Not a Self Portrait with Camera

I started blogging with just words.
Then I added pictures, knowing how much you enjoy them; mostly pilfering whatever struck my fancy from other sites (Wikipedia was an easy target) until I realized I ought to at least try and contribute something original. 
So I scanned my postcard collection, my Dad's old 35 mm slides, old newspaper clippings, magazine articles. 
I asked dear friend and photographer Bianca Dorso to contribute.
Then she gave me a camera.
And that's when I began to get into real trouble.

Memorial Day I was one of the lucky ones who escaped the city and made it all the way out the PCH to Topanga for the festivities.  I missed Blood, Sweat & Tears on Saturday, and Gregg Rolie of Santana on Sunday, but I got to enjoy 29 Mules, Morning Glories and Blues Ryders, so I feel as if I made out pretty well.  My friend Nancy and I parked our folding beach chairs on the baseball diamond and kicked back to relax and enjoy the scene while I got to take literally hundreds of pictures of the local talent without having to do much except sit and shoot (zoom lens, digital, aim and crop later.  Sweet).  And what talent there was -- the young and the restless, the tattooed and scantily clad offspring of hippies, the children of the wonderfully laid back alternative-lifestyle-living folks of Topanga, where Grandma's name is Summer (or Rain), your Dad was raised on a commune in Colorado before he decided to become a software engineer (or a guru) and met your mom who's a therapist, life coach, yoga instructor, Ayurvedic astrologer, spiritual adviser...  

Certainly much more fun than landscapes and still lifes, I thought, making up stories about the people around me and surrepticiously and then furtively snapping away at these lovely and ethereal creatures sporting glittery fairy wings and tie-dyed petticoats with long flowing hair like unwound hemp rope and pierced navels while the boys slouch barefoot and shirtless with back-packs and impossibly low-riding jeans and draw-string pajama bottoms.

And then I began to feel self-conscious (read: creepy), realizing that I was nothing but a voyeur.  I felt like a pervert even though I don't really think I am and had instinctly avoided even pointing the camera anywhere remotely in the direction of small children, for fear some observant parent would start screaming.  So it was interesting when I noticed a young man, maybe 18 or 20, camera slung around his neck, unabashedly, happily snapping away at the adorable hijinks of a group of little tykes on a nearby blanket, all of them dancing and swaying on little bowed baby legs and being as cute as a pile of puppies.  He noticed me and my camera and smiled as if to say, "dude, is that an awesome Kodak Moment or like, you know, what?" -- or something to that effect.  And I nodded in what I imagined a wise old and totally harmless old dude might, and then when he wasn't paying attention I took his picture.  Tit for tat.  Camera to camera. 

But that's it.  My own efforts are strictly private stock, not for public file-sharing.  And then, knowing I can't put them out there for the world to see, I've already begun to lose interest and am starting to delete them all.  I don't know how the photographers who shoot crowds do it.   Do you ask for signed model releases?  Do you do the Diane Arbus thing and make friends?  But I feel guilty.  I feel like I shouldn't be doing it while I'm doing it.  I tell Nancy I'm experimenting with the light, the colors, the settings, the compositions.  But really what I'm doing is framing shots of nubile young flesh glittering the way the vampires in Twilight do when they soar above the cloud cover and above the tops of the trees and stand in the sunlight.  Breathtaking because they are beautiful and young and immortal.  

I think I had better go back to stately homes in 1904 issues of Country Life.  It was a diversion, but I can only vaguely justify the product as an exercise in recording for posterity.  Like Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) did with Goodbye to Berlin (1939) which became I Am A Camera (1951) by John Van Druten and then the film of the same title in 1955 and then, finally, Cabaret. 

If you're interested in decadent Berlin, go and find Miss Knight and Others, by Robert McAlmon (1896-1956).  Not as well known a writer as Isherwood, but he should be.  He captured that world of boys and coke and expat Americans behaving very badly.  Much more badly than I could ever have behaved In Topanga Canyon, I can tell you that.