Love Always

High school graduation day in 1978 -- I'm the one with the diploma. (Photo by R. Bruce Cameron)

Because I am obsessed with the inexorable march of time and anniversaries of various and sundry rites of passage, I was quick to remember that yesterday, June 18, marked the 35th anniversary of my graduation from high school.

I'd hastily add that photographers, by the very nature of our work, are constantly reviewing -- not to say living in the past. The moment we make a photograph, we begin looking back in time as we prepare it for publication. Over the course of a career, we seem to look further and further back through the years.

So, on the occasion of this momentous date, I rifled through my black and white negatives and found pictures of senior week at [Suburban NJ High]. And then, because 35 years later, I could not remember some of the names of my classmates, I went back to our yearbook, its cover depicting a huge rainbow over a bucolic landscape that in no way resembled our town, still in its plastic slipcover, like Grandma's sofa cushions.

Parenthetical aside: do high school or college students still get yearbooks? Do they exist in this digital, put-everything-on-my-smartphone, paper-less age? What mementos of their high school years do kids inscribe for their classmates to acknowledge their journey through puberty?

Because, once I began delving into the pages of the Class of 1978, I had to stop to re-read the writings of my classmates -- boys scribbling brief, desultory messages in wild cursive, right across their black & white portraits; girls in neat, controlled handwriting, carefully framing their faces with long, thoughtful, vaguely grateful missives. ("It was fantastic getting to know you these past few months.")

On first glance, I was reminded of my own kindness, funniness, buffoonery, what a great listener I am (not to say, solicitous) -- or so these people said. Alas, poor Ross, we hardly knew ye -- but you really lightened up Advanced Biology class. Some were more honest than others: I was, at best, a class clown; at worst, a classroom disruption.

Maybe I've just always been a cynic. It's possible. There are a lot of them in my business -- it's an occupational hazard.

But the more lasting image was one of youthful innocence, that, with the benefit of 35 years of hindsight, seems almost hilarious in its naivete. "Love always," ended so many notes from girls I barely knew then. I'm not suggesting that these people were insincere, only that these rituals -- graduations, yearbooks, reunions, and the like -- trigger in us an almost knee-jerk response, in which we become overly effusive.

Yet, as I reviewed these writings that I hadn't really thought about for several decades, I quickly found the ones that touched me most -- then and now.

"Pup," read one from a male classmate, referring to me by my club softball nickname, "Love ya! D.B." Then he penned a cryptic postscript: "'Miles long'." Sophomoric penis humor, or something else? I never asked.

The other, from a girl who has since died, read, "Dear Ross -- Simply -- all my love. Underneath the urbane wittiness, you're a sweet guy."

It's safe to say that I am not now, nor have I ever been, urbane, much less witty, but I have always loved that she thought so, or at least pretended to. Sadly, later, when I was commuting into New York City in the 1980s, I would occasionally see her on the train. I tried to catch her eye, to say hi, but she invariably looked away. I'd say that she didn't recognize me, but it's more likely she just had grown into another place, with no time for the "urbane wittiness" (or witlessness). And I was still too awkward to approach her.

The awkwardness of high school is a time-honored conceit, but the truth is that most of us never outgrow our awkwardness, it just assumes new forms. The inability to get the job/partner/salary/lifestyle we really want, it's all just an extension of not feeling comfortable with one's self.

And that's probably, in the end, the real reason for my wistfulness over this 35-year anniversary; that, even now, I'm not really completely comfortable in my own skin.

But at least I'm a nice guy. Just ask my classmates.

Vaya con Dios, Tia Caroline

Caroline Hendrickson in 2008; Oakland, Calif.

I’ve been ruminating today over the life and times of my aunt Caroline Hendrickson, who died over the weekend. She was 90, and lived alone in Gettysburg, Pa., where both she and her husband, the late Tom Hendrickson, had taught at, and retired from, Gettysburg College.

I wrote recently about grief and photojournalism; it seems that ever since life has been presenting me with ironic rejoinders to same – bombings in Boston, the deaths of two former colleagues, and the passing of familiar “old friends,” but nothing puts an exclamation point on these things like a death in the family.

There will be no obituary for her in The New York Times, or the Washington Post, or even El Pais, the papers she read daily, but Caroline was a fiercely independent woman who struck out on her own in an era when women were expected to be docile domestics. She married a man of whom her mother clearly did not approve. She attained the highest levels of professional standing in a field that was dominated by men and hostile to women.

She traveled to at least five of the seven continents, spoke at least three languages fluently, lived in pre-World War II Germany and post-WWII Europe and championed civil rights long before it was fashionable in this country.

