Moments Beyond Moments

Seems like my favorite photos are often pucked from the sidelines of everyday assignments. I suppose most photographers could say the same.

I grabbed the above image yesterday while spending the evening at a birthday party for a deaf boy and his friends, part of an ongoing newspaper story I'm shooting. This boy, AJ, is one of those friends. In addition to being deaf, he's significantly mentally underdeveloped. I saw his gaze lock with the child's and, though we were surrounded by the din of the Pizza Hut dinner crowd, I could feel the silence between the two of them.

There is a sense that two very different worlds are facing off - one has offered an invitation, and the other is unsure whether to accept, perhaps afraid of the outcome. In this moment, there is the tension about what to do next.

I wonder how often we find ourselves in tense moments each day, even unknowingly, as we fight our own prejudices and fears. Certainly it takes love and a bit of childlike courage to overcome both.

Mexico Addendum...

I nearly forgot to mention one of the best little tidbits about the trip south of the border. On the way home, we stopped at White Sands National Monument in southern New Mexico, near Las Cruces. It's a cool spot: Sand dunes where the sand is powdery white, so fine you can sled, slide, jump, roll, dive, flip (etc.) down the steep slopes of the dunes.

Now as a bit of science trivia, the secret to the powdery white sand is not its close proximity to a world-famous missile range where the first US nuclear bomb was tested (at least that's what THEY say). Instead, the sand is a rare type made out of gypsum that has been deposited on the desert floor and blown around to make a giant sandbox.

Which allows for cool tricks like in the shot above.

Back from Mexico

We arrived home Saturday night after spending a week in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, with a group of Erika's students at Lexington Christian Academy. The trip was in partnership with a small but very solid ministry called Hands and Feet (check them out at www.handsandfeetinc.org), which builds houses in impoverished communities in Juarez. We helped finish one home and put up walls on some soon-to-be church bathrooms in another part of town.

Ciudad Juarez sits right across the US-Mexico border from El Paso, Texas. Or better said, they form one massive city bisected by the Rio Grande - more of a trickle in a concrete moat at that point. Together, they form the largest border community in the world, with an estimated population of between 2.5 and 3 million people. Many Americans don't even know it exists.

Personally, it was for me a beautiful image of what a high school missions trip ought to be. The students not only responded compassionately to the staggering poverty of the shantytowns that make up most of Juarez, but they also responded respectfully. I was pleased to see how they took time to learn about the culture and listen to people's stories - not just act patronizingly. No one even pulled out a camera for the first day or so. And Hands and Feet did an excellent job of bringing Americans to work while also empowering the local church and supporting the local economy.

I sometimes fight skepticism with such trips, but at least this time, I think God smiled. I certainly did - in between the thick clouds of concrete dust and miniature sandstorms that punctuated our time there.

Erika and I spent most of our time shoveling concrete and interpreting for the group. But I found enough time to shoot a couple of nice images from the hip, mostly of the children who seem to come from everywhere in the squatter villages. You'll see them without much trouble on my website (www.andyolsenphoto.com). They'll look distinctly Mexican.

Rough week

Being a photographer sounds exotic and fun to a lot of folks and, well, sometimes it is. It can also be pretty darn mundane. Then again, that's not all bad.

Take this week. I spent most of it shooting plates of food for some restaurant clients who are running magazine ad campaigns. That means squinting at little hamburgers and debating with art directors about whether or not the asparagus looks buttery enough. It also means photographing the same plate of chicken for maybe a couple of hours.

But in the end, somebody's got to eat that lamb when we're done shooting, and it might as well be me...

I also had the privilege of working for the first time with Robin LaChapelle, an art director/project manager from Louisville who is super helpful and caught just about every little detail that I missed. She also made for a very decent food stylist.

Another second, just another new blog...

I admit I was born something of a cynic. So it took me quite a while to warm up to the whole blog revolution. But lately, as the months go by and life grows busier and ever-more compressed, I've had a bit of fear that one day I'll look back and realize it was all a blur. I think that is the nearly the guaranteed result of an unexamined life. And as I thought more about ways to ensure that I stop to process what is happening around me, I couldn't come up with many better options than finally turning to the blogoshpere.

Among the many selling points of blogs (let's not forget the best one, they're free), I found the idea of public access to be most appealing. Not at all that I feel everyone else is entitled to my opinion (if you're looking for a blog with seminal thoughts, you might keep looking...). It's just that there's an extra level of accountability and community to the whole thing. And I just think we put more effort and consideration into anything we do when it's going to be seen by someone who is probably smarter and wiser than we are. At least we should.

So thanks for taking a moment to check in on some fragments of my life and some happenings in my humble little business. And to those wiser and smarter people reading this, thanks in advance for not making fun of me.