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I leave this image of the day with a simple quote I stumbled across – a quote that very accurately describes how I feel when I pick up my camera and head out into the city to see what I might find.
“No place is boring if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.”
— Robert Adams
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Downtown Tucson is divided into the Presidio District, Barrio Viejo, and the Congress Street Arts and Entertainment District. You could throw a rock from one end and hit the other. But the old barrio is filled with old adobe mud-brick buildings and other rustic reminders of Tucson’s past. In the shadow of some of downtown’s taller office buildings and hotels, the neighborhood is strangely quiet, despite the fact that one could walk three blocks north or east and find themselves smack in the middle of the Rio Nuevo bar and restaurant scene.
This is a unique place, one I like to visit often, and home to a number of supremely talented artists, musicians, and other eclectic Tucson personalities.
This photograph was made using a vintage Yashica-D Twin Lens Reflex, a 1960’s-era medium format film camera. I just loaded some new film into the old beast, after several years, and started making new pictures. I look forward to sharing them with you.
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The difficulty with making anything that could even closely be mistaken for art is that art is entirely subjective. We live in a highly interconnected world, and there are volumes of online videos, written articles, marketing books, and web pages dedicated to “hacking” yourself into financial success. That’s fine, except it reduces art to a craft – identify your niche in the market, and then do nothing but the same thing, over and over and over again until it’s time to retire.
There’s a lot of beautiful work made by incredibly talented people who adopt this model of marketing, but I can’t quite seem to hop aboard. I don’t want to sit down, do some social media research, and then spend the rest of my life making different versions of the same picture. I suppose this is why I haven’t ever struck it rich as a creative professional – but I’m definitely satisfied when I finish a piece.
This is the newest image in a series that I started about a decade ago, called ‘An Antique Land,’ a line borrowed from Percy Shelley’s poem. To me, this series of architectural ‘portraits’ taps into the impermanence of our communities. But I prefer not to comment much beyond that; I don’t like to tell people what to think about this kind of work. My interpretation, or my intent, doesn’t imbue this images with significance. I like the idea of people looking at this kind of work and bringing their own ideas to the table.
Until next time, folks. I’ll be seeing you soon.
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”
— Diane Arbus
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I make a lot of pictures that don’t necessarily mean anything. My intent isn’t evident, and I have no specific audience in mind. I just see something that captivates me, often the ignored and banal details of our everyday lives, and I make the picture, I secure the image, I file the document away for future study.
I think a lot of photographers feel that way – that their work doesn’t necessarily have any intrinsic value in the exact moment that they made the picture. But there’s this strange sense that it might mean something to somebody, someday in the future. It’s like a contract with a shadow figure. It’s faith. I’m not a religious person, and I don’t believe in an afterlife. Photography is the closest thing to faith that I will ever have.
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
— Dorothea Lange
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Beyond photography and illustration, I also spend a lot of time tinkering with personal projects. I could write a book about the shenanigans on Capital Hill, but I’ll let the professional news outlets do that. I feel like this image speaks for itself.
Whatever your own personal beliefs may be, I still predict that history will not favor this man.
Good night, and good luck.
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One of my favorite things to do is train my camera on the ground. It’s painfully easy to walk around your own neighborhood and find absolutely nothing interesting. And hell – It’s completely natural for the places we spend the most of our time to become completely innocuous to us. Looking through the camera lens is a way to help renew one’s vision. There are amazing things all around, just waiting to be discovered. You just have to have the eyes and the right mindset to see.
“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
— Alfred Stieglitz
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This is one of my more elaborate designs from this series. The textures and compositions of back-alleys – behind store fronts, grease traps from restaurants, and rusted dumpsters – have always fascinated me. These are the areas we ignore, behind the neon and spruced-up facade of our local shopping centers, and I like taking my camera to the places that are right there, practically right in front of us, but that we ignore.
I will likely be publishing this as a completed series sometime soon, so please to check back in if you find these interesting.
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This is a throwback to several years ago, to a project I desperately want to pick back up again. At the time, I was hoping to illustrate all of the Major Arcana in the standard Tarot deck. It was an ambitious project to say the least, and it quickly fell by the wayside as other developments arose in my life. My unfinished pieces have been taunting me, however, and I think I will be paying them a visit in the near future.
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This is about as abstract as abstract photography gets. In fact, this image could hardly be called photography, save for the fact that it was constructed using photographic paper and photo developing chemicals. Beyond photography, I woul venture to describe these kinds of images as “chemical paintings.”
Anybody who has worked in a darkroom knows that, at one point or another, the artist is going to accidentally expose an entire box of photo paper – and once light hits your photo paper it’s useless to draw traditional prints from.
I began to experiment with photo paper, using paintbrushes to paint photo developer onto ruined paper to see what kind of patterns I could create. In this instance, I took exposed paper (which would simply turn pure black if submerged into developer), and poured india ink into the developing bath, expecting the milky clouds of ink to slow the light from penetrating through and altering the final result. I would then lift the partially developed print and dunk it immediately into the fixer bath to stop the developing process in its tracks before the whole print turned solid black. I wound up with a serious of these nebulous abstractions, which I would then apply colored dyes to.
I really enjoy how this series turned out. I would love to know what you think of the image, and the process.
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Welcome to February. It’s the month when we’re all over it – the holidays, the cold, the relentless winter. This is the last long stretch until the earth starts to really wake up and remind us that it was worth the wait. It’s a long month, but we find a way to survive it, year after year, because that’s what we do. We endure it, and we wait for the green grass and the warm sun and the spring (and summer) rains.
We have this curious tendency to always make comparisons. To always focus on how things are imperfect. To always look to the future, when things are finally – finally! – going to be better.
For about two weeks after its arrival, we love spring. We rejoice in the weather and the light and the lengthening days. But then the heat of summer looms over on the horizon – and the oak mites and mosquito bites – and we immediately start to fixate on the colors of autumn and the warm friendly gatherings around the backyard fire as the earth begins to cool again, the smell of burning leaves, the cool breeze drifting in from the cracked window that makes it possible once again to clutch your partner close in bed without waking up bathed in sweat in the middle of the night because it’s so damn hot. We obsess over our elaborate Halloween decorations, our friends and family gathered around the Thanksgiving table, the wine and conversation as we gather around the fireplace.
Some like it cold. Some like it hot. Most of us find some silly reason to hate what we have, and yearn for what’s coming next. That’s the big mistake.
Rubbing my cold feet together, sitting in front of the computer tonight, I came across this picture – a flooded street in the warehouse district on South Euclid Avenue in Tucson, Arizona. Deprived of water and rainfall for most of the year, the monsoon rains that descend upon the Mojave Desert in July are a welcome reprieve from the oppressive summer heat. But the streets flood and the mosquitoes proliferate. The joy is short-lived and the complaints begin, almost instantly. And I just don’t get it. It happens every year, so it isn’t as if some kind of mysterious plague has blown into town that we couldn’t have expected.
A biblical flood in the desert? It’s more of a miracle than it is a curse, even if your commute is inconvenienced.
Life in the desert is a life of extremes. Freezing weather during the winter nights and oppressive heat during the summer. I feel like this is the perfect environment to develop a genuine appreciation for how fragile life is, how frail our ecosystem. When I’m freezing cold, or when I can’t seem to cool down (and want to dump ice water over myself), I try to concentrate on the engine of change, and the stubborn human spirit that stares the changing seasons down like a twitching-trigger-finger cowboy in an old western duel.
We endure. And there is so much more worth loving than there is worth complaining about here.
Without mincing words, all I can say is this: I fucking love living in the Tucson desert.
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