Life on the Road

Around us, smoke rose from the fires that burned along the dirt path that stretched through the village to the river. A distant haze seemed to settle restlessly over the hands of the trees and the path before us disappeared into the indefiniteness of the shadows beneath the canopy of green.

Among the lessons we have learned is that nothing is ever as it appears to be. Not on the road. Rarely in life.

I smiled as I stood by the side of the river. Another one of those moments when what was supposed to be really wasn’t. We had been told that we would need to take our shoes off and cross a stream on our way to the falls. Only the stream wasn’t a stream. It was a river. And not just a river. Beneath the surface I could see moss covered rocks worn round by the discipline of the passing of the river. There was no way we would get our gear across without getting some or all of it wet. Even JD at six feet three inches wouldn’t be tall enough.

We decided we would take my camera. At five years old, if we were to lose one piece of gear that would be it. So, I watched as JD waded into the river, my camera above his head, as the river rose to almost his shoulders. When he was safely on the other side our guide came back for me. The river rose to my shoulders and I can still remember the round slipperiness of the stones beneath my feet. I am not one to trust and yet here I was, arms raised, my belt held tightly by our guide.

Around me the voices of our party chattered on. As I always do, I lost myself in the memories of other rivers in other places until we reached the falls. The thunder of water against rock pulled me back to the present. Back to the moment. The last moment I remember I was standing over the falls, my back to our party, looking down.

“Falcon,” said a voice somewhere behind me.

I turned quickly. Water against wet rubber on round stone. I went down on my back – concerned only for the camera. Concerned only for the completion of the assignment. Rock against flesh. The dissonance of pain rushing over my back. I knew this feeling – my ribs had taken the full impact.

“Are you OK?”

“I’m not worried about me,” I said not really answering the question. “I heal. The camera won’t.” I remember looking at the camera closely. I held my breath as I took a photo. “Yeah, it’s OK.” A chip in the rim of the polarized filter. Another scratch on the camera body. Another time when things were not as they were supposed to be. Another moment in a life lived on the road.
A moment I remembered with every rut and every bump on the road back to Trujillo……

Descartes, the French philosopher, changed modern philosophy with a single question: Of what can I be certain? In the end, Descartes concluded that there were only two facts about which he could be certain. The first was embodied in his now famous statement, “I think therefore I am.” The second, that god exists. All of my life, I have had my own version of Descartes’
facts. The first is that all things die and one day so shall I. The second was the confidence that no matter how difficult, how miserable, how desperate the circumstances into which I had been born, I would have become the person I now am. If not the person I am now, then certainly, I would have been as successful as I am now.

One need only look at my life to see that this confidence is not misplaced. I nearly died at birth. I suffered severe abuse as a child, near blindness, anorexia… and here I am. Alive. Successful. I not only survived. I followed my dream and left the horrors of my childhood and the challenges of adulthood behind. I am tough, disciplined, focused, and when it comes to pursuing what I want, I am single-minded, passionate, and relentless.

Until Trujillo.

No, it wasn’t the poverty. I have seen poverty at least that bad before. I had been through rural Maine and eastern Kentucky. What I had not seen in person, I had seen in books, on TV…. Besides, the sense of hopelessness that seemed so much apart of my childhood never clouded my determination. It never stopped me from dreaming. When times were the hardest I had found the strength to stand in the face of adversity and survive. No, I didn’t just survive. I actually thrived.

But it was different in Trujillo.

Every day in Trujillo is the same as the one before and identical to the one that will follow it. Each day is as it has been for generations. People bathe in the river as they have since the sixteenth century. People wash their clothes in the river as they have since 1502. There is no sense of a world beyond. No sense that life can be more than it is. No sense of the possibilities the world beyond the narrow confines of Trujillo holds. No sense of tomorrow. No sense that there is a reason to want something more.