Likewise, she believed in being physically fit – until problems with her neck got the better of her, her daily routine included a bicycle ride around the nearby Gettysburg National Military Park. She loved tennis: playing and, later, watching.

She taught me, probably more than anyone else in my family, about the importance of tolerance and acceptance of those who are different from us; she would not be cowed by the (often strident) opinions of her family and friends. My own admittedly liberal viewpoints have been greatly shaped by her world outlook.

She (and Tom) were generous to a fault – it’s fair to say that, without her support, I would not have my home here in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country.

Unfortunately, living 2,900 miles away made our visits together infrequent – I last saw her in the summer of 2011. Technology was not her forte: she did not friend me on Facebook, nor did she check her e-mail daily, much to my chagrin. Anyone in my family will tell you I’m an underachiever in the correspondence department – even more so where the U.S. Postal Service is involved. I hope she knew when she left us how much I cared for her, the dearth of letters and phone calls notwithstanding.

Caroline was not a religious woman, so I doubt she gave a lot of thought to the afterlife; I was surprised when we actually had a church funeral service for Tom. But wherever she has gone, I pray that she will meet up again with her husband, and that they will share a toast with a glass of good tequila and some Mexican dishes with lots of garlic.

Rest in Peace, Caroline.

Snapshots: Photojournalism and Grief

We newspaper photographers like to talk – about challenges of coverage, memorable mistakes, great shots that got away, about each other – and it was in the course of one of those meandering discussions the other night that I got to thinking again about the tragedies of life and how we, as journalists, are called upon to intrude upon people’s most terrible pain to ask that time-honored question, “So, how does that make you feel?”

Lance Iverson, my colleague from the San Francisco Chronicle, mentioned that perhaps his absolute least favorite part of the job was walking into the living room of a family whose child had just been killed by gun violence. We all agreed that was a miserable short straw to get, but it started an inner conversation for me: why is it that, as journalists, people – viewers, readers, editors, other reporters – expect that we will track down the survivors of some horrible conflagration and make them recount it in minute detail? And right now, before the dust has settled?

Somewhere in the back of our heads we all know why it is that we are so fascinated by death: because sooner or later, one way or another, that same fate awaits us all, every one; the only questions to be answered are how, when, and in what manner will we draw our last breath here? Sure, it's morbid, but we all know that person who wants to be the first to tell you about the famous person who just died. Because then we can all intone our regrets, while at the same time thinking, "Thank God that's not me."

 In 28 years of covering the news, I’ve been spared the horror of a Columbine, but I’ve been to plenty of traffic fatalities, fatal fires, shootings and homicide scenes and the fact is that it never really gets easier. But as time has gone on, I’ve become inured to a lot of the emotions that overwhelmed me when I got my first press card in 1985. And that’s the nub of the issue: how to make images that will move our readers when we are so jaded as to no longer feel shocked, or angry, or aggrieved?

Forget the fact that at this point media coverage of high-profile crimes is so overblown as to invite parody – it’s been 25 years since Don Henley famously lampooned the new industry’s fixation on the tragic. Or that the world is awash in images of war, terror, natural disaster and disease, on a scale unseen in human history – the same Internet that makes it possible for me to present you with this plodding mini-thesis also makes it possible to see scores of images of a nature you would never see on your television or in your daily newspaper.

Yes, I've been thinking lately that a lot of life seems to be about grief -- the loss of family, friends, pets, even inanimate objects like one's favorite TV show or a shirt that wears out from repeated wearings. It turns out, after all this talk, that I don't really have any deep insight on the subject, other than to say that it occurs to me that life has a way of beating the optimist out of us.

“Oh, You Meant That Matt Cain!”

 

Matt Cain pitching against the Texas Rangers
in the 2010 World Series.

Many of you have asked me (and when I say "many of you," I mean, well, one of you) if I was lucky enough to be photographing the 22^nd perfect game in modern Major League Baseball history on Wednesday night, when San Francisco Gigantes' hurler Matt Cain dazzled the baseball world by shutting down the Houston Astroglides.

To this well-meaning query, I say, "Thank you for asking. Next question."

The sorry truth is that not only was I not at the game, no photographer from [The Big Newspaper Company] was present at AT&Tyrannical Park to record the first perfect game in the team's history, going back to 1883!

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of baseball's perfect game, and how it's more coveted than even the storied "no-hitter," in which a pitcher or pitchers prevents the opposition from reaching base by means of hitting safely; in a perfect game, a single pitcher faces 27 batters, and retires all of them. That means: no walks, no errors, no hit batsmen. There's obviously an element of luck as well as talent at work, and that's why, in the last 113 seasons, over tens of thousands of games, there have been only 22 perfect ones.

Look at it this way: since Gigantes started playing baseball, there have been more U.S. Presidents than perfect games.

