Part of me - South Dakota

I am sitting in my San Francisco studio. I love it here. The studio has tall ceilings and large exposed beams that are from the original carriage house before it was remodeled. The floors are hardwood and the entire west wall is windows that look out onto a little garden area with a fountain. Although it is located on a very busy street, my studio is set back off the street, behind two old fashioned barn doors and through the garden area so that I don’t hear the traffic. My landlord, Judy, is an amazing politically active woman who has made this community of apartments and studios her art project. She is hand tiled a mosaic on the concrete retaining wall, and most of the plants in the garden she rescued from some throw-away bin. There are also funky artifacts hanging around like the candle arbre that housed a hummingbird next last summer. The garden has become a green oasis in the city and is teeming with hummingbirds, doves, and of course pigeons. It is my oasis. Outside can get a bit nuts, but once I come in here I can sit and relax. And it is a great space for making photographs of pregnant women and their children. My clients and their children come here and immediate sit down and relax. The children love the garden, the fish in the fountain and the hummingbirds.


Today is Friday. I arrived in SF yesterday after being in South Dakota (see my blog jenniferloomis.blogspot.com) taking care of my father. He had his shoulder replaced at the Mayo Clinic and needed us to be there to drive him home as well as get him accustomed to living with only one arm while the other healed. It was great to be with him and to support him during this time. Before the operation, he said he could handle it on his own, after the operation he realized he was wrong and thanked us profusely. Watching my father immobilized and in so much pain, was difficult. He is 70 and for the first time I realized that he is getting older and sooner or later, he won’t be able to live in the middle of nowhere in South Dakota by himself.


My sister and I drove him back to his home on Monday the 1st of June. I was exhausted. I had stayed up with him the entire night after the surgery to make sure he was OK. He was frightened and very glad I stayed. He never asked me to stay, he just said. “you sure you are going to be OK staying here tonight, Ja?” That’s what he has always called me, Ja.

Arriving in South Dakota, was like walking back into a time warp. He has lived there 30 years and when it hadn’t changed since I was a kid. I used to LIVE to go to South Dakota in the summers. I loved the country; I loved my horse and riding her all over, racing pick-up trucks on the hard dirt roads. The small town – before Walmart moved in 2 hours away – was a vibrant community, and was a source of unending fascination for me, I went to 4H events, rodeos, raised chickens, rabbits, calves, fawns, you name the animal I raised it. My father also worked with the Ogala Sioux tribe, now called the Lakota, and so we went to many powwows, sweats, and other rituals and ceremonies (deemed illegal by the US government) often being the only nonnatives there. I had dark hair and dark eyes but didn’t look Indian, but at least I didn’t stand out like my blond sister. We were the minority there and Dad taught us to respect the customs, to have a low profile and observe how to behave. I remember going to sleep at night listening to the singers playing their drums and singing late into the night. When I had to leave South Dakota, I would cry inconsolably. Life felt so unfair.

The town of Martin has 1100 people. There are more pheasants than people and definitely more cows. Another five days was spent here, nursing him back to health and basically cleaning out his cupboards of expired canned goods. At the end of it, I was going a little nuts and was ready to leave and head back to my cities, Seattle, SF and NY.


As I sit here in my SF studio writing this, staring out the window at the fig tree, I am grateful for all of my South Dakota summers and the experiences I had growing up. They made me a better person by contributing to my wanderlust spirit (which has taken me to Japan, Mongolia, Africa and countless other places), giving me a thirst for new cultures, and developed my ability to interface with all kinds of people and feel comfortable in any situation. It is part of what makes me do good work and why I love photographing so much.