People for me, always people

I think today is a “new camera” day for me. I’ve been posting on Blipfoto since 2010, when @JustBe persuaded me to switch over from Flickr. I was here before Polaroid. Before the community-owned company. I’ve been following many of you since 2010, and it has been a privilege to age beside you, to cheer and grieve and dawdle with you over photographs and stories. I’ve mostly documented people in Portland, Oregon, where I moved when I retired from university teaching. I have tons of gaps, never tried to post every day, and for a while I “curated” my blips, deleting here and there (which I now regret). But I come back, year after year, for the people. I want to see what happens to each life I follow. And then what?

@SightSinging sent me this beautiful Maori proverb: He aha te mea nui? Māku e kii atu, he tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata. English translation: What is the most important thing in the world? Well, let me tell you, it is people, it is people, it is people.

It is, for me. 

If anyone doubts our interconnectedness, let them hang out on Blipfoto. If anyone thinks they’re the only one having the experience they’re having, remind them that at any hour, they can click on Blipfoto and find others having that same experience: falling in or out of love; deepening in love or striking out alone; treasuring and losing people and animals. At any hour: illness, aging, death, birth, ambition, projects, pastimes, doldrums, depression, elation, tension, ennui. It’s all here. All the time. 

About the photograph: my 78th birthday is July 26, 2023, and the flowers are a birthday gift from Sue. I’ve reached a kind of watershed. For fifteen years I’ve documented Portland’s activist community and posted photos on social media, thinking I was making a contribution to the work. As the threat of Fascism looms over the USA and policing and surveillance of Centrists increases (we have no Left), photographs can endanger the people in them. I’ve created two photo books, compendia of my work as a social justice photographer. I love holding these books in my hands, a kind of legacy, but I am not donating them to an archive. Not now. I am gifting them to two people who can appreciate and protect them, and in some years, maybe they can go to an archive, if they still exist and if the people in them are beyond punishment. I plan to go on Blipping, but my time as amateur photojournalist has come to an end, both because of surveillance and because my aging body makes me less capable of keeping up with marches and protests. It will still be People for me, always people. But how? To be revealed.