On Writing - my third write-in with the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery - Kurt Cobain

Since there are permission restrictions on the portrait, here's the LINK with a blurb.  Please take a moment to study it, look into Kurt Cobain's eyes and read its history. It was taken in 1993, a few months prior to Kurt Cobain's death.

As the last time, attendees were given a portrait with background story and twenty minutes to write. This time, we were restricted in POV from either Cobain, the photographer Mark Seliger, or from a fan. I chose to write from the photographer's point of view.

I wanted this photograph to be the first in a series, to chart Cobain's path forward into the future. I wish it wasn't so near to the end of his road. I wonder sometimes if I'd had any training in psychology, If I would have seen someone else behind his eyes, someone calling out for help. If that call had been evident, I  might have asked him to hang around longer while I made some calls. 

I 'd heard about Cobain's career of course, and Nirvana's singular rise drew me magnetically to him. I had to get his portrait captured. It's always an honor when the people I want to photograph say 'yes'. There's an intersection where we affirm each other's star status and elevate it higher than even we can reach.

Now that I've captured Kurt's moment of vulnerability forever, it lives on like Nirvana's music.

It's 2020 now -- 30 years after their breakout hit -- and he'll never be remembered as old or sickly or frail or vulnerable or past his prime. He became the teen spirit.

As for Cobain's pain, there are so many layers of irony, aren't there?

His physical pain could be treated, if only symptomatically, and painkillers are misnomers in the end. They don't ever kill the pain once and for all. They only make the pain hide -- sort of whack-a-mole style. Painkillers can, however, kill the man, but that's not what did Kurt in. It was the other pain, the invisible pain that only he could see in his mind and came out in his guitar. That kind of pain can be heard and felt by patients experiencing the same demon.

In that shared experience, the fan thinks Cobain has it all worked out -- just transmute the pain into music and voila, it's therapy enough to conquer another day.

No one held more sway over Cobain than that demon though. Talked him into a dark place and lied about how to get out.

If it was all there in that photograph, I had no way of knowing how to decipher the layers.