We don't get many special bulletins around this joint, so it's with great pleasure that I get to announce the arrival of Azra Bacvic, born July 21 at Sibley Hospital to proud parents Andrea and Djenno Bacvic.

Those of you who read the piece I wrote in the Washington Post last year will remember Djenno for providing a truly touching coda to my story. I wrote, "Just the other day, I received an e-mail from a photographer looking for an internship. His short note almost brought me to tears: “I come from Sarajevo, Bosnia, and my life has put me though many challenges. I am saying this because I have had the chance to see the worst in humans and was lucky enough to survive it. Since then, I have made it my goal to help people record their happiest moments, because those moments are rare and precious, and one never has too many of them.” After I received this email, I hired Djenno as our first official summer intern.

Well, I couldn't be happier to report that Djenno now gets to have one of his own "rare and precious" moments. Azra, whose name in Arabic means "one who levitates," weighed in at 7 lbs. 7 oz. and 20 3/4 inches long. She is cute as can be.

     
And since nothing on The Dark Slide comes without a bit of serendipity, as I've noted many times, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the birth of little Azra came on the very same day that one of the world's worst mass murderers, Radovan Karadzic, a man responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Bosnians, was finally apprehended. Djenno said to me a few minutes ago, "I saw my daughter being born--I cut the umbilical cord--and on the same day something I've been praying for since 1995 happened as well. Amazing."

In Belgrade, a very bad man is caught and in Washington, D.C., a very cute girl is born. All in all, a good day, yesterday.

Congratulations, guys!

Matt

p.s. Since Djenno's family is in Bosnia, we've posted a little gallery so they can see Azra. Click here.

We've gone from journalism lows to Aspen highs in the last couple of posts, and today it's back to good old weddings. It's my bread and  butter, after all, and it ensures I get nice emails from my sister, Jennifer.

Last weekend I had the chance to shoot a lovely wedding out in the Virginia countryside. It was held at a local winery, Hillsborough Vineyards, on a spectacular day, one that went from pouring rain in the early morning to just plain gorgeous by the time we got out to Purcellville for the reception. If you're looking at the same photo I am, the one to the right, I don't have to tell you that Meghan Weidl and Felix Candelario had as perfect weather as one could ever hope for on their wedding day. Funny the way things turn out, eh?

The last time I mentioned Meghan and Felix on these pages, we were driving the length of the George Washington Parkway, looking desperately for a redbud tree to use as an engagement portrait backdrop. We found one alright, and I laughed as we tried to make cool pictures, all the while cars zipping past us on the parkway at 50 miles an hour.

This time we didn't have any traffic issues to worry about. Hillsborough Vineyards is tucked away in the rolling hills and provided just a perfect backdrop for a wedding reception. Guests were greeted with glasses of their homegrown wines and platters of cheese  and all was right with the world. And in a nice twist, table centerpieces weren't floral but rather grape. Bowls of grapes, cylinders of grapes. A lot of grapes. And that's the way it should be at a vineyard.

If you read these posts closely, you know that I love brides and grooms who understand the emotion of their big day more than the trappings of that day. Love over tablecloths, basically. Felix and Meghan got that in a big way. It was great to be there when Meghan opened a box containing a bracelet, something Felix knew she had wanted for her wedding day. And to watch Felix break down during his vows. And to watch Meghan tear up as she danced with her dad. Well, you get the point. These guys are very much in love with each other and their families and it all shone through brilliantly.

I promised Meghan and Felix that they would be able to sneak a peek at some of their pictures while they were on their honeymoon, and you guys can do the same. To see some more pictures from their wedding, click here.

Take care, guys.

 

 

Matt 

And the Colorado rocky mountain high/I've seen it rainin' fire in the sky.

Okay, I'm not really a John Denver fan, so if this were a Monty Python movie, somebody would be rushing into the frame right now screaming, "Stop that! Stop that!" There will be no singing on this blog.

Nor, apparently, will there be any more serious posts about the death of journalism and dopey interns in Florida who can't resist a chance to write about what they ate for lunch. In general, when I write too many posts that aren't wedding or portrait related, my sister will leave a sarcastic message telling me to get back to the nice pictures of brides. Thanks for the support, Jen.

