Find Her on the Beach at Dawn

For the last couple of years, nearly every month between May and November, I wake up at 3am and drive to the beach.

I live in Richmond, Virginia, about two hours west of Virginia Beach, depending on traffic. In the early morning hours before dawn, traffic is sparse. I like to be on the road by four, hitting the Wawa in Newport News on the way for shitty coffee and a breakfast sandwich, so I arrive oceanside by sunrise. I park in the metered spots at the 1st Street jetty, free before 10am, anxious to hit the sand before the sun breaks horizon.

I am hoping for surfers. It’s usually an unrewarded hope before August; decent surf doesn’t really happen at Virginia Beach until late summer into the fall. It’s always worth the drive though, to watch the sky turn lavender then magenta then yellow, before becoming the bright cerulean of midday. In July, I brought along a tiny surfer of my own—Barbie in her sporty yellow one-piece lugging her signature pink board.

I haven’t shot much portraiture this year. Although I’ve always dabbled, I’ve never really felt like a portrait photographer, usually gravitating towards documentary subjects. This year I’ve leaned into that heavily, focusing on rodeos, the tattoo stories series, some surf and skate and nature photography. Closeup shots of moss and mushrooms helped me learn the macro capabilities of my currents lenses, which came in handy when my lifelong love of the plastic princess turned into a full-scale exploration of how to make Barbie fill the frame the way a person would. I want her to feel alive in the images, to be captured with a sense of emotion and humanity. As always, it’s a process. I try something, I try something else. The waves this day were dismal for hot-blooded surfers, but perfect for Barb.

The photos in this post were shot on Lomography Metropolis 35mm film and are unedited, except for a basic color correction the lab does when they scan the film. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

The River White

We did not have a funeral for my father.

When he passed on July 5th last year, a cremation package had already been set in place a couple years before by his mother, also gone by that time and reduced to ashes of her own. We didn’t discuss it much, my mother and brother and me. I wasn’t sure who would come to a funeral, who my father’s friends were. We talked about the expense of it. It was decided we would have a small reception at home for family and a few old friends my mother was still in touch with. My father’s body, picked up the night he died by a couple of young men in suits employed by the Cremation Society of Virginia, was returned to us in a clear plastic bag tucked in a black plastic box, tucked in a larger wooden box, like some sort of elaborately wrapped gift. He sat on a shelf in my mother’s living room like that for just over a year, while the three of us grieved and thought about what to do with him.

In the end, it was decided to release his ashes at Colonial Beach, a rocky shore of the Potomac River less than two hours northeast of Richmond. Colonial Beach is the one of the few places the four of us ever went as a family. We weren’t big on family trips or vacations when I was growing up; my parents, bohemian and unconventional as they were, never really did any of the typical family fun things we saw on television or heard about our friends doing. We didn’t go to amusement parks or playgrounds or camping. My mother, who doesn’t drive, walked us to the post office where we picked out stamps for our collections. We drew and built things and cut out advertisements for porcelain dolls from the Sunday Parade that we glued onto construction paper and kept in a binder. My father took us bird-watching and to the sites of war memorials, to museums and the Baltimore aquarium. We never did any of these things as a family of four—although we all lived in the same house, there were the things my brother and I did with our mother, and the things we did with our father. Colonial Beach was the exception.

We stood atop a small cliff overlooking the Potomac one recent Sunday, taking turns throwing fistfuls of my father’s ashes into the wind. But first my brother, Robert, took a tiny glass vial out of his pocket and carefully packed it with a bit to keep with him. Robert and I climbed down the rocky bank to the water, where we turned the river white with my father. We left a little in the bottom corner of the bag to pack into tiny vials for my mother and me, and to sprinkle in the pet cemetery in her backyard. Back at the top of the overlook, we stood watching the bone-white of my father’s ashes wash down shore and said how he, a recovering addict who turned his life around in his fifties, taught us it’s never too late.

I had two cameras with me that day: my Minolta X-700 loaded with a roll of Kodak that I had already filled with images of flowers for a double-exposure portrait project, and the Pentax K1000 my father had given me, loaded with Amber 400D, a film pretreated to produce color shifts. I finished what was left of both rolls by the time Robert and I climbed closer to the water, but luckily he had his iPhone on him and captured some great photos that I will cherish forever. Collected below is a mix of all three.

Thanks for reading, you’re beautiful.

Dream Without Fear, Love Without Limits

Part two of Carson’s tattoo story continues with decisions made and lessons learned. (You can find part one here). One of Carson’s largest pieces is a promising start on her left thigh, the outline of an owl.

“I got this a while ago on somebody’s couch. It was a friend of a friend, and then I stopped being friends with the friend after I got the outline. And then never went back to his couch, because I didn’t know him or a way to speak to him. And I just haven’t gotten it colored yet because I feel like, as it is, it’s ok, but I’d like to put a decent amount of money into it to make it something great and until I’m ready to do that, I’d rather it just be what it is.”

“I found this on Pinterest very long ago and I always loved owls. The way this one was colored was really cartoon-style and cute. I just thought it was really dope and he would like protect me, and then he never really got finished. There was going to be flowers on the ends of these branches, like there’s just branches that are nothing because he didn’t put lines there. They were going to be like no-outline flowers, all in color.”

“On the back of this calf I have a matching tattoo with my friend Bianca. We both have the same rose, and it’s like stained-glass style. It’s from Beauty and the Beast, it’s a quote. There’s a lot of Beauty and the Beast stuff that’s done in stained-glass and I also just thought it was really cool. ‘Tale as old as time.’”

