Story Noº 17 / 151: Way Up Here

Noº 17/151: Way Up Here
Collection: Beyond the Observatory Roof

The stars may not be the first thing you look at in this photograph.

I can live with that. I did put an entire galaxy through his head, but I understand it has competition further down.

Your eye follows the curve of his body, lingers in the hair on his chest. Then there’s that mouth, slightly open, and the galaxy spilling through his head. Perhaps his mind has gone where his body wants to go.

Whatever he’s thinking, those stars take me somewhere very specific: a hill in my hometown of Livermore.

One night, my sibling Chrissie and I climbed that hill in the olive orchard where I grew up and ducked under a fence onto our neighbor’s property. We were teenagers. This felt scandalous. Some kids did drugs. We moved one field over.

Chrissie was stargazing. I was trying to get the stars to show up in a photograph—which is at least as hard as getting a naked man to relax in front of a camera.

I think it was the first night I managed it. The stars, I mean.

There was so little light pollution that we could easily see the Milky Way. I’ve only been to a few places since where the sky has looked that clear. Whenever it does, I think of that night. Chrissie nearby, my camera pointed up, both of us on the wrong side of a fence.

*A photo of me from that night, to a photo of me visiting the field again this year. I look so different!!*

Building a video game inspired by my surreal portraits keeps pulling me back into older work. “The Countryside” world in Elsewhere that leads you up through the atmosphere and into space draws on the orchard where I grew up.

Revisiting this photograph, I want to bring something of who I am now into something I made then. I also want some of what I felt on that hill to find its way into the image—that feeling of being connected to something much bigger than us.

You won’t find that evening just by looking. You’ll bring your own associations. Maybe his mouth reminds you of someone. Maybe the sky does. Maybe you were happily looking at his ass until I interrupted you with my childhood.

But I’m curious about what catches up with you after that first look. A place? A person? One particular night?

When you look at the stars, who do you remember?