Actually, I have no problem getting back to the nice pictures, because they're a little bit different this week. As some of you know, I just returned from a wonderful trip to Colorado, where I had the pleasure of photographing my friends Frank and Jessica and their family. And though I've spent time in  Montana and Alaska, Colorado was a new experience for me, one I'll be looking forward to repeating in the future. There was no humidity, the air was fresh and there wasn't a mosquito to be found.

It was quite liberating to go on a portrait shoot like this one, with no agenda other than getting beautiful family pictures over the course of a few days. And, needless to say, it's hard to miss when you have backgrounds like Aspen Mountain or Maroon Bells or, for that matter, the great old wooden bed on the porch. One assumes the pictures will come with the great mountain in the background, but more often than not, they come when the kids are playing in the fountain in the middle of downtown. That's why agendas in the mountains are just plain silly. As Frank and Jessica were telling me, one has to be laid back in Aspen, where the weather can shut the airport down in a heartbeat. And that's just the way we approached this shoot.

I arrived in Aspen via Indpendence Pass, and I'm kind of glad I didn't really read the guide book too carefully before setting out. Me and heights are like oil and water, so it's probably for the best that I didn't know that the altitude of the pass was over 12,000 feet. There was plenty of snow up there and a dearth of guardrails but I did just fine. (No, I was not driving like an old lady. Okay, maybe a little bit.) It really is a spectacular view, the wind whipping around and the temperature a good 20 degrees cooler than the valley. I was expecting the thin air to be more noticeable than it was, though I could feel it on the trail out to the overlook.

Once in Aspen, we just hung around the house. We drove up towards Maroon Bells Lake a few times, watched the kids skateboard and ride bikes, and had an amazing dinner at D19, a restaurant that serves the best "forever braised" pork osso buco I've ever tasted. Pretty much we kept it simple, and that's where good pictures come from.

Anyway, I won't go on too long today, since Sunday's post was a bit of a haul. I do want to take the opportunity to thank Frank and Jessica for their hospitality in Aspen. It was a wonderful first trip to Colorado and I can't wait to return.

 To see a little gallery of pictures from our Aspen photo shoot, which could, I believe, be mistaken for a Ralph Lauren ad campaign, click here.

Take care, and I'll have some pictures from the great wedding I did at Hillsborough Vineyards this past Saturday in a few days. And for those of you who want to start humming some John Denver, you may begin now.

Matt 

Last week, in discussing my serendipitous stop in Leadville, Colorado, a place where, I hypothesized, one could identify parallels between the rags to riches to rags saga of Baby Doe Tabor and the rise and fall of the newspapers, I alluded to my favorite fake Onion headline of all time. It’s a bogus Titanic front page with the banner hed “World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-berg,” and a framed copy of it hangs in my studio bathroom.

Now that I’m back from my trip, I see that the news from the world of news once again conjures Titanic imagery, though this time the reason has less to do with the metaphorical world and more to do with simple mechanics: as in, what happens, exactly, when the hull of a ship is at 90 degrees and folks are being plunged into icy water. I haven’t been in any maritime disasters, thank goodness, but I know it’s not a big stretch to imagine a scenario in which people who should be pulling towards a common goal—like swimming towards a life raft—instead resort to and bickering, anger and self-preservation.

This weekend, a couple of postings on various journalism sites illustrated to me just how ugly things are getting in the land of newspapers, where layoffs are occurring with such ferocity that one can’t even keep track any longer. The Los Angeles Times one day, the Mercury News the next, and on and on. I’ve been trying to keep up with the news, always via Romenesko, journalism’s ground zero for insider news, though I admit that it’s becoming harder to separate one round of layoffs from another. Within these stories and blog postings, Titanic clichés run amok, with “rearranging the deck chairs” being an almost constant refrain. But there’s another metaphor that keeps popping and it conjures a different watery image: burning bridges.

Like everyone, I’ve always been led to believe that burning bridges is something to be avoided at all costs, a one-way ticket to, well, anywhere but from whence you just came. We keep out bridges intact, we’re told, so that we always have the prospect-- the potential-- of a job waiting for us somewhere else. What color is your parachute and all that jazz. (And if you're going to go out in a blaze of glory, at least be as creative as the Paris AOL office. On their final day after all being laid off, the office created one helluva music video. Watch it here--the password is "aollover.")

