Nov. 1

Emily: Catching a cold in Armenia, according to Armenians can happen a lot of ways. As a result, most Armenians are very weary about getting cold themselves. Slippers and socks must be worn at all times, when sitting on cement you must put something under you for fear of becoming sterile and an open window in a house causing a draft could be one of the biggest contributing factors to colds in Armenia.

Me: It has been a really a busy Monday and time moves fast, especially in America. The light this man was working under with the dust and the leaves was the prettiest thing I saw all day while on my way to get groceries this evening.

October 31st

Emily and I have decided it would be fun to take daily pictures of our lives and post them on both our blogs.We will be swapping photos about twice a week (due to the long time difference and unpredictable lines of communication between Armenia and America) and posting them with some short words about what was/is significant about the picture. We're going to keep this up for the month of November.

Me: This is my sister, taken at night at my Grandmother's house. We used to share a bed when we were little and always at least a room after sharing a bed. We are night and day in personality, but when we are both together like this, alone, we end up talking until the both of us eventually don't have to say anything about being too tired and then we turn over and fall asleep. It's also about the moment that we get before we turn off the lights, the half hour or so that magazines and books soothe us into a slumber and we think about all that is possible


Emily: The first snow of the year on the mountains above Yeghegnadzor.

wednesday night

I took this picture this past Spring in Armenia, and now that the weather is beginning to turn and the winds are picking up I start to think about how cold I was there and how many nights I spent in my clothes and how many mornings I huddled around my gas oven staring at the wall hoping for the clouds to break. I always liked this picture, but I never got around to using it. It's incredibly weird how distant my past existence there seems now. Anyway my friend Emily (who is still in Armenia) and I have a project we are going to announce in a week, it will be pretty cool so I hope you come back to see. Till then.....drink good coffee and smile more often.

seeing

I came across this quote from a photographer's blog site that I like, Matt Eich. His blog is much much cooler than mine and he gushes his soul in it as well as puts up beautiful photos. I have been busy, and while I know I want to get out and take pictures I just haven't lately. It's not to this blog that I feel loyalty, but to myself - I just choose to say that here and maybe that's a contradiction but I hope to do something about this soon. Anyways, read this because it's
Great. And if you feel like it, you can go to Matt's blog too.

“At first, it appears that nothing could be easier than seeing. We just point our eyes where we want to go, and gather in whatever there is to see. Nothing could be less in need of explanation. The world is flooded with light, and everything is available to be seen. We can see people, pictures, landscapes, and whatever else we need to see, and with the help of science we can see galaxies, viruses, and the insides of our own bodies. Seeing does not interfere with the world or take anything from it, and it does not hurt or damage anything. Seeing is detached and efficient and rational. Unlike the stomach or the heart, eyes are our own to command: they obey every desire and thought.

Each one of those ideas is completely wrong. The truth is more difficult: seeing is irrational, inconsistent, and undependable. It is immensely troubled, cousin to blindness and sexuality, and caught up in the threads of the unconscious. Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where we have sent them. No matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at. If we imagine the eyes as navigational devices, we do so in order not to come to terms with what seeing really is. Seeing is like hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangled in passions–jealousy, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked in an affect–in pleasure and displeasure, and in pain. Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis not mechanism.” - James Elkins, The Object Stares Back

yellow plastic chairs

My previous backyard mountain view I had in Armenia has dwindled in scale and impressiveness from just that - mountains, to an urban lawn with a shed and a tree. A big change I am still waking up to every morning. But today while sitting outside listening to the rain come down these two yellow chairs hit me with something. They looked pretty all of a sudden. I like chairs sitting next to each other, I think they are personally animated in a way. Two chairs hold two people and when they leave, the chairs hold their past - the story. Easy enough. I hope you, as well as me, get a chance to sit with someone this weekend, tell a story or just listen to one.

rodeo

I am not necessarily on a Texan cowboy theme, but it just has happened that the most interesting people and places I have been around since I've been home have been outside the city where life slows down, and consequently, to me, becomes more appealing. It might be because the rodeo represents a subculture of people, not the everyday worker but people who rally around something and live a little differently. Maybe I'm just more comfortable around a group of people like this, I certainly am curious about it.

