Flame Spirals: Journeys Into Nocturnal Photography

By Stu Jenks

Stu Jenks’ first book, Flame Spirals exhibits the Zippo Lighter creations in which he first made a name for himself in the 1990’s. Intertwined with explanations on how he made the nocturnal spirals, Jenks shares his unique observations on God, sex, romance, and death, with a big dose of human universality. A must read for those trying to figure out how to photograph at night and those trying to understand how to walk between two worlds during the day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780984289189

Book preview

Flame Spirals: 

Journeys Through Nocturnal Photography, 

Book One 

Copyright © 2011 by Stu Jenks. 

All rights reserved.

Dust jacket and interior photographs 

Copyright © 2011 by Stu Jenks. 

All rights reserved. 

Interior design Copyright © 2011 

by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved. 

Electronic Edition

ISBN: 978-0-9842891-8-9

Fezziwig Press

PO Box 161

Tucson, Arizona 85702

www.stujenks.com

Fezziwig Press logo design by Julie Unruh.

Table of Contents

Introduction: by Charles de Lint

An Evening Drink from a Pool: Arizona

Owl’s Head, Arizona

El Tiradito: Arizona

The Ikon: Arizona

Ancestor’s Circle: Arizona

The Hoodoos of Coalmine Canyon, Arizona

Stuart Circle: Virginia

Millennium Eve: Arizona

Grace St. Paul’s Episcopal Church: Arizona

OK Street: Arizona

Altar of Repose, Maundy Thursday: Arizona

Casper the Friendly Ghost

St. Mary’s Whitechapel Episcopal Church: Virginia

The Pier Spiral: Virginia

The Everything God

Ed-Lil: Virginia

Solstice Rock: Arizona

Tumamoc Hill: Arizona

Flame Spiral for the Hopi Clowns: Arizona

Acknowledgments

For Ghost Dad, Ghost Mom, Ghost Sis.

Introduction

A few years ago while visiting Tucson, AZ, our friend Terri Windling took my wife MaryAnn, some friends of ours, and me to an open art studio in an old warehouse near the Hotel Congress. She particularly wanted us to see this one installation, The Open Circle Cairn Project by Stu Jenks.

I remember not being particularly thrilled with the prospect. I’m not saying that installations are bad, but too often the ones I’ve experienced are the work of artists who talk the talk while I stand there scratching my head, because I don’t get whatever it is they’re trying to say.

But this one...this one filled me up and stayed with me, long after I’d come home from Tucson. It stayed with me so long that I ended up writing about it in my novel Medicine Road, letting my characters experience it as I had. This is Bess Dillard talking:

Here’s what the place was like: Imagine an enormous basement, completely dark except for a faint circular illumination emanating from the floor at the far end. The air was cool, almost chilly, and soft, low-key instrumental music drifted from hidden speakers. Large wooden support beams were scattered throughout and, far down the room by the light, ethereal photographs hung on the walls, almost invisible.  

Jim handed us each a tiny flashlight from a basket at the bottom of the stairs. As we walked the length of the room to where the photographs hung, we could see that white mini-lights defined a large, open-ended circle formed by a foot-wide trough cut deeply into the cement floor. Sweet-smelling hay, into which the strings of lights were set, marked the edge. Except Jim explained that the trough was an optical illusion. It wasn’t really there. And here’s a weird thing: even when we came right up to it and we knew that it was merely a trick of the light, it didn’t change our initial impression.  

The illusion felt stronger than what was actually there, creating a welcoming space that felt larger than it was and seemed to lie outside of time. We entered the open end of the circle and did a slow turn, feeling the magic and mystery of the place.

When we finally left the circle, I turned my attention to the photographs and realized that this was part of Jenks’s wonderful gift: the ability to create truth out of illusion.

The photographs were small and we had to use the flashlights to see them clearly. They were mostly desert night scenes—cacti and rock formations—to which Jenks had added fiery spirals and circles of light.

Does he Photoshop the designs? Laurel asked.

Jim shook his head. He uses a Zippo lighter.

To me, it didn’t matter how he did it. They were just magic. In that basement, in the sweet-smelling coolness, viewing each print with key chain flashlights...the photographs became windows into another world, where natural scenes of desert landscapes revealed their spiralling energies to us—not simply as static images, but with ghosts of motion.  

We’d gone down to the basement giggling a little at the dark and the mysterious lights and the whole sweet oddness of the presentation. As the cool air touched our skins, as our eyes adjusted to the dimness and the darkness gave up some of its shadows, as we stood before the photographs, playing the beam of a flashlight upon them or squinting in the half light, as we stepped again into the straw circle and the outer world fell away, our voices grew hushed and we fell silent. I can’t say where the others went, but I felt literally transported to some other place where I drank deeply of a peace that was at once bright and shadowed and bittersweet.  

I don’t know how long we were down there, looking at the pictures, sitting in the middle of the straw circle, listening to the music. I just know that time passed at its own pace and we were all reluctant to leave. But eventually, we emerged back into the gallery upstairs once more. And then we were outside, blinking in the sunlight.  

For me the desert is sacred. All wild places are, but my personal connection is strongest to any kind of badlands, and especially the Sonoran Desert. It’s sacred, and I don’t mean that in a figurative sense. It’s been honed to its perfect essence by sun and wind and the long years that have passed since the time when it was an ocean floor.

You either get it, or you don’t. Either you think it’s fun to shoot rattlesnakes and tarantulas, or to tear around and destroy the terrain in a four-wheeler,