Documentary Photography

Six historic missions in six days

During my surfing-themed trip to some of southern and central California’s premier surf destinations, I also visited six historic California missions. In its colonial territories in North American, the Spanish colonial government and Catholic Church established 21 outposts throughout coastal and western California, starting first in San Diego and then all the way north to San Francisco.

I visited in order: San Juan Bautista, San Miguel Arcángel, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Carmel, and Santa Cruz missions. Collectively, the missions tell a story of the state’s transition from thousands of years of habitation by Native Americans, to conquest and ultimately cultural destruction at the hands of first Spain, then briefly Mexico, and finally the United States. Franciscan fathers converted thousands of Native Americans and their treatment overall was more humane than by the later American settlers and the U.S. government. Some historians, and even mainstream publications like Newsweek, have described California Natives’ collective historic experience, particularly during the era of U.S. control, as genocide because of the total collapse of Native culture and their demise, including to infectious diseases. Today there are 110 recognized tribes in the Golden State, and tribal rolls there count more than 700,000 people with Native ancestry.

Two of the missions I photographed, San Juan Bautista and San Miguel, both mentioned the graves of thousands of Indians who died in and around the missions during their long life span. Little evidence of their graves and these Native Americans’ role serving these missions is provided to tell their full story at colonial outposts that ultimately sought to assimilate and conquer the native people. Still, I love these places. They are a window on the past that is mostly forgotten. If you are in California, for holiday or if you live there, put them on your itinerary. You will be taken back in time.

California “mission surf”–a success!

Click on each photo  to see a larger picture on a separate picture page. Note, I used a basic point and shoot Canon–these photos were not meant to be fine art or high resolution. They do, however, tell a story.

I just returned from a six-day surf and tour adventure in southern and central California. It exceeded my expectations. I needed to cleanse all of the mounting stress from work, other life issues impacting people around me, and current events from Syria to my increasingly polarized and right-leaning country. The Pacific Ocean, and its cleansing waves and water, are a good way for me to detoxify the mind and soul. Reality has not changed, but my ability to respond creatively to it has vastly improved.

I originally had planned this trip to hit the great surf beaches from Santa Barbara all the way to Arcata. However, an injury delayed my departure by more than a month. When I left, on Dec. 1, winter had arrived, making any visit to surf spots north of San Francisco untenable. My first night camping at El Refugio beach dipped into the 30s. That was the last night I decided to camp. So, I adapted and focussed on three renown surf spots: Santa Barbara, Morro Bay/Cayucos, Santa Cruz. My surf stops included:

  • El Refugio State Beach Park, where I camped and caught mostly small waves on a calm day.
  • Sand Beach, in Santa Barbara (also called Coal Oil Point), by the University of California at Santa Barbara, where I surfed for two days and had some amazing rides and great moments in a beautiful place. Great surfing by the Santa Barbara women here.
  • Cayucos, in Morro Bay, where I caught some waves that tossed me around like a feather; I prematurely timed my visit in the water two hours before things settled down.
  • Pleasure Point, in Santa Cruz, where I first tried to ride waves at 38th Street and then moved closer to where the really great surfers were long boarding at Pleasure Point.

My skill level did not improve that much, so maybe I am a slow learner. It was definitely worth the time to do this. The rides that I did catch brought on that huge Buddha-like grin. Even the bad news about the latest appointments to the new Trump administration did not send me into despair as it might have a week earlier.

The other highlight of my trip were my visits to six historic California missions, where the Spanish colonial government and Catholic Church established outposts throughout coastal and western California, starting first in San Diego and then all the way north to San Francisco. I visited in order: San Juan Bautista, San Miguel, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Carmel, and Santa Cruz missions. They tell a story of the state’s transition from thousands of years of habitation by Native Americans, to conquest and ultimately cultural destruction at the hands of first Spain, then briefly Mexico, and finally the United States. Two of the missions I photographed, San Juan Bautista and San Miguel, both mentioned the graves of thousands of Indians who died in and around the missions during their long life span. Little evidence of their graves and these Native Americans’ role serving these missions is provided to tell their full story at colonial outposts that sought to convert and conquer the native people. Still, I love these places. They are a window on the past that is mostly forgotten. I will do a photo story on them shortly.