So sure, you'd think that somebody – and by somebody, I'm thinking of that writer-type person who's being paid to sit in the press box and pay attention to the game – would have noticed by, say, the sixth or seventh inning, that the Astroglides were still awaiting their first baserunner of any kind. Or, failing that, maybe an editor, any editor, would have said, while watching the game on TV, "Geez, that's a lotta zeroes up there. Has that ever happened before?"

But no. No one who could have made a difference chose to make a difference, until it was too late to make a difference. When I idly checked my TimeSuckBook news feed, and saw a friend's cryptic status update – "Sshh! Check out the Giants game!" – I suspected something unusual was happening. But then again, even if some alert sports person had called me and said, "Get thee to the City by the Bay, Cain is slaying Abel (Maldonado)!" I could not have gone – after all, I was in the middle of editing some very important high school graduation pictures.

By the time I flipped on the TV and saw the situation, there were two outs in the top of the 8^th inning. I'd have needed a Medevac chopper to make it to the park in time for the final out.

Of course, I should point out that there was a curious dearth of photographers at the game, possibly explained by: a midweek, night game against a last-place, out-of-division team, combined with the pending first round of the U.S. Open at San Francisco's Olympic Club. Only Getty Images and the Associated Press had photographers covering, and while they did a fine job, it's sad to think that the San Francisco Comical had to depend on wire photos for a game that happened one mile from their front door.
 

Oakland's Dallas Braden exults after the final out of his perfect game
in May 2010.


On the amazing day (pictured here) when I was among those lucky photogs who shot the 19^th perfecto, on May 9, 2010 at the Woe.Is.Me Coliseum, it seemed like shooters were just coming out the dugouts by the eighth inning. The place was overrun with photographers by the ninth inning. It must have seemed exceedingly strange to those covering the game Wednesday night that they were the only folks with cameras…


Epilogue: on Thursday morning, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but only vague assurances that this will never happen again. Of course, perfect games don't happen on a schedule. The Gigantes waited 128 years for their first; we may all be dust by the time they get another.

The Long Arm of the Law (Or How I Learned to Forget About the First Amendment, Public Property, Equal Access, etc.)



Federal law enforcement and pro-cannabis protesters outside
Oaksterdam University in Oakland in April 2012.



It goes without saying that, as a photojournalist, I have many opportunities to meet and greet the fine men and women in blue while pursuing the stories that end up in products of [The Great Big Newspaper Chain]. For the most part, these meetings are unremarkable, at press conferences, the doings of government figures, the famous and near-famous, matters of public safety, or just in the random course of daily life.

The past two days' events have lent themselves to a different kind of interaction though, and I have to say that I'm distressed with the general state of law enforcement. Yesterday gave deafening validity to that old axiom that "when it rains, it pours," as Federal agents staged an early morning raid on three different marijuana-based businesses in Oakland, and even as that action was proceeding to riot police and arrests, elsewhere in our fair city, a troubled man decided that the best resolution to the problems of his personal life was to end the lives of seven other random souls.

First, from our Eliot Ness file, Federal agents from the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. Marshals staged a spectacular show of force at Oaksterdam University. Acting on the contents of a sealed warrant, about 50 agents broke into the marijuana cultivation school, and confiscated dozens of boxes of paper files, computer records and (naturally) marijuana plants, even as an angry crowd of about 100 demonstrators gathered on the street outside.

Do I have personal feelings about marijuana, the people who use it, and its legality? I most certainly do. Will I share them here? Not a chance. What I will say is that Oaksterdam has the blessing of Oakland city leaders to instruct its students in the propagation, for personal and medical use, of cannabis, and is affiliated with several medical marijuana dispensaries, which are regulated under California state law. According to the city, Oaksterdam paid more than $1.68 million in taxes last year, at a time when fiscally-challenged Oakland needs every centime it can get its grubby paws on.

The Feds, from all indications, came in unannounced to local authorities, and essentially put Oaksterdam out of business – however briefly – for reasons that agents on the scene refused to disclose. However you feel about marijuana and its effect on the community or the nation, this is a chilling development when the government can break into your home or place of business – without having to tell you why – and wreak havoc. Now, I'm no lawyer, but I seem to remember, vaguely, from high school civics class, that there was some obscure prohibition of "unreasonable search and seizure," somewhere in the U.S. legal code.

If you live here, you know that Oakland, and this country, have decidedly bigger problems than pot growers who are, at least at first glance, playing by the state's rules.

Preoccupied

The Occupy Wall Street movement officially marks its 2-month anniversary today, and I'd just like to say congratulations!

Now pack up your tents and go home.

