Before the housing bubble burst, before Lehman Brothers fell, and before sub-prime loan losses were making the news, I became subconsciously aware of the growing number of vacant commercial spaces around me. I began looking through dirty windows to better see into the interior spaces left behind when businesses fail. They seemed filled with sadness, with the emotions of loss contained within their empty walls. More»
Russia and the Punk Imaginary
Pussy Riot is the first Russian punk band to attain household name status in the West. The reason has less to do with its music than its politics. The subject of global media attention since three of its band members were arrested in February, the all-girl guerrilla group has become the unofficial face of Russia’s pro-democracy movement. More»
Artist or Terrorist?
Taking photos of any public place has become a risky activity for American photographers since the ill-conceived Homeland Security Act was put into effect. When the subject is a sensitive site like a power plant, the danger is greater still. While no laws were broken taking these photos of the Tucson Electric Power facility, the risk of harassment and interrogation was real. More»
Miracle Valley
We were stopped at a rundown liquor store, only a few miles from the Mexican border, when I saw it. My son and I had been driving a lonely stretch of Arizona Highway 92, with little to see except dry grasslands stretching in all directions towards distant broken mountains on the horizon. He was thirsty. This was the only place to get a drink. And yet there, in the distance, was the tattered dome of a church rising from the desolate landscape. I pointed to the complex and told my son, “We’re going in.” More»
Lost Photo Album
When coming across photos of anonymous people, it is impossible not to relate them to our own lives and memories somehow. Often we have an intense positive or negative response to the people looking out of these photographs and the history they represent. The universality of life represented in the photographs — birthdays, weddings, family vacations — crosses economic and gender boundaries.
What we see in photos are events of life and the emotional record of those events. Traces of personal identity become blurred with our own relationship to the events. More»
Flowers for the Living and Rocks for the Dead
One giant scar runs through the otherwise pristine Arizona Highways landscape that spreads in all directions around desolate Arizona Highway 177. In between the towering rock walls, desert mountains, and tree-filled river beds, the Ray Mine sits like its own kind of toxic canyon carved into the landscape. More»
To Die For
All photos shot with a plastic Diana Mini toy camera
Sometimes yesterday feels like it’s a million miles behind you. Sometimes it’s as close as a kiss in the rearview mirror. Standing on the stained asphalt and allowing yourself to slow down and listen to the trucks roaring by can be like finding yourself home after years of driving from here to there and not remembering where your faded map was supposed to lead you. More»
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