In the end, my “mission surf” project brought many rewards. The photographs are just pleasant reminders what filtered into my skin.

Travels through Trump country in 2015

Click on each photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.

In September 2015, I travelled through the heart of the country that swung the Electoral College vote to Republican Donald Trump, giving him the presidency without a 50 percent majority and even behind Democrat Hillary Clinton. My trip had nothing to do with politics. It was about my past and my history, not the future of the country. But the trip was illuminating. I drove through some cities that once formed the bedrock of our industrial economy: Detroit, Toledo, the Ohio River petrochemical corridor, Canton, Akron, Cleveland, and Sandusky.

Even though I didn’t spend time to explore all of those communities, it was easy to spot the remnants of the industrial past that has dramatically downsized in the last 30 years from globalization, mechanization, and trade policies. These have lead 4.5 million manufacturing jobs to leave the United States since the implementation of NAFTA in 1994. Detroit, of course, stood out, as the nation’s great symbol of industrial dislocation, which began long before NAFTA was signed by the United States, Canada, and Mexico. I could not believe how far this area had fallen, and all without any meaningful attention from our two major parties and the nation. The new economy means these were the losers, and nobody in power likes losers.

So when the Trump tornado rolled onto the national stage in 2015, and promised to make them winners, I knew that he would find fertile ground in Ohio and Michigan. I knew that instinctively, simply because I had done a drive by. Why was I, as an outsider, able to see this and those in power and leading a national campaign not aware of what would happen on election day. (See my essay on that topic.)

Where I live in Portland, the Multnomah County Library twice rejected my proposal to host a presentation I offered on these issues through the prism of Detroit. I think the Library failed to do its job as the place for civic discourse because my show would make Detroit look bad (news flash, it is in crisis and has been for decades) and because economic dislocation in the Midwest means little to the nation and especially to those on the West Coast. There is a progressive bubble out on the West Coast that is completely disconnected from the gritty, nasty world that exists in the rest of the country, and even in rural counties in the Northwest.

One of the most chilling takeaways from me was the poverty I saw everywhere in Appalachia in southern Ohio, from Chilicothe, to Waverly, to New Boston –areas that are both economically distressed and hard hit by opioid addiction.  On the Ohio side of the river, I saw more than a handful of Confederate flags hanging in windows of homes and on the back of vehicles. This was an area ready and ripe for a messenger, who claimed he would make America great again and bring back jobs. On election day, when I saw the results come in, I already knew how Ohio and Michigan would fall in the Trump column for electoral votes. I had seen the vote outcome with my own eyes a year earlier.

Veterans Day 2016, how the United States remembers
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Remembrance
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
The Three Soldiers Statue, Washington, D.C.
Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Click on each photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page. These photos were taken at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., in April 2005.

It’s Veterans Day, the holiday created after one of the greatest human tragedies that took the lives of millions of people around the world for no great or noble purpose in World War I. The holiday, honoring the sacrifice of the fallen and those who served, was called Armistice Day, falling on the day hostilities ended on Nov. 11, 1918, between the Allied Powers and Germany. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the holiday a year later, on Nov. 11, 1919. The proclamation noted: “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself one of the most celebrated commanders in U.S. history, signed the Veterans Day proclamation on June  1, 1954, officially changing the name to Veterans Day. It was not until 1968 when Veterans Day had become an official federal government holiday.

Veterans Day is a day many around the country honor the service of America’s veterans and active service members. This week, I saw many tweets honoring the 241st birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps. I recalled the writing of With The Old Breed in Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge. It is one of the finest books I have ever read about the sacrifice the Marines made to win the bloody war in the Pacific.

