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.

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out·take (outtk) n.

The space is really what kills people out here.  The same thing that draws them in also turns them away.  It never ceases to amaze me how much effort is given towards filling it in.  Houses and strip malls, highways, trails, paved trails, trails with lights so you can walk at night, telephone poles and information kiosks.  The mighty hand of progress has decided that the west is a blank page to be filled, a canvas to be colored.  I’m pretty sure that the eastern artists got it right when they decided to embrace the white of the paper, to let the negative space signify the clouds, the oceans, those spaces so sacred that the hand of man could not reproduce them without risking blasphemy.  On those scrolls, the white is a resting point to contemplate the relationship between the things that are painted and the things that are not.

Tomorrow it looks like I’m off to Albuquerque for a couple days.  More photographs to stash away into my drawer, a quiet love affair with the great west.  The trip winds along the forward edge of the Rocky Mountains where the expansive, open ocean of middle America breaks against a geography that pulls upward nearly three miles into the atmosphere.  The journey will close out two weeks that have afforded me yet another trip to Colorado’s northern neighbor, connecting the dots along a span of highway covering nearly 20 hours.

The images that mark off the stopping points along that line fall into one of two categories: images that are part of the unfinished sentence of a work-in-progress or photographs handed over to editors for future publication.  In either case, not suitable for the blog.  What remains are the fragments chipped away from the bigger picture and left on the floor.  Interesting, but not  quite contextualized.  They are bastard pictures, outtakes, orphans, photographs with no home.  An art opening, a stop at friend and filmmaker Chris Bagley’s Cheyenne, Wyoming home (that doubles as a live-in prop house), highway, parking lots, and the frozen frames projected of old commercials, cult movies, and everything else in between.

Here’s to another week celebrating everything in between.

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Polaroids from the National Mall during the inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation’s 44th president.

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