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Wrapped up my work late last night and went out to catch a haunted house party that some friends had been working on all day. The house wound around through a maze of oddities, terminating at the back of the building in a little garage space where a few bands finished up the night. Stuck around for Warren Bedell’s band, Spellcaster. The damn Pharaoh hat thing made my night.
Heading out tomorrow morning for the Comanche National Grasslands in far southeastern Colorado to photograph a deer hunt. The camp ground itself is roughly 10 miles from the Oklahoma panhandle, 30 from northern Texas, and 20 from both Kansas and New Mexico respectively. It’s about as close as the west gets to east coast proximity.
Cell service is sparse. I will be checking and returning messages each morning and again in the evening.
Click below to see photographs from a hunt in southeastern Colorado last year.
I’ve been absent from my blog for almost two weeks. Partly because I’ve been working on finishing up a hefty grant application, partly because Luceo is a matter of days from making a couple exciting announcements, and partly because of editorial embargoes on material that’s sitting in the queue. The latter is what’s been holding up this post.
Two months ago I travelled to Jackson, Wyoming for U.S. News & World Report to spend a day photographing Patagonia Sportswear founder Yvon Chouinard in his (unsurprisingly) modest cabin at the foot of the Tetons. Chouinard is featured in the magazine’s Best Leaders edition (here). I’ve been familiar his company’s unique and forward-looking business model since 2002, when my Montana-based fire crew would travel through the town of Dillon where one of the Company’s outlet stores is located. For a bunch of people who derived their entire livelihood from being in the outdoors, the outlet came to us in the same way that a leisure suit multiplex would come to a busload of used car salesmen. Pure gold.
The thing that has always intrigued me about the company is its ability to be congruent, to stay afloat without putting its soul up for sale. Chouinard, a wealthy but unobtrusive man, has managed to do just that, building a network of businesses that give 1% of their annual sales to grass roots environmental organizations. It’s a nice mixture of business savvy tethered by less flexible ideals. U.S. News writer Kent Garber fills that idea out a bit here:
Chouinard has put environmental activism at the forefront of his company. In 1994, in fact, he threatened to walk away from Patagonia after learning that cotton from industrial farming which figured in 20 percent of the company’s sales, required all sorts of toxic chemicals and was devastating for Earth. “I said, ‘I don’t want to be in business if I have to use this product.’ ” He gave the company 18 months to switch completely to organic cotton.
Suffice it to say, I thoroughly enjoyed this assignment and left feeling like the challenges of Patagonia really aren’t that different from the challenges facing the editorial world. You know, the problem of having high ideals, a changing marketplace, and trouble bridging that gap without sacrificing something along the way. This, however, is a discussion for another post.
I photographed this assignment for editor and friend Avi Gupta. It’s rare that I feel compelled to drop editor names into a blog post, but this time there’s something interesting to share related to the process. I am a wholehearted fan and supporter of Avi’s method, which he shared with me in a conversation over the summer. He describes editing photographs as trying to help hone the photographer’s message –not rework it. If photographers look at each of their pictures as being words or phrases in a larger sentence, the role of the photo editor is somewhat analogous to our other half on the text side. The print editor tunes up grammar, tightens the sentence structure, and helps develop the message of the writer. They don’t ask for the entire lexicon the writer considered using in a sentence and (ideally) they don’t undo the writer’s underlying message in favor of their own. Avi’s process is interesting insofar as it approaches photography as a sophisticated form of communication and respects photographers for their unique perspectives. He’s definitely not alone in that approach, but he is the first editor that I’ve heard describe the process in such a clear fashion.
Avi took a day’s portrait assignment and turned it into a little gallery that contextualizes Chouinard in a way that I’m really happy with. You can see the magazine’s gallery online, here, or click below and see the pictures on the blog.
This weekend was marked by Denver’s first snow of the season, a blast of cold that came almost three weeks before its more traditional appearance on Halloween Eve. For anyone not familiar with my bad winter attitude, I love the west. I hate the snow. Really, I hate the tiny snows, the little flurries that pass through town, freeze my green garden, cause people to drive at a fraction of the speed limit, and make the outdoors a less pleasant place to spend time. I’d trade a winter’s worth of flurries for two or three days of real, honest blizzard. You know, the kind of snow that reminds you how small you are, that packs your front door closed and shuts down the city for days at a time. If Father Winter’s gonna hit you, I kinda feel like the only honorable way to deliver the disrespect is in the form of a knockout punch.
Anything less is a waste of time.