But two events this weekend have me scratching my head a little. In one case, a recently laid off designer at a once-grand newspaper was chastised for bridge burning because he had the audacity to flip the bird, literally and figuratively, at the paper that just fired him. And thousands of miles away, an intern at another large newspaper was being roasted over the coals and accused of bridge burning of another kind. Her crime? Blogging about her paper’s layoffs and defending—some would say brown-nosing-- the editor who announced them.

In the interests of disclosure, I don’t know either of these people, though I do know something about layoffs and creditors. I worked at United Press international during the late 1980’s, where downsizing was something of an art form. Serial numbers were changed on satellite equipment to inflate assets, promises of payments to vendors and freelancers were lies heaped on top of lies, and, most importantly, people seemed to disappear like they were in one of those air brushed Soviet propaganda pictures.

For the most part, people at competing news agencies were supportive, in part because they felt bad and in part because they no longer saw us as a viable threat. I worked in the L.A. bureau and our biggest concern back then was losing our camera position at the Oscars. But I’ll never the day I came back to my F3HP and 600mm lens in the first base photo box at Dodger Stadium. I had gone to get a Coke in between innings and when I returned, I found a photographer from a competing wire service looking closely at my lens and writing something down.

“Um, Doug, what are you doing?” I asked.

“Just copying down the serial numbers of this lens so I can bid on it at the auction after UPI goes out of business,” came the reply.

Wow. Nothing like the support of your fellow journalists, right?

That’s how I felt this weekend as I read about the firing of Martin Gee, a designer at the San Jose Mercury News. The Mercury News was once one of the crown jewels of the Knight Ridder chain.  Today, Knight Ridder doesn’t even exist, so it goes without saying that hard times have fallen on this particular paper and its employees.

Back in April, Gee posted a series of pictures that garnered him some attention in the media world, photos of a newspaper-turned-Old-West-ghost-town. Walking around the once-bustling newsroom, Gee took snapshots of what he saw: empty desks, computers piled upon one another, bulleting boards with no bulletins. These images were linked on sites like Gawker and Flickr, and they provide an eerie body of evidence to the dying newspaper business. If All the President's Men cemented the iconic image of a newsroom, abuzz with paper and activity, Gee's photos look more like something out of an M. Night Shyamalan film.

Last week, Gee finally caught up with many of his colleagues, though not in a way he probably wanted. While on vacation, he was laid off from the Mercury News. He added a few final parting images to his previous collection, including one of his middle finger giving a final salute to the Merc building, and added some captions that included some raw language.

I think Gee’s pictures are remarkably sad and compelling, something the Newseum should put on display instead of all those Bart Simpson-isms and silly 4-D movies, and I attribute the crudeness to the impersonality of the situation unfolding before him. Let’s not forget that frank language was once a revered staple of the news business, long before HR folks came onto the scene. (Mark Knopfler once sang, ‘Then came the churches, then came the schools/ then came the lawyers, then came the rules.” Today, he would have added the H.R. dopes.)

So I was less dismayed by Gee’s understandable parting shot than I was by a posting on Sportsshooter.com. In a discussion thread about the crumbling newspaper industry, someone brought up Mr. Gee’s firing, lamenting that the “newspaper’s loss will be some other industry’s gain.” As is always the case on the internet, someone immediately replied with the following:

“Mr. Gee is going to have a hard time getting hired by anybody familiar with his parting shots. Never burn bridges. Someday you may have to use them to retreat.”

Come again?!? It never ceases to amaze me how much support one gets from one’s colleagues on a message board. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, right? Should Mr. Gee have gone out as a lap dog, praising the wonderful job that MediaNews has done in destroying a great newspaper? And, more to the point, what happens when one burns a bridge in a forest and there’s no one left to hear? I wish Mr. Gee and all the employees of the Mercury News well--past and present-- and don’t begrudge him his middle finger at all. His photographs will one day be looked at as important artifacts of this sad age of printed newspapers.

I wish I could say the same for a certain intern at a large paper in Florida, a young woman who is alternately being hailed as the future of journalism and/or the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award in Bridge Burning.

