Several years ago, I began working on a book about the street performers of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. Inspired by Richard Avedon’s famous photo series In The American West, my goal was to replicate his simple format, where performers would stand in front of a plain white backdrop during daylight, wearing their festival costumes.
© Richard Avedon - In The American West
Over the course of a couple of years, I shot and edited hundreds of images that revealed the humor, humility, and humanity of these walk-about performers, many of whom are paid a stipend to spend their days working in the hot, dusty, sometimes rainy tumult of the lanes during a show day.
Most of the images were shot at the festival, either during a show day or a preseason media event. I also photographed performers at my suburban home if they were unable to schedule a time at the festival.
As the work began to take shape, I started writing the text that would accompany these images. I wanted to include some of the festival’s history, performer anecdotes, and photographs from behind the scenes. I captured private spaces, craft booths, and other corners of the festival grounds that most of the public, and even many participants, have never seen. This book was to be my valentine to a place I loved, and to the performers themselves.
In 2015, I began discussions with an agent about representing a tabletop monograph that would combine large color plates with lyrical writing. My goal was to secure a publisher and ultimately stage a gallery showcase featuring a curated selection of matted and framed prints. It was the most exciting and creatively rewarding project of my life, and that I got to do it with and for walk-about street characters, as I once was, was thrilling. However, the attack of 2018 killed the project, just one of many creative pursuits lost in the immediate aftermath.
At the time, I was also studying and deeply immersed in fine art photography. It was a new form of photographic work for me. I collaborated with other talented photographers in town and partnered with nearly two dozen men and women, many of them professional models. My approach reflected the traditions of photographers I deeply admire: Edward Steichen, Richard Avedon, Peter Lindbergh, Irving Penn, and Patrick Demarchelier, among others, whose monographs line my studio shelves. I never came close to the kind of work those artists achieved, because, like everything else, my photography became a target of ire from the agitated, and all of my clients disappeared and never returned.
It is hard for most people to understand what happens when you are accused of such things, particularly when it is in the press. It is not just that you get dinged for something bad; everything in your life becomes saturated. It is not only that you cannot be successful again, all your past successes are corrupted. It is as if all you have ever been known for is this accusation. And that is the point, because everything you have achieved is deliberately tainted by the energumen and their legal shakari.
So here is what I know: if you are hit hard and beaten up, do something good. Make something with the energy that rises out of frustration, anger, and bone-deep pain. From my experience, sitting in the squalor of self-doubt, fear, disappointment, and heartbreak did nothing, accomplished nothing, meant nothing. I had succumbed to numbness and ugly nihilism because I thought nothing mattered, everything was ruined.
What made things worse at the time was that I had to stay underground until the case was completed. My attorney had to speak for me, and with respect, she was an amazing attorney, but she was insufficient to the cause of my personal expression and to the deep animus I held toward the petty liars, thieves, cowards, and crooks who did this to me.
But through the hundreds of hours I spent walking and reflecting, and the long years of waiting, I came to understand that the best answer to the jejune dullards and their small cruelties was not vengeance, but creation. To make again. To speak again. To give shape to something living out of what was broken. To write, to photograph, to record, to call forward a circle of readers and listeners who might find, in the wreckage, a faint pattern of beauty. Because that is what art often does, it can restore order to the disordered, shape meaning to the meaningless. Each sentence, each image, is an act of recovery, a small defiance against erasure. The more I write, the more I create, the more I insist upon my own presence. And that, I have learned, is a kind of salvation no court, no coward, no lie can take away.
But that was then, and this is now. My photography studio is undergoing a remodel, and when it is finished, I will return to the performer series, not at the same scale but with the same devotion. If all goes well, by next summer I will finally have a book to offer. I do not expect it to be the same book I once imagined. Too much has changed. I have changed. And that is okay. I am still here, and I’ll be here again, and again, until I’m not.
*This was the working title of the table top book I began working on in 2014
