New Project: Guesting (and a Blue Pig)

I spent the better part of the weekend at a good friend’s house in southern Wisconsin. Besides deciding to kayak across the lake at midnight, getting the best sunburn a kid of German/Irish descent can get without going to the hospital, learning how to paddle board (when you have friends who work at Hammecher-Schlemmer you get the strangest, but surprisingly exciting gifts) I took a few snaps. First snaps in about a week! (That’s a long time for this guy).

Besides this I’ve debuted a new series on my website entitled “Guesting” ….

This project is an essay, one I’ve had in mind for at least two years now but have really never been able to articulate, until lately. Check it out, let me know what you think. This is something personal, incomplete and ongoing. I don’t know if it’s the type of thing that will ever end, but it makes up a solid chunk of my archives, my thought process, and has no where else to go for now….so I’ve made it live on the web (woo hoo!)

And of course to be complete here’s a recent snap from the Lakehouse, to be considered for the project.

Stone’s Throw

I’m currently editing through a batch of scans that’s something akin to a notebook of my last two months in Athens. Stroud’s Run was a pretty beautiful (keep in mind my reference is the Chicago suburbs) state park that was hardly a 15 minute drive from my house. So close but I didn’t get there enough. I made sure to check it out a few times before leaving and found a few scenes. I’ll have a gallery on my site up within a week or two (hopefully) of more images from this little photographic notebook thingy.

Green Room / Moving on and Moving Out

My humble, now semi boxed up living space for the past year.

It’s a weird time, I’ve finished graduate school, officially finished. I completed my coursework, defended my master’s project, I’m on my way out to pay my parking ticket so as to leave no debt here and get my diploma mailed to me. I opted to go to the Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, VA instead of walking for graduation. It was a hard decision but one that overall I feel was the right one.

I’ve had a lot of people ask me recently what I thought of going to grad school. Everyone who’s a photographer knows your academic credentials mean next to nothing in this industry, unless you want to teach (which I may at some point considering how much I’ve enjoyed teaching at OU the past year). So, degree notwithstanding, why would you want to take time out of your life to come here? Well, everyone has a different story, and some are more satisfied than others, but I honestly feel that coming to Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication has really given me a chance to find out alot about who I am as a photographer.

Being in grad school has helped me discover, why, on a very basic level, I am doing what I am doing, how I can do it better, and what the purpose is. Feeling some sense of purpose is very satisfying, even if everyone hates the work you produce from your sense of purpose. This “answer” I found here is attributed to the support of the faculty but also really to my classmates who I feel are about the best group of kids I could have had next to me in this journey. I was really given a chance to almost completely focus my life on my passion without worrying about getting work, paying bills (thanks scholarships and teaching jobs). I’ll never have a chance like this again and I’m glad I got out of it what I did. It’s a fantastic break from the real world here.

It’s a photojournalism sequence, sure, but I don’t think I am, nor will I ever be the completely typical photojournalist. It’s just so much more complex than that. Photography has become ingrained in everything I think about and it’s actually very liberating as strange as that may seem. I’ve always thought the obvious world was a strange place and I’m convinced I’ve found the best way to try and understand all of this.

Anyways, if any readers wants to chat with me about my experience here I am more than happy to tell you everything I think about this place. Just don’t be surprised if you want to apply after you talk to me.

As for now, I’m moving out of this strange, overly drunk Appalachian town and back to Naperville, IL where I grew up with plans to be in downtown Chicago within a year or so. I’ll be freelancing, and working on projects…I’ve already got a few things in mind and I’m pretty excited. If there’s one other thing I discovered here, it’s that I’m addicted to the freedom of working on my own.

Here’s to everyone in Athens that helped me along the way, I wish you all complete success in this absurdly tough industry. The battle’s just beginning. Don’t give up. I know I won’t.

Red Room

Somewhere near 123 / Broadway, NYC

Corners

It’s been a great but transient past few days.

Festival of the Photograph (so many photographs), Charlottesville, Va and Morningside Heights, NYC.

I’ll settle home (home) in a few more days. How strange it will be and how much I will miss.

China Kitchen

Flowers in the window on Stimson Ave. I love my Leica.

Nikki

Nikki Jason is a woman I met recently on a freelance assignment. She’s put her passion for skateboarding into goodwill gestures towards her community, organizing skate events and a skateboard camp for girls. As someone who grew up skateboarding, and who credits it for no less than changing my outlook on life, it was really inspirational to meet an adult who is still skating (I wish I could say I skated more than a few times a year now) and doing really good things with it. Plus she was just really cool, and her husband skates. Their trips are to places like Mammoth, CA just for the skateparks! Kindred spirits it seems. I photographed her at the Athens skatepark where she knows how to cruise around those walls behind her pretty well.

1/8 second

another nighttime abstraction…

Christmas in June

Red roses in a green bug.

Americana

This vertical sliver of Athens seemed to me a microcosm of things.