I may not always agree with what our government asks our service men and women to do, but I do honor so many of the great things they have done. For starters, they helped to save the world from fascism and totalitarianism in World War II–something I am thinking about a lot since Donald Trump won in the Electoral College, though lost in the popular vote on Nov. 8, 2016. I am deeply worried knowing he is now the commander and chief of our armed forces. I trust in the leadership of our services to provide needed ballast and a steady hand, even with a leader who may care little about what men like Sledge and his buddies accomplished in far off places like Peleliu. I have hope our current men and women in uniform can be calm in these unsteady times. We need their professionalism now more than ever.

GoPro surfing fetishism, with loving affection

(Click on each photo to open a larger picture on a separate picture page.)

I own a GoPro Hero3, and I love it. It was inevitable I had to buy the GoPro surfboard mount once I owned a surfboard. Last weekend I tried it out when I went to “shark attack” beach, otherwise know as Indian Beach, in Ecola State Park. I went with my surfing Sensei, Sean, who has slowly introduced me to this wonderful sport. Aside from likely cracking one or more ribs, it was a fabulous day (that injury really blew a hole in vacation I just cancelled).

The videos I took have that hilarious GoPro quality of chaos. The board is being tossed around as waves hit, I’m going under foam, the camera goes underwater and blacks out. Most of the time I filmed myself holding on the the board trying to avoid junk waves, because it was a lousy day. I did capture some fun short foam wave rides. I also laughed at how my face scrunched up as a I paddled to get the wave. So I have a lot of B-roll junk video that is very awful. I won’t share that. However, I was able to extract some fun images that only a GoPro can capture with a fisheye lens view, showing the beauty of the moment when waves and water engulf you. It is one reason why I love GoPros. They tell stories beautifully, and I love to tell stories with them.

I played with some settings in post-production and produced these photos. They have a painterly quality I like. This is so much better than another GoPro surf video.

I also was inspired by some hilarious mockumentary videos of GoPro surfing fetishism in southern California. I laughed a lot watching these, because I had captured all of these scenes, minus extreme surfing localism that permeates surf culture globally. This one shows localism gone awry to the Game of Thrones soundtrack (LOL) and this one how many surfers tell their stories to the world, when they really are not that great. Both are published by The Inertia. GoPros used right can also create lovely works of beauty, which also show just how wild dropping-in can be when surfing etiquette gets tossed, often leading to confrontations at the beach. It is all part of the sport, and you have to live with it and accept it.

 

Churches made St. Louis great
Grace United Methodist Church, in the Debaliviere neighborhood
St. Ambrose Catholic Church, on The Hill
Pope Pius V Church, St. Louis
St. Agnes Catholic Church, now closed

Click on each photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.

St. Louis is one of the greatest cities in the United States for exploring the magnificent architecture of American churches from all Christian denominations. The city’s strong Catholic roots, still powerfully expressed through the Archdiocese of St. Louis, are expressed in the great St. Louis Basilica, but also in other churches, cathedrals, basilicas, and worship halls around the city. Most are still functioning, but some have closed because of the city’s precipitous population loss from nearly 900,000 in 1950 to nearly 300,000 in the 2010 census.

Churches from the Catholic and Protestant strains of Christianity provide testimonials to the city’s confidence in itself, its industry, its people, its future, and its identity that the city may have been favored by their lord and protector. I challenge anyone to give me a greater constellation of churches in an urban area than St. Louis. I’m sure Detroit, Chicago, and maybe New York might offer a good fight.

Here is a sample of four churches I took during my last visit. One, St. Agnes Church, owned by the Archdiocese of St. Louis, closed in 1993. It fell victim to the city’s slow and painful decay.

The former ‘King of Beers’
The west entrance to the Anheiser Busch factory displays the iconic Germanic eagle moniker of the King of Beers.
The factory, located near a historic St. Louis neighborhood.
Budweiser as a brand still dominates the local booze market in St. Louis.
Just another subsidiary to a global conglomerate, and long live the king!

My photographic safaris in my former home town of St. Louis inevitably lead to beer. You cannot tell the story or show the story of St. Louis without focusing on the suds that made the city a world-famous beer epicenter.

