David Alan Harvey Loft Workshop, entry 11: it is time to stop and go to bed, so here is one token image from Times Square

In the end, for reasons that I will explain later, I would have one hour to edit my Times Square take and pull the selects together to take to the final critique that would determine what the final images for the evening slide show would be.

As I had only one hour, I did it in an hour and took a decent selection of images to the final critique - still worried that I would not have enough that would make the final cut. Now, however, I have no such time restriction. I can take five hours, ten hours, 20 if I feel like it. So it is much more difficult to edit them down and make a selection.

Only now have I finally found the time to sit down and look at every image that I shot in Times Square. I have spent the last several hours going back and forth through my take and I am not even close to being ready to make a selection to post here.

I want to go to bed, so I am going to post just this one image for now. I selected it for one reason - simply because this is the final image of my Times Square take. I reached it just a little bit ago and so decided to post it and stop for the night.

It is not one of the images I that I brought to the workshop or that went into my piece of the class slideshow. I will not post any of my images that went into the slideshow in what will probably be a multiple-part Times Square series to follow over the next day or so. At the end, when my coverage of the workshop is all done, I will present my part of the slideshow, but I don't want any of the images to appear in this blog until I do.

Also, David was very strict with us about narrowing everything down to only our very best work. I will not be so strict with the images I present here - in part because in many cases I do not know what the best image is, and also I want to show the process that I went through to get to where I wound up.

Friday will be a busy day for me. Among other things, I must go to Anchorage to pick Margie up and bring her home. I do not know how I will find any significant time for this blog, but I will try. Plus, all the images of my initial edit are in my head and they will be playing in my mind even as I go to Anchorage and take care of all these other things. So maybe I can get the Times Square posts all done before I go to bed Friday night. I hope so. The Loft Workshop was a great experience, one that will be with me for the rest of my life, but still it is time to get it all blogged and to move on to other things.

David Alan Harvey Workshop, entry 10: As I head out to shoot my last-gasp attempt to get off Humilation Road I walk through the Hassidic neighborhood of The Loft

David had asked me what I planned to do on this, the final shooting day. I told him that I was going to hit various places where I thought I might find some street preachers, from Columbus Circle to Ground Zero, and see what I could come up with.

No, he said, given the time left and the fact that I had come up with none the previous evening, I should just drop that idea. Sometimes, he said, despite our best efforts, we just run into stone walls, and that is what had happened to me so far, both with my Mormon missionaries and my street preachers.

"Go shoot the hell out of Times Square," he suggested. "You will never see anything like that in Wasilla."

"Okay," I agreed. 

"Put your whole heart into it," David said, "just like you did with your dad."

Obviously, this is not Times Square, nor is the previous frame. The building that houses the loft sits in the largely Hassidic neighborhood of Williamsburg. During my previous walks through the neighborhood, I had spotted some beautiful potential pictures of people, including some wonderful images of parents with children. At home, I would have just shot, before the moment was lost.

Not knowing Hassidic sensibilities, I had stopped each time to ask if they would wind and each time they had smiled politely, thanked me, and said, "no." David then told me that in principle they had no qualms about being photographed, but they had sometimes been ridiculed in the past and so were hesitant, but nothing bad would come of it if I saw a picture and just shot it.

As I walked toward the subway station to do what would be my second Times Square shoot of the day and my final of the workshop, I contemplated this dilemma.

I needed something in my personal record to say that I had been in a workshop that took place in a Hassidic neighborhood. So, as I walked back to the subway, without ever breaking stride, without ever raising my camera from my waist to my eye, I applied my quick draw skills and shot these three Hassidic neighborhood scenes.

I felt a little guilty, but I had to do it - just to put something in the record. Edite Haberman was heavily engaged in the process of shooting an essay on the Hassidic that would go much deeper.

At the train station, I found Zun Lee, catching some sun rays as he waited for the train. We would board together as we set out to do our final round of shooting.

