Family shoot: Francis turns one!

August 29, 2016 Victoria Uhl

Okay, so this shoot wound up not only being a crash course in ceremonial first birthdays, but also one in life and death in a way I hadn't quite experienced before.

We'll do the life part first:

I was referred by a friend to shoot a party for sweet, tiny little Francis and the milestone of his first birthday -- an exciting occasion for most families, but particularly so in Korean culture. After brushing up on the subject (read: Googling), I learned that the first birthdays of Korean children are celebrated with particular fervor, as there was a time when many babies did not live long enough to celebrate that first trip around the sun, and also, that there would be a ceremonial aspect involved. Serving as a means to predict the course of the child's life, at some point during the gathering, several objects get laid out on a mat, and the baby is placed opposite them. It's said that whatever they gravitate toward and ultimately pick up or play with ('choose') bears weight on their choice of future career path. Common examples are string for longevity, a medal to represent justice, pens and paper for artistry, a bundle of coins for banking, a stethoscope, and so on.

Thus Francis, his parents, grandparents, great-grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends all gathered on an overcast Saturday afternoon to ring in his first year triumphantly -- lots of hugs, and lots of smiles, and two cakes, and a ton of babies. After about two hours of shooting, Francis' father, SJ, implored me to take a break; his grandmother basically strongarming me to sit down and join everyone for a bite to eat. I wound up spending a good amount of time with Aunt Rachel, talking about music and cultural differences, and life in Seattle and life in LA, and the insanely good shrimp they were serving, and these bizarre, dense desserts they kept passing around on paper plates.

The tables were cleared and the doljanchi ceremony came next, with everyone gathered around -- Francis 'chose' the medal that represented justice, which was fitting, seeing as SJ is an attorney! He was long overdue for a nap at that point and proceeded to go into low-grade meltdown, and the party wrapped up shortly afterward.

Here's a bit of what the day looked like, from the setting up onward:

Adorable, right? Totally. I know. But there's still the death part. Circles of life and all that, and now looking back, it seems only fitting for an event tied to such rite and tradition.

Not once, but several times during the afternoon, a few people casually, and non-emotionally, referred to the pending death of either themselves or a loved one. They weren't flat or cold, or Actively Not Processing Their Emotions, and they didn't seem to be hiding anything or stuffing any feelings -- they were simply calling it what it was. One woman asked me to take several portraits of her outside, "so that they have a picture to show of me, when I die." (She insisted on taking very serious shots, even though I did persuade her to smile for one.) When I mentioned this in passing, I was told, "Ah, yes, she's sick, she may not live much longer." My instinct was to smooth the pain over, you know, all "Well, she's not going anywhere today!" type of stuff, which was met with a strangely blank look. They were just as matter-of-fact when talking about the great-grandmother, who was hardly able to steady herself when she walked, as they had wanted here there since it would likely be the last big family gathering that showed her in the photos. I felt a hairline fracture begin in the glass case where my heart lives, only to have it erased by the brushing-off and movings-on of figuring out where everyone was going to sit to eat:

Francis is so adorable! This will probably be her last celebration with us. Can I get you another bottle of water?

I'm still not quite sure how to file it all. I'm a bit in awe that I was present enough to experience all these subtleties, and I'm working to remain open around the thoughts that flood in around it, even when they're too big to wrap my brain around completely. It bears some sitting-with that I can't possibly work through the entirety of now, but it's there in the recesses of my mind, almost like a present I get to unwrap when I'm ready. Honestly, it's the first time that death has shown up in my life in a way that isn't all-destroying or fear-inducing, and I'm grateful for it, and for every little nuance of the day. We really are still learning all the time, aren't we.

Happy birthday, Francis. May you live exactly the number of days you're supposed to.

