Top of my bucket list/family pottering

It was actually work, a day planned back in January. But Trouble 1 felt it was more pottering. I am thinking quality family time.

It was in 2002 I had my separate photo exhibit at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, commissioned by them. It was a big show, 44 B&W selenium toned pictures and 8 large in color. In 2007 the region museum in Umeå (Länsmuséet) put them on display too.

The reason the exhibit works in both cities is that it’s about both cities. Or actually, one city and one village. When I first came to Seattle I started shooting what I perceived as the soul of Seattle. Not the typical postcards, but odd parking meters, dressed up sculptures, crummy house boats, the rain. This was easy in those early years, as I was shooting with my outside eye, looking in. The assignment picturing Umeå in the same way was impossible though. Umeå is too close to me, I can’t see it.

Arriving here 1997 after a year in Seattle brought me unexpected help though. I was so miserable coming back. I didn’t want to leave Seattle. Although it was Midsummers, wonderfully light and green, I couldn’t see it. It was black around me. Until I picked up my Rolleiflex and looked through the lens. That’s when I started to notice. The tall shadows in the evening light. The reflections. The details. And that’s when I knew what the Swedish part of the exhibit would be. The micro cosmos here in my village. My front yard.

Trouble & Trouble grew up with their mom constantly around and about with her camera. Always attentive of the light. Hey, I need someone sitting on the dock, the light is falling! My friends and family were haunted by me for years while this epic project was going on, poor guys. 

But the efforts were worth it (at least for me!), because in the end Away is Home, Home is Away (Borta är hemma, hemma är borta) was a really nice show. The title tells the story about having two homes, being enriched and divided by the constant longing for the place where you are not.

Anyway, since 2007 the show has been stored in boxes. I have this plan though. At the top of my life bucket list is making a book out of that show. I have the pictures, the titles and the texts which accompanied the photos. It’s just doing it!

Well, it’s not just just… as I can’t do it myself. I assembled every single photo, mat and fram myself in 2002, disassembled to clean the glass and assembled again for the show 2007. But today… I can’t do any of that. And it’s hard for me to even understand that I once could. The only way getting it done is asking my sons for help. And I know it’s not something they would be over the moon for. But they agreed on helping out.

Trouble & Trouble were here a little after noon last Sunday. The first hour we spent on trying out which scanner to use and the technicalities to get an as good image as possible - my analog prints are (as my printing teacher at Pacific Photo Center Northwest put it - outstanding (yes, really!), and to make digital copies at the same quality is pretty much impossible. The next hour I taught my sons how to dissemble and assemble the frame kits, and then it took us some more hour to get industrious about the whole thing. Work stations, flow. I was lying in my office on my portable sun bed doing the delicate job taking out and putting back the photos in the mat package.

Late afternoon Audrey and Fay joined and we took a break for dinner and some birthday celebration - spring is the family birthday season and everyone except Fay changes numbers at age. Then back to business again. Trouble 2 and Audrey were the last to leave. At 00.10. It took us pretty much 12 hours to digitalize Away is Home, Home is Away - Borta är hemma, hemma är borta, but now it’s done. It’s really done.

Which is nothing but incredible. And I am so grateful. But I am even more grateful for all those hours together with my sons. It was something about knowing and being ready for the assignment. Everyone mentally there and in a good mood. Hours floating away meanwhile we got to hang out together, being industrious. Planning for summer work days around the house. Chitchatting. Pottering. It was something in the dynamics. 

Usually when we get together it’s for an hour or two and for a dedicated subject that isn’t leaving any room for chitchatting. Most of the time the girlfriends are there too, which I love, but I am realizing it was a very long time since it was only me and my sons. I can’t even remember when it last happened. And it just gave me the feeling of family. Family as it once was, minus one, but still, family. Sad, in a way, bitter sweet. But nice. Warm and nice.

The book, at the top of my bucket list, I want to do for myself, but also for my sons. The years for that project is a big chunk of their childhood. And Seattle and our village are their two homes as well as mine. And I am hoping that book, when it’s done (and it will be) is something they will cherish and take pride in. 

