Category Archives: Image A Day – 2017

Last year I attempted to publish one new image every single day. I only made it a couple of months. But with each new year, we have a chance to try and turn things around. Here’s to 2017 and a complete run for ‘image of the day!’

January 25, 2017 – Dead Flowers

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Winter isn’t over, and we’re beginning to enter that last long stretch. For me, February is almost always the longest, coldest, hardest month. But the promise of spring, dormant as it is, surrounds us. Today’s image is a watercolor and ink illustration of a dried husk of a flower, based on a photograph I took during one of the coldest winter days I lived through in Bisbee, Arizona.

I enjoy this image because we always have a tendency to connect themes of death and rebirth to the winter. Leaves fall from trees, grass withers and dies, and our gardens crumple up beneath frost and snow. This image, to me, is a reminder of the color and warmth that we can expect in the following months.

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January 24, 2017 – Coffee Break

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This is a photograph that I made while hiking around Bisbee, Arizona back in 2011. I was in the company of several friends, all journalists, and we had traveled to Bisbee to take a few days off after covering the horrible shooting incident involving Representative Gabby Giffords. We were working around the clock during that news cycle, attending press briefings and funerals, and submitting our photographs and our reports. It was a much-needed getaway after absorbing the tumult of that incident and its aftermath.

Interestingly, coffee is what brought me to Bisbee the following year. I managed to secure a job roasting coffee for a local Bisbee coffee roaster. It was a good few years, living in the bosom of the Mule Mountains. And I will never think about coffee the same way again, after learning the origins, the history, and the processes involved in harvesting, hulling, and roasting America’s number one beverage.

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January 23, 2017 – Boxcar

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There are lots of clichés to either avoid or embrace when developing one’s own photographic style. Portraits with the horizontal bands of light from window blinds raking across the subjects face, looking for garbage on the ground and trying to find the ‘beauty’ in it, and then of course there’s always graffiti. And this is just to name a  few.

I guess my weakness is graffiti. Almost like compiling a mix tape, photographing graffiti is like appropriating somebody else’s art in order to express yourself. Knowing that it’s a common subject in college photography classes, I was always keen to try and document graffiti in a way that combined the tagger’s artistic sensibilities with my own. Not entirely sure how successful I’ve been – it’s always a challenge, evaluating your own work – but I’m quite fond of how this image turned out.

On the south side of Tucson, where faded murals and rusted boxcars sit under the desert sun, I always know where to go to find interesting textures to photograph. I hope you enjoy today’s picture of the day.

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January 22, 2017 – Blood Box

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Back to the old obsession.

I can’t really justify it, and I typically don’t spend a terrible amount of time at home mapping-out symbolism and structure to my series, but that’s just the way it goes. On the surface it might sound unwise, haphazard, and foolish for a visual artist to operate almost entirely from instinct – and that’s probably an accurate assessment. But I hate the stuffy pretensions and relentless insistence that everything has to mean a specific thing. I’ve never been the kind of creator that felt the need to bludgeon his audience with ideas of how they ought to feel about the images he makes.

Half the time I don’t even have a vague idea why I’m drawn to certain types of imagery. I walk around with my camera discover interesting objects and textures, and I make pictures of them. Over time, themes bubble to the surface and I spend some time looking at these themes and I try just as hard as anybody else might – probably harder – to try and figure out what it is that draws me to certain subjects.

Electrical boxes, storefronts, garbage bins, and gas meters? They attract me. Could they be symbols of our interconnectedness – interlocking roadways, an electrical grid, a dependence on natural gas? Maybe that’s what it is. Is it the uniform right angles, the unnatural ninety-degree angle that divides us from the rest of the natural world? Sure. Why not, right? Whatever the seed is for this curiosity, I find these things incredibly fascinating, and I’ve been thinking about them and photographing them for over a decade.

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January 21, 2017 – Blades of Grass

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I always love it when a completely candid photograph manages to look thoroughly manicured and staged. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes the light is just good, the subject is in just the right place, and the resulting photograph winds up with wonderful color and texture.

