Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful...

I did a photo shoot last weekend. A friend of mine who is a fantastic photographer offered half seriously and I jumped at the chance. He is a man who could make any woman look beautiful. He makes run down houses in Kayesville, Utah, look like exotic destinations, and department store clothes look like haute couture. Introducing...Jake Garn. Check it out.

I went to the shoot with a suitcase full of retro clothes from Leah. I didn't end up wearing very much of anything, and in the photo, I look like I am wearing even less! We used the backdrop of Jake's living room wall, and I stood there, worrying that my shirt was going to fall off, trying to destress myself enough that my jaw muscles wouldn't look clenched in the photos. It was nothing like pretending to be a model in the mirror when I am bored and brushing my teeth. Jake has nice eyes, and had a non-judgmental face, but it was still a challenge to have him stare at me in the bright glow of the lights and I felt like my face showed every bit of my nervousness. Which makes the fact that the photograph came out beautiful even more incredible.

The photograph set me thinking about feminine beauty in general. The feminine beauty I love the most is well-personified by one of Orna's artworks:


I began daydreaming about how I would capture that sort of strength in a photograph, and then I realized, I am not a photographer. But I am a storyteller, so let me tell you about it instead. The backdrop is the Four Corners desert, a plateau stretches off in the distance where it meets the sky. The air is soft; the light is soft- it is a spring dawn. I am standing on a dry patch of dirt next to a small, earth colored house. An elderly woman with a long stick in her hand is teaching me to plant her garden according to Navajo tradition, at dawn. Her wrinkled hands drop a seed into the red-brown earth. "Your turn," she says, and hands me the stick and some seeds.

It's this that I want to capture. The one generation saying to the next, "It's your turn." She didn't have many people around her to listen to her and learn from what she wanted to pass on, so I did. She taught me about how to pick the right kind of grass for basket weaving, how to make fry bread, how to speak a little Navajo, and how to mop. It killed her I didn't know how to use her enormous mop. I want to capture her like that too- mouth wide, in hysterics because I don't know how to mop. I tried to explain I had mopped, just with different kinds of mops, but she wouldn't have it. She knew a spoiled city girl when she saw one.

I want to capture too the omnipresent absence of men in the community. There was no work on the reservation and some of the men went in search of a living, some were in jail, some had simply disappeared and no one knew where they were. Some of them were missed by their wives and children, some of them weren't. Usually what I saw were women alone. Women with their mothers and daughters scratching out a living from the ground, from their sheep. Quiet women bumping down dirt roads in gigantic trucks, children or dogs bouncing around in the back.