Jessica DaSilva, who describes herself as “the lovely and talented Jessica DaSilva,” is an intern at the Tampa Tribune. On the blog she keeps to let the world know about her goings-on, DaSilva notes, with a hint of sarcasm, that she covers “small-scale politics and building maintenance” and laments that she keeps being given features to write, even though “those who know me know how much I can’t stand reading features.” She writes about her church goings and comings, how it’s inconceivable that one of her fellow journalism colleagues has no clips to show, and how her orientation at the Tribune wasn’t as “absolutely painful and pointless” as she was led to believe it would be. (She also has a tendency towards declarative statements, like this one in a post about the new Kit Kittredge movie:  “Like every little girl in this country, I grew up absolutely obsessed with American Girl dolls." Every girl? She counted?)

Like many young folks, DaSilva's a walking billboard for the Too Much Information Dep’t., something which could potentially harm her objectivity as a journalist down the line, and that’s exactly how she landed in hot water this past week. Hours after Tribune editor Janet Coats led a staff meeting detailing layoffs and a new business model for the paper, DaSilva blogged about the details of the meeting. Her account is filled with speculation (“The fact Janet made up her own crazy new business model for a newspaper without a prototype or any idea where it would take her was frightening to a lot of people”) and pronouncements probably beyond her pay grade (“A sports reporter in the Tallahassee bureau was layed off (sic) for no other reason other than the fact that it didn’t make sense to keep a full-time staff member there.") She also did a bit of nuzzling up to her editor, calling her “my hero,” ostensibly for seeing the difficult road ahead and for for making these difficult cuts.

DaSilva’s blog post is being dissected, line by line, in her own blog comments section and on other journalism sites. A lot of people are using it to illustrate the age gap that exists in newspapers, with young people loving blogs and the old newspaper fogies not having a clue. I think that's a bit over-reaching.  Many of the posts in her defense fall into one main category: Leave her alone, she’s an intern, she's young. But this defense has a gaping hole in it, in the form of a big question mark, one that has less to due with the future of newspapers and more to do with common courtesy: If she’s just an intern, what on earth led Ms. DaSilva to believe that she should be the chosen one to announce to the world the private details of her own paper’s staff meeting, one in which longtime employees were losing their jobs? It’s as if the bat boy for New York Yankees decided to blog about that night’s closed team meeting.

Ms. DaSilva obviously cares a lot about journalism, which is a good thing for sure. Her post about journalism and its future is titled, "It's Worth Fighting For," and I agree with her completely in that regard. But her musings on just what exactly can save journalism illustrate many of the things plaguing journalism. The instant analysis, like those bulletins from school shootings, often turns out to be wrong ("He used a Glock." "He used a shotgun." "He acted alone." "He had help."); the “confessional” blog format, in which what one ate for lunch becomes "news," just like those live California freeway chases on Fox; and the encroachment of less-than-salient personal tidbits into news accounts. (“Through most of this meeting” DaSilva writes, “I just wanted to shout, “Amen!” and “You go girl!” because Janet understands what’s up.”)

There’s that great scene in “Broadcast News,” the 1987 movie that used to be the definitive statement on downsizing in the news biz, long before this current trend. In it, the vacuous anchor, played by William Hurt, goes off his teleprompter, telling viewers (and I’m paraphrasing here) that an incident involving U.S. fighter planes has been resolved and that "we'll all be alright.” To which the network exec in the booth replies, “Who cares what you think?” Maybe that's the divide right there: with regard to personal information, one generation of journalists believes less is more and the other believes more isn't enough.

Jessica DaSilva has lots of energy for a budding reporter and I hope she succeeds. But I would argue that there are some things that trump that energy, like anointing oneself, while still an intern, as the town crier and discussing, in depth, the details of one's colleague's layoffs in the interests of a good blog post. To me, that's gauche.

Greetings from Leadville, Colorado, which, rising at more than 10,150 feet, is the nation's highest incorporated city.

