Audubon Magazine, the Society’s bi-monthly publication, recently ran photographs from an assignment I shot for them in early September.  The project focused on the Haverfield family and their struggles with the county in which their cattle ranch sits.  The family has been embroiled in a long-running war over the presence of prairie dogs on their ranch. They are part of growing group of cattle ranchers that are pro-prairie dog.  They believe that prairie dogs contribute to increased biodiversity on their property, enabling them to graze their cattle in a fashion that mimics the movement and grazing patterns of pre-settlement buffalo.  Healthier grazing plots mean increased productivity.  But that, according to the Haverfields, requires the help of prairie dogs.

Needless to say, they are not exactly the most popular people in old school western Kansas.  The county, particularly county commissioner Carl Ulrich, contends that prairie dogs are a nuisance and should be eradicated. Many of the Haverfields’ neighbors feel the same way. In recent years, the county has exterminated prairie dogs from the Haverfield property using a number of methods, including gas and poison, before sending them the bill. The Haverfields have discovered a number of ’secondary kill’ animals, carcasses of birds and mammals that have eaten the poisoned prairie dogs and subsequently been killed themselves. Complicating matters, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has recently re-introduced endangered black footed ferrets onto the land, a natural predator of the prairie dogs. This move has heightened tensions between neighbors and led to a series of legal maneuvers on both sides to control the spread of the prairie dogs as well as the ferrets.

Ted Williams, Audubon Magazine’s writer for the piece, explains the situation in detail on the magazine’s site.  Particularly troubling is the county’s choice to use the highly controversial poison, Rozol, in their pursuit of a scorched-earth approach to prairie dogs.  The article is available here.  Get a cup of coffee for this one.  It’s worth the read.

MORE PHOTOS

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.

MORE PHOTOS

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.

MORE PHOTOS

Been so busy with other work lately that I’ve found myself with quite a backlog of material to share from recent weeks.  The easiest pieces to check off are the bits that have been published, including this shoot of a young Colorado girl who is one of tens of thousands of immigrant-children who stand to be positively impacted by the passage of the federal DREAM Act this fall.  The Act comes before both chambers of Congress and essentially affords children of ‘good moral character’ who have been in the United States for more than five years and who have graduated from an American high school a path towards permanent residency.  Their residency hinges on completion of either college education or military service.

For immigrants with the academic credentials to attend college, the DREAM Act affords them the opportunity for in-state tuition as well as federal student loans (two things currently unavailable under federal law).  The biggest tragedy of the status quo is that an estimated 65,000 immigrant-students graduate high school each year and are unable to attend college.  In a twist of unintended consequences, these intelligent, assimilated young men and women remain in the United States as part of a hidden underclass of English-speaking, Americanized, undocumented immigrants.

The thing that is particularly challenging about the Act is how contentious this issue is.  Of all proposed immigration legislation, this is a no-brainer.  As opponents to immigration reform are keen to remind us, many undocumented immigrants have made the journey to the United States of their own volition, knowingly broaching the laws of the United States in doing so; their children, however, have not.  The Act, in its essence, gives a no-fault waiver to children who had no say in how they entered the United States and offers society the ability to harness the talent and enthusiasm that would otherwise go wasted.

The Act was also part of the focus of Luceo’s recent group project, Still Hoping, available here: www.stillhoping.com

MORE PHOTOS

Trying to catch up on old work this evening.  I’ve been shooting a near-booked schedule for the last couple weeks.  Found myself in three different states, spent a night sleeping in an empty horse stall at the Wyoming State Fair, pulled an all-nighter in Kansas chasing nocturnal creatures for the Audubon Society’s magazine, picked up a rental car that ran out of gas 30 miles from anywhere at 2 am in Wyoming, realized that the particular car I rented showed 1/8th of a tank of gas when it was really on E, spent the night on the side of the interstate photographing the stars while I waited for the tow service to bring me some gas –all the while making a list in my head of all the things waiting for me to catch up on when I got home.

Blogging a couple recent assignments chalks up as one of the easier things on that list (blogging the bigger projects I’ve been shooting is another story).

This is Connie Paeglow an advocate of the Five Wishes advanced directive form.  The Five Wishes program is designed to facilitate end-of-life decisions for  people facing issues related to death and dying.  Paeglow became engaged with the program during the death of her late husband in 2003.  She credits the program with helping her through the process of discussing difficult issues with her husband and his family.