As I have published on this blog before, St. Louis became the leading center of American brewing. German-American families became the barons of the new American industry that brought beer to the masses. The Anheuser-Busch dynasty conquered the local market and then the country, producing brands like Budweiser and Busch that were both bland and iconic at the same time.

The Anheuser-Busch complex occupies several city blocks, in the southeast corner of the city, overlooking the mighty Mississippi River. Globalization finally brought the King of Beers to its knees.

Anheuser-Busch became a lowly American subsidiary in 2008 to the Belgium brewing conglomerate InBev, which turned to massive debt financing to acquire the American industrial icon for $52 billion. The sale generated allegations from locals of “traitor” toward billionaire investor Warren Buffet.

The plot thickened in September 2016, when shareholders approved the $104 billion merger of Anheuser-Busch Inbev and SABMiller, another global beer conglomerate, based in London. The announcement was followed by reports of job cuts. The earlier merger had led to nearly 2,000 job cuts in the St. Louis facility between 2011 and 2016, according to local news reports.

Looking at this beautiful industrial facility, sculpted in classic St. Louis brick by great craftsmen, I see a great American business that helped create this city. Now I feel both nostalgia and sadness knowing that this uniquely American corporation has turned into a satellite facility of a company that knows nothing about the city or people who made the brand famous.

Yup, there is a tear in my beer, and I’m crying for you dear.

‘The Hill’ neighborhood of St. Louis

The Hill is one of St. Louis’ most sturdy working-class neighborhoods. It has maintained its Italian roots over many decades, even when ties to the mother country are now fading with time. The Hill‘s two most famous sons are baseball legends Joe Garagiola and the inimitable Yogi Berra. The two grew up on the same street and are celebrated as heroes, like so many other great St. Louis natives who went away.

Bisected by Interstate 44, which barreled through and destroyed many of St. Louis’ historic neighborhoods, the plucky Hill persevered, thanks primarily to its famous eateries. It is located just south of Forest Park and west of the Missouri Botanical Gardens. Compared to other historic St. Louis neighborhoods, it is a much lower-income area, without the elegant brick architecture and stately homes and churches that define classic late 1800s and early 1900s St. Louis. Instead it offers shotgun housing and walkable blocks that are carefully branded with the The Hill moniker and Italy’s national colors. It truly is a model in effective branding and identity building. The Hill also is typical of the racial divide in the city–this neighborhood is white in a city that has long promoted segregated neighborhoods.

I remember first coming here in the early 1970s for Italian celebrations with my family as a kid. I recall a lot of drunk St. Louisans eating food on a typically hot St. Louis summer day. It did not feel that special to me. In high school, my mother bought me a hero sandwich from one of the delis as a special birthday treat. It was delicious. I would occasionally visit the local stores with my mom over the years to buy Italian spices. I have even celebrated a wedding dinner at one of the classic family eateries. I am glad it keeps up its plucky ways.

In a city with so many historic and amazing sights, I probably would not put it in my top five places to visit, mainly because the competition is fierce in that city. But I would swing through if I had a weekend. The Hill is conveniently located, and you might enjoy a nice meal here as well. Buon appetito, amico.

Revisiting an abandoned Detroit public school
This newly updated science lab was left to the scrappers and criminals who have completely destroyed the school without any interference from the Detroit Public Schools.
Scenes of devastation greet visitors to Crockett Technical High School in Detroit (taken September 2015).
The destruction at Crockett would likely be the source of public outrage in other U.S. cities, but not Detroit.

(Click on each photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)

A year ago, in September 2015, I visited my birth city, Detroit. I saw things I could not imagine were possible in the supposedly most powerful country in the world. I toured the city and observed impoverished neighborhoods, shuttered factories, empty homes in every corner of the community, and the omnipresent ruins from arson that have made the Motor City the arson capital of the United States. Detroit had a surreal feel. I called it City of the Future and published several photo essays and a photo gallery on my web site. The most memorable and heart-wrenching place I visited was the now shuttered Crockett Technical High School, at the corner of St. Cyril and Georgia Street.

