I believe I can fly

With

By Irina Souiki

"There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots; the other, wings". -- Hodding Carter

Most people who have children may have heard the phrase "when I grow up I want to be an astronaut" many times. Children reach an age when they want to explore the world around them "to the infinity and beyond", as one of their favorite movie characters, Buzz, the Space Ranger would say. Beckett is not only a very creative photographer, but she is also one of those super mothers of twins who actually goes much further in helping her children live their dreams: she creates beautiful and inspiring images that gives them food for their imaginations, taking them into a realm where everything is possible.

Even as an adult I look at this picture and ask myself : "what if?" What if there will be a time in the future when we'll be able to go and travel in space, to see the World from up there? To look down and see a miniature civilization - hopefully peaceful and understanding. Will we able to be proud for having kept this "Big Blue Marble" shiny and clear?

Beckett likes giving her children wings, but her images resonate with us on a higher level. She may not be aware of it, but she takes us back in time, to our childhood years, where we can contemplate our dreams, fears, and achievements with either regret or pride.

Let's hear from Beckett now.

Beckett, can you tell us what motivates you to take pictures and create unique images, especially those that feature your children?

I've been the person in my family who always took pictures of people. I've drawn from when I was a little kid, filling up many sketchbooks with doodles and bad drawings and portraits. It's been almost a compulsion with me to record various aspects of life. The sketchbooks now are really a kind of visual diary of whatever was going on in my life at the time.

I started getting more seriously into photography as a medium when my boys were born because I just didn't have as much time available anymore, and little kids are in constant motion. Once I started down that slippery slope, I wanted to get better, to capture more of the moods and the fleeting moments so the photos could stand on their own, without my feeling a need to translate them into drawings or paintings. Yet I miss drawing; I feel a need to noodle on some of the photos, enhancing them or turning them on edge slightly to show the sides that are usually hidden. It's great fun. The first of the 'fantasy' images of my boys started as a sort of joke on them, since they still believed everything in photos is real. I think we all tend to think that way, really; that photos only show real life and therefore whatever you see in a photo must have happened. And once I started tweaking with that assumption I was hooked, of course.

What is the story behind this particular shot?

We end up going to "the Blue Museum" (the temporary Academy of Sciences Building in San Francisco) rather often, as it's Riley's favorite place right now. The penguin tank has two portholes that are set under the water, perfect kid sizes. I've been itching to get some shots of the boys playing in them for just this sort of idea. My sis-in-law had a similar idea, and she's done her own image; it's certainly one of those ideas that already exist in the common vernacular.

I debated for a while over what Riley should be looking out at, and finally opted for having him looking out at the earth from orbit. The almost-boredom combined with a familiar view that we never actually get to see in person seemed like a fun combination. Because of course real kids would quickly get past the wonder of being in space and get bored and be whining "are we there yet?" I like the everyday feel combined with the fact that we can't do it. The image makes it seem more possible, somehow, as if by picturing it clearly it brings it a step closer to becoming a reality.

Would you describe to us the technical details involved in this photograph?

Layers in Photoshop are my friend. I took the original image of Riley in the porthole and made a new layer, erased out the water visible through the porthole. I looked for public-domain photos of the earth from orbit from the web, found a few possible ones and picked one that seemed to match the best in terms of light source, color family and so forth, and plopped it in on a layer underneath the porthole image. Various clean-up and smoothing of edges and surfaces followed. I originally shot Riley in the porthole at a very high ISO using only existing light and the photo of the earth was originally in a low resolution. The overall graininess of the images limits the quality a lot, but I was most interested in trying to get the idea across.

Do you find this picture to be more like a dream or a science-fiction movie?

Definitely more like a dream. I don't tend to think in cinematic sequences, usually more in a storybook format, as a string of separate images that enhance and build on each other. I think of most of my fantasy images as only slightly removed from ordinary reality, like a slightly off-kilter alternate universe where we get sideways glimpses into it at unexpected moments. Blink at the wrong time and you've missed it.

Speaking of dreams, what does your son want to be when he grows up?

Riley says: "I want to be a Paleontologist, a Zoologist, a Biologist, an actor and mostly a Dragonologist. And also a Transformer." He and his brother Casey turned five last month. Casey glared at me and shook his head when I asked him what he wanted to be, and went on methodically drawing a picture. He's pretty good, actually.

What about you?

I'm a work in progress. I think art has always been my strongest interest and ability, but I've been a wildlife rescuer, lived and worked in a dairy barn, worked on animal behavior studies with ground squirrels, snakes and marmots and coyotes, worked as a preschool teacher, worked as a press monkey in a printshop, as a freelance illustrator, as an art director, animator and lead artist for a few computer game companies. And most recently I've been a mom to twin boys. Guess which one has been the hardest?