Now I must take a break for several hours to complete some other tasks, but when I get back, I will take you out onto Times Square as I make my last-gasp effort to pull myself off of Humiliation Road. I will then stick with this Loft Series until it is done - no more breaks to update the near-present.

I hope you will stick with me.

I had almost forgot to mention - as you can see, my camera had come back from whatever moisture problem had beset it - not totally. Everynow and then, a frame or two would still go bad. Mostly, it was working okay.

David Alan Harvey Workshop, entry 9: Riding down Humiliation Road with nothing to show for myself, I watched as some superb essays came together; a few drops of rain fell upon my camera

My last Loft Workshop post began with a picture of Zun Lee with his arms wrapped around Tracie Williams, who was painfully frustrated at how her take of the Occupy Wall Street movement at Zucotti Park had gone so far. She was not happy with her presentation, either. David had passed over her protest candid shots, zeroed in on some strong portraits of protesters that she had made using detached flash and had then suggested that she concentrate the remainder of her shoot on doing more such portraits.

She had done just that. Now, when her images were projected onto the screen, we beheld multiple powerful images, including one of a young protestor with his t-shirt pulled up and self-inflicted scars on his chest that just made us all gasp and go, "wow!"

 

When Carolyn Beller put up her images, we also gasped, "wow!" - particularly at the image at the lower left, partially masked by her hand.

I'm afraid that I basically did not take pictures during these workshop sessions, except to raise my camera a couple of times just to put something from the morning on my own personal record, so I do not have pictures of any of my other fellow workshoppers as they made their presentations:

Andy Kropa - who had added a stunning, magical picture from Zucotti Park that has now become one of the iconic - perhaps THE ICONIC - images from the protest there...

Isabella Eseverri - with some sexy dance shots in her essay that would become known as, "Latina."

Mark Bennington - with his atmospherically dark, dreamy, tastefully sexy shots of young woman, all of whom hid secrets behind their lovely and mysterious faces.

Sarah Baker - She had transformed her image of the black barbershop from color into black and white and was creating something warm and homey, yet also powerful, including a "wow" image that also makes you laugh.

Edite Haberman - art. How else can I describe Edite's work? She is an artist. A non-practicing Jew, she had immersed herself in the local Hassidic community and was producing... art; penetrating images of beauty. No one could do what she was doing in just five days - four if you really think about it - but she was doing it.

Jen Klewitz - I have to use that word, "sexy" again, plus - moody, atmospheric, dreamy, romantic - all on the Tango, a dance which is all of those things. Wow! Wow! Wow!

Milli Apelgren - She had produced an exceptional action skateboard image, but it would not be part of her essay. That would all be devoted to some of New York's coolest people. Again, "Wow."

And Zun Lee - Again, Wow! Wow! Wow! He was finding the black father that he had missed growing up.

Yet, there were two photographers who had no "wow" shots projected that day - in fact, neither had any shots projected at all.

One was Uwe Schober of Germany. He had disappeared from the workshops a couple of days before, not long after receiving a pretty blunt critique from David. We were all worried about him, but the word was that he had come in, done his one-on-one meeting with David and that everything was good with him and he was out shooting his essay, also focused on the Occupy Wall Street Movement and those gathered in Zucotti Park. He was said to be producing some excellent material and we would see it tomorrow.

That left only me. I had nothing - not one image to show - not today, not tomorrow. My computer was still at the Apple Store. I had taken on two essays. The first, the one dealing with my own life through Mormon missionaries, had come to a dead end. The excursion that I had taken the day before to get the second essay going had failed to produce a single image, because I had failed to find a single street or subway preacher.

I felt a bit humiliated, sitting there as everybody showed their great work while I put forth nothing. I did not want to be humiliated at the show the next night, but humiliation was the direction that I was headed toward.

Somehow, the presentation and visit of Danny Wilcox Frazier passed by without me ever taking a single photo. I guess I was so mesmerized by Frazier's black and white essay, Driftless: Photographs From Iowa, I forgot to shoot.

In this magnificent essay, Frazier made me realize some of the stretches that I must yet make if I am ever to shoot an essay on Wasilla that plumbs the depths I hope to reach. So far, I have just been splashing on the edges of that essay - but it is there, waiting for me to do it.

