Collage of Compliance 7.3: The Creative Community

My Mom's First Born Son

Uh, does this guy show a family resemblance? This is part three of a subseries about the two brothers my mother gave up for adoption who were discovered through Ancestry. Part one is here and part two is here

A few weeks ago I saw this interview with my oldest half brother Chris and asked if I could share it. So here it is:

Amelia Wysocki

Chris Loomis (Chris Loomis Photography) is an award-winning photographer specializing in beauty, avant-garde fashion, and portraits of well-known public figures in film and television. He always had an aptitude for art and music. He just loved taking pictures of airplanes with his father when I was young and somehow, that transitioned into his current career of photographing people thru his college education.

Chris was born in Cleveland, OH, and graduated from the University of North Texas (UNT), receiving a BFA in Fine Arts/Photography in 1995. Shortly after, he moved to California, attending Brooks Institute of Photography, graduating in 2000. Since then, he remained in the West and has been blessed to shoot for numerous commercial, editorial, and personal clients.

"In this particular market, it pays to be very good as a photographer of many aspects of commercial work to make a living… but my true passion lies in photographing unusual and artistic fashion in environments/backgrounds that I custom create. I also really enjoy photographing actors and musicians… particularly with my own concepts".

Design, art, nature, architecture, high fashion, science, science fiction, surrealism, the paranormal, music, and even old cartoons are just a few of the many things that have inspired Chris, both personally and professionally. From personal projects with high-concept productions to illustrative commissions for clients, he's constantly working to evolve his vision while maintaining the highest level of quality and art direction. He does with through Canon gear, armed with an EOS 5D Mark 4 with a Mark 3 as his backup.

Being artistically minded myself I really loved this quote, so I thought I’d highlight it:

"I believe that creativity is one of the greatest gifts bestowed upon humanity. It is the mechanism by which we can solve problems, boundlessly express ourselves and achieve greatness in any situation or medium, should we choose to tap into that potential".

Chris took 1st place in the 2016 Phoenix Fashion Week’s fashion photography contest, in 2019, he was nominated by Peerspace as one of The 11 Best Phoenix Fashion Photographers, and last year (2021), Chris was selected to exhibit 2 of his landscape photographs by Photoville for the My Park Moment photo contest, which is currently on display outside in San Francisco's Presidio Park.

Chris has had the opportunity to work with some rather noteworthy actors, most of them from the Science-Fiction genre, such as Tim Russ and Robert Picardo from Star Trek: Voyager, Edward James Olmos and Richard Hatch (RIP) from the Battlestar Galactica revival, Claudia Christian and Mira Furlan (RIP) from Babylon 5, and others including Adrienne Wilkinson, Andy Dick, Keith David, and so many others. Just... wow.

"I must admit, I’m so grateful to have had the opportunities I’ve had with each and every one of them! Every actor I’ve photographed, I’m actually a fan of also. So it’s an interesting separation for me, to go from being an adoring fan to being the disciplined, creative, and consummate professional photographer who not only gives good direction but establishes trust and confidently guides these actors into what they are best at, acting and emoting for the camera… be it stills or video. It really is an experiential feeling to watch one side of yourself take charge of a photo shoot, particularly with an actor/celebrity, while overcoming little creative challenges and directing it to a successful outcome while the other side of yourself sits quietly on the sideline starstruck and trying to take mental notes of the experience itself… because it is so special!"

Outside of photography, Chris is also a sculptor and designer and when he has time to breathe, he spends his time running and working out, venturing out to various unique coffee shops that aren’t necessarily close to home, and traveling out of state to other cities in order to enjoy what the world has to offer.

I'd also like to add that while it has become commonplace for career photographers who have their edits managed by an agency or freelance photo retoucher, Chris does all of his own. While this might not sound like a big deal to the uninitiated, it really is since the editing tends to be more than 50% of the job. Bravo, Mr. Loomis!

