Tidepool Galaxies

A few weeks ago, I went on a nature walk with a couple of film pals to practice macro photography with small bits of moss and fungi in mind (followers of the blog might recall this post from February detailing the inspiration found in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss).

I’m still learning the macro capabilities of my current lenses and how to make the best of them. The window of focus in macro photography is very limited; you have to be a very specific distance from your subject, and finding enough light and the right aperture is tricky. But it’s all part of the game, discovering new pieces of your craft and figuring out over time how to achieve them.

My nature walk friends and I talked about how lucky we feel to be artists with the drive to venture into the world and explore it, how interpreting our experiences through art and science adds meaning and fulfillment to our lives. I’m endlessly curious about things like what goes on in leaf litter and tidepools, about how the Sun burns, the lives of tardigrades and blue whales, the birth of the first galaxies.

Which brings me to the photos in this post. I took these pictures on the macro nature walk, but they aren’t really macro pictures. I’ll be sharing more of my macro attempts in the weeks to come, but this collection is more about the intersection of science and art, and a combination of two of my favorite studies: life on Earth and life in the cosmos.

When I shot these photos, and especially once I had the film developed, I felt like I was looking at scenes from beyond our world. Feathery algae and blooming silt remind me of Hubble images of nebulae, spiky-leafed galaxies dotted with floating sediment stars. The effect is at once telescopic and paper collage.

All images in this post were shot at Belle Isle on Kodak UltraMax 400 35mm film and a Minolta X-700. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

Space

I think a lot about my body.

I also think about how much I think about my body, my obsessiveness over it, our society’s general obsessiveness over bodies and what they should look like. It’s not enough that we terrorize each other with strict regulations of what makes a valid body—we terrorize ourselves too.

My body, like many bodies, has carried many versions of itself over the years. As an adult, I have been thirty pounds heavier than I am right now; I have also been thirty pounds lighter. I have known how it felt to take up space, and I have known the bird-like weightlessness of bone-skinny. The median point my body rests at now is where I have spent most of the last twenty years, somewhere in between skinny and fat, the two poles of Western body image.

It occurred to me recently that in Western society, and many other parts of the world, if you are not skinny, you are fat. There exists only the two. Our brains, so used to balking at the smallest roll accumulating around our bellies or the slightest rounding of thigh, immediately associate any presence of fat as fat. I think of what has constituted a plus-size model in the fashion industry for the last forty years—anyone larger than a size 6.

We don’t have language for people who fall between, who are not skinny and are not fat. We struggle vaguely to describe them, waving our hands around trying to approximate their bodies. We are cruelly more succinct when describing ourselves, inspecting our reflections and photos for evidence of too much or not enough. How many of us, I wonder, feel fat simply for the presence of it?

I took these photos in my bathroom a few weeks ago with these thoughts in mind, in the middle of my workday (I work from home). I intentionally wore no makeup, bedhead untouched, in plain white briefs and cropped tank. I thought about what parts of me have changed as I’ve gotten older, the texture of my skin, where parts of me have landed.

I visited the doctor for a skin rash and was quietly handed a printout informing me my BMI falls in the overweight range. I read the printout’s suggestion I eat 500 fewer calories per day and wondered if that’s possible. At home, I open a draft of this blog post and scrutinize the photos; today I think I look small. Other days I do not.

Over the years, I’ve talked to a lot of other people about their bodies as part of portrait series surrounding body image, but don’t often talk about my own. I volley continuously between feeling good about how I look and wishing I looked differently, and practice honoring my body no matter what mindset I’m currently in.

 And it is a practice—there will never come a magic day for any of us where we arrive at full acceptance of ourselves and never turn back. There will always be the pendulum swing between self-love and self-loathing, but the practice of holding space for yourself exactly as you are helps keep the swing reaching closer to love.

Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

Chat Noir

My buddy Steven asked me to sit for some photos last month, a request I say yes to as often as I can for the homies. I’m about as comfortable in front of the camera as behind it, due in part to a lifelong practice of self-portraiture.

Like these five photos, taken by myself in my apartment before Steven arrived, because I had some time to kill and a roll of CineStill 800T (great for indoor low light), and because I was already all dressed up.

If you look closely at my right fist, I’m squeezing the rubber bulb of a cable release—a long tube that screws into my camera’s shutter button at one end, and has the hollow rubber ball at the other end. When I squeeze the ball, air shoots through and presses the shutter. (I have a 20’ one I got from B&H that’s pretty much exactly like this.)

Some of Steven’s shots from this night can be found on my IG and probably at some point on his, but still visit @mestonmestoff to peep his other work.

Thanks for reading, you’re beautiful.