How do I push myself to the depths and lengths that Frazier did of his home state?

It feels impossible.

But it isn't.

Somehow...

but how...

No... it can be done. I can do it.

And here is Carolyn, the human tripod, shooting a portrait of Zun.

I had needed to get to the Apple Store to pick up my computer. Another guest was coming. David warned me not to miss her. I got on the train, picked up the computer from the Apple Store, then shot a few pictures and got just a few drops of rain on my Canon 5D Mark II. This worried me, because when it comes to moisture, the 5D Mark II is absolutely the worst camera I have ever owned - it is probably the worst ever made.

I do not state this lightly - THE WORST. But otherwise, a wonderful camera - in many ways, the best that I have ever owned.

A few drops of rain can be all it takes to shut it down - or even send it to the repair shop.

This is the guest David wanted us all to be there for - Mary Anne Golon, the former picture editor of Time Magazine who now works as an independent photo editor and professional media consultant. Her connections in the world of photojournalism are both broad and deep. Were we to become connected to her, David emphasized, that alone would make our own connections broad and deep - although it would be up to us to make something of those connections.

I did take a few pictures of Golon - and was horrified to see that the raindrops had indeed put my camera out of action. The images were streaked with lines and sprays of color, blue and green in this case, but sometimes red, sometimes purple, sometimes yellow - sometimes all these sprays in one image.

So far, essay wise, the week that been a total failure. And now this.

What the hell?

Humiliation road - I continued my fast charge down it.

David Alan Harvey Loft Workshop, entry 8: events at the Loft; I take on a new type of spiritual photo essay

As I noted last night, on the morning of Wednesday, the third shooting day, I had gotten up and left the Brooklyn apartment early to take my laptop to the Apple Store near the Lincoln Center subway stop so that I could get it repaired that day. Then I would have it that night when it came time to edit what I hoped would finally be a successful day's take. For two days in a row, I had failed to make any progress toward shooting the photo essay that I had hoped to shoot on Mormon missionaries at work in New York City.

The workshop session would also start at 9:00, with bagles, fruit and coffee, so I dropped the computer off and then rushed back to Brooklyn by taxi cab, hoping to get there before I missed too much of the critiques or the presentation of the morning guest, Steve Fine, Photo Director for Sports Illustrated.

By the time I entered the loft, the critique sessions had already begun. If I recall correctly, and I'm not certain I do, I walked in during the middle of Andy Kropa's critique. Andy had taken a lighting workshop from David just before the workshop began and now had a screenful of pictures up that he had taken with flash, detached from the camera at the Occupy Wall Street gathering at Zucotti Park the night before.

David was scolding Andy, asking him if he got anything out of the lighting workshop at all, because the first few frames we looked at were poorly lit and a bit weak on composition as well. Then, suddenly, up came a brilliant image of a young protestor with an angry expression on his face, his fist in the air and a skyscraper behind, then another of an angry black preacher, rallying the crowd and another of the crowd itself.

David had given everybody a goal of one good, solid, photo a day and by the time the edit was done, Andy had a good half-dozen strong images on the screen - stronger than any that I had seen in the media. Yes, he had blown the lighting on some inconsequential shots, but, when the shots had mattered, he had nailed the lighting every time.

Tracie Williams was also shooting an essay in Zucotti Park and the day had not seemed to go well for her, although she had a couple of images onscreen that I thought were strong, including one of Susan Sarandon, standing with a look of righteousness upon her face almost eyeball to eyeball with a cop who looked like a human wall, ready to block her progress whatever it took.

It struck me as the classic irresistible force meeting the immovable object.

The photo did not make the cut. Then David zeroed in on a couple of nighttime portraits that Tracie had done. They were strong. David suggested that she try to do more in that mode.

At her lowest point, Tracie could not hide her frustration. Zun Lee wrapped his arms around her and gave her comfort.

