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When you step from the car into the oppression of swamp humidity, there are options.
Option 1: find lunch—a po’ boy; a bag of Zapp’s Voodoo; a cold beer.
Option 2: Cruise the square; get your palm read; buy a caricature of yourself with oversized ears.
Option 3: Find the street musicians swinging ropes of jazz from well-used brass (if it swings, they play it in the Quarter).
These are the options exercised by most, but in 1997, the first summer I visited the French Quarter without adult supervision, I exercised none of these options. Instead, I headed in the shadow and brick of the Crescent City’s most well-known district. Passing bars, lunch shops, and knickknack stores where tourists stocked up on shiny beads, I found my way to my personal Mecca: 241 Chartres Street, New Orleans, USA. This was the home of A Gallery for Fine Photography.
Inside the Gallery, I saw masters of photography: Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliot Erwitt. I stood slackjawed among tourists who passed by the photos with little more than passing glances. How did these masters capture everyday, earthy, human moments—the light and shadow on a California mountain; a boy carrying bottles of wine, girls in tow; a man tired of the struggle for a modicum of human dignity?
I spent hours in that gallery, and when I stepped back through those doors into the heat of a New Orleans afternoon, I was a different person. All of those images captured by all those men and women. All those moments frozen forever. Everything in all those frames—real, unpainted, undigitized. Each artist used a visual language unique to them, and they shared stories only they could share through the lenses of their cameras. In that gallery, I fell in love with the only medium capable of perfectly capturing, freezing, and reproducing The Real.
I made my way to the opposite corner and found an empty po’ boy joint. Sitting at my table, waiting for my food, I noticed a local artist sketching a sort of pirate ship flying flags that read “NO”. Intrigued, I leaned across my table and asked if I could take his portrait. “For a dollar,” he said. I slid a buck across the table and took light readings.
As I composed a single shot (all he and my college budget would allow), he told me he was not well, and in fact, none of us were well. I was not well. The people cooking up the food were not well. He knew this because because he could see what others could not. The ship was sinking, he said, and when I asked what he meant, he raised his hands in a swirling fashion, and said, “All of this is the ship.”
I took his photo when I was only 19 years old. It was no Erwitt, but it was my experience, the sketcher’s experience, the experience of those looking on from the kitchen. I captured it, and it’s a forever frozen still of The Real.
Searching For The Real? (An Introduction to Blair Speed)
The Real—its definition is the sum of its words. Simply put, it is the actual-factual, by-God real stuff of the created world. And in this age of false, fungible, filtered, manipulated, AI-enhanced, tweaked, influencer-promoted, cotton-candy flavored, additive garbage, The Real is endangered. And if The Real is endangered, then its creators are an endangered species. About this endangered species, Charles Bukowski wrote:
In January,
—my friend and literary agent—emailed me to make a sort of introduction. Blair Speed, he wrote, is “a deep-souled artist who excels with a camera in hand or a pen; she is well acquainted with grief...” As for me, he wrote that I’ve “got a penchant for all things analog, and is convinced (as am I) that most days social media is a brothel.” (A truer word could not have been spoken.) He left the introductions at that but seeded a few links. One of those links was to Speed’s website.Because I know something of John’s penchant for The Real, I navigated to this new-to-me photographer’s website, and there, the same feeling I’d felt all those years ago in A Gallery of Fine Photography washed over me.
The images: a man in leather work gloves, weathered face forward in the driver’s seat of a work truck, toothpick clenched between teeth; children on horses, cowboys-to-be, the lead rider with his hand on his black hat to keep the wind from taking it as an offering; a woman nose-to-nose with her friend, a horse who turns his eye toward the camera. There were other images: a pregnant woman celebrating her beauty; a mother crying in the pain and ecstasy of new life; a dancer bending around the light; an alpinist with crampons and ice picks.
If I had to say one thing about Speed’s work, it’d be this: She works within the human scale. I would not describe her work as sparse so much as I would describe it as tight. She fills her frames with both motion and emotion (which is to say nothing of technique), and it’s those two themes (as I see her work) that unify her visual language. It’s those themes that remind me of what it means to be human.
I reached out, asked whether I could share some of her work, and gracious as she is, she obliged. (For the record, these are not images for print; click the images if you’d like to order a print, which I recommend for purposes of showing an artist love.)
I would like to post all of Speed’s photographs here, but I’ll abstain for copyright reasons. Head to her homepage and spend time with her photographs, and move through them with intention, noting how she captures real people having real experiences in real-time. Note how she presents moments of humans being. See how her works act as a sort of human cartography, how she captures the emotional landscape of a discrete yet universal experience of living.
If you’re like me, when you look at work like Speed’s, you wonder where she and the “real ones” have been hiding (what giant cave hid them?). You wonder how many other real ones there are out there. You wonder why they care enough to capture space, time, and the humans who occupy it. You wonder where The Real work is, wonder whether it’s too late for that work to rise to the top in a world so full of noise. You wonder whether there really is a top. You wonder whether Bukowski’s cave—the bottom—is the only place that matters, whether that cave holds the last civilization of flesh-and-bone people who believe anything true about God, art, music, tears, laughter, sex, food, love, horses, whatever. You wonder whether you’re real enough to enter that cave, and if you are, you wonder: What gifts do I bring to it? You wonder and wonder and wonder and wonder, and this wondering becomes both hope and nightmare.
Nightmare? Yes. I said it.
To be continued…
My 2024 Project: A Visual Language
I’ve been working to create a visual language representing my region. If you’d like to participate in my quest for visual language, consider these ways:
1. Purchase The Observationalist
In the spring of 2023, I began exploring the concept of visual language by creating a book of photos, poems, and short essays entitled The Observationalist. All proceeds are reinvested in the equipment I need to pursue this idea. You can preview The Observationalist by following this link or clicking on the image below.
2. Donate Gear
I wrote this in my last post, and a few of you already responded. THANKS!
Maybe you have an old medium-format film camera you’d like to unload (and in all seriousness, let me know if you have one you’d be willing to sell). Maybe you’d like to throw a tip my way for the gear I need to further the visual language. Feel free to email me or use the Venmo link below.
If you don’t do anything…
Know this: I’m still very glad you’re following along on this ride. Without you, this work wouldn’t be possible. Thanks for reading.
Wow. I really love her work. I almost instantly felt that it was familiar-- Montana or Northwest WY -- so it didn't surprise me at all to learn she is from Montana. I think that sense of instant recognition without being told details is a hallmark of Real.
Hi Seth,
14 trial comp period isn't valid, could you look into that? tks