I’m just speculating, but I suspect Zach’s van may have shared my sentiments as it huffed its dying breath. In its own quiet effort to rage, rage against the dying the of the (summer) light, it lit on fire yesterday. Unexplained and spontaneous, it went out with a final fiery finger to the cold weather that had settled in on the city. The fire consumed the front part of the van, the back part of Zach’s fence, and all the crappy snow that surrounded it. It’s sad to see the old beast go, but good to see it go down swinging.
Had one of the more interesting and challenging assignments that took up the better part of last week. The piece was to focus on Najibullah Zazi, the alleged Afghan-born terror plotter with deep roots in both Colorado and New York. More specifically, the photographs needed to focus on the Colorado places significant to the plot. The challenge of the assignment was one of finding pictures to illustrate the mundane, bedroom community where he resided before his arrest. Complicating the assignment was the fact that the subject of the article had already been extradited, precluding most of the obvious images.
It doesn’t take a Susan Sontag to figure out that there are certain things that photographers gravitate towards and certain things that they don’t. Aurora, Colorado is not one of them. And the part of it that Zazi lived in, even less so. Whitebread, tract housing perched on the shore of the great plains, Aurora is little more than houses stacked on houses stacked on strip malls, with a sprinkling of apartments. Zazi himself lived in one of the newest parts of the city (technically Centennial, Colorado) in a gated apartment complex just a stone’s throw from one of the area’s newest commercial experiments, a gigantic outdoor mall with a town square-styled epicenter, surrounded by boutique stores, restaurants, a cinema, and all the warehouse-sized stores that the developer could fit onto the land. To the south, a golf course. East, a reservoir catering to suburban recreation. And, of course, the great, flat plains.
Not exactly the kind of seedy, dark, underworld you’d expect Bin Laden’s protégés to be hanging in. Even after the alleged purchase of the hair-care supplies needed to build the bomb, Zazi is reported to have checked himself into Homestead Studio Suites, a nondescript chain of pleasantly colored and landscaped extended-stay kitchenettes. You know, the kind of place a visiting manager would stay while he set up a new office branch. Boring. Safe. Beige.
So the assignment took me on a short tour of suburbia, dodging security guards hired to protect the hotel’s image, trying to figure out how to make a picture of a gated apartment with management not too keen on the negative press brought by the scandal. All this capped off with the warehouse that sold the chemicals and a smattering of reportage from the land of the nondescript.
In the end, I found a nice group of apartment residents to host me for the 80’s/Madonna-themed 40th Birthday party of resident Jennifer Williams. After all, it’s not trespassing if you are a guest. For all the hassle of getting turned down by the apartment managers, a little bit of patience and a little bit of luck put me in touch with something that really showcased how normal Zazi’s host community is. A few more days of traipsing through the four wheel trails cut onto the plains (just out of reach of Aurora’s eastward expansion), a visit to the reservoir, and some properly timed appearances at the Beauty Supply Warehouse, and the essay on all things mundane was ready to go.
Originally slated for a several page spread, the Afghanistan War bumped the layout to something a bit shorter. Still, the folks at Time are among some of the most talented and supportive in the business. I’m proud of what ran and happy to see some of the additional work that popped up in the Time.com edit of the photographs.
The article is available here. Time’s online essay can be viewed here.
Did a quick shoot for The Wall Street Journal last week featuring the Shearn family for an article on buying ‘distressed properties’ The Shearns purchased their seven bedroom home in Cherry Hills Village, an exclusive, gated suburb of Denver, for more than $900,000 below it’s original list price. The house sold for slightly less than 1.3 million dollars as a short sale, a pre-foreclosure type of transaction that allows the bank and the troubled seller to move the property before repossession. The bank takes the proceeds of the sale, usually less than the outstanding balance on the property, in order to avoid the expense and burden of foreclosure proceedings.
The full article can be viewed here.
Luceo will be presenting for the latest Open-i Webinar tomorrow morning at 15:00 GMT (that’s eleven, for you east coasters). The webinar will last one hour and will be in conjunction with Nophoto, Drik, and Wéyo. More information about the webinar is available on facebook here or anyone wishing to just log in and join the conversation can do so here.
Made a quick round-trip to Albuquerque this weekend. Ended up stumbling into –er, more of around –the Balloon Fiesta on the trip back to Denver. Mostly US 285, a less circuitous (and more interesting route) than the interstate. ABQ, bypassing Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Ojo Caliente, Antonito, Monte Vista, Salida, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, reaching darkness around the Arkansas River. Everything south of the Arkansas and west of the 100th Meridian was ceded by Mexico to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, sprinkling a huge portion of southern Colorado and all of New Mexico with a bit of Mexico (the older).