“This was the one I got when I was eighteen,” Carson said, pulling up the side of her tank top to reveal the script along her ribs. “It looks awful I think, and it probably needs to be touched up, because it needed to be touched up when it was done. It’s patchy. It hurt more than probably any of them. It says ‘Destino,’ I was really leaning into the Cuban heritage when I got that. Like, why didn’t I get ‘destiny,’ why did I get ‘destino,’ I don’t know. But I really believe in, everything happens for a reason. And destiny, and that if it happens, there’s a reason for it. Not really religious or spiritual, but I just think that the universe gives you things.”

Inked in various places along Carson’s shoulders and arms are the names of her three children paired with sets of characters.

“First we have Alexis. I got this in Petersburg. Karla was getting a tattoo, and I went with her for moral support, and that meant I got a tattoo as well. This is what I thought of on the day, in the chair. I was like, I don’t have my daughter’s name, and this is her birthday in Roman numerals.”

“Wait, look, I can flex now! I can make it look like a muscle. It’s never been a muscle before, that’s new.”

“On the tops of my shoulders, I thought I had learned my lesson but I didn’t. I was still a grownup who got tattooed in somebody’s house. I had Devonte at this time so I was twenty-five, twenty-six. And I got his name tattooed on my shoulders on somebody’s kitchen table. After work, after a long day at Five Guys. It was my employee’s father’s boyfriend who did this. And this is his birthday on the corresponding side. It’s really big, and it’s not greatly done.”

The same employee’s father’s boyfriend also colored in an existing tattoo on Carson’s butt that she’d gotten on a Friday the 13th. “It’s like patchy. I don’t know what I was thinking, I was an adult! I knew better, I knew to go to a shop. And he was like, ‘I’m a great, I got you, I can do a great job.’ And I’m like, totally, got it! And I think I smoking a joint on his table while he was doing it, and like passing the joint to him. Like not smart decisions.”

“This I got on a Cinco de Mayo. I was a little intoxicated from margaritas, and I thought I should go get a tattoo! And Day of the Dead skull was what I decided. It was only $70. The difference when you go into a shop and your energy can make a big difference, because like my friend went in and was like, ‘I can only pay this much, what can you do? What are you going to draw me?’ And I was just like, I’m thinking of a Day of the Dead skull in black and white, and maybe like a rose. Like what do you think? And he came up with all this. And did it for the same price as her tinier, not-great skull. Because she was just coming into it like, ‘This is all I got, what do you have for me?’ As opposed to, I was like, you know, I’m open, what do you got?”

“This was a Friday the 13th, this was like a $40 one. And I just felt like I needed some luck at the time. I used to go to the horse races a lot, so I like the horseshoe. I just thought it was cute, why not?”

She tried a different approach in attracting good luck with a small piece on her hip. “I got that at like twenty or twenty-one, and just you know, ironic. I thought it would bring me good luck, you know.”

“These were both Friday the 13th tattoos. Both from Lucky 13, not from All For One. When I was in middle school, I read a book called A Thousand Paper Cranes, and at the end of the book, it taught you how to make a paper crane. And I remember how to make said paper cranes still, the only piece of origami I can make you. And I make them often, like I used to make them out of receipts or something when I was bored, or little scraps or Post-Its. And just leave little cranes around. So I went there for this one, and waited in the long line because I wanted this one.”

“While we’re running down why we shouldn’t get tattoos in people’s houses and we should get tattoos in tattoo shops, this wonderful quote that takes up my entire back says, ‘Dream without fear, live without limits.’ That’s what it says, right?”

I read aloud slowly, “Dream without fear, love without limits.”

 “See? So, it was wrong. My friend Chelsea was going to this guy’s house to get some cherries tattooed on her, and she wanted me to come along with her. Of course, why not? And then she was like, ‘Do you want a tattoo?’ And I was like, nah, I can’t really afford it right now, the $20 to get a tattoo in this guy’s house, I’m good right now. And she was like, ‘I’ll pay for it, what do you want?’ And I’m like, I don’t really know, I don’t really have anything in mind. And she’s like, ‘Well, find something! I’ll be here for a minute.’ And I found this quote on the Internet. We were also drinking and not sober. He did this on his bed. I didn’t know what it said for a while, and it kind of looks like Disney font. It also looks like he ran out of paper but I’m the paper. Because the spacing between the beginning of his letters and the end of his letters is not equal. There was a stencil and everything, I don’t know happened, I don’t know why it looks like this. Because he did it on his bed, that’s why it looks like this.”

“So after I got this, that’s when I swore I was never going to do another one, and then I got the owl, and I swore I wasn’t going to do another one, and then I did the shoulders and the butt, and then I was like, I’m never going to do this again. I’ve learned my lesson so many times. I’m the fool, every time.”

“The one on the back of my ear I got at the same time that I got ‘Unlucky,’ and I thought that this one was going to hurt so much because it was on my head, and this one didn’t hurt at all. It just kind of felt vibrate-y and a little tickly. And then the teeny ‘Unlucky’ on my hip, that one hurt so bad.”

“I really like how the dots are done in it,” Carson said of the flowers on her feet. “When it first was done, you could feel the dots. You can’t feel them anymore, but for like the first three or four years you could still kind of feel the pink dots. The guy who did this later did something else and he recognized it because of that style. He was like, ‘That’s my style, I’ve taught it to other people,’ but the dots were apparently his thing. He was like a traveling artist who came in, so it was like random that he recognized it.”

Thank you, cousin, for participating in my tattoo stories series, and thank you, readers, for reading. As always, you’re beautiful.