Baby Teeth

Amy has been one of my best friends and favorite collaborators for more than two years, and one of her strongest attributes as an artist is the ability to tell a story. The majority of the subjects I’ve photographed for my ongoing series documenting people’s tattoos have been volunteers; Amy is one of very few that I specifically asked to participate. There is a story in everything she does, and her twenty-five year collection of ink is no exception.

“I got my first tattoo when I was eighteen, and I got my most recent tattoo this year. And I am about to be 44. It’s the lotus on my lower back. Because I’m about to be 44,” she said about her first tattoo during our shoot earlier this summer. “So if you got tattooed when you were eighteen and you are in this age group, that’s probably your first one. I got it when I felt like tattoos all needed to have a very specific and important meaning. I felt like she was a survivor, and that’s kind of what I was trying to do. I guess that set a tone for me, huh?”

“I was living in Salt Lake, and I got this at Big Deluxe Tattoo, which is like one of the only ones in the city, and it was attached to a bar called Burt’s Tiki Lounge. Which had become my favorite bar in all of my known time. It’s gone now. I used to be able to go there when I was underage because of my affiliation with the tattoo shop next door. Which was simply that I had gotten tattooed there and made a few friends while I was there and brought in a few people.”

The most recent is a pair of clasped hands on her upper thigh. “Alex and I got tattooed together on one of our first dates because that’s super normal,” Amy said of her girlfriend, who stood nearby.

“It wasn’t one of our first dates, we had been together for a minute then,” Alex chimed in.

“Was it?” Amy said. “I feel like it hadn’t been that long. I mean, it was early on.”

“I lost my debit card that day,” Alex went on.

“And many other days after,” Amy said. “At a lot of other places.”

“I have some tattoos that I have because I traded tarot for those. One of them is almost gone. That used to say ‘true blue.’ But now she gone. He said he would put it on again but I think there’s something charming about the impermanence of something like that.”

“I like a hand tattoo but I do not want to tattoo the outsides of my hands because they look just like my mom’s, and it’s something that’s been remarked on since I was a kid. My kid talks about it. So I figured I would do the inside. And I did the left hand because I thought it would last longer.”

Amy traded tarot with the same artist who inked her palm for the snake on her rear end. “It’s probably my favorite. It’s one of my favorites. My friend Richard did this. We have been friends for a long time, and I read tarot for him. And I think on this day I drove down to his shop in Bristol, Tennessee. Right over the Virginia/Tennessee border. It’s like five or six hours away. It’s supposed to be the last town that Hank Williams was seen alive in, and that’s like the lore of the town. But Richard moved from RVA down there and opened a little shop, and I drove down there and got this tattoo.”

“I got this one with my kid when he graduated high school. That’s his handwriting. His teachers used to complain about how small it was, and he would fill up notebooks with that shit, and it was so fucking tiny. It looks like baby teeth to me. So I had him write it on a piece of paper. ‘Modern Man Must Hustle,’ it’s a hip hop song, an Atmosphere song that Jake and I used to listen to a lot when he was coming up from the time that he was little. And we’ve seen Atmosphere together a bunch of times. He used to be Jake’s favorite rapper, and mine too at that time.”

“I got this one in Salt Lake City when I was there on vacation. It’s not even a favorite tattoo, I don’t think it’s particularly remarkable. But I was walking down the street on my last day there, and I looked over and I saw a sticker of this Richmond band on this building, and I was like what is this? And I looked up and it was a tattoo shop. So I went in and asked the guy if he had time to do a quick tattoo, and he did that really quick, and I went home. I flew out the next day.”

“Utah [where Amy is from] is the beehive state, and it’s motto is ‘Industry.’ So beehives are everywhere. The state bird of Utah is a seagull. And that’s a pass for me. The story is pioneers came and settled in this really difficult part of land to cultivate, and they finally got crops growing, and then this plague of locusts came and descended on their crops. Like blackened the sky and came down and descended on their crops. And then, as though they were sent from God, these seagulls came and ate the locusts and saved the crops and the people didn’t die and lived through a harsh winter. They love a seagull.”

“I got this tattoo as a memorial tattoo to my sister having died. But I wish that I had chosen something different. But also I guess I don’t. I got this when I was like nineteen. My memories of her death are trauma-response blocked out for like a long period of time after that, and actually are sporadic at best. But what I remember from her funeral are carnations that had been dyed blue. And I don’t know if they had been part of an arrangement or what that was. But I remembered that specifically so that’s what I asked for. And what I got was this cabbage. Which is absolutely fine. You probably have less of a story with something like that, and at some point, people would be like, ‘What is that?’ And I would be like, oh it's a cabbage. And I would just talk about it being a cabbage. So if I’ve ever told you that, it wasn’t totally a lie. And I’m sorry.”

When I asked Amy what the character above the carnation means, she said, “It means ‘alive.’ It means ‘to be alive.’”

“I got this from a dude who, once I got this one, everyone was like, ‘Oh, how was that?’ I was like, I mean, really bruised but I like it. They were like, 'Yeah, he's a ham-handed son of a bitch, huh?’ And I was like yeah, did you guys know that? And they were like, ‘Yeah, he will drill you!’ I was like, I did not know that was the story with this man. I was bruised from like my elbow to my armpit. I was swollen all the way around. This tattoo really was like nothing else.”

