the sun

If you don’t already subscribe to The Sun, you might want to go to their site and read all about this wonderful literary and photographic magazine. It’s been around since 1974, and the editors have been very supportive of my work over the past few years. Eddie and I both look forward to receiving our monthly issue of The Sun because the writing and the photography always make us think about something or other in a new way.

I send the magazine piles of pictures every now and then. The art director usually pulls a handful from the stack to keep on hand for future use and sends the rest back to me. Then, a couple of times a year, I’ll open my new issue to see one of my photographs that has been kept in the “vault” of the magazine’s office!


That was the case with the most recent issue. I opened it to find, to my surprise and delight, an image on the first page that I had sent to them over three years ago. I had actually forgotten all about the picture. It is a photograph I made of my parents when we were at the Mayo Clinic shortly after my mother had been diagnosed with leukemia. If you’ve ever been there, you know that there is a lot of wait-time involved in seeing all the various doctors. This picture is of my parents waiting.

The day after I received this new issue, I got the following e-mail:

“I spent a long while studying the photograph on the first page of the May 2007 Sun magazine. Before going off to write a journal entry about it, I thought I'd see about the photographer. How wonderful to find that you are a Kansas Citian. After visiting your website, I see that you will be presenting at the Kemper. What a joy it would be to see your work there within a week of being introduced to it from a magazine out of North Carolina! Thank you for the gift of your photography!

Another Kansas Citian,

K.”

Besides being blown away by the e-mail, I also decided to spend a little more time with the picture. I resurrected it, in a sense, by putting it at the beginning of my artist talk and using it as a excuse to dedicate the presentation to my folks:

“I dedicate this presentation to my parents, who, over all these years, rarely complained when I stuck a camera in their faces and who even came around at some point to saying with pride that their daughter is a photographer.”