Southern California
For 100 years this place, this concept, this state and this "state" has dared. It has dared to innovate, ideate, instigate, repudiate, devastate, investigate and sometimes irritate. There's something admirably courageous about this part of America. When you dare, you invite the ire of those less confident, those people who gladly accept the norm, the status quo, if only to keep at bay the terror of the unknown, of the risk of failure, of humiliation, of loss. Not here. Not this place. Not these Americans.
Here there be risk takers, fortune makers, and masters of occasional catastrophic failures. But how they do try. How they drive into the unknown with gusto, verve and balls. Sure, when they fall here they fall flat on their face for all the world to see. But when they get it right, they often change the world.
And are these not the very characteristics that founded and built this great nation, this "great experiment". It's as if all those values, that pioneer courage, that Lewis & Clark curiosity splashed up against the West Coast of this great State of Mind, California, stacked up high and wide and deep and stayed here, cooking, brewing, churning, daring.
How does one capture that, true human daring, in a single photograph? Hell I honestly don't know. But I'm a native, I was born here. And for all these reasons it's worth the effort and potential humiliation of failure, and glorious success if I do. If I can, if it's even possible.
Like Lewis once shouted, "Ocian [sic] in view! O! The joy!"
Click.
