Timm's next bouquet

The latest batch of  scans from Wade Boggs yielded this one shot of Timm I hadn't seen before.

My father-in-law Wade Boggs has resumed the scanning project to digitize Timm's 6,000 or so slides. No one else would have the time, the patience and the discipline to do such a task, and then not charge one cent for the work. I've told Wade numerous times how much the family appreciates his work; his task is such a crucial and invaluable one in making Timm's work available to the world.

After taking a break for a couple of months, Wade is back at it, and recently dropped of a flash drive containing some 500 new scans, some of which I include here on the 26th anniversary of Timm's death on April 18, 2008.

Except for the photo included in the post Timm and a block of photos from Timm's 2003 trip to Bolivia, almost all of the scans in this series are of flowers. If you tally up the number of flower pictures in Timm's archives, his interest in flowers as a subject is greater than anything else. I know that Timm did commercial work for Oregon Gardens; perhaps a good number of these photos are from that effort; but the loss of Timm has erased that context, leaving only hundreds - perhaps several thousand - pictures of flowers in his surviving work without explanatory context.

Timm took pictures of flowers everywhere: in gardens big and small; of flower boxes and pots; in vast nurseries and wherever they popped up in the wild. He focused to macro magnitudes to catch a single flower so that it filled the frame, revealing hues and textures and patterns comparable to the stunning diversity of our universe caught by the Hubble Telescope.

Here is a gorgeous fullness which my words are quite unfit to properly name. Nor could a poet on the order of Emily Dickinson:

All the letters I can write
Are not as fair as this,
Syllables of velvet,
Sentences of plush,

Depths of ruby, undrained,
Hid, lip, for thee --
Play it were a humming bird
And just sipped me! (LXXII)

"Just sipped me" -- that is the nourishment and healing of the beautiful images we see here: We are not only fed by the worlds beauties, but the world in turn receives something from our rapt attention, as if our seeing itself were nectar.

In that sense, Timm was like Johnny Appleseed, sowing his visual ecstasies great and small everywhere he turned his eye.

* * *

The other day I received an e-mail from ex-Congresswoman Darlene Hooley, in response to an email I'd sent out to family and friends in advance of the 2d year annniverasry of Timm's passing. She writes,

Thank you for keeping the spirit of Timm alive. I'm so glad I had a chance to work with him. One of the most interesting persons I've ever met. I think of how diverse he was...some knew him for one thing like his photography and others for his work with those who needed guidance to change their life.

I miss him and think of him often.

-- Darlene

Thanks for the note, Darlene. For remembering Timm. (And thanks to Ted Piper, for remembering Timm when he, too, looks through the lens.)

It's hard to believe that Timm's been gone for more than two years. Gone before finding out who would become President (Timm's memorial service in Salem was about the time of the Pennsylvania primary which Hilary Clinton won, yet it would be Timm's long-shot favorite Barack Obama who would become President. Timm missed the financial meltdown and the housing marking collapse; he missed the Haiti earthquake (a humanitarian crisis he would surely have rushed to be a part of before anyone else stirred in their boots); he missed the Gulf Oil spill.

You could say Timm got out before the going got so hard, but then there have been so many sunsets and wave-smashings, spring blossoms and summer showers and autumn golds and winter snowflakes he would have so loved to witness, too.

But when I think now of Timm, I think how work is a permanent record of that look of astonishment at the world's wonder, a look which was visible on his face as a child. That childlike wonder is indelibly fixed in his photographs, the way that Emily Dickinson's own childlike astonishment at God's creation still pours from poems which were written 150 words ago.

When Diamonds are a Legend,
And Diadems -- A Tale --
I Brooch and Earrings for myself
Do sow, and Raise for sale --

And tho' I'm scarce accounted,
My Art, a Summer Day -- had Patrons ---
Once -- it was a Queen --
And once -- a Butterfly --

Thanks for the glories, Timm!