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 15, 2017 – Rusted Car

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rusted-carpostFINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE
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OTHER ‘IMAGE OF THE DAY’ PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE

Today’s image – like most of them – is pretty self-explanatory. I mean, it’s photography, right?

Usually – but hey, not necessarily always – it’s almost always obvious what a photographic image is actually of. Even a brickwork of primary-colored Mondrian tiles is imbued with subtext and pregnant with meaning. So why not a portrait of a rusted heap, rotting in the desert like a disposed of beer can baking under the sun?

But it isn’t my job to tell anybody how they’re supposed to feel about an image like this. Much of my work, I’ve been told, carries with it, or conveys, a certain ambivalence. This isn’t even halfway close to true. I compose my images carefully, but I’m not concerned, at least not at all times, with being explicit with personal meanings. Ambiguity allows for different experiences, and I think that ambiguity can be a very powerful tool when creating artwork – especially photographic artwork, which is often disregarded as an easy, unimportant happenstance that occurs between the photographer and whatever happens to fall before his or her camera lens.

I am drawn to textures, contrasts, and colors. And I love the camera’s ability to take everyday objects and completely re-frame them. We all know what a car is – wheels and a seat, a hood and door-handles. But when we encounter cars in our day-to-day lives, we’re always taking in the whole thing. It’s a familiar object and, because of its familiarity, it’s easy to disregard. But when you look at the details, the scratches, the design of the body, the wear on the upholstery, the scuffs on the tires, something else emerges. I wouldn’t want to give that ‘something’ a name, really, but the camera has given me, if nobody else that looks at my photographs, the ability to recognize absolutely insane beauty in the unutterably mundane.

In a world filled with cars – to an almost sickening degree – I was walking down the road and saw the age and rust on this particular vehicle, and I was drawn to it. So…I dunno. Do with that anecdote what you will.

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January 14, 2017 – The Hilltop Cross

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Today I stumbled across an old photo, taken during the first few months I had lived in Bisbee, Arizona. It’s a mile-high historic town where one of the largest copper mining operations in the world existed. On a, 80 story hilltop overlooking the canyons the comprise most of the town is a makeshift shrine, evidently constructed by a single individual, who hauled mortar and supplies up the trail to the top of the hill, one small load at a time.

The folks that live in town have added to the shrine their own little flourishes. Candles, prayer flags, and sculptures have slowly accumulated, and the cross at the top of the hill kind of belongs to the whole community now. Even in the tumult of my last few months in Bisbee, with a flagging relationship and commensurate flagging reputation among some hostile locals, I always found peace hiking up into the hills to look at the view and be alone with my thoughts.

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January 13, 2017 – Painted Bricks

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OTHER ‘IMAGE OF THE DAY’ PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE

This is another image from a whole, hard-drive consuming series of reductionist, minimalist compositions I’ve made during my ‘urban hikes.’ I made most of these in Tucson, while I was attending university, but I’ve found myself looking at bricks and paint, electrical boxes and telephone wires, and the intersection of all these lines.

I still very much enjoy working in this mode, although it’s very obvious that the audiences is, at best, limited. But that won’t stop me. This kind of imagery is a pure joy to create.

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January 12, 2017 – Abstractions

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Today’s image is a throw-back to a years-long phase in my development as a photographic artist. After working at The Center For Creative photography, I became unapologetically obsessed with the works of Aaron Siskind and Minor White and Beaumont Newhall. I had never considered the camera as an effective device to make abstract images (in the most literal sense, cameras can only document actual object that are actually in front of the lens, so the idea of ‘abstraction’ is counter-intuitive), but began seeking out compositions, colors, and textures.

I spent most of my free time walking around Tucson – where I lived at that time – looking behind dumpsters, in the more colorful and decrepit neighborhoods, behind shops, and through alleyways. Chipped paint, graffiti, rusted metal – these became my obsession.

Whenever I feel like I’m struggling with a creative idea, I know I can always take an urban hike with my camera and find something interesting. This image came from an alley in Flagstaff, Arizona. I was on a road trip with my girlfriend and, as most photographers do, I tortured her with my constant detours. This is, for reasons I’m not entirely able to articulate, one of my favorite captures from that visit.

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January 11, 2017 – Clouds

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I moved back to the desert for a reason. This is one of many.

There’s a quality to the light, to the landscape and skies, that amazed me when I first moved here sixteen years ago. I love the monsoon rains, the mountains, the clouds. They say that nature does all of the hard work, and all you have to do is be there to capture it. There’s some truth to that. But it’s so easy to take our experiences for granted. When we see the same landscape, the same sky, the same friends, the same lover – when we see it every day, we appreciate it less.

