Mr Mojo Risin

I’m excited to share my first tattoo series set as a blog post—I’ve been working on this project off and on for over a year, and have shared several sets on my Instagram, but have so much more space and freedom here on the blog. I love knowing readers will see the photos larger and uncropped, and having the room to include my subjects’ stories.

Which is what this project is all about: stories. If you haven’t seen my previous work from this series, I meet with tattooed volunteers and photograph their ink while talking to them about their journey with tattooing. Many of their tattoos are great, some really great, but it’s the story that brings the collection alive.

I met with Chad in his kitchen a few weeks ago to get his story. We started with the beginning—his first tattoo, a phrase inked above his right knee.

“I got this at 19, it’s ‘Mr Mojo Risin.’ It’s an anagram for Jim Morrison,” Chad told me. “The Doors were like my favorite band. And this is actually from, I have a scrapbook of his handwritten lyrics of ‘L.A. Woman,’ so this is in his handwriting.”

“I think I hid it from my parents for like a year or two, even though I was 19 years old. I remember my grandma walked in the room one night and saw it. She came in asking where my sister was and she sees my tattoo. I put too much lotion on it because I didn’t know what I was doing so it almost looked like it was infected or something, and she looked at it and started crying, like ‘what have you done?’”

Chad says it was a couple years before he got his second tattoo, a horseshoe for his mother. “This is like the horseshoe she used on the horse she used to have, and I got shamrocks because we’re Irish, and me and my mom specifically are into Irish stuff.”

“She was more judgmental about it at first, even the one I got for her. She was like, ‘Yeah, it’s crooked, all the luck’s gonna drain out of it.’ She was talking shit about it for a while. Then eventually she just got over it because I kept getting more.”

“I’ve always been interested in tattoos, but yeah, it’s definitely something that just kind of happened. I got the first one and I thought that would be my only one. I put a lot of thought into my first tattoo, like I thought about it for like at least two years, all the time like, ok it’s gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be perfect. It’s gotta mean something. I didn’t plan on getting anymore honestly. I’ve always been interested in it, but I was kind of like afraid to get more tattoos. Like it was gonna harm me in my future career because I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. And I still don’t.”

Most of Chad’s tattoos are black and grey, but his latest one, a work in progress on his chest, will soon be in full color. “Originally I was only going to do black and white tattoos, or black and grey, but my friend Robbie, he gets a bunch of Japanese tattoos. And I figured if I was gonna get a Japanese tattoo, it would have to be in color, just because it would feel wrong to get it in black and grey, the traditional way to get them is in color. It seemed like almost disrespectful in a way to get it in black and white to me.”

“It’s an Oni head, demon head. It’s supposed to be good luck and ward off evil spirits.”

I asked Chad if he had a favorite piece and he said, “I don’t really have a favorite one. I like them all, I got them all for like, some of these I just thought were cool and some I got for different reasons, like traveling.”

My personal favorite of Chad’s tattoos, however, is the beautiful black and grey guitar on the back of his left arm, inked by Matt Williams in Suffolk, Virginia. “It’s a classical guitar. It’s kind of a tribute to this musician I really like, Justin Townes Earle. He played a guitar like this, and then the flowers are white gardenias. He had a song called ‘White Gardenias’ basically about drug addiction. He died at like 38. I don’t know what it was, it might have been drug related. I don’t know, his music means a lot to me. I actually got to meet him at The National a few years ago and I got to tell him how much his music meant to me, which was really cool. I’ve also been playing guitar since I was about 13.”

The guitar is part of a growing theme on Chad’s left arm that started with a cowgirl. “I went to Asheville, me and my friend were supposed to go on a trip but he bailed. So I went by myself. It was actually probably more fun that I went by myself. This again was this guy’s flash, Steve Zimovan, he used to be in Richmond. After I got the cowgirl one, I just decided my left arm was gonna be like a western sleeve. I’d already gotten a bunch of traditional tattoos on this arm, like the guitar, Americana. So I just like dove into that.”

Later Chad added a flash horse by Richmond tattooist Zac Clark, and a cactus by an old friend. “My stepbrother lives in Houston, and my friend from high school moved to Houston a few years ago after getting out of the Coast Guard and became a tattoo artist. When he was in the Coast Guard, he got totally covered up. His whole body is covered up, his face is tattooed. I saw him after not seeing him since high school, maybe eight years or so. I met up with him and he did the cactus for me, because I was in Texas and it fit with the western stuff. That was really cool, seeing him and getting that tattoo.”

