Unwritten Notes, Lake Tahoe

I don’t ski, never really did, for a whole slew of reasons, but especially now, seeing as I have become quite brittle as I’ve gotten older. I’m more of a “ski-lodge” enthusiast, things involving fireplaces and bourbon and not snow I must interact with at high rates of speed. Either way, we ended up in Tahoe in February at what was billed as a cozy log cabin in the woods.

No. #0433_06A - Lake Tahoe, California. February of 2016.

What we found upon arrival was in fact a two room mobile home, with a fake log cabin facade, in a trailer park, surrounded by other fake log cabin mobile homes, in what I can only assume was someones idea of a practical joke. The queen size bed could only be exited from the end on the left side, which should paint a picture of the square footage we were dealing with. There were some trees, not exactly what I’d call a woods. False advertising would be an understatement.

No. #0432_15A - Fallen Leaf Lake, California. February of 2016.

We had a fine time, accommodations not withstanding, we took some long lovely walks, Tahoe is quite beautiful. We found a casino across the border in Reno with a penthouse bar that made the entire excursion much more bearable. No fireplace, but plenty of bourbon, and no snow to interact with. Don’t think I’ve been back to Tahoe since.

Excerpts from the series “Unwritten Notes” - Photographs Made Elsewhere.

Comprised of work spanning nearly 15 years, the series is largely autobiographical and draws entirely from images made on the road, away from home...

Prints available upon request.

Unwritten Notes, Islamorada

I found myself in South-West Florida in January and somehow convinced my step-father to let my wife and I take his Corvette down to the Florida Keys for a long weekend. It was the first but not the last time I’ve been down to the Keys. I should’ve learned my lesson.

No. #0420_18A - Islamorada, Florida Keys. January of 2016.

We stayed at a place lovingly referred to as the Pines and Palms Resort. It was essentially a glorified motor lodge with no pines and very few palms and could hardly be considered a resort. It did have a pool and a bar and a guy with a gray pony tail playing Jimmy Buffett and Grateful Dead covers on an acoustic guitar. In fact every place we went seemed to employ the same leftover deadhead with a guitar playing cover tunes, like they were part of some local leftover union of musicians.

No. #0422_26A - Hotel. Islamorada, Florida Keys. January of 2016.

The Keys are beautiful, but when you start looking closer it get’s pretty weathered and a little grim, a theme park that never really caught on, then ran out of money, and the employees all decided to hang on until someone shuts the power off, and that was back in 1968.

Let’s be honest, Florida is weird.

Excerpts from the series “Unwritten Notes” - Photographs Made Elsewhere.

Comprised of work spanning nearly 15 years, the series is largely autobiographical and draws entirely from images made on the road, away from home...

Prints available upon request.

On Being Obsolete: In Defense of Analog Things

My fathers Minolta X-700, circa 1981, with 50mm f/1.7 lens and motor drive, on my book shelf at home.

My first “real” camera was a 35mm Minolta X-700 SLR that I borrowed from my father when I was in middle school. He never got it back. Today it’s been retired and sits on a shelf and reminds me of him.

I learned the craft on film, in the darkroom, with wet hands and stained clothes and the odd chemical smell that used to follow all photographers around. Everything changed, it was slow at first, then sort of all at once, I was halfway through college, with two Canon digital bodies and handful of microdrive memory cards that cost a small fortune and held 500 mega-bytes (you read that right, mega-bytes).

Things got lost along the way. There is a large amount of work that I produced late in high school and throughout most of college that I have no access to. I’m not saying any great masterpieces were thrown away, though I wonder what I would find in that work if I did have the negatives and scans and original files that now exist only in the form of digital dust, ones and zeros on some zip disk (100MB each) at the bottom of a land fill or a hard drive that crapped out too soon or the CD-RW disc (750MB at most) that is now valuable only as a coaster. Granted a great deal of this could have been avoided by better “archive management” but let’s be honest, I was in my 20’s, I couldn’t manage much of anything. Just digitize it they said, it’ll last forever…

No. 0001_15 - Mission Street. San Francisco, Ca. May of 2003. The 15th frame of the first roll of film I’d exposed after consciously deciding to change the way I was approaching my work.

Around 2003 I gave up, or least began the process of giving up, on digital capture (I don’t ever want to think about custom white balance or firmware updates ever again). It was slow at first, then sort of all at once. It started when I really began to look at the work I was doing, and quite frankly, I hated it. It was cold and flat and precise, and none of those things interested me. I began to approach what I was doing as an aesthetically minded visual archive of materials that needed to be managed, and it changed everything. In May of 2003 I bought a used Leica, borrowed a lens from a friend, and essentially started over, roll No. #0001.

I understand, it’s all horribly cliché at this point, this whole film thing, the return of analog, the retro rebirth, whatever the influencers are selling now. But I realized somewhere along the way that as much as it was about photographs, what drew me to the work was also the objects themselves. I’m a collector; of images and negatives and prints and things that I want to remember and think about and keep close. Things I’ve deemed important, for whatever reason. Aesthetics notwithstanding, there is an argument to be made for the analog in a world that is continually accelerating technologically. I enjoy making things with my hands. Every single print I’ve exposed and dodged and burned and washed and toned and retouched and signed. It exists because I made it, not the result of some piece of software.

Retouching, captioning and signing silver gelatin darkroom prints, made by hand, by the artist.

The former vice president of google said some years ago “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.” This resonates now more than ever, especially in these days of “rented spaces” that are entirely out of our control. The “Enshittification” of everything online destroys all platforms (flickr, tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, dead or dying in terms of usefulness). The web at large has become “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.”