The waters of the Caribbean rose over the edge of the beach and washed over my feet. The sun was still low in the sky. Restless, I had left my hotel room. It had been a long nyght. A long, restless nyght that still burned against my desire to sleep. A part of me had died and I did not know what to make of what had happened to me. Like Koestler’s Rubashov, I no longer believed in my infallibility. I no longer believed that one way or another I would have become the person I am now. Never in all my life had I been so possessed by self doubt. Never.

The wheels of the plain struck the tarmac in Greensboro. As I always do, I chose to sleep during the aircraft’s descent. As the plain rose and then settled again, I remember wondering who I might have been……

Her eyes haunt me. If I am condemned to live as long as time itself, I shan’t ever forget her, the little girl who sat by a river in a world so far away from mine….

Despite the artistry of our work, we are photo-journalists. We have always observed a kind of Star Trekean “Prime Directive.” We observe the people and circumstances around us and record our emotional response to what we have observed with a kind of detachment that is, well, often disarming, even to me. It is, after all, what our Forebears – the likes of Gordon Parks, Avedon, Atget, Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Smith - all did before us. It is a skill we have worked tirelessly to hone: See it, capture it, and move on. Whatever the “it” that moment happens to be. The way we hold our cameras, our ability to shoot from a moving car and still get what we saw, everything we do is designed to take hold of the one moment that caught our eye. Forever.

The water of the river without a name surged over rocks that rested deeply beneath its surface. I was soaked from the river crossing – from the neck down. The length of my black cargo pants hung pressed against my legs beneath the rising heat of the Honduran sky. Barefooted, I stood at the edge of the river, just letting the water run from me to the earth beneath my feet.

We had passed her and her siblings on our way to the river – they lived in a small cluster of, well, I am not sure what to call them. Hovels. Dirt covered shacks. Primitive shelters. All apply and yet none speaks to what I saw and felt as we passed along the narrow dirt trail to the river. I had seen her and the other two children as we walked to the river. I was surprised that they had somehow followed us to the edge of the river. We had been gone some time – perhaps an hour or more – there is no sense of time there, far from the edge of the city and I found that it took little for me to fade into moments that seemed elastic and random. She held her cat – the same kitten that had been near her feet when we passed the partially finished shelter that was her home.

The youngest of the three, held by the one who I took to be her brother, had a distended stomach, skin that seemed pale and white and hair that was thin and reddish. She was covered with welts. There was some speculation about the cause of the welts and in the end we were told they were mosquitoes. But I had seen all this before. In the third world, young children suffer all manner of illness and cruelty. It is my job to keep a kind of aesthetic immunity from scenes such as this. I can only allow myself to enter so far into all this lest I loose the distance that erodes my sense of objectivity.

She sat on a single stone next to my feet. Her kitten sitting in her lap as though it were a person – its back was to her chest and its paws extended in a way they might were the kitten sitting a dinner table somewhere. I smiled at her. I wish I could say that she smiled in return but she did not. There was little emotion that I could see or feel. I sat down next to her on another stone.

At first I stroked her kitten from across the distance between us. Then, for a moment, I took the kitten, held it so that I could try to show her that I shared her affection for it, and returned it to her.

I am still trying to understand her reaction to what I did. It was, for me, a profound departure from our Prime Directive: “Observe, react, commit to an image, and then detach.” But never, under any circumstances, are we to cross the line between what we observe and ourselves. Doing so compromises our objectivity. Doing so blurs the line between what we see and what we feel to the point where it is emotion that drives the creation of an image, and not the observation of the moment that elicits the emotional response that gives birth to the image.

I had crossed the line.

I knew I was doing it.

I would do it again.

I smiled as warmly as I could. Usually, that is sufficient to elicit a smile in return. There was no smile. No warmth. Yet I sensed in her something. No, I cannot find the words to express what that was. Not even now.


We had been gone longer than anticipated and around us there was a stirring of conversation and movement. It was time to return to our world and leave hers behind. I smiled, gently touched her hair, and stood. She stood too and from behind her kitten spoke to me without words. I took the last two photos – photos of her - my memory card could hold, and by the time I reloaded, people had begun to move down the trail towards the van and the Land Cruiser. It was a long way back to Trujillo over difficult and rutted roads. Darkness falls quickly and we had already had one vehicle stuck in the river. It was a long way back to our hotel and the showers that would cleanse us from the sand of the river.

