May
15
My daughter, Taylor, alternates with me between napping and driving across The Great Plains.
May
13
This essay originally appeared in my first book, Spiritual Wanderer.
My life is a struggle to make sense of things — enormous things and things like, “There’s a bathroom on the right.”
I’m referring, of course, to the Credence Clearwater Revival lyrics, which don’t have anything to do with plumbing. The line that’s so often misquoted is really, “There’s a bad moon on the rise.”
May
04
Mom and Dad sat for one of my early portrait sessions back in the mid-1980s.
So I’m hanging out, chatting with my wife and daughter after running some errands, having a salty snack — the usual slow afternoon things — when KABLOOEY, it hits me; I’ve outlived my father.
Apr
14
A young boy peers out through a shattered wall in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
(First published 30 years ago)
I can’t really say why I went down to Haiti in the first place. A friend of mine, who lived there, wrote and suggested I make the journey to “see some places and faces that would fill a whole book.” As every egocentric photographer knows, that’s all you really need to hear. What a jerky reason to go.
Apr
13
HELPFUL NOTE: That’s rock guitarist The Edge from U2 (with the skullcap, not the wig). If you’re still confused about how to say South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s name after this, it’s pronounced “PEET.”
Mar
09
Massage therapists work their magic during a Mayan Healing Ritual in Costa Maya, Mexico.
You can credit the pills.
You can credit eight months of treatment.
You can credit the warm, moist Caribbean air and glorious sunshine.
Or, like me, you can also credit the Mayan Healing Ritual.
Feb
23
El Castillo is the main pyramid at Chichén Itzá in Yucatán, Mexico.
It’s good to not know what I’m doing.
My wife texted me on a recent Thursday afternoon, asking if I was into a last-minute cruise.
“Okay, cool!” I wrote back.
Early Friday morning, we hopped into my Prius and drove south out of Detroit and snow squalls toward sunny New Orleans. Read More
What a year for movies — a very strange, crazy year.
Two of the Academy Award nominations for Best Picture — Bohemian Rhapsody and Vice — scored in the 60s on Rotten Tomatoes, the number one website for collecting movie reviews. A third film — Green Book — got a tepid 81% score.
And here’s the thing, I think one or two of them should win!
Crunch Time: the Picture Editing team putting together the 120-page book at The Mountain Workshops.
I met Zach this past fall down in Kentucky at The Mountain Workshops, a week-long intensive dive into photojournalism. He was one of our students in the Picture Editing sequence that I’ve been lucky enough to help teach each fall for a large part of this millennium.
Zach made us laugh, worked really hard and helped us — with our other students — pull together a 120-page book of photos and stories in less than a week. But I think I bonded with him during our shady drug deal on the streets of a small Kentucky town.
Dec
17
Rodney’s razor, midway through it’s too-short lifespan.