I thought it would be fun to write a little travelogue from the road, a fluffy piece about a once-proud mining town that today looks a little worn, especially when compared to its fabulously wealthy neighbors like Aspen. But as is usual in my life, serendipity or fate took control of the wheel and instead I find myself pondering the incredibly rich saga of Baby Doe Tabor, who, together with her husband, is Leadville's greatest celebrity, a woman whose impoverished beginnings morphed into incredible wealth and fame, only to return back to destitution and seclusion. And for me, the story of Baby Doe has a bit of everything, from a humorous opera connection (everything in my life comes seems to come back to opera) to a much more serious and cautionary tale about the death of newspapers.

Now, before you start shaking your heads, asking how in the world the story of a  scandalous marriage in 1883 (at The Willard, no less!) between a  divorced young woman and a divorced man twenty-six years her senior could have anything to do with the death of newspapers, bear with me.

This all started, as do many conversations in my life, with a stranger standing next to me. We were in line at the Advantage rental car office at the Denver airport yesterday, waiting patiently for more than an hour an a half to get a car, when I struck up a conversation. (A quick warning: Do not, under any circumstances, rent from Advantage in Denver. The cheap rates will suck you in, like sirens to Ulysses, but the service is beyond terrible. And my car smells like an ashtray.) I asked this gentleman what he did and he replied that he was a percussionist with the Rochester Symphony and was on his way to Vail to play a music festival. He asked me where I was headed and I told him Aspen, though I planned to spend a few days writing in the much less upscale town of Leadville, a  place I picked completely at random. (I wanted a cheap room and nothing to distract me.)

"They have a famous opera house in Leadville," he said.

"Really?" I replied.  " I love opera. Who knew?!"

"Yeah, it's a funny place" he said. "By the way, did you know Renée Fleming is from Rochester?"

I didn't know that, in fact. Fleming is, of course, one of the greatest sopranos of all time. But I was more intrigued by little Leadville and its opera house. We said our goodbyes and I started driving up and up towards my destination.

Leadville is a neat place, actually, known more for what it once was than for what is is today. The birthplace  of the silver rush of the late 1800's, it once boasted a population of more than 40,000. Nowadays, according to a quick census check, that population is somewhere below 3,000. But it doesn't seem to matter much. The mountain views are spectacular, the air is clean (and thin), and I keep looking both ways before crossing streets on the main drag only to realize there are rarely any cars coming. It may be rusty but it's decidedly unpretentious, and that suits me fine.

One thing that is inescapable to anyone visiting Leadville is the legend of Baby Doe Tabor. She is everywhere, from postcards to videos for sale to tours of the Matchless Mine and opera house she and her husband, Horace Tabor, once owned. In fact, tomorrow night, descendants of Baby Doe's sister will perform "The Opulent and Tragic Baby Doe Tabor" in the restored opera house. And while I first chuckled a bit, thinking immediately of one of my favorite movies of all time, "Waiting for Guffman," and its community theater ode to Blaine, Missouri (Corky St. Clair and "Red, White, and Blaine"), people around here take the Tabor saga pretty seriously. And the  more you read, the more you understand why. This story has everything, from class struggles to poltical favors to a daughter named "Silver Dollar." (Her real name, no lie.)

The story goes basically like this (and for a more detailed history, click here): Born Elizabeth McCourt in 1854, Baby Doe (a nickname that sticks) divorces husband number one and meets Horace Tabor, a wealthy silver mine owner. They begin an affair that is an open secret and son after Horace divorces his wife, Augusta. From 1883 until 1893 the pair live famously and flamboyantly, hobnobbing with governors and presidents and spending money in that way that can only signal impending doom. (In the same vein as that great Onion headline about the Titanic: "World's Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg.")

Beginning with a controversial marriage in the Crystal Room at The Willard (her dress costs $7,000 in 1883 dollars!), a room I've photographed many a wedding in and one that I won't look at in the same way again, the couple is scorned by Washington and Denver society. (Apparently, even the Catholic priest who married them didn't know both parties had fishy divorces in their recent pasts. He was peeved.) And and with all meteoric rises, the whole thing comes crashing to the ground in 1893 when gold finally replaces silver as our monetary standard. Horace dies in 1899 and Baby Doe spends the next 36 years living alone in the tiny cabin at the Matchless Mine, finally freezing to death in 1935.