Gay/Socialist: the people's choice!

It’s been called a watershed moment in the US history. And it happened this Monday. Seattle’s first out gay Mayor and it’s first socialist were sworn in to office. To me, I must say the latter is more surprising.

In my photo show Away is Home Home is Away, which I produced on commission for The Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle 2002, there is a pair of pictures called Love.

One of them is from my Swedish village, picturing the hands of my beloved neighbors Alida and Värner at that time 85 and 92 years old. The other one two tall and fit macho men in tanks, one of them black the other white, holding hands, looking at each other. I caught them from behind at a red light on Broadway. It’s a street shot and they are not aware of me. To me the Seattle gay community is a signum for the city.

Mayor Ed Murray took the oath from former governor Gary Locke (the first Asian governor on the US mainland) on a Gaelic bible held by his husband. Socialist City Council member Kshama Sawant’s oath was administered by Washington State Labor Council Vice President Nicole Grant, after which both women turned to the audience raising clenched fists.

I must say, I have never seen a raised clenched fist in Seattle. Perhaps I need a new set of photos juxtaposed, one fist in Umeå and the other one in Seattle.

The event was moved from more or less closed chambers to the City Hall, which was packed with about 1000 people. Reporting happened in national and international news outlets including CNN, Fox News, The Guardian of London, The New York Times, The Times of India and Al-Jazeera International.

Seattle is a liberal American city, no doubt about it. Certainly all my friends are. A couple of years ago I had a meeting with a friend of an acquaintance who was a Republican. I had never even met a Republican before. Driving there I felt like I was meeting with someone from a different planet. It turned out he was a nice person, and we didn’t discuss politics.

I would say my friends are not only liberal, but very liberal indeed. They are opinionated and on top of the political debate not only in Seattle, but national and international. We have never discussed the subject but I doubt that anyone of them would call themselves a socialist though. That’s why I am amazed I have to say, to find a raised clenched fist in the City Council.

Kshama Sawant is known for her uncompromising stands and idealism. She is a former Seattle community college economics instructor, and in her remarks at the ceremony she denounced the “glittering fortunes of the super wealthy” in the city, saying they came at the expense of working people, the poor and unemployed whose lives, she said, “grow more difficult by the day.”

Ed Murray is the architect of the state’s marriage-equality law, which made same-sex marriages legal in December 2012, and one of the country’s longest-serving gay politicians. Murray and Sawant come from different places, but I am thinking those places might be befriending. And this far they agree on a very specific subject: the raise of the minimum wages.

The minimum wage in US is 7.25 dollars per hour. State of Washington has the highest minimum wage in the country, 9.19 dollar by 2013. Now, Kshama Sawant is set on making 2014 the year of the minimum wage 15 dollars in Seattle. Ed Murray chose to make a $15 minimum wage for city employees the topic of his first official press conference. And the pledge by both Murray and Sawant to propose a $15 minimum-wage ordinance to the City Council by April has fueled national interest.

The buzz around the Monday inauguration seems to be an extension of Seattle’s progressive reputation around the country. Washington State already was in the national spotlight for its recent legalization of gay marriage and marijuana. Seattle also was the third city in the country to adopt a paid-sick-leave ordinance that primarily benefits low-wage workers. Since then, three more cities including Portland and New York City have followed suit, putting Seattle at the forefront of liberal initiatives.

Growing up in the Umeå area in the sixties and seventies a raised clenched fist has been more natural to me than same sex marriages. Although Sweden was the seventh country in the world making same sex marriage legal, it didn’t happen until 2009. Umeå has been voted Gay City of the Year twice, but I wouldn’t say gay is a major signum for the city as I feel it is for Seattle; hey, Seattle recently sailed past San Francisco as the most gay city in the US! I would say though that Red Umeå, an epithet from the sixties, still has an accurate ring to it.

Anyhow. Anyway. I am wishing Ed Murray and Kashma Sawant good luck serving the people and City of Seattle, and I am looking forward to what will come out of it!