When asked what his family thinks of his successful career, Chris replied, "My parents have both passed away, but I knew they were very proud of my photography career. My brother also seems to take pride in what I do photographically, even though he’s more caught up in his own world. [giggle]"

In closing, when I inquired what his dream project would be, Chris has this to say... "In a way, I'm already doing the photoshoots of my dreams..." and continued with "I would also like to produce a science fiction short film and we're currently working on an otherworldly fashion show".

Find Chris online at www.chrisloomis.com, Chris Loomis Photography, and www.instagram.com/chrisloomisphoto.

The more conspiracy minded might note the two RIP notices with the list of science fiction stars he’s photographed, but one died in 2017 and Mira Furlan died in early 2021, prior to widespread jab distribution. Chris is vaccinated, as he mentions in this podcast.

He doesn’t strike me as a virtue signaler in the least. I noticed in the podcast how the interviewer seemed to be steering him back into Covid concerns, but it is clear he doesn’t really want to go there and would rather talk about his art. He’s tight lipped about the whole thing and at any rate I hope he is well. “I don’t tell anyone what to do on my set. To each their own.” Chris says during his podcast regarding mask wearing or other safety protocols.

I think it is obvious why he choose to get the conjabs, which had to do with indirect coercion. He travels extensively and mingles with bicoastal Hollywood and New York theater types. Chris would have found his business contacts and ability to travel shrinking catastrophically. It brings me to an odd thought about how privacy is inverted.

Story Time With Amy

“You’re two hours late for Christmas, Craig. Did your car break down again?” Grandpa in Cleveland addressing my dad, followed by chuckles from my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Circa every single Christmas between 1986 through the 1990’s.

I have never particularly cared for Christmas. I can think of at least 10 or 20 holidays that I like better than it, from the Fourth of July (my all time favorite) to Halloween, New Year’s Eve, Songkran, Loy Krathong, Father’s Day, Children’s Day, my Birthday, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, Easter and Cinco de Mayo. I have come up with all kinds of reasons that is over the years. There was my parents nervous fussing and arguing over how we had to look proper to visit her family in Cleveland. Year after year this was accompanied by something going awry in our 110-mile trek from Toledo to there, leaving us arriving all wrong anyways. My 13 month old sister died when I was six on one mid November morning as everything was ramping into the holidays, leaving that yuletide season especially depressing, despite Dad’s friend dressing up as Santa Klaus to surprise us Christmas morning. As a teenager in Ohio I thought I might have seasonal depression from the short cold days in December. I’d wake up in darkness and not get out of school until it was practically dark again, all usually under an overcast cold sky. I liked the pagan holiday of Winter Solstice better than Christmas, because it least then the days would no longer keep getting shorter.

Sometimes I imagined that if I moved somewhere warm where the days weren’t so short that I would find the Yuletide spirit. I sometimes fantasized about being in the Southern Hemisphere at Christmas so it could be summertime. But in thinking back to my very young childhood in Oceanside, California, I realized it was there even before we moved back to Ohio when I was five. I remember us going every Tuesday for 25 cent hamburgers and learning to swim in the community pool before I knew how to ride a bike and the white Ford LTD convertible with the red leather seats. I have no recollection of Christmas, even though both sides of the family celebrated it with beautiful decorations and we were lavished with gifts as children. It was like this gigantic blank spot.  

I still decorated for it, as shown in this picture from the Venice Beach place in 2009:

Every year I got through it. But I wonder how much is related to the Christmas baby that both of my parents knew about. The secret would have created an energetic vibe that came before my birth. Family secrets have a way of doing that.

My brother Andy that I grew up with took a DNA test on Ancestry which confirmed that both Matt and Chris were indeed half brothers (Matt was not my father’s child, for better or worse). My mother’s family was shocked to hear about this: they knew about first born Chris, but had no idea about Matt. I had to put myself inside the shoes of Mom for a bit. Giving up one child for adoption might have been viewed as a forgivable mistake and not a character flaw. She could find a proper husband later who didn’t even need to know about that.

