I’m slow as always in updating this site, but there’s been a lot going on… There were some big developments in August, but that story is going to have to wait for a bit later… so let’s just say I had a nice quiet month with some lovely time on assorted beautiful farms, both shooting Alfred & Jenny’s wedding in upstate NY and spending time with friends and family in the most beautiful part of Normandy where my mom’s from. It was good to have a bit of rest, because things are getting crazy again…

The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe are in full swing, and just yesterday I went  back to re-photograph “Urban Scuba” by Brian Sanders’ JUNK – since I still haven’t yet developed the abilities to stop time, teleport, or just levitate invisibly, it took another pass to get the overhead views of this performance that I wanted. A remote camera clamped into the lighting rig, and voila!

Today I took care of prepping some framed pieces that will be included in the Bread and Roses Community Fund’s 2009 Tribute to Change. I’m quite honored to be included in this tribute to the most excellent documentary photographer Harvey Finkle.

Speaking of framed prints and documentary photography – I just put up some of my photos of the CIW’s work for farmworker justice at the White Dog Cafe in West Philly, just in time for their Dance of the Ripe Tomatoes event. Do you know where your tomatoes come from? The prints will be up until Nov 5th.

Tomorrow morning I’m speaking to a class at the Art Institute, and then running off to shoot a rehearsal of ‘Postcards from the Woods’ by Merián Soto/Performance Practice. Wednesday will be a bit nuts, as I’m flying to Minneapolis at the crack of dawn, hitting the ground running (or rather the ice, slipping) to photograph “Being Branded”  for Deneane Richburg. I’m very much looking forward to seeing her work, but the last time that I photographed for her, a little wipeout in the ice rink resulted in a very swollen elbow for six months or so, so the goal is to not break anything while shooting.

Sadly I won’t get to hang out in Minneapolis, because I’m flying back at the crack of dawn on Thursday in order to be back in time to shoot ‘Small Metal Objects‘ – hopefully the forecasted rain won’t be too much of a problem.

Then I get a little bit of breathing room again, although not really, because I’ve got this big exciting secret project in the works… but it’s got to stay on the down-low for a little bit longer, so stay tuned, OK?
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Dates worth noting:

• September 20, 7pm – Photographic Memory – Film program at International House, featuring John Pettit’s documentary about my archive among other things…
• October 10 & 11, 12pm-6pm – Philadelphia Open Studio Tours – I’ll only be there on saturday, as I’ve got to bop down to VA  to shoot another friend’s wedding on sunday – but some friends will be holding down the fort. But come saturday if you can, I’d love to have you over.
• October 15, 6pm – Tribute to Change – Bread and Roses Community Fund celebration featuring two of my prints.
• October 17 – House of Cars – Innovation and the Parking Garage opens at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Keep an eye out for one of my images from Kate Watson-Wallace’s CAR somewhere in there…
• Nov 4th – last night to see my prints at The White Dog (or go tomorrow…)
• November 13, 7pm – house concert featuring Pezzetino and other special guests TBA.

Greetings from Immokalee, Florida (dubbed “ground zero for modern-day slavery” by federal prosecutors.) I’ve rejoined my friends from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Student-Farmworker Alliance and Just Harvest. On wednesday, a delegation of sustainable food activists visited Immokalee… check out the report featuring my photos. 

This monday, I’ll be photographing in Tallahassee as the CIW  bring the reality of brutal human rights violations in Florida’s fields to the governor’s doorstep. Check their website for the update!

It’s good to be out on the road again… after a good long period grounded in Philly, I’m finally feeling ready to be on the move again. There’s a few other things on the radar coming up, including a trip to the Bay area in California, a roadtrip through the south, and some time in Europe this summer. If you know someone who could use the services of an itinerant photographer along the way, drop a line…

In July, I found myself heading back towards europe for some family time. My mother now lives in the Geneva area, and I hadn’t been out there to visit her since she left Washington DC. I’m hoping to branch out into finding work in both Geneva and DC, because I don’t visit either of my parents often enough.†

After Geneva, my mother and I rendezvoused with the rest of the family in normandy at La Porte Rouge. At the earlier family reunion, I’d taken a ton of photos, and my mother had made a great little book of them as a gift for my grandparents. This time, after many years of completely integrating my work and personal lives, I was determined to try to pry them apart a bit, so no pictures… It’s hard, because good candid portraits are always there to be taken… but it’s an exhausting zone to always be in, so I used the excuse that I couldn’t take any pictures while I was busy holding my new baby cousins. (This was of course a blatant lie, because I’ve taken plenty of good pictures while holding my friend’s twins, or with a dancer climbing on my shoulders for that matter) -†