The trashed and gutted Crockett Technical High School was listed for sale in September 2015 by the Detroit Public Schools, which failed in every sense to protect the school from destruction by scrappers and vandals.

The trashed and gutted Crockett Technical High School was listed for sale in September 2015 by the Detroit Public Schools, which failed in every sense to protect the school from destruction by scrappers and vandals.

In my last photo essay on this gutted and neglected facility of learning, I recounted that Detroit Public Schools (DPS) recently had implemented a painful round of massive school closures, carried out by DPS emergency manager Roy Roberts. In sum, 16 school buildings were closed permanently. In the previous decade, enrollment in the system had fallen 100,000 students, and by 2012-13, enrollment was about a third of what it was a decade earlier.

What I learned during my visit to Crockett from two friendly neighbors who were across the street would have been intolerable in nearly any other major U.S. city. I wrote in my September 2015 photo essay, “They noted that the DPS police did nothing to stop the scrappers once the schools alarm system failed. First the scrappers busted the windows and ripped out the metal. Then they went to work on the interior. One of the men, who said he had lived on that corner much of his life, said he even tried to follow the criminal scrapper and his accomplice once. His calls went unanswered by the school district, he said, and the scrappers did their destruction mostly at night.” The tragedy was compounded, according to one of the neighbors, because the school had been recently fitted with high-speed internet connections to promote a science and technology curriculum.

When I jumped into the old school, I saw newly built science labs completely trashed, eerily similar to how ISIS extremists would destroy monuments of culture and civilization in Iraq and Syria. But in Detroit’s case, the vandals were not crazed religious radicals, they were local residents, scavenging for scrap and destroying either for pleasure, anger, or both.

You can watch this June 2015 Detroit area news report on the scrapping at Crockett–all caught on live footage, with impunity. As one resident trying to protect abandoned public schools said, “How we can we hold off scrappers when we don’t have a license to arrest.”

Today, the DPS is rated the worst in the nation for test scores. In May 2016 The Atlantic reported, “… the country has probably never witnessed an education crisis quite like Detroit’s.” And, then to no one’s surprise and certainly not to anyone in Detroit, no one really gave a crap. What happens in Detroit no longer seems to matter, no matter how awful and absurd.

After my trip to Detroit, I spent about four months trying to get respected Portland universities to host a lecture and photo show (click on the link to see how I presented the concept) on the decline of Detroit and how it looked in 2015. I was turned down by Portland State University, my alma mater Reed College, the University of Portland, and the Multnomah County Library. I made repeated requests to multiple faculty and these organizations.

The topic may just be too depressing or impossible to comprehend. Even worse, the story about mostly black Detroit and its current woes, like the simple destruction of one fine public schools by the community itself, did not fit a narrative of race that is preferred many people at this time. A dominant narrative will always defeat an alternative story, particularly one that is rooted in ugly reality. I suspect this yawning disinterest was a combination of all of these factors.

To accept the reality of what Detroit is requires confronting painful issues about the United States that have not been addressed by our national political system. What we see instead are two candidates vying for the presidency who have used Detroit as a prop and photo-op to tell an economic story that does not resonate with the lives of people struggling in the city. Those two candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, know little to nothing about the ordinary people in Detroit and have never stepped into any neighborhood where schools are abandoned, houses are burned, and blocks have gone feral. If one day one of them or any presidential candidate actually visit a place like Crockett, then I will retract this judgement

But let’s be honest. No one running for the nation’s highest office will ever see or want to see the real Detroit.

Note, I published the same essay on my I Wonder and Wander policy blog on Sept. 30, 2016.

Scenes from bike adventures in urban Portland

Portland, Oregon has a lot of urban rides. Many will take you by jammed freeways, grain elevators, a working port, a refinery, and over and under bridges. I took these photos over the last three months. There is not a grand unifying theme other than the impression of what one sees when you get out of your car and on two wheels.

(Click on each photograph to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)