Behind the scenes: PNW spring tour

May 21, 2016 Victoria Uhl

As it turns out, tour is a lot of loading in, and a lot of loading out, and a lot of looking for healthy food to eat, and a lot of driving, and not a lot of sleeping. In comparison to the rest of the minutes and hours of the days, very little time is spent performing onstage -- which I knew logically, of course? But it's a whole other world experientially. Four-plus days on the road makes an amazing five-week routing overseas look way less exotic, and way more like the work that it is.

I should back up a step. Hi. Barry just got back from Europe, we saw each other for the first time in over a month, had a few painfully short days off together, got married in our front yard, and now he and the band are off on the US leg of the tour. ('The band' being the supporting band for Damien Jurado, The Heavy Light, that I mentioned in that tour rehearsals post back in April.) It's been a bit of a whirlwind!

Between the marriage part and now, we hopped in the car and followed the van for a few days around the northwest, which technically made this past long weekend my first 'tour,' even though it was only for four days. Starting the first night in Spokane -- yes, we spent our wedding night in Moses Lake; no, that doesn't count as our honeymoon, ha! -- I tagged along to the shows in Vancouver, BC; Bellingham, and Portland, before bidding everyone adieu after brunch at The Tin Shed.

So, back to the opening paragraph: lots of loading in, lots of loading out and such. Here are a handful of onstage and off-stage shots that I captured over those four days on the proverbial road, which are mostly from venues, hotels, and the restaurants in-between. I'm pretty happy with them considering this was technically baby's first tour shoot.

As always, images are best viewed on a desktop if you have the option!

Personal travel: Seward, AK

May 9, 2016 Victoria Uhl

I want to try and describe the experience I've had being in Alaska for the last two and a half days, but I hardly know where to begin.

It's 10pm on Saturday. I'm sitting in the B wing of the Anchorage airport, staring out the window at the still-lit sky. It's barely dusk, and I just saw Denali, even though it was a zillion miles away. I guess I should start with when I started to feel the landscape: yesterday, when Jen took me out to Exit Glacier -- there was a break in the clouds for the first time since I'd landed late Wednesday night, and she wanted me to see it since I'd heard about the peaks and the ice fields from the wildlife tour I'd gone on the day before. Talking in the car, among other things, we realized that I'd been confusing glaciers with icebergs, and then the shapes between the mountains started to make more sense.

So we get to the viewpoint for Exit Glacier, and we get out of the car and stand at the edge of this little parking lot. There's one of those low post-and-beam fences where the asphalt stops, you know, the kind that doesn't really keep anything out or in, it just gives you a visual marker of where you should and shouldn't go. The air was freezing in a way it hadn't been in town, and as I was taking it all in I looked down and saw an illustrated plaque that described the view:

Everything that you can see right now used to be covered in ice.

The graphic showed ice levels thousands of feet above the landscape, that had slowly worn down over the years to a massive glacier between the peaks, that now stood as just a fragment of itself; feeding the waterway snaking through the flat land in front of me. I stood there, starting out at these two 4,000+ foot mountains with a massive, frozen river between them, and suddenly I just felt... different. There was some kind of strange pang in my gut, and I understood more than I had the moment before, and I understood Those People Who Freak Out About Nature, and I could feel that icy air blowing from the top of those peaks right down into the center of my body. It was like I saw Earth and Time, and tectonic plates and history. I want to say that it felt like I'd seen a dinosaur or something? Or at least met someone who knew the guy who had a picture of a dinosaur stashed away in his attic.

I didn't understand what it was at the time, but talking later we figured out that I had found myself in awe. Me, jaded about so much, getting my doors blown off by like, giant ice-covered rocks. And hilariously, perfectly, it was the only few hours of the trip that I didn't have my big camera with me.

***

It's not that Seward proper isn't beautiful -- I'd seen the view, sort of, since Thursday morning, when Jen sent me out on that tour in Resurrection Bay. Overcast and drizzly as it was, it was still pretty breathtaking, and there were otters and bald eagles, sea lions and massive fjords; a glimpse of a grey whale that disappeared when too many boats showed up. We hammered across a choppy part of the gulf where you could see ten thousand miles of open ocean, one of the widest unobstructed expanses you can see from anywhere on the planet. And there were murals on the sides of buildings portraying these big, beautifully lit landscapes right up against Seward and the bay, so I knew there was majesty under the fog someplace? But seeing that view, and standing where the ice had been -- it just made everything shift.

