I recently participated in an online presentation on collecting photography and approaching galleries. It was hosted by an active photography collector, not a creator, and she had an interesting perspective. There were a little over two hundred participants, and a vast number, just based on the questions after the talk, were photographers wanting to know one thing. How to be seen.
Read MoreThe air is crisp and cool. A frost coats the rocks and grasses as I walk past in the early morning. At ten thousand feet my lungs feel the effort already and the sun hasn’t risen yet. The deep blue light reveals little: the edge of the high ridgeline above me with its blanket of stars sparkling above, the dark yellow of aspen along the trail, the long still lake off to my right. It’s autumn in the High Sierra, October 17, 2023.
Read MoreAs in life, as in art. The Japanese call it ‘ma’, the artistic interpretation of this negative space. It makes sense in a culture where artistic reduction is paramount, from haiku to bonsai. We in the west don’t have a definitive term for it, the closest is negative space. But calling it negative implies something unfavorable, almost contrary, and this is falsehood.
Read MoreThe moments in a day, in a week, that link together in unforeseen ways.
Read MoreThe morning silence is broken by voices and clomping boots. Humans. Fellow species maybe, but I’ve moved on with the ravens and pinion pine to some other place. A place without plastic pens and coffee shipped halfway around the world. I’m sitting in a little stone cleft, just off the trail. I should rub this pink and red and family dust all over me to blend in and disappear. I don’t need to, they walk past without saying anything. Engrossed with their own conversation, their voices carry down canyon awhile before the stillness envelopes me once again.
Read MoreTo be mad for the thing. Mad and obsessed. Obsession is a dangerous vice to those without something creative to say. To those with something to say, it is the blood of life itself. All art is this madness. But be careful, if it tips too far, if the dance is too much, you may not like what you find, too bad
Read MoreSolitude is not the same as loneliness. One is a state of being, the other a reaction to circumstance. That humans are social animals is not refuted, but what social animal doesn’t need, at times, to disappear with themselves, to go out into the wilderness, to find the good, healthy air.
Read MoreThe year doesn’t matter, it’s the scene that’s important. Subtly is hard to capture. It can border prosaic, almost boring. But, if exercised with artistic intention, in a way that conveys mystery and expresses story then these understated images can transcend entertainment.
Read MoreAfter five days of Sierra wilderness I exited with a bout of stomach and fatigue issues I’ve not felt in the 23 years I’ve been tramping these mountains, most likely stemming from bad water I drank early in the hike. Humility in the face of unforeseen circumstances, unattachment indeed, but not uncaring. I should also mention that I will be filtering water from now on.
Read MoreWhen I initially crafted this project last summer I didn’t know what the output would be but I purposely stripped away modern convenience by leaving behind all electronics and simplified my tools in the form of a pinhole camera and a blank journal to help facilitate creativity.
Read MoreSome people come into your life and flit away with the softest of breezes. Matt came into my life like a bullfighter, edged with raw intensity and when he was around everything was brighter.
Read MoreI turned ten years old the day my father wrote that in one of his journals, he was 44 years old, the age I am today. I received a 10-speed bike that day, now rusting in some landfill.
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