My Job Description
Now that our family have almost concluded celebrating Christmas, I keep mentally preparing for the journey to Togo. Today I re-read my job description and began to meditate on the new job I am going into for these next few months. I often re-read my job description the night before I go into work. I have never been a great memorizer but certain word phrases often jump out at me, and I can hold on to the words and eventually make them an addition to my vocabulary. If there are certain word phrases to a job requirement or description, I try to rehearse in my mind until they congeal. Perhaps it’s interview skills 101, in the listening category. It has always been a skill point that I stressed to any person that I had coached the days before an interview. One must try to repeat/rephrase a sentence from the interviewer as a sign that one has assuredly heard. This job description echoes similarly.
The photography position falls under the department of Public Relations. I have already had some really great conversations with the director and have begun to develop a concept of the images the team will need. I have also made contact with the lead photographer on the ship too, and found out some amazing information. I would love to connect with a group that donates photo gear (Nikon) to build up the gear that is currently on the ship. Debra and her team have taken so many amazing photographs with the gear that they currently have, but would be able to take even better images if they had an extensive choice of lenses.
The exact summary description of my role reads, ‘using artistic gifting to create photo, video, and text documents.’ It goes on to say, ‘Research and discover ideas for projects covering all areas of Mercy Ships.’ The details continue but I have stopped at those two bullet points in the last 24 hours. Two bullets on a job description hold such potent power. I am rolling those thoughts over and over in my head. Like when Mama use to show me how to make the maza for flour tortillas. We would throw all the ingredients in the middle, work the dough, throw in another ingredient, work the dough, and then let it rest until we were ready to pull each lil round piece apart and make the round disc like patties that would soon be a delicious flat flour foundation on the comal.
There is much that comes to mind of the old memories of when the camera and I first met. I was in Puente Trevino Mexicali, and only 14 years old, during a Spring Break week. In my backpack I had a bottle of water, a change of clothes (skirt), a Bible, and a point-n-shoot Kodak 35mm camera that my father had purchased for me at Walgreen’s a few days before. He stopped at the Walgreens’ to purposefully buy it as gift for my trip. When we got back in to the car he turned to me and handed me a white plastic bad and said, “Here, you’re going to need this!.” I opened the bag and immediately said thank you, but thought, ‘oh no! This is one more thing I have to fit in my backpack.’ The next day I had arrived in Mexicali and found myself in a little town called Puente Trevino. I had spent the day in Puente Trevino interpreting for my friends, playing sports with children, making crafts with the high school girls, and having a wonderful time, when all of a sudden someone asked if there was a camera. At that particular point no one had a camera and I had one in my pocket. So they pulled me into a crowd and asked me to start taking photos.
Back in the 35mm days, there wasn’t a way of finding out how the photographs were going to turn out until I got home at the end of the week. I went back to the local Walgreen’s and pulled out my processed film and prints from the C bin (for Cantu), and opened up the envelope. I sat in the passenger seat of our old ’89 Buick and looked at all the prints. To my surprise they weren’t half bad and the group ended up using it for all of its promotional material.
That week, gave me one of the most contagious under the skin infections I have not been able to get rid of even to this day. I have been infected with a love for photography and for people who are wholistically transforming right before my eyes. At every opportunity to document an event I was sure to have a camera and capture the scene. I never tried to pose people or to stop the event. I simply was on the spot, shooting the natural setting, and showing the wow in the most simple of settings. And the search for these moments continues through the rest of my adolescence and early adulthood.
I love to photograph worshipful gatherings in this same manner. There is an expectation for a divine encounter with the Spirit of God, and faces transform. People walk in with heavy burdens, tormenting thoughts, unrelenting woe, and with a timely prophetic phrase, the dark gets shut off from it’s life supply, and hope turns up the wick of light. And click. That very second, right there! Click!.
Even recently, in the outskirts of New Orleans, I had a chance to visit a residence that was highly affected by Katrina. Their home and everything around them had been totally destroyed. The basement area of the home had a water line that marked not only the height of the water but the level of damage the water made too. In the middle of that destruction the beauty of God’s natural creation popped through in the tones of rust on a filing cabinet, in mossy water from a sink basin, or from a broken mirror that reflected the Louisiana swamp land.
I am fortunate to have sat in many classrooms and many nights on the www studying the great photographs of our global history. I have read many famous photographer “how to” stories. Every one of them started out with an idea to execute, and came out with some sort of finished product. I think of Cindy Sherman, who for years photographed herself in so many situations. She would be a 1950 Betty Cocker chic and in another frame she was an abused wife with a black eye. There was another photographer that when he died they found over 20,000 unexposed rolls of film. When they exposed the film it was countless images of the people that surrounded him. Diane Arbus who photographed ugly and odd into beauty and normalcy. Have you ever seen Berenice Abbott portraits of New Yorkers? She always managed to have just enough information in the portrait without over cooking the print and killing the flavor. Garry Winogrand, made men is suits flipping in the air a common image in every stifling corporate office. Thank you Garry! He also took the photographs that we all want to take if we carried a camera around our neck 24/7, and I think he actually did until his death in the late 80’s.
