Every so often I go back and photograph the disorganization of the woods. My brother once told me he doesn’t know anyone who takes more pictures of barren trees than I do. I’m not really sure why I always seek it out, but I guess I don’t need to know why. I hardly even care about the images at times…moreso I’m just interested in trying to find them. In being out there. Now, I’m in the woods quite often, but I’m usually trying to run through them as fast as I can without tripping or falling. Though both are forms of meditation to me, stopping to walk through and carefully consider the scenes with a camera is a different sort. The chaos encountered is alway a challenge to try and deal with and really the true resolution I usually come to is that this must be embraced.

Bex at the cliffs - Sumner, NZ 2004

Recently, Sumner, a small town outside of Christchurch, New Zealand was hit with yet another earthquake – one of many aftershocks the region has encountered since a large quake in February. Fortunately this quake doesn’t seem to have taken any lives, but it’s still a tragedy and has caused  good bit of damage, disrupting the quiet lives of what I think is possibly one of the best places one could live. I used to live in Sumner (for a too brief 5-6 months) and had always planned on returning, hoping to share this place with some new people. Many days I would wake up and start the day with a run, where I’d stop at the top of an exhausting climb before I ran on a trail that was sort of embedded on the cliffsides. The spot at the top of the climb was just majestic – one of my favorite places. (Pictured above)

It sounds crazy but that spot fell into the ocean. Just fell in. The running trail is gone. Can’t take anyone there anymore. I brought my crappy little digital camera up there once, I think, and the sun performed that morning so that I can remember it this way – and it wasn’t always this way. I’m happy I did made the effort to bring that camera now, since I won’t get the chance to go back. I know this isn’t the same sort of loss that many people struggle with that is on a much bigger scale, but I still feel like this is a bit of a personal loss, and this might be the first thing that I’ve really lost and will never get back that I’ve preserved in a picture, which makes it take on new level of importance. Nothing is forever and I’m thankful that I got to experience this place while it was there, and I know that the people and the town will recover and it’s still a beautiful place to be, but it’s going to be a bit different now. Strangely enough this is also one of the few early pictures I made that made me think about becoming a photographer, because at that point I had no idea I would be.

Al Gore’s book on climate change “Our Choice” recently came out as an app for the iPad. The newly worked version of this book includes my view of the Pioneer Forest in Missouri, a large sustainably managed (and absurdly beautiful) forest that I hope to visit again. Good to see it getting good reviews as well as publishers try to figure out how to best exploit new platforms.

It’s been a busy few weeks here since I got back from SF earlier this month, wrapping up shoots for a few new exciting clients and slowly getting things geared up for a few classes I’m teaching this summer. Also, I’ve spent some time in the woods, which, if you know me is par for the course.

I’ll be out in SF for the next week again, but I’m traveling light which means 1 Leica and 1 Rolleiflex and a bag of film (Ok, maybe a hasselblad if it can fit, but it’s not looking likely). Again, for more  pictures and random please check out my tumblr at www.ordinarypictures.tumblr.com, which gets updated probably more often than it should.

It’s been a good few months in terms of opportunities to share my work more. Another one of my favorites sites at Urbanautica recently put up some work from my Post-Landfill Landscapes series. This is a different edit than on my site and includes some images I’ve never shared before. Urbanautica editor Steve Bisson is to thank for this new interpretation of the work and I have to say that it has me thinking more about the project, sorta itching to shoot more of it (like I’m not working on enough already). Chicago centric web publication Gaper’s Block also spread the word, so thanks for that folks.

I’ve always loved the imagery that goes with the fiction pieces in the New Yorker. There’s something inherently unique about a photograph, something supposedly grounded within reality, used to illustrate a body of unrelated, or indirectly related text. In the future I hope to team up with more writers, fiction or non, to use imagery in a way that is an interpretive illustration of the text, rather than a literal image to show you what the text means.

On this note, Annalemma Magazine recently used one of my images to illustrate a short fiction essay entitled “When the War Began” Please check out the curious narrative by writer Joshua Craze. Does the image fit, does it relate, does it help expand your perceptions of Mr. Craze’s exposition? I hope it does. Thanks to Annalemma editor Chris Heavener for using the work. And check out the rest of the magazine, it’s good stuff.

There was a blizzard here, but you knew that. I went out for a walk in the middle of the hardest snowing hours to make a series of abstract images, this one being one of my favorites. The snow was truly on a scale I haven’t seen except for the time I almost fell in a tree well in at Whistler/Blackcomb. The Tribune has the storytelling pictures taken care of.

There’s something great about hiking a barren place on cloudy, cold October days when no one else in the world finds it to be a suitable activity.

So, what I didn’t mention in my last post about this experiment project is that every so often, when I process a batch of film from my time on the Fox River shoreline, I spend some time in my yard setting fire to the negatives to a certain extent. Most of the time I don’t scan the negatives beforehand. There’s a reason for all of this that maybe I’ll get into later when I’m out of the initial sketching mode, but for now I’m just figuring out this process. This is the work that I’ll be bringing to the American Diversity Project….though I’m not sure it will necessarily conclude with the December meeting. If you visit the ADP website you’ll see this year’s theme is water and oil. I decided to take a more interpretive and material based approach than my normal, more straightforward documentary work.

Things have been a bit busy around here lately, have been in NYC this week and saw some familiar faces as well as met some great new people. A visit to the city always recharges me. I will most likely be out of town again sporadically in different weeks leading up to the new year.

I’m going to use this moment in my Tuesday morning to point any of you readers to a beautiful new website by Concord, NH photographer Max Bittle.

I’ve watched Max’s work for awhile, since the days when he was a student at Southern Illinois University and would always have better pictures than me in the annual student contests. There are some photographers who do amazing work, but it’s a challenge to look at … it’s not stuff you might always want on your wall. Well Max is the kind of photographer who could fill a house with great prints.