Personal pictures from 2010

Sisters Quilt Show 2010

Oregon Ballet Theatre at Caldera Arts Cener

Last week was a very special opportunity for me. With the cooperation and assistance of the Caldera Arts center folks and the Oregon Ballet Theatre I was provided the access to document the seven dancers who came to central Oregon to produce a new work and perform it and three other pieces for the local community. The new work, choreographed by one of the principal dancers, Anne Mueller, took the majority of the time since the dance was literally being constructed from scratch. The dancers along with Anne are Alison Roper, Steven Houser, Lucas Threefoot, Christian Squires, Brian Simcoe and Artur Sultanov and of course, Christopher Stowell, the artistic director. Irina Golberg, the principal accompanist, played the piano pieces and are now melodies I can't get out of my head.

Hawaiian Interlude

Central Oregon has had a fairly mild winter compared to other regions of the country. Nevertheless, the continuous gray and dreary days piled up in January and February creating the urge in many around here to pack up and leave for warmer climates, if just for a week or two. Spring is slow in arriving here, two or three nice days then back to the clouds, rain, 40º temps. Our escape was to Maui for a week and that just isn't enough time. Next winter, two weeks.

Going To The Other Side

Great intentions don't always produce the desired result. After changing the title of this blog I had several places I wanted to explore. The weather has been uncooperative, nearly a month of drab, endless, gray days. I also contracted a deep chest cough that evolved into the worst cold in my adult life. Photography, blogging? Forget it. Finally now there is sun and renewed will that is stronger as the coughing subsides.

We drove to Eugene today to see Allison and drop off her bike, have a good lunch and a visit. From Sisters to Eugene is about 2 hours through the Cascades, over Santiam Pass and descending along the McKenzie River 68 miles from its headwaters out into the fertile valleys and small villages of Rainbow, Blue River, Vida, Nimrod, Walterville and Springfield.

Although there is no demarcation line separating the lush forests of the west side of the Cascades and the stark, dramatic, and dry terrain of the rain shadowed eastern side, the change happens in only a few miles and a slight decrease in elevation. The McKenzie River's source is just over the crest of the range at Clear Lake. The flow through the narrow channels of the first few miles is a thundering wild child river. Three waterfalls, Sahalie, Koosah and Tamolitch punctuate the fury of the river and are assessable on a well-traveled foot path through the dense forest.

We've stopped here before yet today's visit seemed all new. The fragrance of the forest, the deafening sound of the river put us each in our own space as we hiked the short trail between the falls.

The long angular light faded as the sun dropped behind the trees. In a 45 minute walk the drabness of the past month seemed to be cast off into the river and carried away. And this all happened thirty minutes from our front door.

Moving on from Moving On

After three years of writing about my personal journey of moving on from my prior life in Sacramento, it's time to move on again.
The masthead for the blog reflects what is currently interesting in my life, to me AND hopefully to you. The Oregon experience.
I have a lot going on that I'll describe in upcoming posts. Thanks for your interest.

2010 Moon Over Tollgate

I had high hopes for clear skies around here to photograph the blue moon (the second full moon in December). No such luck. Nothing but gray skies and rain. Last night, January 1st was totally clear. Out with the camera, tripod and some long extension cords to control the house lights during the 25 second exposure.

Happy Holidays from Sisters, Oregon

To all the viewers of my blog, faithful and occasional, my best wishes to you all for a pleasant holiday and a peaceful and fulfilling 2010.

USA Cyclocross Championships

I spent a day at the USA Cyclocross Championships in Bend, Oregon. The sport is wildly popular in the Northwest and the competitions are usually held in autumn through spring when the conditions on the loop courses are often wet, muddy, ice and snow and cold. For the four-day event here all of the above have been factors in the racing and everyone seems happy about that. Aerobic capacity and bike handling skills separate the riders quickly in the timed races. Spectators line the course and ring cowbells in support of the competitors. After the races everyone heads into town for parties. No wonder cyclocross is so popular.

