The vertical walls of Yosemite Valley were not made to be climbed, which of course is why it’s compelling to try. And folly must be the sign of the most advanced cultures, since no others have the time or resources to pursue objectives as pointless as this. After all, you can drive a car to the top. These delinquents in the photograph are making a drawing, but the drawing is also a map. It is the route up the southwest face of El Capitan, the largest sheer face of rock in the U.S. It is drafted in a language that they were obliged to invent, more beautiful because it is inadvertently so; noble in its fiction, it’s the sort of metaphor you are going to have to be willing to hang your life on. It took climbers months of the kind of physical struggle and mental exhaustion that permits you to forget you are working thousands of feet off the deck with nothing under your heels, in order to possess this unintended line of agreement between what the stone will offer and what you are demanding. When considering this climb, I recall standing in the restaurant Windows on the World, where the glass windows went right down to the floor, as I suppose they all did in the Twin Towers. Touching my toes to the glass and looking down, I thought to myself, “that’s how it’s going to look halfway up.”

Chris James, Artist

This photo shows my mother with her stepmother and an aunt celebrating her tenth birthday. I discovered it this past summer. While I had seen pictures of her as a child before, this one had a profound effect on me.

After my mother abandoned our family when I was four, pictures of her disappeared. By the time I found her again, sixteen years later, my obsession with collecting family photographs came to include pictures of her as a child.

What I had not realized before was that in each photo I was looking for the answer to the same question. I heard the answer this summer, fifty years after this picture was taken. This sweet, pudgy child didn’t blow out her birthday candles dreaming that one day she would abandon her children. She never wished for, nor planned, what would be the most painful event of our family history. This image is now the most important picture I own because it records a child’s vulnerable innocence, and because it has given me a profound sense of closure.

Liliana Leopardi, Art Historian