Megan's Garden 1: the rudimentary beginnings of a photo project and steps toward healing


I have begun photographing my friend Megan and her garden as part of a class I am taking with Democrat & Chronicle photographer Will Yurman at Rochester's Community Darkroom. This ultimately will be at least a year-long project for me, as I take her through the seasons.

I spent a good part of Friday with my friend Megan in her garden. (Megan is the former ED nurse I stayed with after my emergency appendectomy in May. I met her in my Ai Chi class.)

Megan also has fibromyalgia and Sjogren’s Syndrome; and like me she is seriously ADD, though she has a few other medical conditions in addition, and she is physically far worse off than I am. Megan recently had to leave her 30-year nursing career because of her health issues. And of course, I had to let go of a very promising career as a scholar and college professor. So a lot of what interests (and inspires) me is observing her progress through the same trajectory my own life has taken. I’ve also been a significant emotional support for her, having passed this way before.

I have begun photographing Megan and her garden as part of a class I am taking with Democrat & Chronicle photographer Will Yurman at Rochester's Community Darkroom.

A fascinating thing that happened in this shoot (before it was all just her garden, without her in it) was how Megan and I began relating to each other through the photos. She was very self-conscious at first, worrying about how she would look. So I had her just go about her gardening while I shot some of the changes since June. Then I went back to her when she lost track of me. After a while, I downloaded the images onto my laptop and showed them to her, along with a selection of my earlier photos. She was thrilled with them and immediately saw the value of what I was doing.

After that, she completely relaxed. She sees the process of what I am doing as healing for the both of us — and, likely, for others who have been or are going through it as well. One idea I have for sharing the end product is a slide show — including voice recording — at medical conferences that involve both doctors and patients (like the Sjogren’s Foundation and/or Fibromyalgia Association conference). I dunno. Maybe there’s grant money for that somewhere.

We talked a lot of the way through, too.

Photography is one of my ways of coping. It is pure joy. I could spend endless hours at this, without a single thought to pain or fatigue. Just like Megan in her garden.

I’ve set up an online QuickTime slide show of a tiny selection (I have over 240 images total — mostly just practice; this is just a little more than 10%, including a few from my May/June shoots) here.

I hope the link works. This technology is new to me & I may not have done it right. It is a 1.9 MB file, so a dial-up download will be pretty slow.

I'm not thrilled with all of them, by any means. This is just a very rudimentary beginning. My absolute favorite is the next to last one, which shows Megan in a close-up at a moment of exhaustion and pain so familiar to me. But I look at it now and I see distractions in it that I really wish weren't there! Still, the process helps me to see Megan. That is one thing I use the camera for: to teach myself to see what I would otherwise miss.

Many of these are thematically repetitious, but after culling 27 out of over 240, cutting further is just a bit much for now. Since I plan to follow her through the seasons (what she does in winter without her garden is part of the story), quite possibly NONE of these will end up in the final cut.

One thing I know I need to figure out how to do next time is to get more facial shots. That’s a huge challenge when someone is gardening — and therefore usually looking down — and I don’t want to pose her.

I am somewhat limited with technology. These were all taken with my Canon PowerShot S1 that I’ve had just since last December. It has a 10x zoom, but obviously that can’t do the same kinds of things as my old Nikon FM with telephoto & wide angle zoom lenses. I plan to do some film as well because of that. Film & processing cost is a huge limiting factor for me, so I can’t use it just for practice, the way I can with digital.

This is the first photo class I’ve taken since 1987, and only the second ever. In ‘87, while I was in the doctoral program in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, I TA’d in an introduction to documentary photography class taught by Drake Hokanson — they allowed me to take the class the first semester as part of my teaching assistantship, with my responsibilities for darkroom supervision and grading gradually increasing. It was a wonderful opportunity for which I will be eternally grateful.

Until this class with Will this summer, I had no idea how important it is for me to be in contact with other photographers and to share work. I am bubbling over with excitement.

Posted: Sat - July 30, 2005 at 08:38 PM          

©