Veterans Day 2009

If there must be trouble let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. - Thomas Paine



A daughter gets her birthday wish, her daddy comes home. Darren Stewart, a TSGT with the 6th Air Refueling Sqaudron, 60th Air Mobility Wing gives his daughter Sydney Stewart a kiss after arriving home from a 2003 tour of duty in the Persian Gulf region.

Cambodia 1979-2009

November 4, 1979. What do you remember about that day?

The major event that day was the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran being overrun by student followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran's fundamentalist revolutionaries. Ninety hostages were captured and fifty-two of them would remain in captivity for the next 444 days. It was the turning point in U.S. and Iran diplomatic relations.

For me, it was the day I and fellow journalist, Joel Brinkley, left for the Thailand/Cambodia border where thousands of Cambodian refugees were crossing into Thailand to escape the war between the North Vietnamese and the crumbling Khmer Rouge regime. Our efforts there were centered around a Louisville, Kentucky physician, Dr. Kenneth Rasmussen, who was on the front line of treatment for the sick and starving who survived weeks, if not months, of perilous overland travel to the safety of the camps.

This past summer Joel and I made a return trip to Cambodia, thirty years after the "Living the Cambodian Nightmare" project. We wanted to see firsthand how life for the rural population, 80% of the 13.7 million citizens of Cambodia are faring.

Frankly, all is not well. In many respects Cambodia is much as it was prior to the Khmer Rouge era, 1975-1979. Old methods of rice production are still used, the infrastructure is minimal, education is not mandatory, corruption exits at every level of life and hope is a rare commodity.

While the world centers it's attention on the Middle East, Africa and other regions of conflict, Cambodia barely registers on anyone's radar. It has become the forgotten country.

I offer the two audiovisual shows below. The first is from our 1979 journey and has been expanded from the original version to include additional photographs of Cambodians in transit to the United States and several of a family that had been sponsored by Dr. Rasmussen and his wife. The last photograph is of Sot Oung, the father, in an English language class. He is looking over his shoulder out a window to see snow falling for the first time in his life. Ironically, a sentence on the blackboard being used as an example of tenses, says "How often do you go back home?" There are several responses to use. The first is "I never go back home."

I have reconnected with Dr. Rasmussen, now retired and living in Tennessee. He remained in contact with the family for a few years. They moved to Indianapolis where Sot worked for Lear Jet and Saot, his wife, became a dental technician. The couple divorced and Dr. Rasmussen hasn't heard from anyone in the family in over ten years.

The world has witnessed additional human tragedy, genocide and despair in the past thirty years. The legacy of Khmer Rouge debacle, Cambodians killing 1.7 million fellow Cambodians, has had little effect on the country's ability to redefine itself in the 21st. century.

Kirsten Bloom, Changing Roles.

For the last 14 years, Kirsten Bloom has been the most familiar face of the Sacramento Ballet. Audiences have admired and respected her abilities as a dancer and an athlete in numerous roles. She has performed in Romeo and Juliet, Giselle, Carmina Burana, A Streetcar Named Desire, Concerto Barocco, Etosha, and of course, The Nutcracker, each one demanding a different personna. Vulnerable, tender, feisty, sympathetic, headstrong, or regal, Kirsten showed the essence of the character in her dance. She partnered with Jared Nelson, Jack Hansen, Luis Napoles, Bobby Briscoe, Michael Vester in many of the dances adding the collaborative dimension to her abilities.

Kirsten will be taking on her greatest role, that of a mother next April and will begin her maternity leave after her final performance October 24th during the Capital Choreography Competition at the Crest Theatre in Sacramento. She says she is not retiring and plans to return to dance in the future.

I have been fortunate to photograph Kirsten on and offstage for most of the time she has been dancing with the company. Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda, the Artistic Directors of the company will work with the current dancers and mold them into world-class artists as they have with Kirsten. Who will dance the role of the "Sugar Plum Fairy" in this year's edition of the Nutcracker? Whoever she is will have one of the best ever to emulate.

