She cared about shit. Michele Stern

Michele’s second cousin, my second cousin-in-law and friend, Marion Kaplan, passed away a week or so ago. I don’t think she would have said, “Passed away,” actually. She was not a “passed away” kind of person. She was a “tell it like it is” kind of person. She was a hitchhike, at nineteen, from South Africa to Kenya-type person. However you want to put it, Marion is gone, and the world is less interesting.

When I first met Marion Kaplan, sometime in the oughts, we were in Arkansas, and she was planning on going to Chicago to take a picture of “the young senator who gave the keynote speech at the Kerry Democratic Convention.” I was surprised at how confident she was that she would be able to meet him and get his portrait — that is until she said she had some friends at Life magazine who could help. Now I know that was so typically Marion.

I bonded with Marion over photography and our mutual curiosity about almost everything. I differed from Marion in the guile required to satisfy that curiosity firsthand. What is it like to sail on a dhow? Marion knew; in the early 1970s, she sailed on a dhow from Dubai, which was still a small fishing village in the Persian Gulf, to Mombasa, Africa.

I had the pleasure of accompanying Marion into the great American Outback. One memory that sticks with me is stopping at a pass overlooking the Smoke Creek Desert. I thought it would be a good place to take a photograph. By the time I got out of the car, collected my photo gear, and switched to a wide-angle lens, Marion had, somehow, levitated two hundred yards down the road, camera in hand, stalking the best view.

Another memory from an addendum to that trip is when Marion and I were driving south on Highway 395, just north of Minden, Nevada. Marion said, “Stop!” “pull over!” I’d driven this section of 395 maybe thirty times without stopping or even seeing it, but Marion knew a good picture when she saw it.

I’ll miss Marion. She was an extraordinary woman and a remarkable person. I’ll miss her emails remarking on some world event or something she disagreed with on my blog. Marion Kaplan has enriched my life.

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