“It’s like the crown of thorns and temptation, and the apple. I was feeling dramatic. Everything in my life was like drama at that time. I was writing dark poetry in dark places. I was in a place. You’ve been there.”

“I got this one because I woke up after a breakup, all like broken up and sad, and I called James, my tattoo guy who did like six of my tattoos. And I was like, ‘James, I had this dream about this tattoo with these knives stabbing through this heart, this bomb heart.’ And he was like, ‘Ok, I’ll do that.’ I was like, I want it today. And he was like, ‘Ok…’ He was like, ‘Come down after hours and I will do this for you, you fucking monster.’”

“He did the skeleton key. It was his idea to make it look like it was broken and going through my skin, and I still think that was a nice idea. He owns his own shop now and has for a bunch of years, called Sailor Jim’s Electric Tattoo.”

Come back tomorrow for part two of Amy’s tattoos and their stories. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

Find Her on the Beach at Dawn

For the last couple of years, nearly every month between May and November, I wake up at 3am and drive to the beach.

I live in Richmond, Virginia, about two hours west of Virginia Beach, depending on traffic. In the early morning hours before dawn, traffic is sparse. I like to be on the road by four, hitting the Wawa in Newport News on the way for shitty coffee and a breakfast sandwich, so I arrive oceanside by sunrise. I park in the metered spots at the 1st Street jetty, free before 10am, anxious to hit the sand before the sun breaks horizon.

I am hoping for surfers. It’s usually an unrewarded hope before August; decent surf doesn’t really happen at Virginia Beach until late summer into the fall. It’s always worth the drive though, to watch the sky turn lavender then magenta then yellow, before becoming the bright cerulean of midday. In July, I brought along a tiny surfer of my own—Barbie in her sporty yellow one-piece lugging her signature pink board.

I haven’t shot much portraiture this year. Although I’ve always dabbled, I’ve never really felt like a portrait photographer, usually gravitating towards documentary subjects. This year I’ve leaned into that heavily, focusing on rodeos, the tattoo stories series, some surf and skate and nature photography. Closeup shots of moss and mushrooms helped me learn the macro capabilities of my currents lenses, which came in handy when my lifelong love of the plastic princess turned into a full-scale exploration of how to make Barbie fill the frame the way a person would. I want her to feel alive in the images, to be captured with a sense of emotion and humanity. As always, it’s a process. I try something, I try something else. The waves this day were dismal for hot-blooded surfers, but perfect for Barb.

The photos in this post were shot on Lomography Metropolis 35mm film and are unedited, except for a basic color correction the lab does when they scan the film. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

The River White

We did not have a funeral for my father.

When he passed on July 5th last year, a cremation package had already been set in place a couple years before by his mother, also gone by that time and reduced to ashes of her own. We didn’t discuss it much, my mother and brother and me. I wasn’t sure who would come to a funeral, who my father’s friends were. We talked about the expense of it. It was decided we would have a small reception at home for family and a few old friends my mother was still in touch with. My father’s body, picked up the night he died by a couple of young men in suits employed by the Cremation Society of Virginia, was returned to us in a clear plastic bag tucked in a black plastic box, tucked in a larger wooden box, like some sort of elaborately wrapped gift. He sat on a shelf in my mother’s living room like that for just over a year, while the three of us grieved and thought about what to do with him.

In the end, it was decided to release his ashes at Colonial Beach, a rocky shore of the Potomac River less than two hours northeast of Richmond. Colonial Beach is the one of the few places the four of us ever went as a family. We weren’t big on family trips or vacations when I was growing up; my parents, bohemian and unconventional as they were, never really did any of the typical family fun things we saw on television or heard about our friends doing. We didn’t go to amusement parks or playgrounds or camping. My mother, who doesn’t drive, walked us to the post office where we picked out stamps for our collections. We drew and built things and cut out advertisements for porcelain dolls from the Sunday Parade that we glued onto construction paper and kept in a binder. My father took us bird-watching and to the sites of war memorials, to museums and the Baltimore aquarium. We never did any of these things as a family of four—although we all lived in the same house, there were the things my brother and I did with our mother, and the things we did with our father. Colonial Beach was the exception.

We stood atop a small cliff overlooking the Potomac one recent Sunday, taking turns throwing fistfuls of my father’s ashes into the wind. But first my brother, Robert, took a tiny glass vial out of his pocket and carefully packed it with a bit to keep with him. Robert and I climbed down the rocky bank to the water, where we turned the river white with my father. We left a little in the bottom corner of the bag to pack into tiny vials for my mother and me, and to sprinkle in the pet cemetery in her backyard. Back at the top of the overlook, we stood watching the bone-white of my father’s ashes wash down shore and said how he, a recovering addict who turned his life around in his fifties, taught us it’s never too late.

I had two cameras with me that day: my Minolta X-700 loaded with a roll of Kodak that I had already filled with images of flowers for a double-exposure portrait project, and the Pentax K1000 my father had given me, loaded with Amber 400D, a film pretreated to produce color shifts. I finished what was left of both rolls by the time Robert and I climbed closer to the water, but luckily he had his iPhone on him and captured some great photos that I will cherish forever. Collected below is a mix of all three.

Thanks for reading, you’re beautiful.