Mary Travers

Anyone who lived the 60's or has since appreciated what happened then can't say "Peter, Paul" without adding "Mary." Mary Travers, 72, died today of the effects of chemotherapy in her battle against leukemia. The trio led the folksong revival which popularized many of Bob Dylan's songs.

I learned to finger pick a guitar by playing of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" endlessly at the slowest speed possible on my little record player until I could virtually match the notes. I'm sure I wasn't alone in the attempt to make my guitar sound as seamless.

The trio brought "Blowin' In The Wind," and many more, to mainstream popularity. And this is where the story gets personal for me.

In August, 1966 PP&M were scheduled to perform at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre just outside Denver, Colorado. There were high winds and rain during the afternoon, typical weather for Colorado in late summer. The concert could have been moved to an indoor venue, the Denver Coliseum, but it wasn't. Red Rocks is one of the most spectacular venues for a concert anywhere in the U.S.A. seating 9450 with unobstructed views of the stage. I arrived there in the rain with Sue, my date, and eventual first wife, two hours before the concert. We secured great seats, center, mid-venue and with an umbrella we waited.

The concert was set to begin at 7:00pm. At 6:45pm the rain stopped and a light breeze flowed over the sandstone walls through the audience. At 6:55pm the breeze intensified to a moderate wind. At 7:02pm Peter, Paul and Mary, without any introduction, came onstage and performed "Blowin' In The Wind." The soft warm wind, the acoustical perfection of the venue and the ethereal music is a moment that is one of my most enduring memories.

Years passed and I moved on from Denver to Louisville, Kentucky, the city where Mary was born. In 1985 PP&M reunited as a trio and scheduled Louisville as one of the performance cities. I was working at the Courier-Journal and submitted a request to photograph the rehearsal. I did cover the short practice session (unfortunately the b/w negatives lost) and I took the opportunity to introduce myself and I asked them about that 1966 concert at Red Rocks.

They all instantly remembered that moment. An introduction had been planned and the first song was not "Blowin' In The Wind." But, they also felt the breeze, saw the clearing sky and understood the spiritual connection between music, the audience, and the physical atmosphere. With no hesitation they changed the opening song. PP&M simply walked onstage, began the concert and mesmerized 10,000 hearts.

Mary Travers, your silky voice will always resonate in my core.

A Summer of Contrasts

Cambodia and Canada. Experiences I'll never forget.

Cambodia, "The Forgotten Country."

I completed my three week tour of rural Cambodia with writer Joel Brinkley.Everday was challenging and surprising for the experiences we had visiting with people who told amazing stories of thier lives, the terrible ordeal of the Khmer Rouge and how they cope with a rather dysfunctional government. We visited hospitals, small villages, government officials and often found our best stories simply by luck. I've posted these images in hopes that you will continue on to the website gallery for additional photos and information. The link to the gallery is:
http://archive.jaymather.org/c/mather/gallery-collection/Cambodia-1979-2009/P00004llkaurlo_0. Or simply click on the Photo Shelter Gallery link on the right to see all the galleries.

Face to face with Cambodia's past

The Cambodian national torment is the Khmer Rouge era. In 1979 when survivors were arriving in Thailand the horrific stories they brought with them sounded unimaginable, yet true. Today, thirty years later I had the opportunity to see the places where genocide happened. One place just 15 km outside of Phnom Penh, is Choeng Ek, one of the "killing fields." Numerous mass graves have been uncovered, leaving a pock-marked landscape where victims were bludgeoned to death in order to save bullets.
People come and walk silently along the dirt paths that rim the craters. In some areas, remnants of clothing and shards of bone are visible. A monument in the center of the complex has a ten-layer repository of skulls. It is a somber, sad place.

A second is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the center of Phnom Penh. Known during the Khmer Rouge regime as S-21, the former high school was converted to a torture and execution center for anyone thought to be in opposition to the mandates of Pol Pot. Between 1975 and 1979, 10,519 people were brought from throughout Cambodia, held for several months, tortured in a myriad of despicable ways, then executed. Only two survived, one a photographer who made haunting mug shots of every inmate and an artist who promised he could portray Pol Pot in a favorable manner but also painted depictions of the torture methods.