From behind the kitten she smiled at me.

I remember standing there for a moment, the past person in our party, looking at her.

Another time, another place, I might have cried. But as I stepped away from her, I pulled myself back over the line. Back into the distance that I always keep around me. Back into the objectivity our Prime Directive demands.

And yet, she haunts me still. Even now. Even securely in my world. Thousands of miles away. She haunts me.

The Old Church

It was cold. Bitterly. Even through my gloves, the cold reached my fingers and I found myself curling my fingers into the palm of my hands to keep them from becoming so cold that I would lose all sense of having them.

The church stood on a hill to my right – I caught it out of the corner of my eye
as we drove back toward Sparta, NC. Lew and I debated whether or not we would go
over the fence but it really wasn’t much of a debate. We both knew we would go
over it. And so we did, carefully staying clear of the barbed wire. As much as I
do not like the cold, I treasure the silent sound of footsteps on the snow on a
bitterly cold day. Lew drifted to the right and I followed the drifting snow to the right.
The church is empty. Boarded up. A barbed wire fence tightly follows its outer walls. Locks hold the doors closed. I imagined the church as it might have been long ago, filled with people and voices, and wondered what could have happened.
For me there was more than a passing interest – having lost my faith long ago
despite my PhD in biblical theology. Time and memory and distance. Another life
I once lived so long ago.

The wind stirred from the valley below and the shadows moved restlessly over the face of the snow. Our time here had passed.

Save for the light from the LCD of my laptop, it is still vey dark. And very early. Even the snow, unusual for North Carolina at this time of year, has yet to lighten the darkness. The cats have been fed. Anaximander, white save for gray left on his head and tail, has decided I am worthy of attention this morning, and he keeps pressing his head into my hand as I type. Or try to. Cats are that way, after all.

Coffee is brewing and its smoky darkness already rises around me. As I always do at this time of the darkened morning, I imagine what it will be like to savor that first sip.

end of the year is less than two weeks away. There is a flurry of activity here as we rush to complete as much work as we can. One hundred and twenty five prints leave Monday for Honduras – our largest single print order in our history – to be sold by Royal Caribbean at the Port of Roatan – and many small orders that will be Christmas presents still wait to be printed.

It has been a memorable year here. Changes abound. New web sites. New equipment. New partners. New places we have worked. From the canyons north of Cedar City, Utah, to the remote village of Punta Gorda, Roatan, Honduras, there has been no end to interesting places. We missed a military coup by a matter of hours, and we survived a Chrysler Sebring convertible on a snow and ice covered mountain road high in the mountains of Utah. More memories that we will add to those we have gathered over the past seven years.

For me, personally, it was a good year as well. I received my third Image of the Day on One Model Place for a photo I did as part of a series with isis, my muse. Five selections from other series were published on Michelle7. One, isis and Demeter, was the “cover” in September. My thanks to isis, Demeter and Innana, for sharing their beauty with me. My work was featured on NextCat, Behance and on Deviant Art I was part of seven features. Not bad all in all.

It was a good year for the firm as well. FJ Westcott named us to its Top 100 Endorsed Pros. X-Rite named us to its Coloratti. There were new partnerships with Chimera, Pocket Wizard, Sekonic, and Induro. Our work was on the cover of several different publications. Traffic on the web site tripled to more than 100,000. We were discovered in Asia – fully fifteen percent of our hits come from China now.

There will be more changes in 2010. Among them: Videos will come to the blog and to the seminar site. We will become a content delivery company. While photography will remain our core business, with Blue Flame 6 Productions, video production will become as important and increasingly, our work will be targeted toward mobile devices. We even have a Canon camcorder that will let us chronicle our life on the road for this blog. This week we released our 2009 portfolio still video formatted – and downloadable from our site – in formats for BlackBerry, iPod, iPhone, and Palm Treo Pro smart phones. Our goal is to deliver content any where in the world, on demand.

