RESPECT - AND RESIST!

Photo © Trevor Thompson 2019

We published the hardcover version of REFUGE two and a half years ago and I was recently reminded of how it began, and what I was trying to prove or communicate during that beginning. Deep within I understood my intention but also couldn't get out of my own way, my old ways, so I had to write the voice of resistance and confrontation first. I sat with it for a while and realized the original introduction I hate-typed through the night would present a barrier to entry and affinity that would place the reader in conflict with what I was hoping to share. I placed the original Intro in a "Do Not Erase" folder and let it sit until this morning when I time-traveled back to review it after some thorn(s) pricked me hard enough to do so. It's a viable piece of writing, a tone folks who knew me way back when will find familiar, and perhaps relevant to the confrontational attitude slowly permeating many of our lives in these "interesting times".

I refer to this as the OG Punk Rock Intro to REFUGE.

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Most photography books make me sick.

The images are often incredible. Many make me wish I had seen and captured them, and aspire to be as competent.

Then come the words ... fuck. Mostly useless. Because people so thoroughly anchored by the visual can rarely or accurately express with words what it is that compels them to choose, compose, and capture a particular 1/125th of a second.

“I wanted to express this,” and “I chose this angle to communicate that,” or, “I selected this film (back then) or this filter/edit (present day) to influence the action stopped by the photograph ...” I could go on but why bother? Pretentious. Sick-making justification after the fact. And in the case of most photographers, pedantic.

Yes, it may be a compelling image but it doesn’t mean more. It was an accident of presence and timing. Or - perhaps - it was intentionally staged and captured, with precise technical skill. Whatever. It’s an image. And as lovely as it is that’s all it will ever be. Hence the rush to broadcast intent, and message, to describe art and metaphor, to tell the viewer what s/he is seeing, and describe its deeper significance — to prevent them doing so themselves.

No one wants to be irrelevant. So we build monuments. We try to create something that will last beyond the instant of a “like” or imbue our actions with enough meaning to keep us making and learning from them. The reality is this: nothing happened. You documented. But you didn’t do anything. Of course, you were there. Perhaps bullets flew over some heads - after all it’s the modern world - but generally it was strip clubs and strippers, hotel room locations, aspiring models, abstract and contrast, poverty, the third world, athletic endeavor and maybe the wild environment. Or, as a friend described you, "Paparazzi of the poor and war.” You captured the images, and later with a computer or darkroom, you “made” them.

Do I really want to buy a book about it? I thought I did and I did. I spent a lot of money on books to learn something. But when the self-congratulating, self-aggrandizing theme showed through most of them - except for “On Being An Angel” - I realized the commercial rock arena of photography books was wide open for an old school punk rock attack.

Most punks were not musicians. They could barely play instruments. Their attitude and energy made the music, the movement. I am not a photographer. I know my way around a camera, the darkroom and the computer. I carry a camera. I point it at things. I shoot by feeling. Without intent. My attitude makes this book different. Although I am not the man of action I was, what I did informs what I do. Some call me a writer and it’s true, I am published and translated, and I never wrote about anything I didn’t do. And when I did I took some pictures. The words were most important but I understood Kuleshov so I used images to multiply the power of my words, to put the reader in the environment.

Still, a picture of hardcore alpine climbing can’t communicate the feeling of the moment: the smell of five days of hard effort and calorie-restriction, dehydration, the exposure and tension, the risk, a sense of incoming weather and maybe the dread that I’d chosen a partner who wasn’t up to the task, the taste of freeze-dried food in the back of my throat, the high altitude nausea, fear that has a flavor all its own … I thought I could write that. Or show it in a photograph. Or combine the two to make a whole.

In my effort to illustrate or clarify I often failed: a beautiful mountain image distracts the viewer from a description of risk and death. When I listed the friends and climbing partners who had died in the mountains few saw those mountains as tombstones the way I did. Spectators saw beauty. I lived with the teeth.

Those teeth shaped me. And when I came down from the mountains I brought their scars with me. I should have died young. I stopped climbing but that didn’t stop the need. I quit but I couldn’t kick. I tried to replace it. I shot pistols in competition. I trained the military. I ran a business into the ground. I raced my skis and my bike. I prepared Hollywood actors for blockbuster superhero roles. But nothing affected me like climbing did. Nothing could fill the hole I dug by quitting. The trivia I mocked from the summits became my daily life. And slowly, certainly, what I once thought mundane gave me glimpses of beauty I only thought accessible from those high mountain tops. I seek this beauty every day - on the open road, in the streets at night, at sunset and sometimes sunrise, in the eyes of a friend, or someone's touch, in the depth of physical effort, and in the moment of rubbed-raw vulnerability after that effort is done. These images balance what I saw and felt up there.

The mountains were my classroom. They taught me sensitivity, and sight, and to think in a way that allowed me to survive ambition that killed many who chased it. I saw it up there and I spoke it in the valley, in the gym I founded, at the seminars I taught, to the people who listened. No book could convey what I’ve lived but hell, I’ll try. What’s the worst that can happen? Criticism? Excellent. Especially if it helps me grow and improve. Praise? Yeah, whatever. It tickles the ego but unless given by peers, it’s empty — I have to give a fuck about your opinion for it to matter.

I assembled and produced this book to upset what’s driven by semi-titillating images which, despite their extraordinary beauty have no depth. No story. I saw the status quo that had suffocated alpinism and pushed past it. I did it because I could. And to prove that it could be done. I haven’t changed. So this book doesn’t conform to an established norm. It isn’t solely photographs, and it isn't strictly words. Because I am not a typical photographer and I’m barely a writer. I’m a man who has lived and accomplished a lot. And for now, words and images are my only way to communicate my experience, and perhaps to change yours.