Our last stop on Chad’s tattoo journey takes us halfway around the world to South Africa, where he spent a summer studying anthropology abroad. “I was there for a month studying human evolution and culture, and this is Mrs. Ples. It’s an Australopithecus, I don’t remember it’s been a long time. But it’s like one of those famous hominids, it’s kind of like what made people know that human existence started in South Africa and moved out to the rest of the world. Southern Africa and the southeast is known as the cradle of civilization because that’s basically where humanity started. This is one of the earliest human ancestors.”

“I was afraid to get a tattoo in South Africa, I was like what is like down there? But it was actually one of the cleanest shops I’ve been to.”

Thank you for reading, I truly appreciate each person who takes a few minutes to view my work here. I know that a quick mindless scroll on social media is an easy way to see what people are up to, but I created this blog to move away from that sort of thing, and it means a lot to me for people to spend a little extra time with something I made. This project means a lot to me too—it’s something I do in dedication to my father, and I have so much appreciation to the people who are wiling to let me photograph their bodies and record their stories. Thank you, you’re beautiful.

Macro Moss and Friends

I hope this post finds you well. We should be in the deep throes of winter here in central Virginia but it's been a mild one so far. It's bittersweet to enjoy warmer days while knowing that the nice weather is being caused by detrimental climate change. I've been thinking a lot about our relationship with the Earth as humans, and how many of us don't view it as an actual "relationship."

I read Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Gathering Moss recently, a small collection of essays about Kimmerer's experiences as a bryologist, or moss scientist. Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and brings to her research a mix of Western academia and Indigenous ways of learning. Many Indigenous peoples of North America believe plants (and all organic matter on Earth) are our ancestors, and should be treated as beings, not just resources. I highly recommend both Gathering Moss and her more famous book Braiding Sweetgrass for more on how we can better honor the land around us.

The other impact that Gathering Moss had on me was a profound desire to go outside and look very closely at moss. As a bryologist, Kimmerer goes into detail about the biology and processes of moss in the book, and I was fascinated to learn a small patch of moss is much like a whole forest in miniature. I Googled the price of magnifying loupes, and took a walk around my own neighborhood with a telephoto lens in hopes of capturing closeups of the tiny plants. Kimmerer says the abundant presence of moss in urban areas is a sign of good air quality, and in Richmond we have a lot. We also have a lot of lichen, the small plates of blue matter growing alongside and on top of the moss featured in many of these photos.

Lichen is not a plant and does not have roots, but still needs water to grow. Mosses are phenomenal at retaining water, their tiny little leaves acting in tandem as a sponge, which is why where you see moss, you often see lichen too. Some ferns, like the tiny one below, are epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants. In forests, ferns can be found growing on trees, and often attach to the moss on the tree as an anchor and water source. The baby fern in the below photo is likely rooted in the moss growing on this brick wall, an example of how moss is a vital part of the ecosystem.

This was my first real attempt at macro photography, and I am very pleased with how the shots came out. Even though my excursion was originally inspired by moss, I found myself more drawn to the pale blue lichen and also to these little petals of fungus growing from the tree bark. I had no idea what to expect when I sent the film off for processing, and was impressed by the minute detail my lens was able to capture.

There will definitely be more of this sort of thing to come, nature walks for closeup images of small bits of life. The images in this post were taken in the city (my city is admittedly very green, much greener than some others), but I plan to venture into more natural areas as well and see what I can find. If you’re interested in learning how you can forge a better relationship with the world around you, I highly recommend reading either of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s books mentioned here.

Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

Bang Bang

Another set from my impromptu New Years shoot with Amy. This was Amy’s wildcard look (see my previous post for more on the concept). I’ve been toying around with a Vivatar hot shoe flash that I bought on eBay last year—these are some of the first photos I’ve gotten processed using it, and I’m really happy with the effect. This’ll be a quick post text-wise; I’m shooting it off in the last ten minutes of my lunch break. Sometimes it’s hard to find time to do all the things I want to do. I work full time, and I’m writing a novel, and I have friends and meals to cook and laundry to do, and I go to the gym. Taking the actual photos is the least time-consuming part of my work with photography—I spend more time in the process of organizing and sharing that work, creating zines and this blog and compiling series and so much more. Every minute of our busy days is valuable, so I appreciate the time my readers spend visiting this space.

Photos taken on Kodak 200 film and Minolta X-700 camera. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.