mushrooms from my fridge.

Baby Pumpkin

One of my goals for the new year is to learn to paint oils.  My mom and I are both participating in Leslie Saeta's 30 Paintings in 30 Days project.  I'm excited to hone my skills!

Little Egg

This summer was so wonderful, being able to exercise nearly every day, taking life slow.  I've been going on a lot of walks in my new neighborhood. A month ago I found this little egg lying on the sidewalk, just down from my house.  I thought that it must have accidentally fallen from its nest.  

I cradled it in my hand for the next 30 minutes, thinking of how I wanted to honor the bird's life that never would live by photographing it.  It sat on my windowsill for weeks as I busied myself with cooking projects and endless experiments in fermentation.  The shell had been broken in the fall, and while tiny and seemingly innocuous -- the baby egg started to smell. It was slowly turning and disintegrating into something else.  It was time to finally photograph it, or go put it outside under a tree.  

I thought of how to shoot it.  I placed the little orb on my photo light table, which made it glow from below, turning it into a massive-looking planet.  I tried to set up a seamless background slope with a piece of plexiglass I bought from the hardware store, but I ended up liking this image with the horizon line more than those images.  

Afterwards the shoot, I was curious about what type of bird egg I had found, so I did some research. I learned on NestWatch.org that the Brown Headed Cowbird is a parasitic laying bird, which means that the mother bird lays her egg in a nest of another bird species.  I'd never heard of such a thing!  Brown Headed Cowbirds don't raise their own young!  And they have an aggressive, domineering way of being with other birds.  I had imagined that the egg had fallen mistakenly from the nest, when it is very possible that the mother bird who found the imposing egg might have deliberately purged it from her nest, crashing it to the ground for me to find.  

No matter what happened before I found it, I still would like to honor this little bird's life.  All of us are trying to make it in the world. Some more forcefully, others more peacefully.
 

Another version of the Brown Headed Cowbird egg, shot on a light table in the studio.  Photograph © Tracey Haynes 2014

9/11, Thirteen Years Later

On September 11th, 2001, I was staying in a hostel which sat on the northern edge of Central Park in Harlem.  I was moving to New York City after having graduated from journalism school a few months before, and was staying there until I found an apartment.  It sounds fantastical, but I had intended to go up to the top of the south tower that morning to the observation deck, which I only just learned about the weekend before at a party of some acquaintances.  The man who told me about it lived just a couple of blocks away from the towers, and I remember standing outside on that Saturday night, gazing up the long stretch of all that metal, glass, and artificial light, into the dark distance in the sky.  "You can go up in them? Huh.  I could do that on Tuesday…"

I overslept that morning.  And when I woke up and got ready, I walked into the foyer of the hostel, to see the first images of the south tower burning from a small T.V. set suspended from the ceiling in the corner of room.  Then, the news was reporting it as an accident.  Not knowing how big this was, I grabbed my camera bag which at the time had only two rolls of film (film!), one camera body, and one lens in it, and immediately took the A train southbound to get to where the towers were.  Mid-route, I spoke with other passengers to try to learn more about the situation.  No one knew anything. The conductor said the train was going out of service, and that the last stop would be Chambers and West Broadway.  Everyone had to get out.  We emerged from the underground, five blocks away from the towers, to see that now both towers had been hit and were in flames.  The realization that the crisis was so much bigger and scarier and unexplainable slowly bubbled up inside me.  "What is happening? Who did this?  What does it all mean?"  I began making pictures of what I saw around me. Some were quietly watching, some crying, some on their cell phones.  I cannot remember how long I was there -- 5 minutes, 10? -- before the south tower started to cascade down to the earth, turning a 100 floors of life and concrete, steel, and glass to dust, which would cover lower Manhattan, and hang in the air for weeks before fully being washed from the sky.  

When the first tower began to fall, frightened people ran past me, hitting both of my shoulders as I tried to crouch down to make a picture.  A police officer yelled for everyone to run northward, and others were dazed behind her.  

Today, my brother Ted, sent me a text message, saying that he always thinks of me on this day because our family was worried about what had happened to me, since we weren't able to get in touch with each other until later on that evening.  They knew that I would have gone down to be close to it all.  My mother left me a heart-stabbing voicemail urging me to call her. I feel in her voice that she feared I had died.  I kept that voicemail for a long time, and I still wish I had it, but that was many cell phones ago.  And why should I want it?  Thirteen years now have passed, and it "seems like another life now," Teddy wrote.  

Yesterday I showed my pictures from 9/11 to my Photography One students, high schoolers who were two-, three-, or four-years-old then.  For them, 9/11 is a part of the fabric of their worldview; they cannot imagine life before it.  Like a fish in water.

It's another 9/11 anniversary, and I sit here as the day finishes, quiet, with cicadas squeaking outside, nearly a 1,000 miles away from where I stood thirteen years ago.  My memories are as crisp as they were that bright, cloudless day.  My thoughts are with those who did lose a beloved family member that day, or, like my friend, Petra, nearly all of her coworkers who died in the attack.  We all keep moving, going, changing, and that day still remains just as powerful as it was then, and, really -- incomprehensible.