My Father's Camera

Linda Wolf photographed by Heather Wolf at the Portland Jazz Festival - Tedeschi Trucks Band West Coast Tour 2016

I hated being photographed by my father when I was a pre-teen. I wanted to be Gidget or Annette Funicello. Cute, pretty, small, wanted by the boys. Instead, I was too much of a tom-boy or a hothouse flower, strong-bodied, but thin-skinned. In all but a few photos my dad took of me as a pre-teen girl, I thought I looked like a chubby dork. My father was an avid amateur photographer. He was always photographing me and I hated it.

One Thanksgiving, when I was around sixteen, I got so defensive when my father lifted his camera to take a picture of me, I shot negative energy through my eyes so forcefully at him that the camera flew out of his hands and crashed on the floor. We both looked shocked. What had I done? I knew I’d grown some serious energy agency, but I didn’t know I was that think powerful!

That same year, with my boyfriend, Jay, I had done LSD for the first time, as well as made love for the first time and I felt like my mind had the power of a quantum physicist or Uri Geller, the spoon bender! On Acid, I found out or at least I thought I found out, that I could manifest a lot just from the acts of intention and envisioning. I experienced that I could change my mind by simply changing my thoughts, and I could change the way things were happening in the room with my energy. This was how I changed a bad trip if I was heading towards one – by force of will.

On LSD, I found a multitude of inner voices as well as something like an over-voice – like an over-soul. It was the strongest voice in my head. It had always been there vying for attention, but my thoughts and all the other voices crowded it out. On Acid, I saw thinking as holistic and malleable. Everything was interconnected. There was No Thing – every “thing” was alive. It was mind-bending, and mind-expanding, which is why Acid was called a mind-expanding drug as well as a dangerous substance. It could cause you to believe you could fly and I knew at least one person who tried doing just that and died. I loved 90% of my Acid trips and I vividly recall that at the end of each trip, I’d try my best to cling to the ecstatic state of consciousness I was in. Coming down felt like a descent back into the flat dimension of “normal” reality and limited consciousness. But one cannot live life high on an Acid trip. You’d go nuts!

These years, though, I don’t even drink much wine, let alone take mild-altering drugs. The most I do is micro-dose on psilocybin for periods and consume a snippet of a THC CBD gummy for sleep. Even my libido is a closed-up shop doing inventory, shutters down, doors locked except for a staffer who might come in late. Men-o-pause is the perfect name for this time of my elderish womanhood life. Sleep is more important than a good fuck! My vagina, these days simply desires rest! She’s put out a lot in her lifetime.

Menopause was the first time I took a big break , but I did have a fabulous flare-up of hot desire after I went through it. This was probably normal, but also due to getting back into being a Rock & Roll photographer again. Being on stage photographing as well as singing at sixty-six years old was an unexpected fluke, which turned into going on the road with Tedeschi Trucks Band, documenting their West Coast tour. I felt like I was twenty again for a couple of months! Rock and Roll will keep you ageless! But, having been through one end of the R&R world as a teenager and out of the other end as a mother with two children to bring up, I wasn’t about to leave my husband for the advances of one or two of the musicians, who remembered me as the beautiful Linda Wolf from the documentary movie, Joe Cocker: Mad Dogs & Englishmen. Back then, I do remember feeling beautiful. It was the time when my libido ran wild, fermenting everyone in my path with a perfume of get-it-on pheromones.

Anyway, Thanksgiving time is here again, and lots of picture-taking opportunities: the gatherings, the family, the baby, you know, that kind of thing. I think of my father every Thanksgiving because at one of the family dinners, I made my father’s camera crashing to the floor. That was about the time I’d just started becoming a photographer myself. It was my dad who taught me to use the camera.

I loved my father. He and I had our battles when I became a full-fledged teenager. But, during my little girl years, he was my rock of Gibraltar. Best friends. We’d spend Saturdays at the Beach. He’d take me horseback riding at Griffith Park on Sundays or boating at MacArthur Park, after which we’d go to the Big-as-a-Dinner-Plate pancake stand. He filled me with a sense of stability while my mother was increasingly falling apart from a lack of juju and a shortage of depth. She had a poet’s sensitivity, and he was a jock, had been the center of the USC Trojans and a stuntman in his youth. She lured him into a more elevated world, which he loved. They studied Italian and took yearly trips to Greece and Italy to see art before their marriage dissolved as my mother fell in love with a well-known writer from a New York publishing family and our little triad was destroyed. But I was out of the house by then, hanging out in Hollywood, being a Rock and Roll photographer, and as far away from them as possible.

Now, as an elder myself, I owe the most gratitude to them. Barbara and Joseph, my flawed but very beautiful parents; my mother, who gave me an artist’s education, and my father, who gave me his cameras.

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