Carol J. Skumanich, my paternal grandmother, affectionately known to her children and grandchildren as Gaby, passed away on Friday August 3rd, 2012. My phone on silent, my life ticking along, I did not receive the news until 10:30 that evening when I returned my dad’s phone call. I want to say that I was shocked but I wasn’t. My grandmother had been ill, suffering from COPD and emphysema, for a very long time. Her immune system compromised, she was prone to pneumonia and other lung infections. She had been fighting... Read the Rest →
My thoughts on picture-making have shifted greatly over the last 12 months or so. School taught me to think about picture-making as a means to communicate some greater truth about your subject and relate to greater social issues. Coming home and working in a environment that is about picture making in another way, a way born solely out of aesthetic has made me re-evaluate what it means to pick up a camera. I work among those* who’s main purpose in making pictures is to make them fit into a mold... Read the Rest →
Secretly, I have always wanted to be a Southerner, one who is born from the South. Sadly, I was born above the Mason-Dixon line and don’t get to have such an honor but I figure I can always visit. Or live there as my stupid hopeful plans go for the next year or so. When I set out last Thursday for a 8 hour drive to Winston-Salem North Carolina, the sun was bright and the weather forecast was promising for the trip: 85 degree weather with clear skies. Car packed,... Read the Rest →
I find comfort in the menial tasks of domesticity, where my life floats beautiful around the mundane. In small housekeeping based tasks, I find satisfaction in keeping a clean space, a clean house, meticulously organized and put together. It is no surprise that upon coming home, I have found myself more willing to put up with and maintain my mother’s expectation of order that has been established long before I was born, long before she was even born. In washing dishes, I find time to mediate. In making my bed... Read the Rest →
It’s 4.30 on a Sunday in mid-March and right now, I can’t think of a better time to be breathing in the crisp, mud-scented air than this moment. I listen to six cylinders and gravel crunch under the wheels and my brain is rapid-firing at me with thoughts about what the fuck I am doing and who the fuck I am. I downshift for the stop sign and brake. Here, now my head and heart is full of wanting of direction and an idea of what I will be in... Read the Rest →
Two things, which are shining examples of those things from the past coming back to impact the future. Polaroid film. Instant, with those strange colors, is one object in photo-making who’s manufacturing life has met it’s end. The need for the instamatic camera and the one and only it spits out has radically diminished with the massive take-over of digital cameras. It is a niche market now, an object of the past that technology has eradicated. Which is why I want to see The Impossible Project succeed this year. I... Read the Rest →
During a long, cold drive home from Boston this past weekend, I zoned out on the rhythm and sounds of the road when the familiar opening lines of Springsteen’s cover of This Land is Your Land woke me up from my road-induced stooper. I reached down to turn it up and started thinking about the lyrics, about the land I was driving through. Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land makes me well up with tears. I try not to get sentimental or patriotic, since my relationship with the United... Read the Rest →
It is just barely 8.30 AM on a late December Sunday and I am crunching over snow in damp leather boots, wearing the same clothes from the night before. Here, in quiet rolling rural Pennsylvania, the snow and the ice and the silence and the cold have settled into the land and the air. However, today it has started to warm up, in a freak accident of winter, and the fields and the horizon are thick with white fog. Black trees divide fallow fields into loose grids and here, the... Read the Rest →
Recently, I started working at a large photo lab here in L.V. Through the tedious and unending process of scanning film and eventually printing pictures (I’m still in training alright?), I see a large number of photographs that normally I wouldn’t even bother thinking about. I get an odd excitement when I get to make reprints or when I pull film out of the C-41 machine. I find it extremely interesting to get to look at photos, be they good or mediocre. It’s getting to see into a life that... Read the Rest →
Photographing has always been an escape from my day-to-day life. I have considerable trouble making photographs in my every day observance of the world because, I suppose, photography is about escapism for me.
