My photo, “aero”, has been selected for Rayko Photo Center’s 8th Annual International Juried Plastic Camera Show! 

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Ingredients 10.1 – 10.4 (part of ongoing series) chicken bones, skin, cartilage, bay leaves, salt, pepper, celery salt Produced: burned and discarded chicken stock January, 2014.

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The places I have lived can be split into very distinct periods of my life, even in repetition.  Looking back, I have found time marked in periods of five to six, beginning upon my indoctrination i…

Geographical Navel-gazing

Geographical Navel-gazing

The places I have lived can be split into very distinct periods of my life, even in repetition.  Looking back, I have found time marked in periods of five to six, beginning upon my indoctrination into “womanhood”.

0-16.
I had a very idyllic childhood.  Even if I felt like a freak because of my lazy eye, it was never an issue thanks to the absolute love of my family.  My memories of childhood are pure and good, at least until 16, when adulthood beckoned and I was unprepared.  Yet, even though I became indoctrinated into the world of sex and relationships through the high drama that small towns specialize in, Topeka, KS is seen with rose-colored glasses for most of my upbringing.

16-21.
It was during this time, this relationship, that I visited Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans for the first time.  Not knowing how much each would later shape me as a person.  At sixteen, New York had my heart.  It was the goal.  My introduction to Los Angeles was experienced attached/detached, with him, wanting to break free but not ready, under the shadow of dramatic adventures.  New Orleans, much the same, yet the drama turned to eleven.  Punishment for wanting freedom, a delayed deception, hidden only because he knew, oh he knew what it would do.  New York though, New York was mine.  At sixteen, free to walk alone and independent.  I sent him home early and took charge of my experience.  It may be the first time I realized how exhilarating traveling alone can be (my “solo hurrahs”).

19-24.
To be so young in Los Angeles, and after six months, so free.  I fumbled, I faltered, I expanded and contracted.  Los Angeles, though I could never inhabit again, was crucial to my upbringing, to exploration.  It proved that even good fish can live in shallow water.  It mixed darkness and light at a constant 70 degrees, consistent enough to find truth amongst the backdrops and scenery.  In the end, so many good fish starting swimming away, the frustration of transportation, the consistency itself, meant it was time to leave.  Los Angeles, in hindsight, holds the youthful, experimental part of me.

24-30.
Home again.  A complicated prairie.  The town of my birth never felt like home and I detest many aspects of it with an almost visceral quality.  Education called me back and I found a niche 20 miles over, found friends for life, a very expensive piece of paper.

Life became very easy.

30-36.
I watched a city I love brought to its knees.  Like many, I wanted to help, so I enlisted a friend and we drove to New Orleans in the dead of night to gut houses, a year later, returning to rebuild.  It was like a punch in the face, seeing her like that.  We have a complicated history, Nouvelle Orleans and I.  At  seventeen, she was ground zero of my young emotional pain, though I wouldn’t know it until eighteen.  It was the drawn out deception that hurt more than the actual act, something that, to this day, I try not to think about, a pain I can feel in certain parts of my body still, though a dull, fleeting ache.  Because of that, I had never considered her a viable option for anything long-term.  But it wasn’t her fault, time passes, she needed an ally, and I needed her complications.

New Orleans, New Orleans felt/feels like home.

And here I am, on the precipice of 37, conflicted again.  Because I love this city, I love her unconditionally, yet she tries me.  My city of young pain has turned around and hurt me again.  New Orleans, my heartbreak hotel.  It’s not her fault she’s the scene of the second crime.  Truth be told, it could have happened anywhere.  But it didn’t, and she will forever be tied to those two personal truths.  She can’t help making you feel, opening you up.  It why she’s sought out, why she’s taken advantage of, exploited.  America’s last authentic joy and pain.  It’s not her fault that “authentic” is now a commodity, that the murky waters creep up from the Gulf and the shallow waters from the West.  But I don’t know if I can watch it happen.  Sometimes, sometimes you just love something so much that you have to run away (and I mean this on at least two levels).  Seeing her stripped of her honesty is almost more unsettling than the crime, the land loss, the entire state bending over to take it from oil & gas.  I’m not sure I can watch her Disneyfied, commodified, homogenized for the masses.  I’m not sure I have the strength to stop it.