None of the workshop participants had expressed any desire to become sports photographers, but when he introduced Steve Fine, David said that did not matter. Whether one is shooting news, documentary, art, sports or whatever, the goal is to come up with photos that speak and the basic principles that guide Steve Fine in selecting photos for Sports Illustrated are pretty much universal, whatever the discipline or the media outlet.

Fine's primary message to me was that a photographer is his own worst editor. A photographer is too close to his work and gets invested in it. Even as a photographer shoots, she selects pictures in her mind that she thinks are going to be the ones - but maybe they aren't at all. Yet, when the photographer sits down to edit his take, he does not want to yield them.

A photographer often projects strengths and meaning into an image that no one else can see. If a photographer has to explain why he thinks an image is great, then it is not going to work. Fine wants the image to speak to him, not the photographer's words about the picture.

This presents me with a bit of a conundrum. I believe that Steve Fine is right. Yet, except for the spread I shot for National Geographic, I have always been my own editor.

Usually, I have been creating one-man publications that I shoot, edit, report, write, layout, mock up, produce and send to the printers. Always, those publications have been successful with my readers. Yet, there have occassions when I have needed a picture from a take I have done years before and so have dug out the raw take. I have often been surprised to find that I missed my very best image during my original edit.

Still, I have to edit my own take. I have always been and remain a one-man band.

Steve Fine insists that photographers who shoot for him send him their complete, unedited, take. This also shows him how a photographer works. Once he understands this, he is better able to decide how to use the photographer in the future.

He also told us of the great lengths Sports Illustrated goes to plan how to shoot an event, be it the Beijing Olympics or a football game. He and his staff seek to envision every possible angle and moment of action that might happen and to put a photographer with the right equipment in place to shoot these moments.

He showed us the SI Beijing Olympic finals, from grand entry to finale and told us how certain decisions were made. I'm not going to try to sum it all up, but it was impressive, the results spectacular.

Steve Fine is a busy man and he could have left right after he made his presentation, but he chose instead to stay with us, to participate in the critiques and then to join us for lunch at a nearby Brazilian restaurant.

Mine was one of the presentations he helped to critique. I started off by noting that my hoped-for essay on Mormon missionaries had failed, that I had gotten little more than shots of missionaries leaving the building, plus my shots of Elders Matthews and Bussard riding the subway. Hardly an essay.

He found a couple of the shots reasonably interesting, but noted that many young men in New York wear suits, white shirts and ties and that visually, my pictures could be of any of those young men, Mormons or not. He seemed to think that an essay on missionaries in New York could be a challenge to pull off and asked me what picture or pictures I had specifically hoped to take of missionaries at work.

Whatever they happened to do when I was with them, I told him. I would know the picture when I saw it. He did not think this was the right approach. He advised that I visualize specific pictures and try to figure out how to get them. Furthermore, he chastised me a little bit and said I should have stayed to meet with the mission president.

One must take seriously the advice of one so much more accomplished than himself as Steve Fine is than me. So I gave it some thought. Then I decided that under the circumstance, I had still done the right thing. As to preplaning, of course I imagined certain possible scenarios in my head, such as missionaries getting invited into a home, missionaries getting the door slammed in their face, missionaries talking to passersby on the street, riding bicycles, playing basketball with youth, but the truth was I had no way to know what might happen. The activities of missionaries wandering the street play out in very different and less predictable scenarios than do events taking place on a track, football field, or the racing lanes of a pool.

How could I have known that lady missionaries would board the same train we did? How could I have known that when the crowd thinned out a bit, a very pregnant lady would stand almost between the two young Elders? One cannot plan for these kind of things. One must be ready to react and shoot, whatever happens.

Sometimes, being a photographer is like being a sharp-shooter with a high powered-rifle and scope. Sometimes, it is like being a quick-draw artist with a six-shooter on his hip, drawing and firing as needed. I can sharp-shoot, but must often, I am a quick-draw artist.

As for the mission president, when I found him he had promised to meet with me in 15 minutes and then I had been told to come back in five hours. He had also said that it would "be impossible" for me to shoot pictures of missionaries working in New York, unless I just happened upon them by chance.