Coffee’s ready. Sun is nearly up. Time to head out. From all of us here at NyghtFalcon, best wishes for 2010 and our thanks for all you have given us this year.

We are pleased to announce our new seminar program.

Please be patient while the video loads.

I couldn’t possibly tell you when I first discovered Irving Penn. Honestly, I haven’t a clue. I was never one to look at the name below a photo, not until I became a photographer, so I can’t tell you that from my early days I even knew who he was. I didn’t. I just know that, like George Hurrell, he has always been in my memory and there isn’t a single photo I have taken that in some way he has not influenced.

I can’t point to a particular photo of his and say that this one image more than any other has touched me or shaped my style. I can’t say that just one of his images became the seminal link between his work and what has now become the NyghtFalcon style. I can’t. But he is there. I see it in the way I see the world. I feel it in the way I hold my camera. I am aware of it when I think about how I will approach a still life, a model, a building….. Somehow he taught me how to see into people, into things, into the world around me and this ability to disarm and be disarmed is why we say that the art of photography is learning to see the world again for the first time.

Perhaps that’s what I did and perhaps that is how I first discovered Penn.

Up the street from us lived a couple who had no children. We adopted them and I confess that once I discovered my “Uncle” Howie’s penchant for magazine subscriptions I spent hours and hours on the steps to their cellar consumed in images. When I was old enough, I was allowed to actually go into the cellar and there lost myself in an endless collection of magazines. I am sure it was there that I found Penn and Avedon and Smith and Parks.

Howie died more than twenty years ago and I left Connecticut and the cellar filled with magazines while still in my teens. Yet, it seems that I have carried with me all these years those photographs Irving Penn left for me to find – like the fabled trail of crumbs that enabled me to find my way home, my way to the person I always should have been. It has been a long road – one filled with more twists and turns and dark nyghts than I care to remember. And here I am. Where I always should have been.

Thank you, Irving Penn, for helping me find my way home.

“I’ve looked into the empty faces of the people of the nyght… Something is just not right – cause I know that I gotta get out of here ‘cause New York’s not my home….” Jim Croce, New York’s not My Home

The cold and rain passed into a deep blue sky that faded far into the distance. Despite the passing of October, the day was August-warm and as I crossed Vanderbilt Avenue, I pulled my sleeves up and away from my hands. It was a beautiful day and it was the last of our trip. Fortuitous for sure. Despite my love for the rain, I never relished rain in New York, not even after all these years. I especially disliked the stench of wet flesh and clothing in the subways. Besides, it is one thing to watch the rain from the silence of a dry room and another to suffer it relentless on the streets of the City.

I had never felt at home in New York, despite the fact that over the course of my life, the City had figured prominently in my life. It seems, as I look back, that at every key turn in my life, I was here. I had come to know the City, I had endured the aftermath of 9-11 with it, and I had longed, as did Jim Croce, to get out. I felt trapped and I couldn’t see a way out. Then when I left, I vowed never to return. But that was seven years ago now. Even if New York hadn’t changed, I had. The rough edge of the City no longer cuts me as it has. And I can see now, that even in the tough sometimes unforgiving urban sprawl, there is beauty and even amongst the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, there is compassion and caring.

At the base of the fountain I found one of those moments. A memorial to a teenager who I assume died there. All those things which were important to him, along with a photo, carefully arraigned at the edge of the fountain. Four of his friends watched from the stone bench over my shoulder. They fell silent as I knelt by the shrine they had created for him, perhaps fearful that I would disturb their memories of him. Without touching studied each of the items carefully left to remember him – I could feel their pain and despite the warmth of the day, I shivered as their sadness filled me. I wanted to photograph them but a little silent voice within me told me to let them be and so I did. When I returned nearly an hour later, they were still there. I turned one last time as I passed into the distance and watched as the sun moved toward the passing of another day in Brooklyn.

