Author Archives: FernandoMerrill

Past Tents: Beautiful Photos of an Old-School One-Ring Circus

by FernandoMerrill Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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One summer day in the late 1990s, photographer Norma I. Quintana saw that the circus was coming to town. Over the next decade, she followed the one-ring Circus Chimera as it toured California, photographing its performers, many of whom had learned their acts from their parents and were passing them onto their own kids, like the contortionist’s baby daughter below. “Their children referred to me as ‘the photo lady’ and I often helped watch them while their aerialist mothers were in midair,” Quintana recalls in her new book, Circus: A Traveling Life. But the big top is no more: Due to changes in immigration policy, the circus could no longer hire seasonal performers and workers from Mexico, and in 2007 it folded up its tent for good.

Photographs and text from Circus: A Traveling Life, by Norma I. Quintana.

Harlequin

Wheel of Destiny

“For a decade, I rendezvoused with James Judkins’s Circus Chimera whenever their route fell within a hundred miles of my home. I would travel for weeks each summer, often with my two young children in tow. As this circus was building its new tour, I was building a new body of work. It became a grand obsession—one that would see me grow as an individual, a mother and an artist, and result in an extensive series of portraits and this, my first monograph, Circus: A Traveling Life.”

Inner Practice

Yawn

“One day while shooting, I was asked to take a group picture as a favor. During the pose I tripped over my camera bag and fell flat on my face. Of course I was horrified. But, to my amazement, no one reacted. A tumbler came to my rescue, helped me up and dusted me off, but otherwise ignored my embarrassment. Later it was explained, simply, that in the circus falling is as natural as walking. The circus performer is raised from a young age to get up from a fall and redo the routine immediately. There is no room for embarrassment, because fear and discouragement might set in, impacting one’s life and livelihood.”

Fan and Relaxation

Crawling Aerialist

“I spent so much time photographing this series that it wasn’t long before my children and I became familiar faces at the Circus. The families of acrobats, aerialists, jugglers and dancers welcomed us with warm smiles and genuine joy on our annual returns. Their children referred to me as ‘the photo lady’ and I often helped watch them while their aerialist mothers were in midair. These mothers often watched my children while I was photographing.”

Pain

Cube

“I continue to be fascinated by the family-oriented nature of the circus, by its natural born lineage and the lifestyle of its traveling talent in and out of the ring, on and off the road.”

Tiny Contortionist

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Past Tents: Beautiful Photos of an Old-School One-Ring Circus

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There’s Not Much Point in Pretending to Care About the New Republican Health Care Plan

by FernandoMerrill Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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I have been derelict in my duty. A team of Republicans introduced a genuine alternative to Obamacare earlier this week, and I haven’t blogged about it. I’ll be honest: I just couldn’t work up the energy for several reasons.

Even on fleeting inspection, it’s obviously a feeble plan. It would cover very few people; most of the people it does cover couldn’t come close to affording it; and its policies would offer benefits so meager as to be almost useless.
The small amount of good it does is funded by reducing the tax deduction for employer health care. This is a joke. It would meet with massive resistance from virtually every Republican constituency. In particular, Grover Norquist would score it as a tax hike (which it is) and that means it would be DOA in the Republican caucus.
Even without the tax hike, this bill is going nowhere. I’ll give props to Tom Coburn and his friends for at least taking a semi-serious shot at health care reform, but no one seriously thinks it would have any chance of garnering even majority Republican support, let alone passing Congress.

As Dylan Scott reports, the sponsors of this bill have already watered down the tax hike. It barely took them a day. The new wording is a little vague, but it most likely eliminates the new funding entirely. And without funding, the bill is even more of a joke than it was to begin with.

It’s really kind of pointless to pretend that this is a real plan with real prospects of getting Republican support, but if you want to read all the details plan anyway, Jonathan Cohn has you covered here. As always, Cohn is very gentlemanly about the whole thing, but his bottom line is accurate: “The authors of the Patient CARE Act and many of their allies are acting as if conservatives have some magic elixir for health care problems—a way to provide the same kind of security that the Affordable Care Act will, but with a lot less interference in the market and a lot less taxpayer money. It’s all the goodies of liberal health care reform, they imply, but without the unpleasant parts. They’re wrong.”

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There’s Not Much Point in Pretending to Care About the New Republican Health Care Plan

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