the ever-living ghost of what once was.

from a funeral i photographed this morning. the service was for a 16-year-old boy who was stabbed in a park, then rode his bike up the street only to collapse and die in a stranger's arms. the details around his death are still being investigated.

the service was huge and beautiful, a catholic ceremony in the south side of town. it's almost the anniversary of the death of another local teen, manuel, whose service was at the very same church. different family, different set of details, but the same sadness one year apart.

the whole thing's tumbling down.

in my sixteen months as a staff photographer, there are days that i feel like i am finally getting a handle on this business of newspapers. most of the time, however, i realize this monster is bigger than i thought.

let me preface this by saying that i do not know anything about running a newspaper as a business. i do not think in terms of ad revenue, salaries, investors, numbers. i can think in terms of readers, column-widths and stories. i realize that at almost 2 years, i might still be a little too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for my own good.

i'll be the first to admit i don't understand how half the staff can quit and the newsroom is emptier than a dive on a tuesday night while we're on the block to be sold, yet we're still losing enough money in ad revenue to prompt what eventually could be the absorption of the entire paper into one sheet. okay, it's not that bad, but what's stopping it from going that far?
newspapers as we know it may be a dying industry, just like everyone says. i might be at the first and last traditional paper i'll ever work for. somehow, though, i've managed to hit a relative calm. everyone says, "things are so uncertain," but in the greater scope of life, when are things really that concrete? i'm not afraid to lose my job in the sense of losing my ability to tell stories through my photography. but i am uneasy about losing the venue in which to communicate with and affect change within this community.
recently i had a talk with fellow photojournalist jared soares about home and the waves of longing for that basement room in your parent's house when you were fourteen and only had to worry about the next day's homework. when i get "homesick" in stockton, it's not for my physical childhood house. i miss the confidence and certainty that anything lay ahead, and the promise of a bright future. not to say i've given up, but when things get overwhelming, it's understandable to wish for better times.
sometimes i miss being a kid and making "big" decisions that carried no real weight in the long run. this is probably why, lately, i've been content for the most part to photograph those "grip and grin" situations. even when the photographs aren't spectacular, i find myself feeding on the excitement of the people i'm photographing. its payoff is twofold: not only does it help me gain perspective on my own life, it forces me to spend more than the requisite ten minutes to get that "newspaper quality" shot to fill the hole left open by page designers. every now and then i'll get a photograph i'm happy with an hour or two after i normally would have left. and i've come to terms with the fact that 95% of the time my captions are cut dramatically shorter and the photos run one column wide because i was given the opportunity to spend an hour of my day thinking about someone other than myself, listening to someone other than my own head.

two days late, far too short.

it's two days after christmas. two days after the most emotionally taxing holiday i've experienced so far. spent most of the day cleaning house to bide my time and distract myself from thinking too much.

so now it's taken two days before i could gather my thoughts enough to make this post.

this post is a belated christmas gift, of sorts, to my foster brother, anthony.

the last time i saw anthony was christmas of 2005. i was home from college for a few days, and for the first time i felt brave enough to tell my father i was spending most of that time driving around with anthony. exploring los angeles with my 6-foot-tall hispanic transvestite foster brother. my brother who'd legally changed his name for the last ten years to Marie Antoinette, and who only let a few select people refer to him by his birth name. my brother who'd battled with homelessness, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexuality and discrimination, but who still lovingly called me "little sis" when introducing me to his friends after sneaking me into a gay bar when i was less than a year shy of my 21st birthday.

we spent those few days doing nothing and doing everything. i met his friends. his manicurist. went with him to the clinic to get prescriptions and re-start hormone treatments so he could get back on track with his yet incomplete sex change. drove him around the east side to every liquor store, where he would buy single-shots and down them before getting back into the car. stood at the doorway of the house where they filmed "six feet under" - his favorite tv show - on christmas eve, arguing if it would be rude to knock when the family that lived there was likely in bed. hung out at his apartment with his roommate and their many cats, thumbing through photo albums of his friends, many of whom died in the 80s during the AIDS epidemic. talked about the years we'd missed in-between, and how proud he was that i was in college and on my way to a "real career." told me he was glad i'd moved to san francisco, because now i would understand him more. told me he loved me as if we were blood.

and the whole time he let me take pictures of him and his life, of our adventures, because i'd had my archives and computer stolen days before, and had to start my college career from scratch.

so this post is dedicated to him. yes, sappy, i know. but i hadn't seen anthony since christmas 2 years ago, hadn't heard his voice since a phone conversation last christmas, and this christmas he's gone.

michael anthony soto passed away in march of 2007 at the age of 42, and this was the first christmas in my life that i couldn't do our annual catch-up. with no family around, this year was the hardest yet.

the pictures don't do him justice, but this is anthony. you are dearly missed.

windows.

in response to a recent blog post by fellow photographer jared soares, here are some window light portraits. well, portraits and candid portraits.

i thought i'd shot a ton more of these, but then realized i actually rarely utilize the simple window-light portraits because everyone does them, and usually they do them better than i can think to in a pinch. but there's something really soft and beautiful about the quality of light... maybe i should think to try it more often.


...because sometimes window light is the best light. and you can bet it's usually the cheapest.

isolated view.

it's the end of the year, and that means digging through about 70 DVDs of archived photos to compile a year-end photo gallery for the paper.

editing is always the hardest part for me. much harder than taking photos. there's always attachment to the shots you work the hardest to get, even if they're not the best. there's the photos you really like, but no one else really sees why. and there's the "artsy" photos where you think you really pushed the envelope and did something different, even though paolo pellegrin or eugene richards did it long before you were a twinkle in your parents' eyes.

either way, it's interesting to go through a year's worth of work and see what i did wrong and where i've grown as both a person and a photographer. and it always jogs my memory for all those stories i put on the backburner all year long that i really should investigate further.

so here's a couple from just the last few months that i really liked. still haven't decided if they have a place in the paper's web gallery, but it's nice to know they have a place here, for me.

two of the cover shots for our monthly alternative-entertainment, let's-get-young-hip-readers tabloid:

from a story about a Katrina survivor living in Stockton:
soccer practice:
from 20 minutes at a high school band competition:
from a largely unpublished series of prep sports portraits:
so that's it. we'll see what happens as this gallery deadline approaches.