Now these moments are presenting themselves for a few months while in Togo. The past experiences are all ingredients to the maza. You add a bit of this, that, and some of that suff over there, and soon I’ll have delicious maza. My hope is to take these images, artistic processes, outrageous experiments, and mind bends into the maza. I can then hopefully create something uniquely my own but respectful of the great profession of photography and the miraculous click of the shutter.
The photography position falls under the department of Public Relations. I have already had some really great conversations with the director and have begun to develop a concept of the images the team will need. I have also made contact with the lead photographer on the ship too, and found out some amazing information. I would love to connect with a group that donates photo gear (Nikon) to build up the gear that is currently on the ship. Debra and her team have taken so many amazing photographs with the gear that they currently have, but would be able to take even better images if they had an extensive choice of lenses.
The exact summary description of my role reads, ‘using artistic gifting to create photo, video, and text documents.’ It goes on to say, ‘Research and discover ideas for projects covering all areas of Mercy Ships.’ The details continue but I have stopped at those two bullet points in the last 24 hours. Two bullets on a job description hold such potent power. I am rolling those thoughts over and over in my head. Like when Mama use to show me how to make the maza for flour tortillas. We would throw all the ingredients in the middle, work the dough, throw in another ingredient, work the dough, and then let it rest until we were ready to pull each lil round piece apart and make the round disc like patties that would soon be a delicious flat flour foundation on the comal.
There is much that comes to mind of the old memories of when the camera and I first met. I was in Puente Trevino Mexicali, and only 14 years old, during a Spring Break week. In my backpack I had a bottle of water, a change of clothes (skirt), a Bible, and a point-n-shoot Kodak 35mm camera that my father had purchased for me at Walgreen’s a few days before. He stopped at the Walgreens’ to purposefully buy it as gift for my trip. When we got back in to the car he turned to me and handed me a white plastic bad and said, “Here, you’re going to need this!.” I opened the bag and immediately said thank you, but thought, ‘oh no! This is one more thing I have to fit in my backpack.’ The next day I had arrived in Mexicali and found myself in a little town called Puente Trevino. I had spent the day in Puente Trevino interpreting for my friends, playing sports with children, making crafts with the high school girls, and having a wonderful time, when all of a sudden someone asked if there was a camera. At that particular point no one had a camera and I had one in my pocket. So they pulled me into a crowd and asked me to start taking photos.
Back in the 35mm days, there wasn’t a way of finding out how the photographs were going to turn out until I got home at the end of the week. I went back to the local Walgreen’s and pulled out my processed film and prints from the C bin (for Cantu), and opened up the envelope. I sat in the passenger seat of our old ’89 Buick and looked at all the prints. To my surprise they weren’t half bad and the group ended up using it for all of its promotional material.
That week, gave me one of the most contagious under the skin infections I have not been able to get rid of even to this day. I have been infected with a love for photography and for people who are wholistically transforming right before my eyes. At every opportunity to document an event I was sure to have a camera and capture the scene. I never tried to pose people or to stop the event. I simply was on the spot, shooting the natural setting, and showing the wow in the most simple of settings. And the search for these moments continues through the rest of my adolescence and early adulthood.
I love to photograph worshipful gatherings in this same manner. There is an expectation for a divine encounter with the Spirit of God, and faces transform. People walk in with heavy burdens, tormenting thoughts, unrelenting woe, and with a timely prophetic phrase, the dark gets shut off from it’s life supply, and hope turns up the wick of light. And click. That very second, right there! Click!.
Even recently, in the outskirts of New Orleans, I had a chance to visit a residence that was highly affected by Katrina. Their home and everything around them had been totally destroyed. The basement area of the home had a water line that marked not only the height of the water but the level of damage the water made too. In the middle of that destruction the beauty of God’s natural creation popped through in the tones of rust on a filing cabinet, in mossy water from a sink basin, or from a broken mirror that reflected the Louisiana swamp land.
I am fortunate to have sat in many classrooms and many nights on the www studying the great photographs of our global history. I have read many famous photographer “how to” stories. Every one of them started out with an idea to execute, and came out with some sort of finished product. I think of Cindy Sherman, who for years photographed herself in so many situations. She would be a 1950 Betty Cocker chic and in another frame she was an abused wife with a black eye. There was another photographer that when he died they found over 20,000 unexposed rolls of film. When they exposed the film it was countless images of the people that surrounded him. Diane Arbus who photographed ugly and odd into beauty and normalcy. Have you ever seen Berenice Abbott portraits of New Yorkers? She always managed to have just enough information in the portrait without over cooking the print and killing the flavor. Garry Winogrand, made men is suits flipping in the air a common image in every stifling corporate office. Thank you Garry! He also took the photographs that we all want to take if we carried a camera around our neck 24/7, and I think he actually did until his death in the late 80’s.
Now these moments are presenting themselves for a few months while in Togo. The past experiences are all ingredients to the maza. You add a bit of this, that, and some of that suff over there, and soon I’ll have delicious maza. My hope is to take these images, artistic processes, outrageous experiments, and mind bends into the maza. I can then hopefully create something uniquely my own but respectful of the great profession of photography and the miraculous click of the shutter.
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