A steady stream of people move quietly through the halls and into the rooms full of hundreds of the photographic portraits and paintings. Many are Cambodians coming with their families. They stare at the photos, reach out to touch. I'm reminded of of the respect and reverence that visitors to the Viet Nam Memorial show. S-21 is Cambodia's "Wall."

In another section of the complex rooms with stark steel bed frames and shackles that bound the prisoners remind the visitors that cruelty and crudity are inseparable. Two floors of another building are full of small cubicles constructed from brick and mortar or wood where prisoners were crammed into the spaces to await their fate.

This was a necessary tour for me, not pleasant yet as haunting and memorable as anywhere I have ever been.

Closing a circle

Recently Joel Brinkley and I got together to discuss some details of our return to Cambodia next week. Although we hadn't seen each other in nearly 25 years we have been communicating through e-mails and telephone and it seemed easy to pick up where we left off so long ago. There will be a lot of time to talk about our lives in the next few weeks and how two young upstart journalists in 1979 got the biggest story of their careers.

This documentary project nearly died an early death for lack of funding. I wrote a grant proposal to the Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting asking for expenses but was denied. However, a local foundation here in Sisters, Oregon, the Roundhouse Foundation, agreed to fund my transportation costs. Hopefully I'll find an outlet for the photographs after my return but with most publications having little or no freelance budget and online outlets paying minimal usage fees I'm not expecting instant wealth.

Still, the opportunity to return to see how the Cambodian people live now after the Khmer Rouge, is incredible. I believe this will complete a journey within my professional life and it also may open up new possibilities as well.

Joel, a visiting Journalism professor at Stanford University, made an observation about the span of time we had working for daily newspapers. Basically, newspapers were not the crusading, risk-taking, and aggressive publications they became after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. Those two events drew idealistic, adventurous, talented and healthy skeptics into journalism. The best years of daily journalism for newspapers also encompassed entire careers for people like Joel, me and thousands of others.

The dying newspaper industry finds many publications are cutting staffs, reducing news coverage, and publishing what people "want" instead of "need" or ceasing publication altogether. We feel very lucky to have moved on to the new phases of our lives.

One small thing bothers both of us: a lack of photos of us out in the field being journalists. While we were actually working the protocol never included stopping for a moment to make some pictures at whatever situation we were in. It seemed like grandstanding. Now we would like to have a few pictures of those times. Joel shot a few of me in Cambodia and I shot a few of him. The only roll of film that was ruined in processing had his pictures on it. I'm still irritated about that.

Joel's wife, Sabra, shot this photo of us. In the coming weeks I will be concentrating on documenting the rural Cambodian citizens. Making the photographs for Joel's book is the top priority but I won't forget this time to stop occasionally and make a few for the memory book.

Moving on sometimes requires looking back

To those of you who have followed this blog I apologize for the lack of a new post. Frankly, I've been unable to find a subject that excited me. However, I have been actively continuing my project to convert many of my photographs from film to digital, a tedious yet quite rewarding effort.

Some of the negatives are 35+ years old and are as clean as the day I processed the film while other strips of film have serious degradation. I think back to the days of hand processing and know that often the film wasn't left in the hypo clearing solution or washed long enough. Archival processing was usually trumped by newspaper deadlines. Fortunately, most of the issues of pinholes, dust and scratches can be remedied in Photoshop but the process often takes hours for each image.

The reward is to see the photographs again and always better than I could have ever printed them in a darkroom. It has also been a chance to assess how my style of shooting changed and matured over the years. The most pleasant surprise in this endeavor has been the opportunity to reconnect with some of the people I photographed through internet people search engines.

I've noticed that the years 1969, 1979, 1989, 1999, and 2009 are benchmarks, connected by images I made during major projects or in special moments in my life.