Plus, I do understand some basic things about the culture that I grew up in. If I had waited around the temple area for the five hour period to end and had then been fortunate enough to actually be granted a meeting with the president, Elders Matthews and Bussard would have already reached home. All the missionaries would have been gone. It would have been just me and the President, who had already made it clear that the only way I could photograph his missionaries was to happen upon them by chance and even then, there would be parameters he would want me to follow.

I made a judgment call. I believe I made the right one.

It did not result in a photo essay, but as for my long-term, ongoing, Looking Back at Me project, it gave me the material I needed both to deal with the issue of race and to tell the story of how Margie and I came together.

In that sense, I feel I succeeded.

Still, I learned a great deal from Steve Fine and the fact that I disagree with him does not change the fact that I greatly admire what he does at Sports Illustrated.

Loft workshop participants at the restaurant. Not everybody was there. A few were off working on their projects.

David has an endless reservoir of stories to tell - like when National Geographic sent him to cover the Arctic Slope, he was a passenger in a small plane that was flying through clouds into Anaktuvuk Pass. The pilot goofed. His landing gear struck the ridge of the mountain, was torn off the plane, which then had to make a belly landing.

Workshopper Isabella Eseverri of Venezuela listens as the master speaks.

David and our waiter exchanged a few sentences in Portugese - rather risqué sentences, it turned out. David would soon return to Rio De Janeiro to finish up his Rio Book - a personal project dealing with one night through work spread out over years.

He also has a Rio spread in the works for National Geographic.

After lunch, we all walked off in our own directions. The leaves on the trees in New York were still green for the most part, but at least one tree species had turned early and had already dropped yellow leaves on the sidewalk.

I now had to find a new subject to shoot for my essay. Andy Kropa suggested that I might think about shooting an essay on street and subway preachers, which New York has in abundance. Perhaps I could even work one of my Mormon missionary pictures into it. I liked the suggestion. I decided to do it.

David gives every workshop participant an hour or two of private time and mine was scheduled for 4:00 PM, which did not leave me much time to go anywhere. I decided to just wander about the local area to see if I might find any street preachers there. I didn't. 

I did find Zun Lee, wandering about on the sidewalks Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood just like I was. Zun was scheduled to see David just ahead of me. We went into a coffee shop and he bought me an Americano. In my earlier posts, I mentioned that Zun had only recently discovered that his father was black. As his father had not been there for him, and that is the stereotype that many have of black fathers, Zun had been wanting to his essay on black fathers who are there for their children.

It seemed that it might be too risky - a topic that he might fail to accomplish in just five shooting days - actually, a little more than four, if one takes everything into consideration. Zun came to the workshop believing that maybe he would take on a safer subject, something more easily accomplished.

Then, when he saw the slides of my father that I had shown on the opening day, he told me, he had been moved. In them, he said, he found the inspiration and courage to shoot the essay of his heart. He had already come up with some powerful, powerful, images.

We parted. He went to his meeting and I continued to wander fruitlessly. When I came for my session with David, he was still meeting with Zun. David describes his role in these one-on-ones as both teacher and confessor - kind of like a Catholic Priest. Anything goes there, nothing off bounds.

When I met with him, it would have been hard to confess anything, as people who wanted him for one thing or another kept coming in and out. That was okay with me. I didn't confess anything, but I did talk about some of my projects that few know about. I suspect that if I finish all the work that I want to do I will, in the process, confess everything to the world anyway. He said he would help.

Sometimes, I feel bad for the families of writers and photographers. We are driven to do this, to take those aspects of our lives that so many others hold private and quiet and then to put them before the world in our work, one way or another.

I have barely begun, but the day is coming.

After I met with David, I set out to see if I could find some street preachers. The previous Saturday, just before the workshop began, I had gone to Times Square to get my ceremonial pretzel and there had found this preacher and his fellow preachers, being scolded harshly, shrilly, loudly and pointedly by this lady.

