Lake Oswego Photographer’s Picture Graces Cover of New Book

by Corey Buchanan, September 25, 2024

Article also on Lake Oswego Review website, while available, here

Despite visiting it over 100 times, Lake Oswego photographer Martin Stabler said he always sees something different during each walk through the Portland Japanese Garden.

A couple years ago, he took photos of irises in three stages — including one when the flower was unfurling and its seeds scattering. Local author and former Marylhurst University professor Martha Gies felt the photograph was an apt reflection of her new memoir “Broken Open.” So, with Stabler’s approval, she used the picture for the cover. The book was published by Trail To Table Press.

“The symbolism there is you live a life and, if you are writing a memoir at a later age, it’s like you try to give something back,” Gies said, adding that the flower being at a stage where it was beginning to droop, but not brown, was also resonant.

Gies received notoriety for her debut book “Up All Night,” about Portland graveyard workers in 2004. Her new book features essays about three stages of her life — her childhood in the Willamette Valley, finding her professional calling and contemporary jottings about topics like her conversion to Catholicism. Gies and Stabler connected because the author is a subscriber of the photographer’s daily email blast, “Daily Sightings,” which features photographs and poems. She said the blog “always cheers me up.”

Stabler never thought his photos would be used for a book cover and Gies said the two joked about needing to consult with their team of lawyers. Stabler was proud to have his photo connected with “Broken Open.”

“I think her book is marvelous and I think she is a wonderful combination of fearlessness and curiosity and that comes through. I think there is a whole lot of empathy that weaves through her stories,” Stabler said.

Stabler also had another interpretation of the symbolism of the image:

“The book is in part about witnessing people’s vulnerability, and I think you can say an iris is very vulnerable in that it is thin petals. It could be easily broken and yet it stands for beauty. It holds up under tough weather conditions. It symbolizes some resilience.”

For more information about the book, visit https://marthagies.com/broken-open.