FY-College — Joshua Touster Photography

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#54 Formative Years> CollegeTitle: Tom with Snowball, Olympia WAMedium: Silver Gelatin Print from 35mm B&W NegativeCopyright © 2022 Joshua Touster—————Tom With Snowball was probably my most well known photograph that I took in college. It was even featured on the poster for the school’s photography exhibition in 1975. So it was a trip hearing recently from my old college pal Andy Harper, who I hadn’t seen since 1989. Andy requested, and I sent him a print of Tom with Snowball, and a month later we got together for coffee when he was visiting Boston from the West Coast. As we sat drinking, he read me this essay that he had recently written… THE FUN JOB OF HUMANS In a certain view, we are all born into a binary world of opposites. Life and death, for sure, for sure! Up and down, and for the photographer, especially a certain Josh Touster at Evergreen: black and white. If you remove Tom from the snowball picture, we are left with a world of exactly two shades. Black black and white, white. No details, even in the snowball, frozen in a tiny moment of rest between going up, and coming down. The snowball suggests another pair of opposites: time and timeless. How zen, that the decisive CLICK of this photograph comes at the only motionless moment in the snowball’s journey… truly timeless! Time for a spacey paragraph, with the picture of the snowball as a perfect, pure planet! The film 2001 suggests another key opposite: inner and outer. The further we get from earth, maybe the closer we get to the center of the human heart. Now we look into the other world that is Tom’s eyes, and in that still blackness we see two small perfect white circles. We could say… sure, all eyes have that… or we could reflect that in the very middle of the two Yin-Yang shapes there is a spot of the OTHER… the heart of black … is white. Maybe the more salient point is: in the middle of white… there is the blackest black. Joy and despair run hand in hand, and as humans we know and live it. The fun job of humans is to mediate the binary duality to see the big picture of a world that has no missing parts.. no part of stuff or spirit ignored.. No world that is only up OR down, hot OR cold, right OR wrong, artfully perfect OR fatally creatively flawed!! A colorful world of the entire range of white and black and grays, on faces and hands, on all kinds of clothes worn in all sorts of weather. Our fun job, and Tom’s fun job to remind us: An embrace of opposites that holds them all, and takes a brave if even tentative step beyond. Shit, that’s art!! Thank you Josh, and thank you Tom, and thanks to a very RARE event… a snowstorm in Olympia, Washington. Last fun opposite… (I am still finding them!): Behind Tom’s head is what could be another hovering snowball, but its surface is smoother. A second’s thought reveals the glossy white globe of a streetlight, and diving inside we warm to the toasty filament inside, coursing with the blood of electrons flowing from negative to positive!! Funny, but it does go that way. So add HOT and COLD to UP and DOWN to FUNNY and so SAD you want to cry, and so funny that you laugh until you cry, and so sad that you carry that sadness inside your bones for as long as you shall live.Andy Harper. Snohomish, WA. August, 2023

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