As a kid, I always wanted to be an artist and was told that couldn't happen. I settled for wanting to be a vet and found out the hard way that my heart wasn't in it and I didn't have the brain for it. I finally settled on becoming an illustrator. Not that I made a big name for myself or anything, but I did make a decent living at it. Now I'm in the process of flailing around trying to find options that combine at least some of my hard-won experience with the kind of flexibility I need for my kids. I wish money weren't an issue. Honestly, I just want to be a creative person who makes cool images.

I love drawing and sketching. Painting is satisfying, but much harder work for me. I tend to have a realistic style which has been quite handy for getting work. I've used photography as a drawing reference tool for so long that I find myself having to readjust my thinking to allow the possibility that photography in itself can be an art medium for me. I haven't managed to get much into the technical side of photography and my lack of technical training in photography tends to hold me back. I put a lot of preliminary work into a painting, doing thumbnails, composition and value sketches, color roughs, then the final drawing which then gets painted. I tend to get too tight in my paintings, so using photography as the main medium is very good for me in that it forces me to work with what's there right at the moment and removes a lot of the tension of having to create everything from scratch. Playing with photographs has become a new, fun medium for me without the pressures of needing to be commercially desirable. With photography, I'm really enjoying myself, I'm not taking myself seriously, I'm not worrying about making images for anyone but myself. I've been having fun exploring fantasies without concerns about what anyone else thinks. It's very liberating after years of making images to order.

You have a recurrent theme in your pictures, that is wings and flying. What is the significance of this theme for you?

I think it has something to do with the age my boys are at now, although people with wings have been a recurring theme through many of my sketchbooks for years. I used to have very real, vivid flying dreams. But the boys are at an age where magical things are still possible; they still think dragons are real and maybe people can fly if they have the right wings. I loved fantasy play at that age and I still persist with a stubborn refusal to completely give up on the notion that magic still exists, somewhere, somehow. I am a pragmatic, practical person used to making my way in the regular world and yet I cherish the feather-light feel of magic all around when I look up in the sky.

I'm hoping to do a series of images for a book idea that combines drawings with paintings and fantasy photos like some of the ones in my stream. If one word had to describe it, 'change' would be it. Everything changes. And that is both liberating and heartbreaking at the same time.

Flying is such a common human fantasy, isn't it? The few flying images I've posted of the boys all have a sort of ordinariness to them, a snapshot quality that I like because to me, it makes the odd fact of them flying more mundane and believable. Some mom just happened to catch a rather bad snapshot of her kid flying with his new wings. Happens all the time, you know?

If you were to take this picture again, is there something you'd want to change about it?

I'd try to get better quality images, really. I'd work harder to make it a bit more unique, yet still try to tap into that universal dream space. Easy to say, harder to do, especially when I need to go pick up the boys in a few minutes more.

Some people could compare your picture to those of Anne Geddes. What do you think about this?

I wouldn't have thought of that myself, Anne Geddes being a pro, well-distributed and generally very commercial. She seems to be regarded as rather cliche these days by those who keep ahead of trends, but her work obviously struck a chord with a lot of people to become so popular. I've enjoyed her work when I've seen it, more for the technical beauty her images have rather than the content. That may sound odd, but I'm not really a person who goes gooey over babies in general; I've been enjoying my kids as they've grown, but I'm really enjoying the age they are now, when they can communicate and have such rich fantasy lives.

I think most of the fantasy images I've posted in my Flickr stream have a similar element of 'cliche' or 'common fantasy' that Anne Geddes also taps into. That cliche factor has made me hesitate a number of times about posting mine, but I keep deciding to go ahead and put them up for fun. And when it comes right down to it, I also decided not to worry about possible negative opinions of the images. Though I will confess I like the idea of someone seeing one of my fantasy images and having that odd feeling of recognition; an almost embarrassed feeling, as though I've seen into their secret lives. I guess that would be tapping into the collective unconscious and bringing an idea out into the light where someone can say, 'hey, yeah, that's been in my head for years...' I love the idea that we all share fantasies; it's part of the power of the collective mind.

Are there any artists or writers who inspire you in your photography?

I've admired a large number of artists and illustrators for years. John Singer Sargent, Mucha, Velasquez, Maxfield Parrish, N.C. Wyeth. I discovered a few of the big-name photographers in art school; Steichen, Steinlen, Margaret Bourke White, and others. Strong portraits have always grabbed me by the heart. I greatly admire a number of contemporary illustrators working in graphic novels, as well as photographers, including a number of people on Flickr and in Utata. This group has been very inspiring to me.

What is the definition of a cool shot for you?

I've been realizing that technical artistry combined with strong emotional content really gets me. The emotion is the interesting part to me, really. I love portraits that are open and honest and unflinching. I have landscapes in my favorites that I love because of their emotional content; stark architectural shots don't usually do it for me. I admire shots that have sheer technical artistry, but an image also has to use that artistry towards something more, some resonance of rhythm or color or light and dark that grabs my heart in some way. I need to be able to connect with the image on a gut level.

Thank you, Beckett, for answering our questions with such passion and insight. Let's hope that we'll get to use our wings, the same way as you are teaching your children to love life and live their dreams.