Utah Wedding Photographer-Melissa Kelsey » My Life

My Grandmother’s Paintings

melissakelseyphotography — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:23:33 +0000

My grandmother was an artist who painted, mostly in oils. She’s been gone a while, but it was time to finally distribute the paintings throughout the family. My mom and her siblings gathered at my grandparents’ house and did the daunting emotional task of figuring out who gets what.

My grandmother taught me how to draw by making shapes and splitting the face into proper proportions and then, forming out the lines. She showed me how to paint a little, and a great memory was making linocut prints by carving special linoleum blocks, that we would ink up and stamp onto thick watercolor-type paper. She made holiday cards just about every year this way, and it made for a pretty fantastic collection. They have a great stylish 1960s aesthetic.

The art room at her house was a special place for me. It had a certain smell of paper, oil paints, and wood, all baked together by the warm sun that streamed through the big windows.

I came home one day, to a huge box with my three paintings in it. I opened it up right away and placed my paintings where I think they’ll go in my house. They immediately brought cheeriness and richness to my living room.

Thanks, Gram.

Because it’s snowy out…

melissakelseyphotography — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:20:13 +0000

I shot these a few days after Christmas and this recent snow inspired me to post them. The apples on those trees are finally all brown and droopy now, like the soft insides could just plop right out of the skin any time.

My dog-children, Sugar and Mia kept me company while I shot these in my backyard.

Friday Randomness

melissakelseyphotography — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:10:01 +0000

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

I was at the fabric store, buying ribbon for wrapping Christmas gifts. I was looking at wrapping paper for something good and different, but there wasn’t anything I liked. I was browsing the store and saw a woman with a really cool tone on tone red-striped wrapping paper. I asked her where she got it in the store. She said it was the last one and I was a little disappointed, but it wasn’t a big deal since it’s just wrapping paper.

I was in line to check out behind her later and when she was finished paying for her items, including the red-striped wrapping paper, she turned to me and said, “Here, I want you to have this, you liked it so much.” I was taken aback and told her she didn’t need to do that. She insisted and gave it to me and said, “Merry Christmas!” I thanked her and was just so touched by that little gesture. She could have just handed it to me before she paid for it, but she bought it and then gave it to me. I guess it just hit her at that moment when she saw me in line behind her and she gave it to me. It’s just wrapping paper, but the gesture was just so kind.

Thank you, lady with the wrapping paper, wherever you are!

I’m published! :)

melissakelseyphotography — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:00:33 +0000

I’m published! The Wyofile, a Wyoming newspaper, asked if they could use one of my photos from a shoot I did for Maverik Country Stores last year. My photo is the third one down on the page. The article topic is really interesting, too!

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One in Nine: Wyoming’s Mormons. Star Valley’s Helen and Bill Call, Mormons Outside the Church

12/08/2008

By Tom Rea

Helen Call

AFTON — Helen Call was in a church women’s relief society meeting one day when some of the other members objected to some of her pointed questions about the tenets of the Mormon faith.

“People reacted very negatively,” she recalled recently. “I said to myself, well, I just don’t fit there anymore, and I just quit going.”

In 2000, Helen had joined 51 other Mormon women who signed a letter published in the Salt Lake Tribune opposing Mormon Church President and Prophet Gordon B. Hinckley’s statements about women in the church.

”Mormon women are in a bind,” the letter said. “If we disagree we reap trouble; if we relent we lose our voice. When our leaders say they ‘hear no complaint’ it’s because they have intimidated women into silence and compliance. Few women will risk excommunication.”

The same year, Helen Call’s husband, former Maverik Country Stores president and CEO William “Bill” Call, published a book that questioned what he called the “absolutism” of the Salt Lake City church leadership. Not long after that, he was excommunicated.

Both Helen and Bill Call come from prominent Star Valley families descended from polygamous Mormon pioneers.

The Call’s Family Home

The Calls are one of the most successful — and unconventional –couples in Star Valley. In terms of family history and service to the community, two standards that are very important in church culture and teachings, few people in the Star Valley can top the Calls, who live in an ultra-modern, glass fronted home — with an attached music studio for Bill– on the outskirts of Afton. Though they are no longer part of the church, no profile of the Star Valley Mormons would be complete without them.

After her eight children were grown, Helen went to work for Lincoln County Public Health as a childbirth coach and later a specialist in breast feeding. She also served 12 years on the board of the Star Valley Hospital and still does a great deal, quietly, her friend Laura Lechner told me, for the women of Star Valley.

From 1983 to 1999, Bill Call served as president and CEO of the Afton-based Maverik Country Stores, now a billion-dollar-a-year-company with 190 gas station/convenience stores across the mountain west. He also holds a doctorate of music arts degree from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, has composed three operas and four symphonies, and has written several books on theology.

The ideas in the second of those books, The Cultural Revolution: From the Decay of a Dying World Comes the Birth of a New Age, published in 2000, got him excommunicated two years later from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Photo Credit: Melissa Kelsey
The Maverik Country Store dynasty

But the excommunication, the highest form of censure the church has, was the culmination of two decades of questioning and writings about their faith that led to the Calls’ break with the church.

