Tag Archives: photography

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 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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January 15, 2017 – Rusted Car

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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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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 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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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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