NyghtFalcon and One Model Place to Hold First Annual Model-ween

On Friday, October 30, NyghtFalcon and One Model Place will jointly host a Halloween version of "In the Click". The quarterly "In the Click" event creates an open, safe environment in which photographers and models can work together to build their respective portfolios. This event will have a Halloween theme and the model with the best costume will be awarded a prize. The event is from 6:00 to 9:00 PM at Bonamanzee Conference and Event Center. Directions to Bonamanzee are below.

There will be an open shoot before the formal event from 3:00 to 5:30 PM. Models over 18 may remain after the event ends at 9:00 PM and work with photographers till 11:00 PM.

While lingerie is allowed for this shoot, garments cannot be see-through. As always, implied, partial or full-nudes are not allowed.

The event is free. Photographers are asked to tip models. We recommend $20 for 20 minutes.

Directions to the Conference Center:Bonamanzee is located just north off Highway 220, take the Madison – Wentworth exit. At the end of the ramp, take Rt. 704 towards Wentworth. The Conference Center is 2.9 miles from the 704 exit just outside of the town, Madison. The entrance sign on the left on Rt. 704 just after Painter Rd. Bonamanzee is 25 Minutes North of Greensboro and the Piedmont Triad International Airport.

We do not know much about the details of Atget’s life. Some of the more general facts survive. We know, for example, that he was born in Bordeaux in 1856. An orphan, Atget was brought up by an uncle. While still very young he went to sea as cabin boy. These experiences made a deep impression upon him and shaped his vision of the world – we know that in his later years he recalled to his friends many of the events from this period.
Atget’s path to a career as a photographer was rather circuitous. As a young man, after leaving the merchant marine, he pursued a career on the stage. He never rose to the stages of Paris as far as we know and his career was limited to the provinces and later the suburbs of Paris. Apparently, he was not physically suited for the parts offered to leading men and so he found himself usually playing the villain’s part. Eventually, he left the theater and decided to become a painter. Despite the fact that he continued to paint for some time, this too proved lacking. But his experience as a painter was enough to provide the foundation for his work as an art photographer.

For thirty years, Atget pursued one subject, Paris. He did so with equipment that we today would find primitive. He worked without benefit of light or color meters and his 18cm x 24cm view camera lacked all the features we now take for granted. The lens on his camera was likely quite simple and had a fixed focal length. The glass plates he used offered little consistency since the emulsion on the glass varied greatly. As one web author wrote –

“Because the emulsion used then were non-color-sensitive, he never used filters. For interior work, he used no artificial light of any sort but availed himself always of natural light. Any shutter used with the lens was at most a simple bulb shutter. Atget made a practice of closing down to a small aperture if conditions permitted. Only when he photographed people did he open up the diaphragm and focus critically on the center of interest, leaving the background out of focus. It is doubtful if his lens could have been faster than 1/11 at its widest opening. It would seem from the photographs themselves that most of them were taken during the summer months when the sun’s actinic rays are stronger. Also most of the human figures of these series are posed to the extent that Atget probably asked them ‘to hold still a moment.’”

Yet, his scenes from the life of Paris remain profoundly breathtaking and even though the Paris we know is now very different, his work is still moving and still speaks to us about the heart of the city.

Atget enjoyed little success during his life time.  Some prominent Parisians of the time - Luc-Olivier-Merson  and the playwright Victorien Sardou – did purchase his work but his success was otherwise minimal. Before the World War of 1914-1918, Atget was gradually winning recognition and financial support. The First World War brought an end to that and save for the purchase of some of his plates by the archives of the Palais Royale, his lived a simple, impoverished life. In 1927 his death passed with little notice.

The vast body of Atget’s work focuses not upon the extraordinary, but upon Paris itself. The day to day. That which others viewed to be mundane. Atget’s ability to see the world again for the first time, even in the most mundane of moments and events, discloses to those who see his work, the depth and beauty that is always hidden right before our eyes. We need only open our eyes to see the world again. It is this ability to see the extraordinary in the mundane, this ability to see past the everyday, which resonates to those of us at NyghtFalcon.