Helen stopped going to church first. As much as anything, she said, it was a kind of intellectual complacency she found everywhere in Mormonism that drove her away from it.

”My mother said to me one day, ‘You never question the gospel.’ But I found myself wanting to question things — why this and why that.

”I didn’t want to be rebellious. I just wanted to be an individual.”

Helen and Bill both grew up in Star Valley. She was a Burton and her mother was a Field, important families that trace their lines to the valley’s original, polygamous pioneers. The two got to know each other, however, at Brigham Young University. Bill had recently returned from a mission to Mexico. They married for time and all eternity in the temple in Salt Lake City when she was 19 and he 23. She had finished one year at BYU. After the children began to come she took more classes, but never graduated. A friend told her not to worry, that she was “too serious about school” anyway.

Bill Call

Bill acquired bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music at BYU, before the couple moved to Illinois for his doctorate. He finished the coursework in 1968, and got the degree in 1971. Meanwhile, they had moved to Banning, California, where Bill’s father, Maverik founder Reuel Call, had bought a plot of land and was planning to build an oil refinery. The refinery never materialized, though the company did open a filling station in nearby Palm Springs.

After less than a year in California, Bill and Helen moved back to Afton, and concentrated on family and business life.

As the years went by and Helen and Bill gradually felt more estranged from the church, their eight children reacted differently.

”It was a real shakeup for some of the kids,” Helen said. She clearly remembers nursing a baby the day in the early 1980s that Clayton, their second son, about seventeen and very upset, came to her with questions about her belief. She describes Clayton as “a very philosophical, thinking person.”

”Your children have free agency” in Mormon life, she said. But parents may fear that, behind their backs, their children will turn away from the church. They worry, ” ‘will I have them with me for eternity?’ “ Helen said. (Families of the faithful stay together in the afterlife.)

After talking with his mother, Clayton “went to visit with Bill and they talked for 15 or 20 minutes. And he got it,” she said. The boy, after listening closely, understood his father’s point of view. Sometimes, after moments like that in people’s lives, “things are never the same,” Helen Call said.

About three years later, Bill remembers, Clayton was preparing to go on a mission to Brazil. As is customary, the young man was slated to be celebrated at a church meeting– a special service at the ward house — before he left.

Usually the missionary’s parents speak at such events, along with others close to the family, followed by the about-to-be missionary. All remarks together might take up half or three quarters of an hour.

But Bill found he had a lot to say that day, and spoke for 30 minutes straight.

”It upset people,” Helen said. Clayton then spoke for five or ten minutes.

Bill’s remarks eventually became the basis for his first book. Clayton, meanwhile, spent three weeks at the LDS missionary training center before he realized he was not cut out for the work. He came home, and never went to Brazil.

The Trial of Faith: Discussions Concerning Mormonism and Neo-Mormonism, was published in 1986. Bill Call was in his mid-forties at the time, most of the children were still at home, and he still sees it as a book about a man and his family. In The Trial, a man gives a talk at a church meeting, going beyond what was normally acceptable there. The stake president tells him a kind of church trial is likely to result. As the trial approaches, the man engages in long conversations with a friend. The book is in the form of a dialog.

Bill still doesn’t see the book as anti-church, but understood then and since that it was “on the edge of what the church finds appropriate.”

It had little circulation, however. Bill’s older brother, Larry Call, stake president at the time, received some complaints about the book but never did much, Bill said. What little controversy there might have been died quickly away.

Around the time Helen left the church, Bill found he had so many problems with what he was expected to teach, in his capacity as instructor of the men in the church, that he couldn’t do it any longer. He no longer enjoyed directing the choir, either. “The things I’d had in common with the church, they changed,” he said.

Finally, Helen asked Bill why he kept going to church if his questions kept causing such unease. It wasn’t that she was trying to dissuade him, she said; she was genuinely curious about the answer. But after that, he quit going, too.

”Before I quit I hardly ever missed a meeting. The day I stopped I never went again,” he said.

In 2000, he published his second book, The Cultural Revolution: From the Decay of a Dying World Comes the Birth of a New Age. This book traces the changes in western thinking from absolutism to pluralism over the last 500 years or so, Bill said. At the same time it points out that the Mormon church has gone essentially the opposite direction in its brief 178 years. The church worldwide is now growing so fast, he said, that out of necessity it’s become far more centralized, regimented, and disciplined, especially in how it promulgates doctrine and trains its missionaries.

Power is so centralized that “things can be decided definitely and fast,” he said. But the church leadership is old, and often out of touch with its younger members, he said.

”My intent was to be critical in a positive way,” he said. His intent was to criticize the general authorities, as the LDS leadership bureaucracy in Salt Lake City is called. He meant no criticism of the church at home, in Star Valley.

Still, local church authorities felt they could no longer ignore his thinking. And criticism in general is suspect in the Mormon Church, he said.

