peace&noise: Heidi Utz

Showing posts with label Heidi Utz. Show all posts

30 May 2017

Detroit, Eastern Market

Detroit, 2016

Eastern Market mural, created in 2015 by Fel3000ft.

17 May 2017

27 April 2017

One of my very favorite places in Portland--and Catholic places anywhere. The Grotto is a sanctuary in a marginal neighborhood in north PDX. They have a cliffside meditation chapel that overlooks the Columbia River Valley, the Cascades, and Mt. St. Helen. It's where I shot this photo 7 years ago, which I just finished tonight.

26 April 2017

Modness

I took this photo of my friend Marti in her dorm room back in college, way too many years ago. We lived together senior year, in a suite we called the Mod Quad. I entered it in my first photo show and it won an award. Marti and I are still friends, and she looks almost exactly the same today. God, I hope she still has that jacket.

23 April 2017

Stockyard Cafe

I stumbled onto these grain silos on a backroad between Bozeman and Livingston on my first trip to Big Sky country in 2015.

22 April 2017

Mirror

Spring, and its weathers, come to the Deschutes River.

21 April 2017

Chapel Door, St. Gertrude's

I stayed at the Benedictine Monastery of St. Gertrude, in Cottonwood, Idaho, for a 2-week retreat. The monastery's remote setting, 200 miles from a major highway in any direction, provides a beautiful place to connect with self and spirit. This chapel was built from blue porphyry stone quarried from the hill behind it in the 1920s.

14 April 2017

Deschutes, April Afternoon

These days, my health issues make walking any distance not my strong suit. So I've made a deal with myself that I'll be really present with 20 good minutes in nature, and try to find something beautiful. Yesterday it was the clouds and the water.

14 February 2017

February 14

07 February 2017

The Salton Sea

Driving the 111 through far southeastern California near Mexico, you suddenly hit a point where you know you've entered another world. To one side is arid desert and the occasional long train, looking surreal with its brightly colored cars in the hot white light as it parallels your car. To your right emerges the Salton Sea, a freshwater lake azure blue against bright white sands. As the land grows increasingly arid and the sun increasingly intense, even the subtlest of color pops out in bold relief, and everything is delineated as if under spotlight. For 350 square miles, the play of water against sand brings a study in contrast and the entrance of greater perspective than you felt at the last-stop gas station miles back in Indio.

When beauty stops you in your tracks and you cut the engine before the lake, you tread on "sands" of pulverized fish bones. Perhaps the first thing you grasp: lakes hold a delicate balance of salt in their waters. And when too much enters, the life of its inhabitants necessarily perishes. All life walks a line of delicate balance. Human error can transform a thriving resort like Bombay Beach into a piscean graveyard, where wind-battered trailers serve as aluminum reminders of impermanence. Along the shore you see embedded volcanic mud pots and smell the saltiest brine of oversalination and decaying fish.

The brine enters your pores as the hot wind whips your skin. You try to forget that even this degree of salt cannot sanitize the DDT and Agent Orange remnants flowing through the pretty blue waters. Tough birds cluster together on rocks, though rampant white feathers prove that environments like this take down even the most resilient.

223 feet below sea level, Bombay Beach shelters solely renegades, with a harsh, drying sun that desiccates clutches of '60s and '70s trailers from the heyday,

when more than a million tourists annually thronged to the resort, escaping the city to the end of the Earth.

Today the tiny town of 300 boasts little more than a market and 2 restaurants. It's difficult to tell if most of the trailers you stare into are occupied or not.

And of course in a place where the rent is free and the sleeps smash the bounds of funky, there are always going to be artists...

But most amazing of all is just how lost you can get in the colors of the panorama before you, and the peace of being alone, far from the properly salinated places drowning in population.