More images from the next batch of scans

Yesterday I drove out to my in-law's house in Oviedo to pick up more scans of Timm's slides. (Wade has been working diligently at the project, scanning some two thousand out of about five thousand total slides I brought back from Oregon after Timm passed away). A blowing, warm, cloudy, disturbed afternoon with Hurricane Gustav far to the west and churning up the Gulf of Mexico toward New Orleans, headachey in the way I get when the air pressure changes dramatically, when a big storm is passing close by.

Much remains here from the wild drenching we got from Tropical Storm Fay. As I approached Lake Jessup on the 419, the neighboring wetlands had flooded, with the tops of palm trees barely above water. No problem driving over the bridge crossing the lake but on the far side none of the docks were visible and the waterline was several feet up the houses along the shore. If we get another drenching storm there could be real trouble for many subdivisions that were foolishly built in low-lying areas.

I picked up another thousand scans from Wade, downloading from his iMac onto a 2-gig memory stick. Wade has developed a very comprehensive way of identifying and tracking the scans, numbering each slide and assigning a batch number to the sleeve of slides they came from. Still, the sleeves of scans were piled helter-skelter in a box in Timm's bedroom and most of the sleeves have no identifying comments.

After I got back home I sat on the couch with the laptop with the Louisville-Kentucky college football game on TV (a yawner, Louisville's lost all of its offense) and kitten Hugo in my lap (he's been quite ill but yesterday started showing definite signs of recovery) and the day blowing in the window, telegraphing Hurricane Gustav on the wires of the wind.

I went through the scans. It was an odd way to read a creative life, scoops of what Timm saw on a day, sometimes on a working gig (so many of the scans were from Oregon Gardens, one of his most consistent freelance jobs), other times from jaunts in the woods or up in the mountains. I came across scans that were already on Timm's laptop or portable drive; he'd obviously pulled out ones that he planned to use or sell or develop. (Timm did a calendar of shots from Oregon a few years back; he also had sold photos for commercial gigs like the Oregon Gardens as well as stock photos for online sites.)

It's a little like archaeology, digging thus in Timm's creative dirt, unearthing beauties which may not have been seen by other eyes than Timm's, sorting, tagging, trying to name what it was, how it moved and flowered in him, what sort of vision he had for its future. Timm and I talked only peripherally about his photography; he was quiet about it except to say he worked at it and hoped to make good money with it some day. On his laptop there are inventories of equipment and .pdf copies of income tax returns which showed a little profit for his efforts (not much). Shoots and jobs are organized into folders.

But there's almost nothing in the written record that I have perused so far that offers what Timm thought about his photography, what he liked most to shoot (if volume instead can speak, it would be flowers, waterfalls and kids), how he wanted to develop, what he wanted to learn. I've written dozens of poems about the work of writing poems - to wit -

POETICS (2004)

What comes after. What comes of it.
Not the starry edifice but its
Ruination in hot-verbed rot.
Not the World Trade Center but those
Two deep pools filling with lost dreams.
Not the marriage but the way it
Deepens as it ages, its blue
Ripeness spilling real love's too-blue
-Full cup. Not the poem but the way
It crosses over wintry seas
To find anchorage in wilder
Harbors. In my Book of Kells the
Letters are both cruel and vernal,
Enlacing old doors to fling the sky:
Both beaten prow and Michael's sigh.

-- so it's strange to me that Timm was so silent about his most productive work.

But I've said before that Timm perhaps chose to develop his photography most because it was not a reflective, editorial device but a clear eye on the world, unclouded by history or theology or psychology.

Whatever the case, Timm left very few writings which say much about his photography - nothing on his laptop or in the journals Christie sent me (of an earlier period, before Timm got really serious about it). There is the one comment Timm makes about beauty healing which I take as so foundational for Timm's photography work that little else perhaps need to be said.

* * *

Thinking about Timm's incomplete, scattershot and voluminous opus makes me think of the state of my own writing archives - sheesh. Almost twenty years of daily study and writing has resulted in ten thousand or so poems, many in numerous revisions stuck in various places; prose ranging from essays to posts; lots of commercial work (book reviews, mostly, though I've a file cabinet drawer or two crammed with newsletters and flyers and ads and annual reports I've written or in some other way created); there are blogs out there in cyberspace with so much prose and first-draft poetry I've written. Much of it exists digitally but then there are boxes of journals up in the attic, many journals crammed with research, two shelves of ring binders of stuff on the shelf and a file cabinet stuffed with more research and the like. I've some more attempts at organizing the mess, but perhaps more importantly, I've written down some thoughts about that work, how it is organized, where the best stuff can be found and what I would like to have done with it if I should pass away.

The work of archiving Timm's photos and remembering him here has chastened me greatly about wishing anyone to do something with it at a later date; I'm tempted to burn a good three quarters of it. (I'm the worst packrat when it comes to my work, thinking that some day I'll have use for this or that, blithe to the incoherent mass piling up behind. I willingly took on the responsibility of organizing Timm's archives, and I volunteered to be the same go-to person for Dad's archives, some 50 years of work, correspondence, journals and clippings.

Having dealt with some of the issues of those archives, I know that someone's going to end up with quite a job tackling mine. So one outcome of my work on Timm's archive is to vow to leave mine in much more organized shape. And I sure should dump the sizable majority of half-cognized, poorly developed, emotionally raw stuff which is creation's manure-pile, fertile soil perhaps but not very pleasant or even meaningful for anyone else to dig in.

Anyway, my intention is to get all of Timm's photographic work in usable (sortable, archivable) digital format, create an archive which has some semblance of Timm's intentions, make his best work available (not here but probably on a photos-only gallery website similar to the commercial one linked from the top of this website) and offer some means for people who want to make prints. With all of the other pressing work of my own life, this project may take another six months or so to complete; by then, I'm not sure who will be interested in this work. But it will preserve as a whole the most lasting part of Timm's life. The rest of Timm was gone too soon; but we do have these images, which I consider gifts from Timm to the world which should be shared and enjoyed.

OK, 'nuff said. More of Timm's pictures. Enjoy.

p.s. Thanks again, Wade, for all of your hard work. We would not otherwise have this beautiful window into Timm's eye of wonder and beauty.