So here I sit, with the post-trip blues, wondering if I had it right twenty years ago, or twenty years ago, I knew it was right now.  Or I am I just running (wherever you go, there you are).  Constantly running, because standing still means spending too much time in my head, always, always in my head.  Or maybe I’m just simply unhappy with the status quo, the recent emotional upheavals, the boredom, and need a change.

I don’t know.  I know that I had an amazing trip and I know I have amazing friends and family and that’s all I’m really sure of right now.  I know I’ve said a lot and nothing at all, under the guise of vague wordsmithing, because that’s what I do.    

I know I love your churches literal and figurative, and all of your red doors.

 I know that “Sleep No More” and the entire McKittrick Hotel will never leave me and I just wanna go back and back and back and stay there forever.  I know that even though the couple who owns Hogs & Heifers (NYC/Vegas) was very nice and inquisitive about you, I won’t do that to you, New Orleans.  I still love you too much. I know that it was nice, so very nice, to walk and walk and walk.  I know what it’s like to have a little piece of you hanging around in New York, if only for a little while.

This gallery contains 5 photos.

Ingredients 8.1 – 8.5  |  “I looked down and saw the moon, frozen and still, sending us messages in bubbles.  Some small wishes, wants, hopes and fears, coming to the surface.” Produced: tubs of water to pack the freezer for … Continue reading →

Ingredients 7.1  |  “We brought her up, up, up to live amongst giants.  Our hearts broken and flying.”

Produced: beet juice & lemonade

(as a sidenote: pleasantly, I cannot help but think of Philip Guston when I look at this.)

My prose-y response to a new Edward Burtynsky exhibit.

Words by JILL ENSLEY. All photographs copyright EDWARD BURTYNKSY.

The Scars of Our Connections: Edward Burtynsky’s ‘Water’

October 29, 2013 in LOUISIANA

As a Gulf Coast resident, it’s not easy to look at “Oil Spill #10,” (above).   The photograph’s deceptive beauty comes from its vibrant, emerald water streaked with jagged rivulets of black oil.  Taken out of context, it could be a close up of of raw gemstone, yet the horizon gives it away, pushes you back and you see the quiet horror of our collective actions–or inactions–in those dark rivers.  Personally, living in Louisiana, on the Gulf Coast, it’s hard not to go into Edward Burtynsky’s new exhibition of photography, Water, without preconceived notions about oil and water, the result of being surrounded by each one, both threatened and sustained by each.  It’s hard not to view such industry with a critical eye when you live so close to the largest man-made environmental disaster the United States has ever seen.  Yet, most of the world lives near water, it’s human nature, it’s survival, it’s necessary, it’s primal.  And unlike oil, we need it to live.  That’s the uneasy part of the work, of nearly all of Edward Burtynsky’s catalog, his “inverted sublime” worlds, the upside down-ness of resource mining on a grand scale. Water simply brings us to the new frontier, the new commodity and future industrialization and scarcity of the very resource that covers 70% of our planet.  There are companies at this very moment looking into the logistics of shipping pure Icelandic water–from melting glaciers, no less–to areas that have tainted their own supply.  According to UNESCO, “By 2025, an estimated 60 percent of the world’s population will live in water-stressed conditions, and a similar proportion will be without adequate sanitation.”  This is the next big business.

Read full response at Southern Glossary…

“Water runs concurrently at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Contemporary Arts Center through January 19th, 2014.

Can’t make it to see the exhibit in person?  There’s an app for that.”

This gallery contains 10 photos.

I took a lot of phonephotos this past week for my turn at the helm of BeingNOLA.  I used a lot of goofy filters.  But I like ‘em, so here you go. New Orleans, LA September, 2013.

In the meantime…

While you anxiously await Part II of my long-due Kentucky travel blog (will be up by next Tues!), I would like to shamelessly promote my Etsy store, Holy Crow Studios.

I just put these little beauts in the shop, along with a few others:

Opening day of Big Sky Season.  Some wild cloud towers being built in the atmos. phere.  Long keel boat houses float below.

April 28th, 2013.

New Orleans, LA.