But on the Philly photographic front, one of the highlights of July was working with Sebastienne Mundheim on photos for her upcoming Sea of Birds piece. The things that she makes out of very simple materials are really wonderful… She was a bit frazzled at the time, but the piece apparently came together to wide acclaim at the Live Arts Festival, and people told me many great things about it, but sadly I missed it myself, as I was scrambling to redo this website and hers wasn’t among the list of shows that I was assigned to by the festival this year…

I was getting ready to engage with the festival in two different ways- both more as a professional in photographing it, limiting myself to only actually photographing the shows that I was getting paid to shoot (even though in the past, some of the best gems were the ones that I’d thrown myself into unpaid) and also as a “performer”, as we’d decided to hold some more dance/photo sessions for How Philly Moves as a performance event in the festival.

While I was primarily laying low and doing my own work, I did run up to NYC for a little corporate portrait photographer gig – gotta pay those bills, right?

Back at home, there was not too much to report, but I did have a great experience working on the CD cover for Joshua Marcus‘ new record ‘Reverse The Charges’ – it involved some quality time in the dark in his basement, doing some light-paintings of a cardboard sculpture by Beth Nixon, with a painting by Jack Ohly in the background. Wonderful combination of wonderful artists… and now the record is out and it’s gorgeous, so you should check it out…

Another month, another friend releasing another great new record… If you’re not familiar with Amy Pickard, you should be.†

That short film on my archive by photo archivist / filmmaker John Pettit ended up winning third place in First Person Arts’ competition. Here it is:

While I still wasn’t really ready to be heading back out on the road, the rest of the world wasn’t waiting, and my friends at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers were on the move in Miami. It was one of those crazy brief jaunts down, little sleep, lots of photos.

So here we were, a small crew in a big yellow schoolbus full of radio gear, heading to Honduras… and every conceivable thing that could have happened to hold us up did… it was like a perfectly scripted absurdist comedy, and I’ll write a bit more about it later. Suffice to say, when I was expecting to be gone for a week and a half or two at the max, I ended up using the whole three weeks that I had before I had to come back for a gig in Philly. I managed to accompany them all the way to the destination, but wasn’t able to stick around for the end of the building of the station…

While in Philly, I got some more MRIs, this time of my left knee, and confirmed that all of my throwing myself around is indeed breaking my body. And so it goes. And so I ran off to Rhode Island to play wedding photographer for some friends, and threw myself around some more :)

So it was supposed to be a quiet summer getting caught up on my back end admin work, but then I got the call inviting me to hop on board of a big yellow schoolbus packed full of radio tower equipment driving from Illinois to Honduras, and it was hard to turn down… rushed through two quick shoot for Network for New Music and the First Person Documentary and then hit the road…

I headed out to Pittsburgh, where I took some photos for Soma Mestizo, but mostly spent the time camped out with my friend Ilya who was helping me with this website stuff. He basically built all of the infrastructure in the space of a month, but without having finished editing my photos, I couldn’t really plug the content into it. I thought that it would take me a month or two tops… unfortunately, life doesn’t really stop on a dime just because you need time to get caught up, and it ended up taking me over a year to be ready to go…

One of the notable shoots this month however was for Pig Iron Theatre’s Isabella – when people asked me what I’d done that day, I got a great reactions to my response: “Oh, I spent a bunch of time locked in the dark in a walk-in-refrigerator, with a naked man with a hacksaw…

After a quiet New Years with a friend in London, I continued with my crazy zigzag itinerary -> two days in oxford, a day in paris, landed in Philly and photographed a friend’s wedding the next morning, ran off to florida for a wedding in Immokalee, and then barely enough time home to backup my data and run off to Kenya for three weeks if Radio Building adventures. I also ended up teaching some impromptu photo workshops while, there, among other things..

After all this intense running around, I would be pretty fried once home…

I clearly hadn’t yet learned my lesson about overextending myself and traveling too much, because in December of 2006 and January of 2007, I had one of the craziest itineraries ever. Here’s what it looked like, between some photo projects and commitments to family and friends:

One week in Oaxaca with a human rights delegation, then Philly, New York, Philly, DC, a day in Paris, two days in Normandy, through Paris to take the train to London, two days there then two days in Oxford, another day in London, another day in Paris, land in Philly and photograph a friend’s wedding, then head down to florida a few days later to play wedding photographer there as well, then back to Philly with just enough time to download and backup my files before running off to Kenya for three weeks with the Prometheus Radio Project folks for an Indymedia convergence in Nairobi around the World Social Forum…†

It was the beginning of a pretty crazy time…