Ali, San Antonio, TX, @abbasrowshan._ -
'I heard the state trooper talking to my brother at our front door from the other room. He said mom had died in a car accident near Beeville, Texas. She left the family two years ago, I hadn’t seen her in two months.
For three days I was numb.
The fourth day all I could get down was a single piece of toast. The day of the funeral.
In a muslim burial, the body is washed by family or friends of the same gender and wrapped in veils. When I entered the room, only her pale gray face was exposed. I knelt down and hugged her. A river of tears went down my face, I kissed her on the cheek and just held her. I spoke to her, told her I was sorry she had to leave so soon. When my family had said all goodbyes, we lifted her body onto a stretcher and carried her to the grave. Below in the dirt lay a white wooden box with no top or bottom, exposing the earth below. My brother and I climbed down. Others from the mosque helped us lower our mother’s cold body into the box. Once we climbed out, a concrete slab was placed over the box. The grave was filled with dirt, then decorated with rose petals and bouquets of flowers.
The funeral process is an intimate one. Sometimes it felt like I couldn’t do it, like I wanted to run away, but I only get to bury my mom once and I wanted my last goodbye to be special.'
The pictured shirt is the last gift Ali received from his mother.
Moments From 2020 - Gimo
Gimo, Los Angeles, CA, @i_am_gimo -
‘My mother raised me in dresses, blouses, and long hair. I was her only daughter, a mirror of herself. Her Gabriella.
She showed her love by sharing womanhood, but it never quite made sense to me. I resented being told who I was before I knew myself, hiding how I truly felt.
This summer, home in Chicago for two weeks, I decided to come out to her as trans non binary. We sat separated, her on the couch, me curled up on the lazy boy across the living room.
I confessed how I don’t see the girl she dressed like a JCPenny catalogue when I look in the mirror. I see a hard jaw. Soft scarred lips. Restless hair. Dark strong features celebrated on my brother and father. How it hurt when after I buzzed my long hair she would only tell me she missed it long, how beautiful I used to be.
She lived as a woman. I lived as someone in between.
Mom told me she loved me no matter what, though I could feel her holding something back, thoughts trailing off, opting to change the subject. I don’t expect her to ever fully understand, and that’s okay. She’s still my mom and I’m her child. That kind of love never fades.’
Moments From 2020 - Rachel
Rachel, Brooklyn, New York, @official.dairy.queen - ‘Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been in New York City working at a school for children with communication and developmental delays. One of my students, an inquisitive 7 year old boy, is still trying to make sense of the government mask mandate.
When I was first evaluating his coordination skills back in September, he immediately noticed the white tiles in the background of the pictures in our evaluation guide. “How come all these people are exercising on the subway without masks?” he asked. He then reminded me that I should tell them to put on their masks if they’re going to be exercising on the subway.
Later on in our evaluation, I asked him to lay down on the floor with me to do some strength testing. He hesitated--“If we sit on the floor, are we close to the germs?” After a few months of working together using a hybrid model of Zoom and in-person therapy, he seemed to be getting used to the mask mandate. That is, until one day he pulled down his mask, pointed at his lips, and asked my coworker, “Do you have a mouth in there like me?”’
Moments From 2020 - Lee
Lee, Columbia, South Carolina, @leafcarrot - 'Earlier this year I had three jobs.
In March, I have zero. There's no return plan. For months, I hike until my bones can't carry me anymore, until I can sleep.
Time passes like a treadmill.
I have no construction experience; Shawn hires me on the spot. He has a felony and can’t get hired on a construction crew. He is independent and underpays himself to snipe contracts from "prettyboys". He feels like a hero for it. He tells me about scams he ran in prison. I watch for cops while he smokes weed in the van at lunch. We melt the rubber coating off copper wires on a bonfire in his back yard. He says America is fair.
At night, I leave the job and march downtown. I watch a crowd break into a country western bar, they line up all the liquor bottles on the sidewalk. A young black man tells a pastor we can’t all be politicians. Some of us have to be in the streets. That night I fall asleep in my clothes, with tear gas and drywall dust forming matted knots in my hair. The sour smell is in my dreams. Dawn, we are painting a child’s bedroom. Shawn asks me if I am a conservative or a liberal. I say “I’m not entertained by rich people’s problems.”
His response to my ideas is always the same: “That’s the problem with you liberals.”'
Moments From 2020 - Angeliki
Angeliki, Athens, Greece, @kellykaramousali - ‘I got to the protest around 10am. Roads closed, thousands of protesters, people of all ages, walking, holding banners, chanting: ‘’They are not innocent!’’. We were all there to support the family of Pavlos Fyssas, a 34-year-old musician whose life was taken unfairly in 2013. His death set in motion the trial against Greece’s largest fascist group, Golden Dawn. At around 11:30 am, unanimous convictions from the members of the court were announced, including the recognition of Golden Dawn as a criminal organization. The crowd of 20,000 protesters started cheering and chanting once again, filled with pure joy.
I could not reach the court through the crowd, but once people began cheering/yelling louder and louder, the police gathered and threw tear gas into the crowd, causing a riot between them and certain groups of people that in return threw molotovs. I quickly left at that point, as did most of the protesters. When I got home, I watched online the reaction of Pavlos’ mother as she stepped outside the court room, screaming with tears in her eyes that her son had finally won.'