But two? Mom probably felt ruined for life. I suspect though I haven’t asked her directly that my father only knew about Matt, while my mother’s side of the family only knew about Chris. My Dad’s side of the family didn’t know about either of them.

Who would she turn to with her deepest secrets during these times, especially when she began to wonder if baby Elizabeth’s heart condition was a sign of God punishing her for her past? Let’s just say that Mom went to a lot of Confession, like every single time it was offered. She worked as a personal cook for the priests at the rectory for years. I have no doubt that they knew her sins and she thus felt comfortable in those places.

“This whole time we always thought that your Mom was saving your Dad. It sounds like he was saving her a lot more than we knew.” My uncle quipped later. Indeed.

Mom eventually opened up to me about the whole story regarding the two sons she had put up for adoption. The first born Chris was also indeed born in the colder months, as a Sagittarius in the December holiday season. I asked her about the father. “My mother never liked that guy. She called him a con man.” My mom quipped. “I met him at a bus stop, which is never a good sign.”  That entanglement lasted for a year and Mom told me they broke it off mutually. “He’d been married before. I mean, he was divorced, with a son. But I just, with my Catholic upbringing, I didn’t want to get too involved with someone married before. And money was terrible.” My mother had recently graduated from college with a BA in English Literature and said she was mired in credit card debt. “I just wasn’t in a position to take care of a child then.”

Mom told me that she had had already broken things off with Chris’s biological father when she found out that she was pregnant. She never told the man. "I wanted the adoption to be closed. All I asked was that the child would be raised in a Christian family.” I would say that recognizing that she could not properly care for her son represented an incredible act of love and sacrifice. There’s also the alternate timeline viewpoint from science fiction that if she had chosen differently, then my life, or my brother Andy’s, or my half brother Matt’s, would not have likely been possible. It had to happen the way it happened.

Mom sounds quite a bit lighter now, at least to me. She assured me that there are no more secrets of this sort, which somewhat disappointed me. By that point like a veritable seven year old I was kind of hoping Mom had a big sister for me in her treasure box of secrets. I suppose now that full blood brother Andy is in the Ancestry database some half sibling could pop up on my father’s side, but I don’t think so. It wouldn’t surprise me if my Dad was a virgin before her. By that point Mom would have been into that kind of thing.

“If it wasn’t for your dad I don’t think I ever would have gotten married!” My mother exclaimed to me. Perhaps, but who knows what the future would have held.

It’s occurred to me that the secrets we keep can best be understood and processed by our family members, yet instead they are the least likely to know. Google knows what kind of porn you watch and Amazon knows by your shopping habits that you are pregnant. Your husband doesn’t know about the affair that you had, but your OB GYN sure does. Sexual partners can’t know how many sexual partners you’ve been with but you post your exploits on an anonymous Reddit forum. Your parole officer knows all about your struggles with addiction but your parents are kept in the dark. You post drama within your family on a public forum before you try to talk to the family member. On and on it goes.

And then somehow you arrive an an upside down world where private information like vaccination status is supposed to be shared publicly to signal allegiance to some larger group. Yet a mother whose 15 year old son is complaining of chest pains is not allowed to know if he’s been jabbed or not, because it’s medically confidential. A child abuse investigator or a doctor who has a need for this information is not supposed to record it. Facebook profiles that proudly signaled the triumphant end to the pandemic with their let’s get vaccinated stickers are set to private when the person inexplicably dies weeks or months later.

Mom might have thought that meeting a man at a bus stop was a bad sign. I doubt Chris feels that way. I’ve had this song going through my head:

He had this message for me some time ago regarding Mom: “I have nothing but love for her...and gratitude for carrying me around for the duration of those 9 months in 1971.”

She gave us life. As my uncle said, my mother is a fucking saint.

Buy me a ko-fi