A thousand years ago, I was in Junior Achievement. It was such a cultural shock after years of 4-H.
In JA, we kids from nowhere-ville were suddenly rubbing shoulders with smart rich kids. Their fathers who volunteered were from corporate and university life. Our fathers were laborers and craftsmen who could never get away from work or came home exhausted.
In JA, we produced a weekly television show on WSBT TV. Our show was vaguely modeled after the network TV show, I’ve Got A Secret. Every week a panel of teenage ‘regulars’ would compete against a panel of local high school kids to be the first to guess correctly what object was being portrayed by zooming in on extreme close up photos.
I was one of the regular panelists. It was funny. We showed up in our best approximations of bee-hives, crew cuts or raggy can’t do anything with this hair looks. We dressed in our Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, looking a little on the hoody side no matter how hard we tried to look ‘prep.’
The well-off kids had very beautiful clothes, just their everyday wear. I remember the kindness of one boy in particular, a boy raised in rarefied air, but who was just straight-forward, no bs, but gallant in a way I’d never known before. My father went on his knees to his father. My dad was his father’s tailor. But, I remember this boy treated me as though I were just regular.
That was very cool. All these years later, I’ve always wanted to tell him how much that meant to me, a girl who grew up in the boonies. I imagine most everyone has someone like that in their heart files: ‘Dearly wish I could thank you for something kind that you may not have even noticed.’
It’s odd what you derive from experiences when you are young and hardly yet written upon. Out of the JA experience, something about what I called ‘the tiny world’ took hold of me. Since, all my adult life I have shot with extension tubes on a old Pentax SLR, recording in close-close up, the magnificent beauty of our world so often passed by without notice.
My life’s work so often deals with the terrors and intractables in life, meaning uncertainties, prognoses unpredictive past a certain point, the 1000 faces of human nature falling into many odd shapes of governance by self and others… that photography is something I do to have something intractable in life, something that more or less stays put wherever I put it … that, even so, still requires a quest, a hunt, many tries to get it as just-right-never perfect, as possible… but that turns out sometimes even better when it rains, or is overcast or it is dark as the inside of a rock.
I hope maybe someday, I might be able to take a turn at an electron microscope, although I haven’t a clue about where, or how I’d be able to have such a chance. But, nonetheless, the irony I’ve learned from these years of photography is that often the smallest, overlooked things in the world have such steep magnitude when viewed by human spirit.
The world beneath the world. To borrow a phrase from Holden Caulfield, “it knocks me out” … While all the slam and brash and holler goes on in the bigger world ceaselessly, there is the tiny world of unbelievable color, intricate cloisonné forms, extravagant silken arcs and luminous chitin… underneath it all.
The tiny world, maybe for many of us, is one of the few places we might take rest. Certainly today, as I freed a little Monarch from a big fat spider’s web that hung like a Marie Antoinette drapery of several foots’ span between the limber pine and the house… it was rest today for one… plus one more.