Go-Cart, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1996.

My grandfather had a government job that he wasn't allowed to talk about. Most fathers in Los Alamos in the 1950's had government jobs that they weren't allowed to talk about. That is part of what makes Los Alamos kind of surreal. Los Alamos is Levittown on the mesa, or maybe the Stepford Wives on the high desert. There are world changing secrets kept behind closed doors, but you never get that sense driving down the street. 

My grandfather's generation did not seem to question it that much. He believed profoundly in what he was doing. If I had ever asked him if it was stressful to keep those kind of secrets, he only chuckled, I am sure. Keeping those kinds of secrets would have really eaten away at me. 

To relax, he over-engineered toys for his children. Solving a problem on a drafting table was his dearest expression of love. It must have also been deeply relaxing at the end of a day at work.

This go-cart was built for my mom and aunt. He designed the steering system and welded it together in his car-port. Originally, it had a battery powered engine on the back. My mother, as a young girl, yelled that it should go faster. Moments later, she drove it into a fire hydrant.

I played with the go-cart as a child. Every kid on the street played with it when I was a child. We would coast down the long hill of Manhattan Loop. There was no stopping the little car. My grandfather forgot to engineer brakes. Instead, you coasted to a stop or stuck out your feet and slid them on the ground. It is a miracle that no one ever backed out of their driveway and hit one of us.

Franklin and Bicycle, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1996.

The Franklin had been the family car in the forties and fifties. It  made the trip to Los Alamos from Indiana. For most of my young life it  sat in the back yard in a metal shed under a couple of tall pine trees. Next to the shed was a frame of a home built RV that was started and never finished. The RV body was filled with rusting metal and scraps that had been saved as raw material for future projects. That part of the yard was a wonderful place to play as a kid. Luckily, no one ever ended up with tetanus or hantavirus. A few yards past the shed and  Franklin, the yard turned to scrub oak and boulders, and then it dropped off into a shear cliff at the edge of the Mesa. As a child, I thought the canyon went down forever. Looking at it on google maps, I am not so sure it was that deep.

My grandfather became know in the neighborhood as the guy who collected old bicycles. Every ten broken speed on the block ended up in the shed, along with the bikes that the family outgrew or left behind. 

The small bike in this image had been mine. It was a Christmas gift in 1976 or 77.  My cousins Beth and Leon inherited it at some point. My grandfather expected toys to get a couple of generations worth of use.

 A friend just told me he found the images "evidentiary" in the sense that Weegee's images blasted away at crime scenes with a similar flash. I appreciated the sentiment, although I don't think my images stand up to a comparison with Aurthur Fellig's. I don't get to claim any forethought on the question of lighting. I wish I had known more about off-camera flash then.

I was drawn to photograph there because I was haunted by my childhood memories of time spent in that house and around the city. In that way, maybe the strange lens of the Holga and the relentless blast of the on-camera flash makes sense. The images are about searching dark recesses and remembering in an imprecise way.

Model Airplane, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1996.

When I am browsing a contact sheet, I never know what images are worth hanging onto and what images I need to let go of. Smarter photographers than I am say that in the current age of Instagram, the real trick is to learn how to edit images ruthlessly. Select only the best images to present publicly. The best photographers take plenty of terrible images. They just know how to keep them private.

This image seemed worth the time to scan and clean up. I can't tell if it should have been kept private. It may not survive the next round of editing to end up in a portfolio.  

My grandfather had built a model airplane, like the one pinned to the foam core in this image, when I was young. It had a rubber band powered propeller and was made with paper glued to a balsa wood frame. I loved flying it with him. It was a pretty flimsy toy to let a five-year-old play with, and by the end of the summer he had patched it so many times that none of the original paper was left.

I started putting together this model while I was working on an MFA in Albuquerque.  I was photographing my grandparent's home in Los Alamos on the weekends. In the course of visiting my grandparents, I kept thinking about that summer I spent with them when I was five years old. 

I was trying to find some life balance when I picked the model up at a hobby shop. I put it together to prove I could do it. My grandfather spent his youth building things and I never felt like I met his expectations of competence as a carpenter, mechanic, or photographer. Somehow his voice often shows up in my head expressing doubts. He kind of had a gift for doing that to the people around him. 

The Recumbent II

I went to graduate school a year after my mother died. I had wanted to be back in New Mexico for graduate school, and felt fortunate to be accepted to the photography program in Albuquerque. In addition to having long admired the program, It was a chance to be close to my family and I was pretty clear that any artwork I would be making would involve processing her life and the aftermath of her death.

Years after I left graduate school, I was trying to organize some negatives and I found this treasure trove of images I had made around Albuquerque and Los Alamos while I was in school. I had been visiting my grandparents in Los Alamos on weekends for a while, and had started photographing the city and their house with a Holga.

My grandfather was a larger than life figure. My grandmother called him a "complicated" man. Most of the images I took on those visits seemed to center around him and the fantastic projects he had engineered around the house in the forty years he had lived there.

The Holga images were mostly processed and put in a box along with their contact sheets. They didn't seem like graduate-school work; I felt like I was supposed to be doing things that were more important.

So when I found the box of images years later, there was a real sense of loss. The best, most honest work of those years had been ignored in a legitimate effort to just finish school and get on with living.

I've really felt compelled in the last year to finally do something with them. Here you go.