So it was a small town rodeo and fair, and it was a moving place - full of teenagers out on the prowl, cowboys standing in line for another can of beer, horses wide eyed in prancing nervousness, kids of all ages just running around. A nice place to be with a camera.

I grew up this way. My Mother was more than encouraging for my siblings and I to get into riding horses, we had at least 4 around at all times to "help us also love them" as much as she did. I am still a little frightened by a horse, but at the same time in awe of their power, gentleness and constant smell.

Of course the workers at the fair are just as novel, perhaps, for their lifestyle choice and pleading with kids to keep taking whacks at a some balloon that will never result in them winning a giant stuffed animal.

I watched this girl's face as she watched her friends ride the Zipper. You should know this ride, it's loopy and sickening to look at - her face lit up by the glow of thrill was too much to pass up.

A great place to be for a night, the rodeo. And no better destination than your own small town in Texas.

barn hand luke

Luke is the barn hand at the boarding ranch my mother uses for her horse. I've only "known" him for about 2 years, and have been interested in photographing him for about as long. Single, he lives alone on this ranch tending to the horses 7 days a week.

He wakes up at 5, begins feeding and turning the horses out from their stalls, goes back home for breakfast and a shave, and returns to begin cleaning up after them and all the duties in between. He says the worst part of his job is when he has to help put a horse down.

Originally from a small town in North Carolina, Luke left his family farm at age 20 after his father died and hasn't returned. His sense of humor rivals the day in day out work of caring for horses as he jokes about being kidnapped by a pretty woman and never returning.

He doesn't leave the ranch very often, in fact he says he would like to drive in to San Antonio (45 minutes down the highway) to see his old friends but that that would cost him too much in gas, and he just "don't" have the time or money for that. With a heavy draw of a southern accent, he fits right in this scene and for the last 25 years says he is happy to be doing what he does with the horses - making sure they're alright.

summer celebs

There are no limits of personal boundary or curiousity with this girl. A young girl, 7 years old, although she will tell you she is in her late twenties and is the so called pop celebrity star Hannah Montana. I have had a blast talking to her, answering her questions like, "you're so skinny, are you this skinny in real life?" and asking a few of my own. I'm glad I could jump in on the tail end of summer in Texas, to dive in a body of water that is clean, to teach a kid how to swim and be privy to summer celebrities in my own backyard.

readjustment

It has only been 2 or 3 weeks since I left Armenia, and I find myself perplexed at how fast it has become a memory. While I am happy to be home, to be with my family and good friends, to sleep in air conditioning, to eat anything I want anytime - I miss the landscape of Armenia, the spoken language and just being there. After compiling about 30 of my favorite images from my 2 years there (I should have way more, but inch anem?) I am thinking about ways to exhibit them and introduce Americans to the social and cultural world of Armenia. But mostly I just wanted to post another photo, to create something, maybe to hold on to something, to find a tiny escape from the tumbling change that my life is going through. These pictures come from a small village near the Georgian border, Bagratashen.

and just like that, it's over.

There is so much of this experience that cannot be translated into the language of someone who hasn't been through it - but it has certainly been the best thing I have done so far. It's an interesting process, living outside your country for a few years and noticing the kinds of changes that brings about in you. The kind of duality you can feel for two very different places, both familiar to you like the home you were brought up in, has amazed me and taught me good things about how much a person can adapt to. I wanted to take a photo of something for you, something that would be more cornerstone-ish to the way I feel right now. But my computer has been sold, and is going through a Russian makeover tomorrow and I will not have anymore time or access to post to this blog. So I decided this image would do. The Armenian writing on the mustache says "Congratulations every day", but translated further into an understandable English phrase would say "Every day is a day to celebrate."And from what I have learned here, it is. A Tuesday afternoon is just as good as a Friday night and there are a million reasons to be thankful as well as to slow down. I don't know how much longer I will keep this blog, it's a nice place to breathe, but I don't know. In any case, thank you for taking the time to read it and look at my photos. I hope to take photography more seriously when I return. I have had the time to read many books - like everyone in PC - and the last paragraph I read in "Interpreter of Maladies" really struck an obvious yet ineffably important chord with me and what I can't say I think Jhumpa Lahiri says perfectly.

