I claimed then, as a child, that I was not escaping. I was expanding my imagination. I was exploring new worlds. I was exciting previously unused neurons in my brain. Besides, what kind of mother takes away the Newbury awarded young adult fiction from her budding young daughter’s grasp? Begrudgingly, I found myself outside raising animals, racing go-karts, shooting off my brother’s various weapons. My own real life adventures.
To use a book to explain my bookishness, I quote the narrator in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. “At home I mostly read. I had to drown out the clamor in me, and reading was only available way. Reading, of course, was helpful; it stirred, delighted, and tormented me.” Only I had no real clamor in me. I was not escaping from anything particular. I was part of a healthy family. I had free range of 45 acres of farmland and woods to traipse and lay claim to. But regardless, I dove into books like a soldier diving for cover during an ambush. I was glued to pages the way kids are usually glued to TV screens. I should mention that our TV received all of three channels and I never followed a single TV show until college, where, incidentally, I learned all kinds of ways to escape.
The need to escape arises when real life threatens to overwhelm me with decisions and setbacks. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man believes that we reached a point “where we consider real life as work—almost as painful labor—and we are secretly agreed that the way it is presented in literature is much better.” Photography provides that same sense of escape. It places me behind the camera and away from the action. My lens is pointed toward the story, but I am not acting in it.
In this project I am portraying escape as a two-fold process. Part of my escape originates in placing myself behind the camera and outside of the action. The second part is the content of my photography and the physical capturing of the means, methods, and manner that I employ to escape pressing deadlines, friendship issues, or the weight of adulthood. In my portfolio I have compiled photographs of dinner parties, hiking, and make believe time with my two nephews (who not only provide me with escape, but also with unlimited love, a double bonus).
The escape provided by a themed costume party yields the benefit of transposing myself into a different lifestyle and era. I am not proponing that people escape their lives through drink and diversion, I am merely pointing out the incidental benefits of doing so occasionally.
The second escape I pursue in my photographs is nature. Climbing Spencer’s Butte with friends when I should be studying transitive Russian verbs, for example. Standing on the crest of the butte, the horizon is practically limitless. Smoke sneaks lazily out of chimneys in hideaway houses in the woods. The Willamette snakes through her valley. Standing practically above the cloud line, my thoughts are empty of responsibility and tied-downness.
The western scene of my third set of photographs is enlivened by two young boys, yet innocent of the weight of living. These brothers’ biggest shared concern is the demolition their young toddler sister will wreck on their mega-block creations, or perhaps that one of them might have gotten a bigger slice of cake than the other. Trusted par’dners, these young gentlemen invent worlds of their own to inhabit and direct. They hunt, and kill, and save, and imprison, and escape, and bring to law, and ride, and shoot, and shoot again. They get kisses from their mother.
I visit my sister and her family to enter into their world as well as to leave my own. In graduate school, there are no babies; there are no boo-boos to kiss; there are no sloppy kisses given in return; there is no precious repetition of “Aunt Randi” to win my attention; there are no tousle-haired boys, fresh from naps with fuzzy dreams to share; there is no sister to make me homemade bagels or play card game after card game with. Escaping to my sister’s house lets me play a different role than usually expected of me: turn my homework on time, come to class ready to learn, be a good friend and courteous roommate, discover groundbreaking new stories to write, market myself as a talented freelancer, find gainful employment immediately post graduation.
So here I am, finding escape in the photographic art form, documenting the escapes I have allowed myself. I am no longer the adolescent girl stuck in fiction; I’ve learned to embrace the escape provided to me by real life. Nephews tramping in the backyard, which their imagination allows them to project as a deserted western outpost; hikes up mountains to literally rise above my daily responsibilities; evening soirees that transport me to a different generation’s version of gaiety and escape.