The more I saw all the Baby Doe paraphernalia, the more her named seemed to ring a bell. Wasn't there an opera about a Baby Doe, I  thought? I got back to my room at the stately Silver King motel, where the Fruit Loops are prepared just the way I like them, and Googled "La Fanciulla del West," even though I already knew that the Puccini opera by that name takes place in a mining town in the Sierra Madre mountains of California, not Colorado, and whose main character is Minnie, not Baby Doe. So I Googled "Baby Doe'" instead and laughed immediately at the results.

Baby Doe rang a bell with me because not only have I heard the American opera The Ballad of Baby Doe before, I've actually seen the opera, at the Kennedy Center in my own backyard. As Homer Simpson might say, "D'oh!" and yes, the pun is intended. In hindsight, I remember it now, because Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a huge opera buff, was entering the theater that night just as we were walking in. My memory lapse notwithstanding, The Ballad of Baby Doe is one of the most heralded of all American operas, though usually lagging in name recognition behind the likes of Porgy and Bess and Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, my personal favorite. Google told me one more thing that made me smile: one of the more acclaimed recordings of The Ballad of Baby Doe features Renée Fleming singing the title role.

By the way, did you know Renée Fleming is from Rochester?"  that guy said to me only yesterday in line at the rental car place. Weird.

Now for the big u-turn. Opera serendipity aside, I was struck by something completely different as I thought about the rise and fall of the Tabors and their silver mine. As I paid my $7 this afternoon and toured the Matchless Mine and Baby Doe's tiny cabin, all twenty square feet of it, all I could think about was the newspaper industry. A stretch, perhaps, but that's the way my mind works.

You see, for all the scandal, intrigue and infamy that surrounded the love affair of Baby Doe and Horace Tabor, their ultimate downfall came as a result of something far less glamorous: they utterly failed to anticipate the complete collapse of the silver market and the triumph of the gold standard. They partied like it was 1899 (okay, actually 1893), right up until the rug was being pulled out from under them. (Reminds me a bit of some of the Gannett Christmas parties in the late 1980's.) There wasn't, as far as I could see, any kind of diversification that would have left them insulated from the disaster that was looming.

Obviously there's a new standard in the newspaper world, where I spent my first 15 years as a photographer, and it's known as the internet. The silver standard that is print is crumbling before our eyes. Newspapers, like those mines of 1893, are laying off journalists by the score. Ad revenue is evaporating. And like a huge dirigible crashing to the ground, media corporations, led by barons like Sam Zell and Rupert Murdoch and Dean Singleton, are clamoring to throw off what they see as dead weight, namely reporters and photographers and copy editors.

It's a pretty grim situation, and a recent letter on the media site Romenesko, simple and stark, really makes one stop and think. It reads, "McClatchy shares are worth 1/10th of what they were four or five years ago and they just keep sinking. As a former Knight Ridder employee with vested rights in the pension plan, I'm wondering what will happen to newspaper pension plans if some of these media giants go bankrupt. I haven't seen this question addressed on your site. I'm sure there must be plenty of other journalists who are wondering the same thing I am."

1/10th of what they were... 

I doubt that number will improve. More likely, and sadly, it will get even worse. And like the thousands of miners who became extinct after the collapse of the silver, the newspaper industry, looking more and more like yesterday's currency, faces a bleak future. Much of the blame is being heaped on the new executives, especially guys like Lee Abrams, the chief innovation officer for Sam Zell's Tribune empire and a man with little newspaper experience, for their seeming indifference to the old ways. (Abrams recently expressed surprise that newspapers actually have reporters covering the news in places like Iraq. I'm not joking. He was appropriately ripped to bits by a former newspaper editor-turned-blogger, Nancy Nall, who, with her biting wit, made him look like an emperor without a shred of clothing.)

And though it's easy to make fun of someone like Abrams for being clueless, this trajectory was started long before he arrived on the scene. This is a sea change, not the result of one bungling manager. What we are seeing with newspapers and print is more akin to the collapse of film for digital, or horses for Model-T's, or silver for gold.

Mining towns like Leadville exist today only as ghosts, places where you take your family to buy a souvenir piece of Fool's Gold and then get back on the interstate.  They are monuments to the obsolete. I'd hate to have to explain to Alexandra someday what  a newspaper was, but after spending some time with the legend of Baby Doe Tabor this afternoon, I have to believe it's inevitable.

Matt