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Hey everyone, I hope the Thanksgiving festivities are settling well in body and belly. I shook off a good bit of lethargy today with a long, slow run in the late afternoon sun and now find myself in my favorite late night coffee shop breaking my no-coffee-after-noon rule, punk rock playing in the background, as I dive into this letter. Big news tonight! A handful of years in the making, erika.gallery, a website I built to house my mom’s transcendent photography, is now live! I’m stoked for her as she steps further into the unknown of sharing one’s art — and for you — who have the opportunity to slow down, stare deep into her photographs, and come away with renewed appreciation for sight itself and our infinitely rich reality (in which, as we always swim, we rarely really see). My mom is a human deep and unique. Curious and an earner of high-marks throughout her youth, she was set to graduate high school a semester early, hop Eurail around Europe for six months, and attend the University of Vermont to become a marine biologist. Then, as a high school senior walking home one night, she and her sister were hit by a drunk driver who drove right through an intersection, onto the sidewalk at 40-50mph, and straight into them. The front of the car hit her legs and her head cracked the windshield, a trauma-sustaining blow that, among a world of physical, emotional, and legal challenges, blunted her ability to memorize and certain intellectual gifts. Not to the point you’d ever notice interacting with her, but after a long recovery period, she entered that marine biology program, but try as she might, she could no longer retain the breadth of information required to walk the path she intuited and planned. All this to say, at seventeen, my mom was cleaved from her particular ways of being, expression, and gifts. For some years, she underwent a prolonged soul-searching period. Her once clear path now impassible, she moved out west, waited tables in fine dining establishments, and enjoyed things on the surface, but with a deep, underlying sense of loss and inability to express or alchemize it. That is, until she picked up the camera and discovered it a form of expression unobstructed. At 21, she entered Paier College of Art and poured her awareness into photography. For years to come, she worked in the medium and field with a renewed sense of satisfaction and interest, again at home in the world. At 30, she had me. Photography fell away as my dad and her poured their lives into their family. She opened and ran an at-home daycare so she could stay home and raise her kiddo. My brother and sister came along and (while, of course, every family has its trials) we had some of the most loving and wholesome childhood years of almost anyone I know. Now, fast forward twenty-six years. It’s Christmas Day, 2016. The idea had popped into my head to experiment in getting my mom a genuinely thoughtful Christmas gift (you know, instead of grabbing a candle, bubble bath, or whatever seems nice at the store two days before the big day). With surprising ease, immediate and extended family all agreed to pitch in to get her a pro-quality, Nikon DSLR camera kit with a couple of lenses. Christmas Day comes, my mom unwraps the camera, and she is thunderstruck unlike I’ve ever seen in my entire life. She just starts sobbing. She cannot believe it. It’s like a surprise moment of impossible reunion with a best friend who passed decades ago (and, in a way, it was). Naturally, my mom takes right to photography again. She loses herself in it for hours in the dawn of desert mornings, stops cooking dinner just as everything’s set to capture the way the setting sun’s playing across those palm fronds, and begins again to see the world through the lens of a photographer. “Oh... I wish I had the camera” becomes her common phrase in the face of beauty, moments of humanity, or when interesting lines of perspective intersect our shared experiences. A bit of a photographer myself, at first, I could not understand why she kept this narrow 55-300mm lens on her camera, which I also had but rarely touched. Over years of watching her make photographs and thousands of hours personally spent shooting real estate, I’ve discovered that rather than the hard-to-miss ease of a wide lens, a telephoto lens lends tight focus to the little, often overlooked wonders of reality and more freedom to play with line and shape:
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