This, obviously, is a piece that’s intended to be appreciated on its purely aesthetic merits. There’s no lesson or philosophy here, other than a very broad appreciation of nature and color. I had gotten up in the morning to start the day off with a hike up in the hills and noticed that the desert was quickly coming back to life. It was springtime and we had received some decent rain, and the dry, straw-colored desert landscape was turning green.

I hope you enjoy!

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January 20, 2017 – Monsoon In Arizona

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Sometimes you just get lucky.

While living in Bisbee, Arizona, up on the hilltop on High Road (an appropriate name for a road in a town known for it’s debauchery and drinking and weed smoking), I sat on the wrap-around deck and looked across the canyon toward ‘B Hill.’ I was home sick with strep throat, and a monsoon storm rolled through town, dumping rain and lighting on our scenic little corner of the cosmos. I set up my tripod and started snapping at the rainbow, thinking it might be a fun image for our liberal little town.

Bisbee is know for it’s raucous gay pride weekend, it’s open and accepting politics, it’s unique character. The first microbrewery in the entire state of Arizona was opened in Bisbee, and Bisbee was the first municipality in the state to legalize gay marriage – a symbolic victory, of course, as these marriages were only considered valid within the city limits at that time.

A rainbow over Bisbee seemed like it’d be a fun picture, naturally.

But then I captured this, and I was awe-struck. I’ve never been a storm chaser or a lightning photographer, but the composition was so astonishing and accidental, I absolutely had to share it. I hope you enjoy.

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January 19, 2017 – Waterfront

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I’ve often said that with certain types of photography all you have to do is let nature do the hard work. We have all the necessary technology to document the beautiful moments – all one has to do is open their eyes, recognize that the moment is occurring, and use their tools to document it. Sure, it’s a simplistic view, but it isn’t far from the truth. Most photographers are witnesses with useful tools. When we aren’t creating tableaux – constructing scenes with actors and makeup and wardrobe and artificial light – we are witnesses doing little else than capturing happenstance moments.

This was one of those moments. It’s a scene that hundreds of people walk by every single day, and I don’t doubt that many of them take pause, look across the water, and appreciate the view. I don’t doubt that this exact photograph has been made several times over. But this image is mine. It was a great day, walking down the streets of a strange town.

What I have noticed, as a photographer, is that my best moments, almost always, are experienced alone.

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January 18, 2017 – Pixel Art and Cross Stitch

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It may come as a surprise to those that know me, but I actually have always had an affinity for cross-stitch. Recently, I took up the craft after a fifteen-year hiatus. I was introduced to this in a middle-school Home Economics class, and I even made an elaborate composition of a pheasant in flight for my father (who is a hunting enthusiast) for Christmas.

What I hadn’t considered, until very recently, is that cross-stitch is essentially the analogue version of pixel art. I began making pixel art in the early 1990s when I received a Super Nintendo for Christmas. Along with the console, my parents gave me a cartridge of Mario Paint, a game which allows the user to make stamps in a pixel-grid. This appealed to my meticulous – some might say obsessive compulsive – nature.

The image above depicts the trio of character from ‘The Big Lebowski,’ one of my favorite cult films. I’ve been making lots of patterns and decided to open an online shop to display and sell my pixel art and cross-stitch patterns. I hope you check it out.

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January 17, 2017 – Red White Blue

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This is an abandoned image from a series I wanted to make called “Compositions In Red, White, And Blue.” The conceit was simple enough – I wanted to find objects and textures in various states of decay that, as the name indicates, carry the colors of our national flag. The implicit message in the series is the death of the so-called American Dream.

I wanted to make sure that I approached the project from a minimalist and abstract perspective because I wasn’t entirely concerned with the series being purely political. The political message was always intended to be implied; I also wanted the images to be aesthetically satisfying to look at and work as stand-alone pieces.

I really like this composition, and and hope that you do, too.

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January 16, 2017 – Snow Field

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What better way to embrace the winter than by making photographs and artwork that celebrate it? We’re in that stretch of winter where things often start to really slow down; I know a lot of people who dread the upcoming February storms. I left the Midwest to escape the cold, but whenever I return I feel as though I have a much deeper appreciation for the natural beauty of the Plains States, as flat and sparse as the landscapes often are.

We always take a little bit of our home town with us when we leave.

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