This is why she scolded them so severely, because of the numbers they had written on the picture over the forehead of Jesus. The mark of beast, the sign of Satan, written upon the forehead of He whom she regards as Savior. She came at the little band of street preachers so strongly that they packed up and moved.

I don't think their beef was against Jesus, but just how he is portrayed. I heard one of them tell the lady that Jesus is black and should be portrayed as black.

I spent only a few minutes in their presence and did not really figure out what they are about or what message they were trying to preach. I asked one, and he said they had to go, they would set up somewhere else and then if I came by, he would tell me.

But I was not shooting an essay then, I did not want to stay on Times Square and so I did not follow when they wandered off. Two white police officers had carefully observed the exchange between the street preachers and the woman, ready to take action if necessary. They seemed to be well-trained on the need to respect people's civil right to self-expression and so did nothing but observe.

As the street preachers walked away, I asked the police officers who they were.

"Just a few assholes, trying to get attention," one of them answered.

Now, as my so far totally unproductive third shooting day turned into night, I remembered the street preachers. I also remembered seeing a woman preaching on a Times Square sidewalk as I ate my ceremonial pretzel, and it seemed like I had seen at least one more preacher on Times Square the previous Saturday as well. So I took the subway to Times Square, certain that I would find street preachers there.

I didn't - not a single one. I saw this guy and his partner, collecting money for the homeless. I thought they might they were preachers. They weren't - they were just people doing the holy work that all great faiths advocate - to house and feed the poor.

So I took a picture, gave them $5.00 and moved on. 

I saw this Muslim woman, with her family, in the crowd. I took a couple of wide angle shots of them eating at a table, then pulled back and shot this telephoto view... but... she wasn't preaching.

True, her attire carried a message of faith, but she was not trying to convert anybody. She was just trying to enjoy an evening in the best known landmark in the greatest city on earth with her family.

In past trips to New York, I had seen preachers working the subway. Surely, if I searched, I would find preachers down in the subterranean depths of New York City.

First,I had to go back to the Apple Store and pick up my laptop. I needed to get there by 9:00 PM - closing time. So I jumped on a train and off I went. As the train rolled down the track, I began to envision different pictures I might take of preachers, working the bowels of the subway system.

I became quite taken by some of these envisioned but as yet unphotographed images. Suddenly, I realized that I had passed the Lincoln Center station at 66th street. It was getting close to 9:00, but no big deal. There was still time to hop off at the next station, catch a train back and pick up my computer.

The train reached the next station and just kept going - and then the next, the next after that, and still the next... until finally we stopped somewhere in the 170's. It was the late-night express.

I got out, caught a train back, exited at Lincoln Center, literally ran up the stairs, out onto the road and dashed off toward the Apple Store. I reached the door at 9:03. It was locked. No one would unlock it.

I would have no computer tonight. I would have to take the time to return to the Apple Store and get it the next day. Well, I figured, I would do a Central Park preacher search - at least that way I would be close.

I spent the next few hours roaming about the subway, especially the larger stations at Columbus Circle and below Times Square. I did not encounter a preacher of any kind. Not one.

Three shooting days had now passed. I did not have a single image done on my essay. There was only one full shooting day left - Thursday. Perhaps I could get in a few hours Friday, but that seemed kind of unlikely.

Humiliation - is that where I was headed? I was not willing to accept such an idea. 

It kind of looked like it, though.

David Alan Harvey Loft Workshop, entry seven: the bypassed story of how my wife's first kiss knocked me for a loop... back to the workshop

These are the first two young Elders that I saw exit the building that houses both the temple and the church house gymnasium were the conference took place. I did follow them briefly into the subway, where I did a couple of portraits and took a shot of them exchanging sign language. The missionary in the lead with the taxi-cab-matching water bottle is hearing-impaired. They left me with the understanding that they do missionary work with the hearing impaired.

When I stopped at their house the other day to pick Margie up, Lavina told me that she had read the post that I wrote about what I went through to marry Margie. She said she had enjoyed it, but she had expected to see the story of our first kiss in it and was disappointed that it was not there.

