we wait for storms to roll in like front porch philosophers tasting the wind shear forehead slick from the way summer rests on your skin (like monarchs on a blade) and the clouds are strange and restless and wonderful the way beautiful things are before they break open.

“Art is how we let the parts of life that are too immense to contain back into the world. It is a release valve. When people are cut by the ruthless edge of mortality, sometimes we bleed onto a canvas. And sometimes we show that to the world to make sure we remember what was done to us, or by us. But, we have a habit of hanging the art of war in our minds.” // Read the rest on Substack. Revisiting these images from a series in 2020 called “I Am Your Neighbor”.

Photo from a series back in 2020 called I Am Your Neighbor. This is of a Syrian refugee who eventually made her way to the US and used art as an outlet to discuss the terrible things she witnessed in her home country. I am starting a new project I’ve been considering for a while called “Cloth”. It will feature faith leaders from different communities (priests, pastors, imams, rabbis, etc.) photographed in their respective houses of worship. I will ask a few open-ended questions as well to accompany the images for a short write-up. At the moment, I’m lining up these sessions for the late summer and fall, so please don’t hesitate to reach out with people who you think would be a good fit for this project. Why? Faith leaders are at the intersection of history and culture, drawing wisdom from ancient wells for our time; witnesses to life and death and all the in-between; confessors, counselors, earthbound intercessors—and entirely human. That, to me, is the only reason I need.

I am not compelled by the same career achievements that my peers value. I am not a thing to be optimized, to better produce and meet insatiable demands. I am not a program or a computer. I sit beneath the oaks this morning, tossing in summer gusts, the entire canopy dancing and the sunlight glancing through the leaves, cutting along the filigree edge and softly dappling the world below, and me. Any other day I should be in an office, staring into the endlessness of binary code, illuminated not by the morning sun but by pixels, my worth tethered to the money they believe I should have for what I can do, my meaning wrapped up in whatever I can show to the rest of them. My vacations, my lawn and cars, my name on a building. I already have my value, I am made of the earth and the forever atoms and am dust at the end of it—my name is in the soil and rivers. I am the ocean, maybe you have heard of me. I am mountaintop and sea-bottom trench. I know my place and my name, I am everywhere and everything. I am nothing at all. I am exactly where I need to be.

I’m sharing this photo because I love it and because it is submitted for the #oneplusphotoawards

I have been awake since 3am because either God or indigestion called to me and around 4am I heard the first bird—there is always a first bird—trill and the rest soon joined to call off the night watch. Blue creeps between the limbs. I’m reading Czeslaw Milosz who bundles eternity into small occurrences which might be how we all do it if we are honest, like the Robin chanting Lauds for us. So long ago, monks prayed Matins during the night and said Lauds in the early dawn. The “office of daybreak”, is a strange and formal title to the slow breath of waking and it used to be that they would read the last three Psalms, one of which says May the praise of God be in their mouths and a double-edged sword in their hands.

I wrote a piece on how to photograph a protest on my Substack. But here’s a piece. Protestors were seething. So were the outnumbered counter-protestors. Rage boiled over into shouts and screams and car horns and mile-long chants like some unholy choir. I was overstimulated. My hands shook. Not out of mortal fear but out of fear for us. The air was tense. I stood upon the arrhythmic heart of my country, oceans of bad blood pulsing beneath my feet, and let myself feel it. But only for a minute. I took a deep breath, choked down my own convictions, and dialed into photographer mode. People should see this.

I think that what I’m trying to say is there’s a weariness that coats our best intentions—a layer of mistrust that began with school shootings and planes collapsing buildings. And that as we start to wrinkle around the eyes, the familiarity with tragedy—the impermanence of things like life—either becomes an excuse for bitterness or a reason for hope. I do not hold bitterness against anyone. I understand. If life has torn at you and left scars along your ribcage, you can be bitter and scared. Hell, I’ll yell at the sky with you and rant at the stars. But there’s a question at the end of every broken body and it has to do with hope, and whether or not we will allow it’s bruised and jaded truth live beside the haunted way we are.

I don’t really shoot weddings anymore. I made too many grunting noises when standing up from awkward angles and I spent most of my time talking to the grandparents at the reception that I knew I was destined for a less-bendy, more laid back portfolio. Still, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t days when the light hits just right for a few elopement portraits and makes me almost miss the big days.

Funky hat shoot with @finallydrsoby — congrats to all the recent grads!