I spent most of last week in Banff, a small tourist town for snowbirds at the edge of the Canadian Rockies. This was made possible, even mandatory, because astronomers who have their budgets cut to the point where their projects can only afford to meet as a work-all-weekend add-on to another conference and its airfare costs are good at finding ( Read more... )

Two weekends ago, I attended a fabulous and very helpful portrait workshop run by freaking kylecassidy. Last weekend, I attended a get-together of some of my oldest tribe on a farm turned "Interfaith Sanctuary of Earth Religion" in the Appalachian mountains in Pennsylvania. Lacking some of the equipment and all of the time and energy to demand patient ( Read more... )

I misdeveloped my first roll of film last night. It feels strangely freeing to have got that out of the way. Luckily, I live in an adorably anachronistic future and made a partially correctable mistake: the film is scratched up and the images will probably fade over the next few weeks, but a Very Long Time in a scanner and software for dust and ( Read more... )

I learned a new word today. As in the word is also new, not just my knowledge of it. I approve of it. Also I am quite suddenly certain it is pretty much the basis of my lifetime artistic output and some of my spiritual identity, so there's that.

(Wikipedia) Solastalgia is a neologism coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 with ( Read more... )

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It's difficult not use the word "shoot" in discussing photography, so deeply is the firearm metaphor wound up in our vernacular. But I take, or make, most of my photographs in a city colloquially known as "Bodymore" with a somewhat embarrassing murder rate per capita, known outside its own borders primarily through television in the form of ( Read more... )

I had a lot to write here about climate change, rapid-cycling weather patterns and agricultural impacts, flooding, local insfrastructure collapse, the sinking of Venice, and my own slow-building realisation that so many of the coastal historic landmarks that I love, abandoned or thriving, may well have less time ahead of them than behind ( Read more... )

It's been a year this morning since my grandfather-who-helped-raise-me died. It's been three hundred and sixty-six days, in fact, because not only is February the cruelest month, last February was excessive enough in its cruelty to drag on longer than usual. According to Victorian mourning tradition, the definitive Western example of excessive ( Read more... )

I was recently made aware of a post by a rather fantastic blogger about the Gordian Knot of class issues and insecurity and prejudice so tightly tied around the American Dream, called "poor people aren't supposed to want nice things". Go read it. I will tell you that it hurt rather a lot for me to read. It is in many ways my own story ( Read more... )

Molly Crabapple, artist and founder of Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School, wrote recently for Vice magazine about her former life as an alternative model, burlesque dancer, and, in her words, 'Professional Naked Girl'. Occasionally friends ask me why I lament certain photographically-based portraits never getting out of my head into the real world and ( Read more... )