I told her that I had intended to write it, but felt like the post was getting impossibly long and so skipped over it. She told me that to her the length had not mattered, that once she started reading she was enjoying it so much that she just wanted to keep reading and reading. She wished that I had included the story.

So, here is the story of the first time I kissed Margie, told briefly - because a kiss, after all, is a brief act. Well, usually... not always... and when it is not, babies sometimes follow...

I had wanted to kiss her after our first date, I had wanted to kiss her on our second date... in fact, I had wanted to kiss her even before we dated at all, like the moment leading up to the first date when we walked across campus together, came upon a rain puddle and she suddenly stomped in it, splashing it all over me. 

I was thrilled, because if a woman does something like that, then you know she likes you, has a crush on you, maybe even loves you. So I wanted to kiss her right there - but I did not dare.

I did not work up the nerve until our third date. Neither one of us had a working vehicle then, so, when it was over, I walked her home and then up the flight of stairs that led to the second-floor apartment in which she lived with a couple of roommates.

We stood talking in the doorway for awhile, close together and then I just did it - leaned in and met her willing lips with my own. It wasn't a super long kiss, but it was super nice. When it was over, we said goodbye, but I could not make myself leave until she finally closed the door. I then turned to go.

I felt so exuberant that I spontaneously decided not to walk, run, or skip down the stairs, but to leap completely over and past them so that I would land directly on the walkway below. Above me, the stairs continued in a zig-zag up to the next floor and I leaped so far and high that I struck the top of my head on the bottom of a stair up there.

This caused the forward motion of my head to slow down in relation to the rest of my body and my feet to speed up and swing foward. I then sailed completely past the flight of stairs below and landed flat on my back on the concrete walkway.

I lay there stunned and dazed for what I figured was maybe 15 or 20 seconds. Then, shakily, my head hurting, but the rest of me seemingly okay because I had landed so flat as to evenly distribute the force of the impact. I got up, walked off and headed back to my own apartment, close to one mile away.

When I next saw Margie, she asked why I had taken so long to leave. About 15 minutes after she had closed the door behind me, she looked out her bedroom window and saw me walk away just then. She could not understand what I had been doing all that time.

So, instead of lying there dazed for 15 or 20 seconds, I must have cold-conked myself. I must have lain there unconscious for the entire 15 minutes that passed between the time she closed the door and looked out the window.

I fell hard for my wife. Her first kiss knocked me for a loop.

Even though I am no longer an active Mormon, my mission totally changed my life and set the course for all that would follow. The story of how Margie and I came together makes that point, but my mission also determined the course my career would follow.

I was already a photographer when I entered the mission field and would have been, anyway. In some ways, one could say my mission was a two-year setback to my career. I did bring my camera into the mission field and I did use it - yet, my entire two-year take totalled fewer images than I now sometimes shoot on a single day when working in the field.

Before my mission, I had conflicting goals - to return to the coast that my father had moved us off of during the middle of my high school sophomore year, immerse myself in surfing and in surfing photography - or to move to Alaska and settle here. I had wanted to do this since I first became aware of Alaska. Also, I had figured out that there was no reason one could not surf in Alaska as long as he dressed for it. I did not think the goals necessarily incompatible.

I often pictured myself as an Alaskan surfer with an airplane, flying from beach to beach.

I am pretty certain that one way or another, I would have wound up in Alaska - but what would my relationship have been to this place, and to its Native people? In the course of my wanderings and travels, I meet many Alaska residents, politicians included, who have absolutely no empathy, understanding of or even the desire to understand the original inhabitants whose state they now live in.

They do not recognize Native rights and see them only as impediments to fulfill their own desires, be they economic or recreational hunting and fishing.

Perhaps I would have become one of them. Perhaps right now, we would share the same viewpoints.

But after living with the Lakota-Dakota for two years, I could never join them. Furthermore, I soon found that when I get disconnected from Native cultures for any length of time, I feel dislocated and empty. One way or another, since the day I first stepped onto the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation as a missionary, I have lived my life Native people. I have made my career with Native people and have been fortunate that Native people always seem to accept me, wherever I go.

