In the entire time I knew him, Richard Avedon never tired of shooting beautiful things.

Even if he had to make them. He imbued Audrey Hepburn with an insurmountable, curious grace. She was not accessible. Except through how, and why, and where through Avedon’s single, unwavering eye. Its focus has never left the stage. Those images will stop you and take your breath away. Time and why and where were rendered irrelevant. There was only then.

The first time I met Richard Avedon, was three in the morning outside of Macy’s windows in San Francisco. I was having a photographic opening with Crawford Barton in a gallery, and we wanted to hand-deliver an invitation which was a photo of Imogene Cunningham wearing her mother’s long black dress, and Imogene insisted she wanted to crawl through the concrete sewer pipes being put into the ground near the backyard of her home.

Whatever Imogene wanted, Imogene got. Avedon was like that, too.

Seeing the image of Imogene in the sewer pipe made him laugh so hard, he had to sit down on the curb to recover.

Photography doesn’t do what Avedon did. Whatever Richard wanted, Richard got. Photography has turned very dark.

I miss those small moments of laughing in the street.

There is little to laugh about today.

Today, commercial photography lingers, but the grace is often just not there. The environment of photography has changed like we all have changed. The culture back then is dust.

I am writing this from a gas station Colorado. I have not seen the country in a long time. I am on a motorcycle, and have hit every state in the lower 48. Sorry, but, you can’t see much of the country from the safe insides of a sealed car.

The changes are shocking, and awesome to behold. They’re in your face.

It’s here. It has arrived. The mask I wear, and the bike helmet with the visor, does not keep the stink out.

I have less hope than I’ve ever had. I have no hope whatsoever. It’s on your skin. It’s on your clothes. It’s in your lungs. Eyes.

I am not seeing the wild animals I used to see. I take plenty of back roads, because, frankly, that’s the point. The America I used to be hopeful about is done. There is no small ray of sunshine. This is the epitome of dystopia.

We have given up.

The problem is far bigger than government can correct. Denial has won. We continue to collectively believe we are not a species like any other species. Somehow, through all of it, we think we are something else. I do not know what. I do not know who we think we are.

We are arrived here to destroy what the earth once offered to every species on the planet. The planet has sustained life for a long time. We are all evaporating. It is not an accident that a new virus would emerge. Every species of life is opportunistic. That would be us, too. In the end, the smallest of creatures are going to win.

The human species has already lost. Denial’s greatest gift is the decimation of identity. What made Avedon different was how he could transcend what we knew of reality. He took us to places that were not real.

Our problem is that we thought they were.

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