Dealing with the Devil

He says he lives that philosophy and uses it to relieve stress. Brooms tell him that "all of our toils are in vain, so just enjoy life. Nothing is that damned important."

His stick series is also in that vein. Years ago, before Zabel shaved off all his hair and took to loft living, he owned a house in Lakewood. One day, he was doing yard work, clearing out old brush and trimming bushes. "I was hacking away and I trimmed out the perfect stick," he says, his eyes lighting up. "It was a stick--I still have the stick--and I said, 'This is a stick! Look at it! A stick!'"

Entranced, Zabel photographed the stick, posing it and placing it and letting different shades of light bounce off of it. Then he found other sticks and photographed them, too.

His Sticks series was born.
To Zabel, Sticks is about permission to revel in the most mundane of things, license to get off on life. Such revelry is its own high, he says, and people don't do enough of it. "When you are a kid you know how to do that," he explains. "Then somebody told us that's not acting like an adult, and so we are not supposed to go back and jump around and go, 'Stick!' You're supposed to say 'Oh, a stick.' You're not supposed to get off on it."

He admits that many people just don't get the stick thing. On a furniture shoot in Mexico, Zabel went foraging about town with his camera, bending close to the roads and ground. "I'd be like, 'Wow, these are sticks from a different country,' and they would come along and say, 'Whatcha doing?'"

He would look up happily. "Oh, I'm photographing sticks," he'd reply.
"Oh. Really," the person would say, then walk away.
Zabel shakes his head. "I just wanted to hold up the stick and say, 'See this? This is damned basic. And it's free. And it's funny. And if you look at it--the absurdity of it--you could get off.'"

For Ed Zabel, that's what life is all about.