Fireworks
I sit in the back of my parents '97 avalon reading the Kite Runner. I am in the parking lot for Horseshoe Bend, a spectacular slice of canyon South of Page AZ.
A truck pulls into the lot after dark and waits. About 15 minutes later a second car pulls up next to the truck. It drives without caution, confident and excited. A man gets out carrying a powerful flashlight. He seems to carry on a conversation with the truck. He points the flashlight into the hill that borders the lot, illuminating low brush. Rotating in a slow circle, he seems to scan the area with the flashlight, looking for something he doesn't see, at least not tonight.
The beam of the flashlight hits my car, roughly seventy-five meters away. It continues on for a second, then double-takes back to my car. The beam illuminates the avalon's interior for a beat, my face likely obscured by foggy windows. The light moves on, deeming my presence unobtrusive to whatever might unfold next. The light completes its circle and soon a much warmer pin of light appears next to the car. The pin jumps and lands on the ground before exploding, a small multicolored release of bright sparks.
It's strange to watch fireworks through fogged glass and a groggy mental state from the other side of a parking lot. The small points of light are like stars, far enough away to be beyond one's natural circle of confusion but bright enough to emit a mysterious glimmer that sparkles and shines. Through the car's glass windows I hear no voice of the man with the light or the man in the truck, only a repeated lighting and exploding of fireworks. I can register neither excitement or enjoyment in the silhouettes. The emotion of the moment is removed, leaving only a strange, detached action, as if the man's duty is simply to release the fireworks into the void.
Between pyrotechnics the flashlight sweeps the horizon as if it fascinates the man just to see the beam in all its glory. I imagine the man has received the flashlight recently as a gift. The novelty remains and can you believe how bright this thing is? The flashlight has a Fresnel element, I can see the beam widen and tighten as the man adjusts his preferred angle of view.
Spinning Saturns, Roman Candles, Bottle Rockets, all quietly fading into the night from the lone figure. after a while the fireworks stop. The playing with the flashlight continues. Again and again the light sails across the banks of sand and brush. I watch the light reveal low sage and scrubby tumbleweed on the hill. After a while the man tires of the flashlight as well. It no longer spills into the land surrounding the lot, instead illuminating a small patch of gravel beneath the man's feet. After a few minutes the light goes off and a car door slams shut. The cars turn around, this time it's the headlights which reveal the dirt and brush. The small car leads, it's engine excitedly zooming towards some new change of fate, the truck politely follows.
Photographs from the Sawtooths
While in Idaho I did an overnight with my brother in the Sawtooth Range up to Toxaway Lake. These are simple photographs taken with a junk lens (hence the vignetting) to share a bit of a nice backpacking experience.
I don't know if I've ever taken a zoom and no primes to photograph a trip before so this was a bit of an experiment. The lens was a Tamron 28-200 3.8-5.6 from the late 90's, it's a two touch superzoom with manual aperture control, kinda fun! $30 on ebay, I've used it for a few video projects. In 16:9 the vignetting isn't as apparent.
A Short Story in the Eastern Fjords
A few weeks earlier I had ridden through the eastern fjords of Iceland in the early hours with three Americans. That morning the low sunlight had a serene pink glow about it, peeking out above soft clouds to light the tips of the mountains. I remembered crossing a huge pass, cliff faces dripped in rosy sunlight. The pass gave way to a perfect coastal town, nestled between fjord and sea. I was tired then, drifting in and out of consciousness to peek up at the magentas, fair, ghostly reds, pinks.
I wanted to see that view again, to experience it just as I had before. I now found myself back in Egilsstaðir, a small central town in eastern Iceland from which several roads snake out to the north, south, and eastern coast . I decided to walk the coastal route, I believed the road's pass was the same as the pass from the ride. In no particular hurry I set off from the town. I enjoyed pleasant weather on the way up, a layer of fog closed the view below me.
Step-by step I looked ahead for that grand cliff face, wondering when I would finally be able to see what had roused me from my sleep while riding with the Americans. I looked and looked, right up until I reached the crest of the road. With the road beginning to decline I realized I had already passed the mountain I had seen before. It was a pretty mountain, no doubt, but nowhere near as powerful a view as I remembered it. In my lucid state the grandeur of the pass had faded. The dreamlike, otherworldly nature of the views I saw in the car relied on my semi-conscious state.
I camped in the pass for two days, using the time to finish Peter Matthiessen's "The Snow Leopard." I urinated too close to my tent site and a distinct smell hung around while I read. A year later I would repeat this mistake while camping for a few weeks in Aragon.
After finishing Matthiessen I continued along the road into stormy weather and fog. A long, rainy day of walking on asphalt left me dog tired. Walking alongside speeding cars does little to raise morale, an already diminished goal can become pointlessly bleak. The fog subsided and the day became dreary. As I reached the small town of Reyðarfjörður, I saw nothing of interest. I sat for a few minutes at a picnic table looking through the gloom then hitched back the way I came, returning to Egilsstaðir in around 15 minutes. At least I killed some time.
Photographs from Wyoming
I want to share a few photographs from passing through Wyoming. I stayed on the eastern side of the state with the bulk of my time in its famous national parks.
Photographs from Antelope Island
I want to share some record of my visit to Antelope Island. First, the bison the island is known for:
Late in the day I took a walk up to the ridge-line to see the sunset.
Sunset in one direction, moonrise in the other.
After the sun set, an antelope wandered nearby, looking for food.