”The general attitude of the church is, you don’t say anything, period.” Criticism threatens the faith of anyone who might be struggling, he said, and therefore the church makes no room for it.

He was excommunicated.

Bill was asked to meet with the leadership of the Star Valley Stake. This meant the president, his top two counselors, twelve more high councilmen, and the bishop of his ward, many of them men had known well for years.

Bill says now that he welcomed the close attention to his ideas. They quoted him passages from the book that they found theologically unacceptable.

”Rather than back down, I’d take them to a place in the book where the same point was made even stronger,” he said.

Excommunications up to the 1980s were much more high profile than they are now, he said. But because this event was so low-key, and because Helen and Bill already had not been going to church for five years or more, it caused hardly a ripple in Star Valley’s Mormon community.

Excommunications are supposedly confidential, though Bill and Helen figure that with 15 or 20 people at the meeting its outcome was hardly a secret. Still, they said no one’s ever asked them about it, or made them feel shunned or unwelcome, including Bill’s older brothers Larry and Val Call, both of them former stake presidents.

Around the time of the excommunication, Bill also left the company. The Wall Street Journal reported he sold his Maverik interests for $6 million.

”It was a falling out between my brothers and myself. … I was the younger brother and I was in charge of the company,” he said, and that was a problem.

Helen was not excommunicated.

”I wasn’t,” she said, “because I didn’t write a book and go out and say things to people.”

And Mormon home teachers still come to the house each month. Every Mormon home is visited each month by men from the priesthood and women from the relief society.

”I’m not a member, so they can’t visit me,” Bill said. “But because Helen is a member it’s very loose, and people are very friendly.” The subject of Bill’s excommunication never comes up — though Bill knows one of the teachers knows about it, because he was present at the final meeting.

”It’s a nice system,” Helen said. “A ward is kind of like a family … every time the teacher leaves he says, ‘Anything you need, you let me know.’ And I know he means it.”

Bill said they both still consider themselves Mormon, in a cultural and lifestyle sense.

”The organization is very good,” Helen said. “If people need help you can get it very fast. And the culture is helpful, as long as you fit into it.”

And Helen and Bill keep questioning — together. “We get these videotapes from The Teaching Company,” which publishes college-level lectures and the like, she said. “We fix a nice dinner, watch these lectures, and we have a discussion.

”It’s intriguing to really look at something. What does a baby do? Look things over, very closely. You need to do that with life,” Helen Call said.

I won, I won!

melissakelseyphotography — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 16:15:05 +0000

Local photographer celebrities, Pepper Nix and Mitch Burt threw an amazing Halloween costume party for photographers. They had their place decked to the nines with every imaginable Halloween detail. They even had gravestones, a bloody hot tub with a skeleton in it, body parts “grilling” on the grill, and fog to top it off outside.

One of the highlights of the evening was the photo booth by Foto Cabina. You know those little booths you sit in and make silly faces in and then a strip of 4 photos comes out? Well, this is that, but waaaaay better. It’s a luxurious, modern booth that you can use at events and weddings. www.fotocabina.com If you want to have Foto Cabina at your wedding, let me know and I’ll connect you with the right people. It will make your wedding sooooo fun.

That’s me in the top left corner with the unibrow and red lips in true Frida Kahlo fashion. Mitch Burt is the devil, Dustin Izatt is the little dwarf whose name I can’t think of right now, and Pam and Ritchie Belangdal are pirates, I think?

The other highlight was that I won the costume contest. There was a male and female winner. Bob Ross won for the male prize. I was Frida Kahlo, who was a Mexican revolutionary painter. If you don’t know who she is, you should Google her or see the latest movie about her called, “Frida” with Salma Hayek as Frida. Frida rocks. What did I win? A Kura Door massage! I really need one from sitting at this computer, working all the time!

Here’s Frida… and me as Frida

Wild Beauty

melissakelseyphotography — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:57:50 +0000

This is my sister, Meredith. She embodies the title of this blog post.My husband, my dogs, and I went home for Christmas to Northern California and I knew I had to do a photo shoot with Meredith.It was so wonderful to be back in my little forest right outside the door of my childhood home. It was really special for me to take these photographs of Meredith. I spent a lot of time with her preparing for this shoot, choosing outfits, styling her hair, doing her makeup. She is a natural model. I really didn’t tell her anything, she just posed so naturally. She’s been that way since she was a little girl.At the end of the session, she just totally amazed me (you’ll see). I love her.

Family Portraits

melissakelseyphotography — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:48:30 +0000

So, I was busy with families last week. What a great time. First, there was my family portrait with my husband, Todd’s family. I had to set up the shot, put the camera on timer and run for it, taking my place in the group. We went to Nibley near Logan where my sister in-law and brother in-law live and it was beautiful there. I think they turned out pretty well.

Then, there was the Torreano family. What a fun, cute family. The Torreano twins are so adorable. Even Fynn, the dog got in on the action. See what I mean?