1969 was the year I entered the Peace Corps and was sent to Malaysia. It was also the year I began taking photography seriously.

Ten years later, 1979, I returned to Southeast Asia to photograph Cambodian refugees coming to Thailand as the Khmer Rouge regime was collapsing and revealing the genocide of nearly 2 million citizens. (the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting).

In 1989 I was half-way through the Yosemite Centennial project to document the human experience in the park. (a Pulitzer finalist in 1991).

1999 was the third year of my volunteer work with the Sacramento Ballet that gave me the opportunity to establish a 13-year body of work culminating in a trip to China with the company on their first foreign performing tour in 2007.

2009 finds me retired from newspaper work but certainly not from documentary photography. I chose this image of North Sister to say my photographic life has wide open possibilities.

Now, one of the greatest opportunities I've ever had is about to happen. I will be returning to Cambodia with my friend and fellow journalist Joel Brinkley, who I worked with on the "Living the Cambodian Nightmare" project thirty years ago. We will be visiting mostly in rural areas of the country to show that life for the average citizen has not seen a lot of improvement despite a resurgence of the national economy. Joel is writing a book which I will illustrate and we also hope to publish our words and pictures in print and/or online when we return.

The perspective I have now after "looking back" certainly helps inspire me to understand what "moving on" is all about.

Newspapers: going, going, gone.

One of my three wishes for the Genie when he appears in front of me is to always know the exact right thing to say at the precise moment it needs to be said. The Genie has not appeared and now, when I need those perfect words, I can't find the right ones to comfort or inspire. The best I can do is go out and make a photograph. A Canadian goose in flight. Fly away and be free.

My head and heart are having trouble staying connected this week following the announcement of more layoffs of journalists at the Sacramento Bee. My head knew it was coming, my heart is not as accommodating and aches for my friends and former colleagues who are now tossed into the burgeoning ranks of the unemployed. The process, from this distant point of view, appears flawed..again. No upper management layoffs; only the folks who actually do the work of getting out on the streets to get the stories and photographs get axed. The list is there for all to see on the Sacramento Bee Guild website.

The first person I heard sound the siren of the quantum shift of news dissemination from newsprint to online was the former publisher of the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times, Barry Bingham Jr. in 1982 when the internet was barely out of the womb. His vision of people reading the news off computer screens instead of newsprint was not readily accepted. He was predicting that new world journalism be round, not flat. And he was more right than he'll ever know. He died in 2006 without seeing the current march of many major U.S. newspapers, like a herd of wildebeests plunging over a cliff in very slow-motion, to obscurity or outright oblivion.

I rarely have dreams that I recall but I had one recently that sticks in my mind. I was standing in an orchard in California and there were no bees buzzing around. The thought I had in the scene was that the collapse of the bee colonies was a siren warning that that the financial world, without the banking and credit markets pollinating as they are supposed to, would lead to world economic turmoil. The bees were fleeing, like coastal animals who sense an oncoming tsunami and move to higher ground long before humans figure out what's happening.

Awakening, I'm at a loss for words.

Iditarod sled dogs

I need to get away from reading bad news. The updates on the tanked world economy and the untenable situation my former co-workers face at the Sacramento Bee with their job futures are constant, sad and unrelenting. So, I'm taking a break from it and turning my attention to something a tad more positive. The 2009 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

Sixty-seven mushers leave Anchorage, Alaska Saturday on their 1,150 mile race across the frozen tundra powered by their sled dog teams. This is the Tour de France on snow and ice but unlike the bike race there is no one to hide behind or draft off. The dogs are the princes of this sport. Forty pound bundles of muscle and exuberance. Twelve tied to a sled, running their legs off for ten to seventeen days.

I have a particular interest in this year's race since one of the entrants is a local. Rachel Scdoris along with her dad Jerry live outside Bend and operate a sled dog tour at Mt. Bachelor, 20 miles west of Bend. She is entrant #58 and I'll be watching cable and tracking her progress on the web.