Today we woke up after that York Peppermint Pattie mountaintop moment to bluebird skies and blasting sun, and ALL of the mountains, and ocean as far as you could see, and everything just kept unfolding. It was the San Juans on steroids, Hawaii except covered in snow; huge masses of land and cliffsides sticking straight up out of the water. We drove out this rocky bay where I took a thousand pictures, and we filled our water bottles with a hose that someone rigged into a the side of a mountain a long time ago to feed straight glacier runoff. Spring Water. Later, we ate fresh halibut with a view of the shipyard, and talked and talked and talked. And on the drive back to Anchorage, the sun hit that water and those cliffsides and those mountains in just the right way, and the world just looked so big, bigger than I'd ever seen before; so big that I could hardly fucking stand it. It's like the vast expanse of my heart and my insides and all the love I'd ever known and the universe and Life Itself personified into the landscape somehow. It did this, even, it's making me write about the view the way I'd write about a band. Except it's for real this time.

The thing is, I wasn't expecting any of this. The last few days have been so tender: I've sat listening to a friend who's recovering from both broken arm and broken heart, the whole reason for the trip, barely four days in her new apartment by the time I'd arrived. We processed, she worked; I cleaned. I dug into her kitchen mostly, helping to build her a home, throwing out the trash that the tenant before her had left behind. I went through boxes labeled by the heartbreaker, organized spices and dishes, and put trinkets on the tiny shelves in her medicine cabinet. I listened, I splurged on Thai food, we took long walks and spent a few hours soaking in Seward from the upstairs of the local coffeehouse. I heard so many stories, met so many pets, got a hundred hugs -- all on top of that thing happening with the dinosaurs and Time and the new hole in my gut.

It all collided perfectly in a way that I never could have planned in a million years, and it's a trip that has changed me forever, on every level.

Here's what some of it looked like:

So now what?

Now, the announcements will come over the loudspeaker, and the plane will board, and in a few hours I'll be in, well, less awe: back to SeaTac, back to my car, back to the house, back to the cat and the plants and the records. Hopefully I can sneak in a few hours of sleep before I head south again to pick Barry up from his flight. For now, I'll have to leave here content with the memories and the photos, with the literal and metaphorical tattoo that Seward has left on my sleeve, and with the cues from what I discovered here: tapping into the vein of all the love there is to give, and remembering no matter what we do or don't plan, that the seasons dictate the ebb and flow of where our lives take us -- not the other way around.

Road trip: Christmas in Wyoming

January 1, 2016 Victoria Uhl

It's difficult to put into words just how unreal it was to be in Jackson Hole for Christmas this year. The mountains, the animals, the sheer scale of the wide-open-ness, all folded together with meeting most of Barry's family for the first time -- it was an absolute postcard holiday, a dozen different kinds of snowy and warm-hearted and perfect.

I could write a whole gushy, emotional post about all the feelings and the family dinners, and the way the air was, and how quiet it was at night, and how much I adore the pretty little turquoise ring I picked up to remember the trip by. I probably will at some point, but until then, here are my favorite shots from those few freezing, beautiful days:

Photobooth: NYE wedding!

January 12, 2015 Victoria Uhl

Best New Year's Eve ever? Possibly. I spent the night down on Lake Union surrounded by friends, witnessing the wedding of my boss and her partner, and running a sparkly, prop-filled photobooth (my wedding gift to them). To top it all off, we ran down to the water just as the clock struck midnight, all fireworks and KEXP blasting from the houseboats and kisses in the middle of the street.

I didn't have a camera for that last part, but here's a fraction of the photos from the booth I mentioned: