Just Knocked Over With Joy.

Its so incredibly hard to do what you want to do with your life.
Ive had the unique luck to be able to be surrounded mostly with incredibly
successful and talented people. When your life is inundated with these massively talented individuls you lose perspective (rightfully so) on the amount of talent they possess. You get lost in jokes and the ebb and flow of day to day friendship.
The fact that these are people who are at the height of mastery with their talent,fades into the background ease of movie referencing and food consumption.
Chloe Is a Photographer. Not just any photographer, a really supremely talented one. I have been blessed with having her in my life
for several years and in those years she has taught me more about
composition,drive,heart,perseverence,honesty, and passion, to name just a few, than any single person,book,or quote has or will ever have the ability to.
Ever since I met her she has never seemed so at home as when she held a camera at her hip, like a cowboy and his revolver, just waiting to spring her index finger over the shutter. Everywhere we went she would contort her body into pretzel like shapes to get every last un-appreciated angle of her subject. She would dance around the mundane fixtures of life that we take for granted (park benches, subway signs, the old man on the corner) and illuminate colors and lines and shapes that to the average observer (me) would never ever be seen. Her talent is just that, she sees what no one else can and translates that effortlessly into her camera and from her camera to finished photo. Her spacial awareness is flawless. She is a fixer, a tailor, a mender of aethestic problems. This ability transcends the idea of her just being a photographer. Since I have had the pleasure of living with chloe, she has turned every last dusty corner of our apartment into a functional,beautiful, cozy humble abode. The countless hours I watched her spend painstakingly drilling things into the walls, drag paint cans around, spray paint on the fire escape,and the days I would come home and her tiny 99pound frame would be pouring with sweet smelling sweat after re-arranging every last piece of furniture in our place was awe inspiring. You could put Chloe in a room with no floors and have it be directly under the skunk and fartbomb factory and give her nothing but a drill and some paint and somehow in a week it would be the most well lit, perfectly smelling room in the world. She really IS that good. This isnt hyperbole.
There was a time where her dedication and drive actually made me feel quite useless, I would feel dwarfed by her grand schemes and lavish ideas.
Eventually she rubbed off on me (heyohh...) and I started taking pride in things like my work, my writing, my music, my dishes, my clothes not being on the floor and replacing the toilet roll as soon as it ends (im still working on batting 1000% on this one, but still,if I kept on my previous lives path, id have the original charmin roll from '04 still next to the toilet)
Chloe would, as most humans and artists do, have bouts of self doubt.
I would try and reassure her and encourage her to not let the artistic blues get her down, but I knew my words just sounded like a boyfriend/bestfriend even though I meant them as if i was an outside observor.
The bottom line was that it didnt matter, because every time I would see her stumble as a human, the next batch of photos that would pop out of her were twice the quality as the previous ones. She always would let her down moments fuel her desire to better and MAKE better (just like rollins, which is ultimately why she is one of the few humans who should be allowed to have Black Flag bars tattooed on them).
Since I met Chloe her life had been turning and so had mine. The gears of change were shifting when we met and hers were a little more oiled and greased than mine were so I had the pleasure of watching her go from a professional performance artist to starting her REAL dream to nurturing her REAL passion and to start letting in her REAL talent.
She has been documenting my entire life for 2 years and counting. It is a gift I have no clue how to thank or how to repay. Every time anything of any significance happens, there she was with some version of some camera taking nanosecond captures of our travels and life together. Usually Photographers take 300 photos to find the 1 decent one. Although I can hear her disagree as I write this, I would venture to say that of all the sets of photos I saw her take, I very rarely saw any image that could be labeled as "bad".
I saw Chloe start to take her photography to the next stages of success.
She worked for a long time for a theater company shooting their productions and she assembled a website and made the fucking cutest business cards and started to get her name out there. She shot weddings and concerts and birthdays and anything she could wrap her eye around.
When I look back at these events I was involved with, her images of those days are far more beautiful than even my own imagination can recall.
Chloe has the ability to capture two ends of the spectrum with a middle ground of beauty that is unmatched in modern photography. She can shoot a beautiful island wedding and capture every last nuance of ellegance in an already beautiful situation, and alternatively she will shoot the dullest of days spent parked in front of the couch in pajamas and make it look like fireworks are going off in the very same room we paced with boredom.
Recently and Amazingly,Chloe was given some really mindblowing opportunities to be photographing some very large bands for a VERY large magazine. There were contracts signed and the whole nine. I know how nervous she was. There is nothing more frightening than having to stare down your dreams "face to face" ,as oppossed to "Day Dream to Day Dream". I knew she would knock it out of the park if not for any other reason than the fact that you just CANT blow opportunities when you are the kind of talented she is. If you have been "taught" a bunch of art school garbage your whole life, you can FORGET that information and choke totally, but if you have been blessed with a gift like she has, then there is no way that you can out and out FAIL. You can do badly for YOUR standards, but ultimately you are going to do better than the hacks that co-habit your profession. True talent finds a way.
I know it goes without needing to say, but after chloe finally showed me the results from her photoshoots I was awe-struck. I was blown away on a personal level because it was such a joy to watch someone I care about so deeply,succeed. I was blown away as a musician because seeing the way she shot these bands, its the way ive always WISHED concert photography existed but never had. She really GETS what it is to be involved in the music, to be on stage, to have a passion that gets overlooked constantly. She is a music lover (and has GREAT taste in it) and because of all of these things, looking over these photos with her I could feel I was looking at something incredibly important artistically and personally for someone I truly Cherish.
Today Chloe and I drove to downtown brooklyn to postpone my jury duty til july so that i can go in short sleeves and hopefully get turned down for jury service. We had spent the previous night in our pajamas under a teddy blanket on the couch while she uploaded the photos from her two photo assignments for the magazine. I tried not to make a big deal out of it because I felt like adding any sort of pressure was unneeded. I now know her well enough to know that the pressure she put on herself was more than enough.
As I ran out of the court house with my 6 months postponement approved I jumped into the car to hear the news that she had heard back from the magazine and that they loved her photos!!!! She then read me the email from the magazines editor! Although I wont quote it verbatim in case she wants to be the one to put it on the interwebs, but I will paraphrase.
The Email pretty much confirmed that her photos are head and shoulders above the competition, that her passion is visible, her ability is vast, and her career is going to be a beautiful one if she continues on the path she is already on.
We celebrated with drinks and mexican food and a chihuahua in a bag.
I am so honestly genuinely happy for Chloe, and this is a double joy because without Chloe having been in my life, I would have no idea HOW to feel happy for SOMEONE ELSE. Like I said, she is a special human, Bordering on alien. She can see a pile of puke and make it the most beautiful thing for miles, she can take something destroyed and build it back to elegant, Truly, I wouldnt be surprised if She could reverse the effects of mold on bread. I can promise you this because I am a direct product of it. Without her in my life, I would be just another street corner unnoticed and ugly with a thousand flaws and cracks. I would be a boring living room and a terrible sunset obscured by fog. I want to say thank you to Chloe for forcing me to take out all the trash in my life, simplify, learn, love, and to let my outside reflect the inside and vice versa.
More importantly I want to thank her for starting to believe that her art should be in this world in a MAJOR way.
Chloes art needs to be seen. It needs to be mimicked for generations, it needs to be referenced in schools, people need to speak about her art with myth and confusion, she deserves to be misunderstood by her peers while enhancing the art form and leaving the same peers in her artistic wake as she rebuilds and destroys the constructs of what is and is not "photography".
I have purposely not included any of her photos in this entry because you should be inspired to go and look at her website, far too many times I have seen chloes photos used and abused on social networking sites and band websites and theater productions with ZERO CREDIT given to her.
You can find her photos and hire her at
www.ohchloe.com
or you can just wait a year and her visions will be fucking everywhere and you wont be able to book her with a million dollar art grant from your Fucking Stupid University.