Matthew Crabtree, a Lost Angeles-based certified fraud investigator, poses for portraits near Denver, Colo.  He turned out to be about the most accommodating subject I could ask for, indulging me for a series of photographs while he vacationed at his parents’ home outside Denver, Colo.  

***

Picked up a fun last-minute assignment on Friday for The Wall Street Journal.  The gig put me on a break-neck schedule of back-to-back shoots that finally ended on Sunday at midnight with a second round of Lucha Libre.  I was going to try to make the Rocky Mountain Fur Con’s closing dance late last night after lucha but found myself in such exhausted shape that it was time to go home and wind down what turned out to be an incredibly productive weekend.

This particular shoot presented the challenge of having to make portraits of a subject with very little story information and and even smaller timeframe. Slated as something that was supposed to have a bit of an X-Files feel to it, Crabtree (and the focus of the article) turned out to be a little less conspiracy-esque than originally described.  Thankfully, the first photographs that I shot matched that tone a bit better (and can be viewed along with the article, here).  

MORE PHOTOS

This project started by accident when friend and fellow photographer Michael Rubenstein loaned me a Polaroid back for a Holga camera in 2007.  Ten frames later I was sold.  The Polaroid brings two photographic methods that are seemingly at odds with each other together into one format.  You get the immediacy of digital with the tangible, ’share-ability’ of film.  A few days after borrowing Rubenstein’s back, I returned to Colorado and bought my first ten dollar Land Camera, a relatively obsolete Polaroid with limited control and a cost-prohibitive cap on how much film I could actually shoot.  Now priced at over a dollar a frame, the format forces a judicious approach to making frames, something that the bottomless 32 gig digital cards seem to undermine.  Listen to the clicks on the tape of any news conference and you will, no doubt, hear photographers pushing the limits of 24 frames-per-second, a method of shooting so rapid and oblivious as to make the process closer to shooting a movie than a still frame.

Since 2007, the camera has gone with me almost everywhere I’ve been, from my next door neighbor’s living room after his open-heart surgery to Obama’s inauguration.  Until earlier this year, I’d been looking at all these different events as isolated series of images; recently, it’s become obvious that there is a bigger tale of Americana at hand in the thread that winds through all of the photographs.  NPR’s Claire O’Neill recently helped me put together an edit of this work-in-progress that gets at this.  I’m very happy with her final edit and even happier that she’s taken the time to share it on NPR’s blog, The Picture Show.  Please have a look for yourself and feel free to revisit my website in the coming weeks.  I’m working on a comprehensive edit of this work that will bring all the Polaroid galleries into one, bigger grouping of pictures.

I recently photographed people and places impacted by the closure of New Frontier Bank in Greeley, Colo. The bank was forced into receivership after what the FDIC describes as “unsafe or unsound banking practices and violations of law and regulations.”   Many eastern Colorado farms and business were impacted by the closing of the bank and are now unable to transfer their loans to other institutions. The fallout threatens commercial and agricultural businesses that have historically relied on the bank for short-term credit.  The essay appears in the June 16th issue of the Journal and a nice edit of the work also appears on the Photo Journal blog.

The story turned out to be a little more nuanced than fat cat bankers getting ahead of themselves.  There aren’t clear villains and victims, rather a sense of loss that is common to both sides of the cashbox.  The bank was rooted in a very humble beginning during which the founder, Larry Seastrom (pictured above), sold ten dollar shares to friends and neighbors in order to raise capital.  New Frontier  purchased a doublewide trailer as its first place of business and, over more than a decade, it grew into a much more formidable building.   The business began to shape its image around its involvement and commitment to the local community.  The short version of the bank’s fall is somewhat of a perfect storm of overextended lending, undercapitalized business, and a sharp decline in the price of milk that wreaked havoc on many of the bank’s large agricultural loans.  Many of the businesses who received money the bank are now having difficulty refinancing their loans through other institutions.  They face the possibility of losing their collateral later this year when the FDIC packages and sells off New Frontier’s loans.

The assignment came as a welcome challenge and a bit of a crash course in getting my head around the nuance of the relationship between the abstract banking world and the real-life fallout experienced by New Frontier’s customers.  This is the second piece that I’ve worked on with Wall Street Journal writer Stephanie Simon and a real treat to work with a writer able to tackle the complexities of the story.

MORE PHOTOS