The above photo is one of my Looking Back at Me shots. Frankly, I am not very happy with it. I wish that I had worked it a little harder, composed it a little better. I wish that I had stuck with it until I could finally have got Elders Uele and Peck to drop the silly "thumbs up" thing, but they seemed determined to do the "thumbs up" no matter what. I was shooting a job, so I took just a few frames and then gave up, left them and went on to shoot my job.

I should have stuck with it until I got it right. Those pictures behind them on the wall of the Iñupiat Heritage Center in Barrow are my pictures. Had I never served a Mormon mission, I never would have taken them. I don't know what I would photographed instead, but it would not have been these aged Elders, and I would not have spent the time that I have out on the ice and water of the Chukchi Sea, following the Iñupiat as they went out to receive the gift of the bowhead whale.

Even though I am now long inactive, I took these pictures and all these events transpired only because I served a Mormon mission.

Many years ago, Erik Hill, the photographer pictured here, followed some Mormon missionaries based in Anchorage and did an essay on them for the Anchorage Daily News, where he continues to work. I was long puzzled how he ever managed to get the cooperation of church authorities to do the essay, but I never got a chance to ask him about it.

When I was in New York, failing at my own attempt to get that kind of cooperation, I thought of Erik often. Then, about ten days after I returned home, he and I both wound up photographing the Alaska small schools state championship football game, where the Barrow Whalers fell to the Nikiski Bulldogs. Afterward, we shot this same scene from opposite views.

And after that, I visited Erik a bit and asked him how he managed to do his Mormon missionary essay.

He told me that it had taken a lot of negotiation back and forth, over a week or more, with mission and church authorities not only in Anchorage but Salt Lake City. Then, when they agreed to cooperate and let him follow their missionaries, he had to agree to allow them to send someone along to observe - to make certain the shoot stayed within what they considered to be the proper parameters.

This is in no way a criticism of Erik - he succeeded at getting an essay that he would not have been able to shoot otherwise. During the leadup to and early days of the Iraq war, top national and international journalists accepted the terms of the Saddam Hussein regime and agreed to be followed by minders, as that was the only way they were going to get anything on the ground.

Yet, I am not certain I could have accepted such terms - maybe, but I kind of doubt it. It would have grated too much against me. I suspect that in my short train ride, I got a few pictures that such a minder would have sought to put a stop to. There is nothing wrong with those pictures; the activities they depict are innocent. They are real. Yet, I do not think a minder would have allowed them to unfold in front of my camera.

Given the state of my computer monitor, it was difficult, but that night back at the Brooklyn apartment, I did select a representative sample of the day's missionary take - even tough I bypassed a couple that I might have included if I could have better made the images out on my monitor..

In the morning, I got up very early, walked to the train station and then rode the subway all the way back to the Lincoln Center/Mormon temple subway station and from there walked to the Apple Store, where I positioned myself at the very front of the line that soon formed behind me. The door was opened at exactly 9:00 AM - the very time when all workshop participants were supposed to have gathered at The Loft with David. I knew their first activity would be to eat bagels, fruit, cold cereal if they wanted it and to drink coffee, so I had a little buffer. 

Still, I knew I would miss the first part of the workshop session. I charged into the Apple Store ahead of everybody, took the stairs to the below-ground level two at a time and got to the service desk ahead of anyone else. I signed over my computer to repair staff, who told me it would be ready sometime in the afternoon. I had no idea where I could find the time to come back and get it, but I needed it. 

I then sprinted up the stairs and onto the street. I hailed a cab. Traffic looked impossible, but the driver was good and made the right decisions about which route to take and got me back faster than the subway would have. The work session was in progress when I entered. Critiques of the previous days work were ongoing.

Soon, the man on the right entered - Steve Fine, the Director of Photography for Sports Illustrated. He had a presentation to make, but afterward agreed to join in the remaining critique sessions - including mine. He would have some pointed remarks to make.

That is where I will pick up in my next entry.