What do we lose when we no longer have pictures to see and share and revisit outside of whatever platform is dominating the digital landscape? How will we access those platforms in the future, if they even exist? I don’t want to rant about how “it was better when” (maybe a little). After all, I’m writing this on a computer with several orders of magnitude more computing power than the first space shuttle, and I’ll publish it to what is essentially a worldwide audience by pushing a button while at home. Technology is great. But what happens when the lights go out…?

What happens when Square Space gets bought out or goes under or just decides to pull the plug because of something offensive I wrote? What happens to all the photographs I’ve made and things I’ve written and the drivel I’ve put out into the world? If nothing else, it’ll be in a box, in the negatives, in the prints and the books and all the things that I’ve put on paper, part of the archive. Like so many creative folks from Gen-X and the Elder Millennial generation I’ve become obsolete and I’m ok with that. There will be a record of what I did when I’m gone. One that you can pick up and hold and smell and feel the textures of in your hands. At least until they toss it out with the rest of the trash…

Things I’ve been reading lately…

The Gen-X Career Meltdown
Just when they should be at their peak, experienced workers in creative fields find that their skills are all but obsolete.

A Long Hard Look at America
As the transatlantic alliance falters, a major exhibition of U.S. photography offers Europeans a dizzying array of perspectives.

Safety Off
It might have something to do with being in proximity to people that are comforted, one could even say thrilled, by footage of humans being shackled and imprisoned.

Unwritten Notes, Big Sur

We got married on a Friday in October at City Hall in San Francisco. In November we drove South down the coast to Big Sur during what I can only describe as a torrential rain storm that should have convinced us to stay home. Alas, we did not.

No. 0325_07A Big Sur, California. November of 2014.

We turned off Highway 1 onto what was less of a road and more of a graded dirt path leading up the hill that was in the process of converting itself into a small river. Piloting a 2 wheel drive hybrid sedan up said dirt-river-path was not ideal, to say the least. We almost turned back several times and in hindsight that would have probably been the logical thing to do but we pushed on and made it the 2 miles up the dirt-river-path and just like that the rain stopped and the storm blew itself out.

No. 0325_08A Big Sur, California. November of 2014.

It was a short honeymoon. We spent a long weekend in a little cottage with a little kitchen table and an ancient wood stove and an outdoor claw foot tub overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and that was enough. We read books and drank champaign in the bath and watched the ocean crawl by.

Excerpts from the series “Unwritten Notes” - Photographs Made Elsewhere.

Comprised of work spanning nearly 15 years, the series is largely autobiographical and draws entirely from images made on the road, away from home...

Prints available upon request.

What's Real. What Isn't. Why Does It Matter?

We spent a bit of time last January in Puerto Vallarta with some close friends. Traveling with a 6 year old is not for the faint of heart. As such, we travel heavy, and we travel well. By well, I mean airbnb’s, housing swaps and bougie rentals. By heavy, I mean we travel with a lot of Legos, children’s books and action figures. Certainly not the low budget shoe string travels of my youth…

No. 0936_04A-05A Yelapa, Mexico. January of 2025.

No. 0935_16A Thomas with Legos, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. January of 2025.

Where we stayed in Puerto Vallarta is basically the Castro district in San Francisco with cobblestones and worse parking. In fact, we ran into several people over the course of the week that we knew from the City. We had a grand time, eating too much and consuming wildly too many margaritas. The last night of the trip one of our traveling companions stated “this has been fun, but it’s not the real Mexico.”

I laughed it off at the time and completely forgot about the comment until I started looking through the film I’d exposed while we were there. It begged the question, what is the real Mexico? It certainly looks real enough in the negatives. I’d imagine the people that live in Puerto Vallarta feel like it’s pretty real. What’s the real San Francisco? Does it include Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39 and the rest of the tourist traps? Or do we exclude those places and experiences from the common definition of what constitutes the “real” in the City? For the record I absolutely abhor Pier 39 but love a bread bowl of clam chowder from a street vendor in Fisherman’s Wharf.

No. 0941_34A Mahi Mahi Fish. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. January of 2025

No. 0941_34A Fisherman. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. January of 2025

The guy I found unloading giant Mahi Mahi fish in the back of his pickup looked and sounded pretty real. I asked if I could get a pic and he said ‘sure Cabrón’ and held one up for the camera. This question of authenticity really escapes me if I’m honest. The fog over Banderas Bay and the young men fishing off the pier at sunset and the dudes walking around in t-shirts emblazoned with “MEXICAN VIAGRA” all seem real. At the very least they existed. I have it on film. Does that not imply some semblance of authenticity?

No. 0939_22-23 Banderas Bay. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. January of 2025

No. 0941_20A Fisherman, Playa Los Muertos Pier. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. January of 2025

No. 0942_25A ‘Mexican Viagra’ Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. January of 2025

Anyhow we took a water taxi and saw whales and ate tacos. We got drunk and hung around the beach at sunset and my kid lost his first tooth. My wife came home with a shot glass from the drag bar in her purse and no recollection of how it got there. It all felt pretty real and authentic and it was in Mexico, so there’s that. I guess we’ll go looking for the real Mexico next time.

No. 0940_02A Sunset, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. January of 2025

Things I’ve been reading lately…

The Rise of End Times Fascism
The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them.

You Should Hire A GenX-er With An Art Degree Before It's Too Late
There's been a radical shift, you're going to need a special set of skills.

Nothing To Say
Somewhere along the way, I decided I have nothing to say. This happened gradually, imperceptibly, much like aging happens