Being an artist is recognizing this tendency, and never taking anything for granted.

This is all temporary, and it’s all incredibly amazing. I love being here, and I am in love with life.

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January 10, 2017 – The Sunflower

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I was born and raised in Kansas – the sunflower state. I had to leave, of course, once I turned eighteen and needed to head out into the world. The politics are infuriating, and the landscape is flat, and this adventurous spirit needed a whole other kind of infuriating politics – and he needed mountains. He needed overbearing heat with a guarantee of no snow days. That’s what Arizona has done for me.

Strangely, I see more sunflowers in Arizona than I ever really did in Kansas. Every time I see them growing wild, off the side of the highway, I am reminded of my home state. Not the awkward chubby adolescent years or the embarrassing first kiss or the struggles. I’m reminded of friendly people at the gas station, and warm faces during the holidays, of leaves crunching beneath my feet and the crackle of a campground fire pit, and the smell of burning leaves.

I’ll always miss Kansas, even though I’ll never recapture those long-ago memories.

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January 09, 2017 – The Love Of A Good Woman

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cass-reclining-blogFINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE
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Making art is like writing a love song to the beauty of…being alive. No artist was ever inspired to scratch graphite onto paper or lay pigment onto canvas who wasn’t in love, or devastated by sorrow, with the miracle of being alive, sentient, able to experience all of the landscapes and views, colors and splendor.

Making art with a loved one is transcendent.

The painful part is when love fails. I have a catalogue of photographs, drawings, paintings, of all of the women I have loved in my life. When the relationship fails there are hard feelings and bittersweet memories, and we tend to tell stories of the mayhem and anger and frustration – but I have all of these documents of the good times, and I can’t deny that those good times actually happened.

It kinda keeps you honest, you know? We want to paint a picture of that jerk, that dysfunctional person, that demon – but at the end of the day, we were once in love with them, weren’t we? And social media is extending this, where we can all look back at the jobs that were lost, relationships that ended, sunrises and sunsets that we will never see again.

I am nostalgic about yesterday, for God’s sake. I am riddled with sadness, almost all of the time. Because, at the end of the day, it has all been good, and memorable, and inspiring. And I continue to make artwork and celebrate the experiences I’ve had with those that are close to me, because I have to believe that maybe this time the story will last longer, that feelings won’t turn sour, that the world is going to be okay, make sense, turn out okay.

That’s how I feel when I am with this woman. I feel light. And I feel comforted. And I feel inspired. And there’s no greater feeling than having the love of a good woman. No greater feeling at all.

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January 08, 2017 – Skull

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One of the things I love the most about photography is that the camera lens has the ability to reveal things that we would otherwise not ever notice. Infrared sensors (and infrared film) and macro lenses, much like the microscope and the telescope, reveal whole worlds that exist beyond our natural senses.

Sometimes, when I’m at a loss, I take a deep breath and put on my magnifiers. There’s a whole universe of textures, colors, insects, and fascinating patterns, all within five feet of where you are. Take the time to look, and you’ll be surprised.

This detail photograph of a cow’s skull reminds me of the grand canyon – the striated lines and the textures are reminiscent of a craggy peak. This isn’t the first time I’ve done up-close studies of skeletal remains, and it probably won’t be the last.

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January 07, 2017 – Sunset

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OTHER ‘IMAGE OF THE DAY’ PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE

Landscape photography is about as old as photography itself – it has reached a level of cliche that’s hard to escape. At the same time, it isn’t the easiest art-form, either. We all have friends who have taken that ‘epic’ sunset photograph, replete with power lines and ugly houses in the foreground that completely distract from the colors, the clouds, and the experience.

I’m not a naysayer – I love that we all have cameras in our pockets, on our phones, that allow us to document majestic moments. But this doesn’t make us all artists. There’s something to be said about composition, intent, and execution. Cameras allow us all to be witnesses to nature’s majesty, but that doesn’t make us all artists. What I love about camera technology is that it hints at the possibility that we all CAN be artists – the tools to make exciting images are completely democratized, totally universal and, as I already mentioned, in each and every one of our pockets.

Get out there, guys. Keep your eyes open. Make something. Nature does all of the heavy lifting – all you have to do is recognize the beauty, pick up your camera, and give it a go.

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January 06, 2017 – The Landscape

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After living in Kansas City for over a year, it feels so good being back in the desert, where I belong. There’s nothing like an Arizona sunrise. At every hour, there are wonderful things to photograph, mountains to hike, winding roads to drive down. This, to me, is paradise.

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