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.

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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.

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Just got back from a two-day adventure celebrating the 27th birthday of a Denver friend.  Her party turned out about a dozen people for a camping trip near the Holy Cross Wilderness Area in the White River National Forest, just west of Vail.  Pretty incredible country.  Most of the folks who came up made a day hike that took us on a nine-mile trek across two mountain passes through a series of alpine lakes that sit just at timberline.  For those of you reading this at lower elevations, timberline is this peculiar point on taller mountain where the trees just stop growing.  In Colorado, it’s at about 11,000 feet, a little over two miles above sea-level.

The hike turned out to be a little more of an ass-kicker than I had anticipated.  Turns out that the gallon of water that I drank over the course of the day was about half what I needed.  Spent the last hour of the hike is a bit of a dehydrated haze which took me down for the rest of the evening.   Recovering well today and, after looking through the pictures, I’m glad I did it.

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The Polaroid follow-up.  

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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. 

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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.

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I’m heading to Wyoming in a few minutes to continue with some work that I started last month.  Looking forward to being able to share a finished product, but the mighty god of publication embargos will prevent that until the project runs.  

Went to my third machine gun shoot last weekend, adding chapters to an ongoing look at the role of the gun as part of the bigger American archetype.  Kinda’ fun to go to these things now after becoming more familiar with the people, the guns, the sound, and the concussion that goes along with them.  Every time I sit down to write one of these gun posts, I find myself wanting to point backwards to my initial sentiments that I shared after attending my first shoot.  The write-up is available here.  The only pieces of that story to have changed are that my friend, mentioned in the beginning of the text, who struck an IED in Afghanistan, has since been awarded a Purple Heart and the Bronze Star; Lester, the happy farmer with the bowling ball cannon, finally made the photo edit and is pictured below with his son, Daniel; And the event’s organizer, Bob McBride, was kind enough to loan me a pair of gloves for the latest shoot.  The hole in the index finger was, according to McBride, for boogers.  Turns out it worked just as well to adjust camera controls.  

These are a few of the Polaroids I took away from the last shoot.  Only had a few hours on account of some other work I had to return to Denver for.  Color photos to follow sometime in the next week.

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Found this in front of a dentist’s office yesterday.  Neat, orderly, perfectly spaced, clean.  Just like your teeth after you leave his office.

Seriously, is it me, or are dentists really just licensed sociopaths?