The protest, and its various offshoots around the world, calling for big banks and other multinational corporations to pay their fair share of the national tax burden, has certainly put a microscope on the financial inequities of life in the 21^st century. Millionaires, billionaires, banks, corporations – they should all be hanging their heads in shame, realizing, perhaps for the first time, what greedy bastards they are.

But you see, here's the thing: they're not. And the protesters should get it through their collective skull that camping out, having a nationwide pajama party – even if it goes on for months – is not going to lead to the changes they for which they apparently hope. Because really rich people, and the corporations they run, serve on the boards of, or receive dividends/profits from, don't pay any attention to the likes of folks like you. If they did, they would most likely say something like, "Go ahead! Camp out! Knock yourselves out! Freeze to death! Just don't come near my villa or I'll have you locked up."

Don't believe me? Just listen to Republican lawmakers like John McCain, or GOP presidential candidates like Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich. McCain is calling for lower corporate tax rates (although, one has to ask: how could they go below the 0% that many are paying now?); Cain and Gingrich are suggesting that Occupy protesters are nothing more than layabouts who favor food stamps over a paycheck. Who do you think is funding their campaigns?

If the Occupiers really wish to see the rich take notice of their plight, here's your formula for success: vote with your wallets.

Seriously: stop lining the pockets of the corporations that are making these people rich. Stop going to Wal*Mart. Stop going to Target. Stop going to McDonald's. Stop going to Starbucks. Jesus, stop buying iPhones and Androids and all that other crap that's getting made in China anyway – thus destroying any chance that there will ever again be an American manufacturing base.

If the Occupy people could convince one-third of Americans – plenty less than the vaunted 99% – to boycott General Electric or Microsoft or Apple or (good luck with this) all Chinese-made products for a month, or take their savings out of the big banks and transfer them to local credit unions, you'd see rich people sitting up and taking notice.

Why? Because you'd be taking their money back from them. Most of their millions are only on paper anyway – the value of a stock or a mutual fund.

But this marching in the streets crap? Chanting meaningless, overbaked slogans and tying up the police, costing already cash-strapped cities millions of dollars in overtime and clean-up costs? A waste of time and breath.

Do the smart thing: declare victory, pack up your encampments, and go home and organize a nationwide boycott.

You can start by refusing to read this blog.

Now get outta here, and I mean it.

The Pimping of 9/11

Never forget. Always remember.

Yeah. Okay. Happy 9/11.

At the risk of appearing callous to the deaths of nearly 3,000 people, on one of the most horrific days in American history, I just want to take this opportunity to say: Enough already.

Yes, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 were a seminal moment for many of us – you'd practically have to have been in a coma to not remember where you were when you first heard the news of twin jetliners slamming into the tallest buildings in New York City. And it's perfectly fitting that we would remember those events on the 10^th anniversary of the date. And yet…

"Now is the time to reflect on those people who lost their lives in the 9/11 attacks." That well-considered message, by the way, came from my bank ATM, which reminded me of the upcoming anniversary all of last week. Thank God I don't do more banking; I might be a mirror by now, what with all that reflecting. Perhaps next week there'll be a message saying, "Now is the time to reflect on all the millions of people who lost their jobs, homes, retirement, and veritable future, thanks to the gross mismanagement and greed of banks like ours. By the way, may we interest you in an adjustable rate mortgage?"

FOX Sports promoted their upcoming NFL football lineup during an Oakland A's-Texas Rangers baseball game yesterday. Among the features they would air on FOX NFL Sunday would be "Terry [Bradshaw] and Howie [Long]'s thoughts on 9/11!" Excuse me? Unless they rescued injured staffers from the Pentagon, or helped overpower some of the Flight 93 hijackers, why would I possibly care what two former football players had to say?

There's just something truly perverse and ghoulish in the way that the media has approached the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, and I find myself repulsed even though, given a week or so to anticipate the coverage, I expected nothing less.

On the upside, we now can forget about 9/11 and its world-changing events for the next – how long? 10 years? – before we have to review the stories of heroism and loss. But the truth is – and this is, at its heart the reason that this anniversary overkill is so galling – that there isn't a single day that goes by that we aren't touched by the events of 9/11. Going to the airport is only the most obvious example. Entering a government building, parking in an underground garage, or even making a photograph of a "public" place – fear of terrorism has subjected us to increased surveillance, scrutiny, invasion of privacy. It's become so pervasive as to be second nature for most of us.

But every time the government decides to rob us of our fundamental freedoms – of movement, of assembly, of speech – they'll trot out the terrorism boogey man, and he will always be wearing a tee-shirt with the silhouette of the Twin Towers on it.

So, yes, let's never forget. Let's always remember. But let's try not to wallow in the grief, or be swallowed up by the fear.