"I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only person to seek their fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."

De Hajo bolorine...
Paige

e. rabbit haas

I was really glad Emily came around for my second year in Peace Corps - it turned out we had a lot in common and we both share a love for the camera. It has been fortuitous that I have had the luck I have had with site mates- and I am very grateful for these friendships . A goofball extraordinaire - I'll miss her company and silly laugh.

arman the barber

When my hair was longer in the beginning, I'd sometimes go see Arman the Barber and have him straighten it out. He's a marine looking hair stylist that likes to drink homeade vodka while working. I never let him cut my hair, in fear that it would end up like that haircut I got when I was 7 - sad and embarrassing. But I liked sitting in his chair sipping some of the stuff myself and talking to him about things in Vayk, and now that my hair has grown out again I decided to go pay him a visit. He gave me an Armenian music disc and I told him I'd bring him this Michael Jackson cd I have in exchange. Should have seen the grin on his face...

jon m.

I can easily say that if it weren't for Jon, I don't think I would or could have stayed here for 2 years. It's hard enough to work and live here, it's so much harder without good friends close by . We've spent a lot of time together, talking our way through this experience. It's difficult to explain the friend I've found in Jon - but my soul is lighter because of it.

faces & voices

I'm going to try to post as many of these as I can, don't expect too much, but I thought it would be fun to put together some audio recordings along with the faces that I will miss when I leave. This is Rubik and Aygestan, my second host family. I lived with them for 7 months. I asked her what she would remember about that time, and she said she'd remember the time she knocked on my door in the middle of a winter day and found me sleeping in all my clothes, jacket, and hat on under all the blankets. I'd forgotten about that, but she recalls well as told in the audio. Mostly I remember how many things I said wrong around the dinner table that caused everyone to nearly spew drinks from their mouth in laughter, and the times I had to wake them up at 3 or 4 in the morning because a water pipe bust in the bathroom or when I was locked out of the house in the snow from wanting to see how cold it was outside. It was, as I recall, cold enough.

lav k'lini

I have about 2 weeks left in Armenia, the end has come. I am photographing the little things that I have found oddly charming but never thought they could really tell anyone much about Armenia. Like this bed, that struck me as a possible metaphor for what I've come to know about this country, which carries a simple austere beauty that reflects the waiting I feel like people are doing here. Waiting for the day to pass, the seeds to grow, a job to materialize, a child to be born, the next pension paycheck to arrive. It's a post Soviet country that has been torn apart by Communism and is still struggling to recover from the abandonment. Slowly things are getting better, but not for everyone. Outside of Yerevan, the people of this country sit waiting.....for something to happen.

I finally finished reading Robert Kaplan's "Eastward to Tartary" which is a great geo-political travel book about this part of the world. In it he says this, which I think echoes the status quo regardless of the fact the book was published 10 years ago, "Americans are triumphant about the collapse of the Soviet Union. But throughout the Caucasus and beyond, I experienced firsthand how the Soviet collapse, while a blessing in the long run, has meanwhile ruined millions of real lives. Communism, however disastrous, was still a system that provided pensions, schooling, social peace, and physical security for a multitude of people who often had no recollection of anything better. The collapse of that system has left a chaotic void that, so far, has made life here much worse."
There is still a wonderful spirit here - an identity that is very strong and persistent. And with this, I hope, there will be more on the coming horizon.