Just added a complete edit of the Diving Bell work to my site that the folks at Luceo helped me put together earlier this week. Really appreciated everyone’s comments on this stuff and would like to invite you all to see the final product here.
Tags : Colorado, LARP, Polaroid, portraits | 6 comments
Had the chance to photograph Live Action Role Playing (LARPing) yesterday in mountain park just outside Conifer, Colorado. No doubt this vein of activity is photographer crack, something so outrageously visual that it’s almost too overwhelming to step out of the car. I spent a good portion of my time yesterday learning how the game works, a task that I think could take me a few more visits before the rules sink in.
Another nice little tip from the Eyeosaur folks. Rumor has it that they just finalized their distribution agreement for their newest full length documentary, Wesley Willis’s Joyrides. Keep an eye out.
Luceo’s own Tim Lytvinenko has been a creative force in recent days, turning out a couple of fun, little stop motion shorts. He’s on a cross-country trip right now, due in my home-city of Denver any day now, as he makes his way from Raleigh to San Francisco with his partner at Well Done Media. Anyhow, the shorts are fun and it’d be criminal not to share.
Finally made it back to Colorado after a week of sleeping in the back of this strange rental car. My little diving bell. The last set of photographs comes from the return trip, Riverton, Wyoming all the way to the Colorado border. All the stuff I was shooting when I wasn’t shooting the stuff I was sent to Wyoming to photograph in the first place. The route passes through the almost-ghost town of Jeffrey City, pictured above, a little municipality that was centered on the cold war Uranium boom. When the Uranium market collapsed, the mine was closed and the population left with it. All that remains today are about 100 people, dozens of foundations and trailer hook-ups, empty mine worker housing, a block of empty commercial buildings, a church, and a bar. Also along the way, Muddy Gap, Rawlins, Laramie, and another handful of towns.
Took my diving bell through an oil field south of Riverton on the Wind River Reservation this afternoon.
Tags : bull, car window, cow, riverton, wyoming | 3 comments
I left Denver last night at 11pm. An all-night drive to Wyoming. Or at least as much as I could do on truck stop coffee. Ended up making it to a rest area outside of Riverton just as the sun was starting to come up, something that I took to be a sign that I better stop for some sleep before the new day started. I rented a car for this trip since my proud, old truck is somehow hanging on to the same clutch after more than 185,000 miles. It’s going to go sometime soon and I’m not too keen on the idea of trying to swap out clutches in a Wyoming parking lot.
The back seats of the rental folded flat to make a nice little bed so I kicked out my sleeping bag in the back of the car and set about to getting some sleep. Through my closed eyelids I watched as the moonlight gave way to the deep blues of the pre-dawn. The madrugada. It’s not so much the golden hour that I’ve been drawn to lately, but that hour or two before the sun comes up when the sky glows like a dull electric-blue furnace. The tones are quiet and the landscape is quiet and everything seems like it is enjoying its short moment of peace before the tumult of the day is upon it. I sat up, exhausted but unable to sleep, peeking out the windows of the peculiar car, their inset into the body of the automobile making them appear as awkward maritime port-holes. Lost in a sleepless haze, the metaphor seemed appropriate. It is how we travel, always peeking through a window into another world that is not completely ours, those foreign places we pass by at 65 mph, rapid-fire zoo exhibits, places we imagine as much as we experience.