Blood Lotus

My photo, “Orange Needles,” appears in the summer issue of the online literary journal Blood Lotus:

I am pleased that it introduces the Creative Nonfiction section of the journal, which is how I’d categorize my photography, if I had to put it in a literature classification.

The first piece in the section is about how the value of objects changes over time – another theme that I keep returning to.

Anyhow, check it out – there’s some good reading in there, and the cover piece is very nice too.

Street Legal

There’s a new online literary journal, CeLLA’s Round Trip, which happens to have published one of my photos from Dubai. My photo’s called “Street Legal” and it’s on page 34… but page through because there’s plenty of eye candy. (I haven’t read it yet so can’t vouch for the writing…)

And notice the nice, virtual format of issuu.com. It’s a free online magazine publishing service, so if you’ve ever wanted to be a zine publisher, here’s your chance.

In honor of this publication, I put up a special gallery at Baraka Images. This gallery will come down eventually, so check it out now!

Meanwhile, here’s another sample.

(In case you can’t read the sign, it says in Arabic and English, “Celebrate the joy of togetherness – Celebrate shopping!”)

Togetherness, indeed.

I do miss the irony that is Dubai.

Anderbo.com does Afghanistan

I can’t seem to leave Afghanistan… I keep working with those photos, from 2002-05, because the depth of meaning they have for me seems to elude the actual image.

Anyhow, six of them are published today as a photo memoir, “Afghanistan Blues,” in Anderbo.com, a New York online journal whose editor, Rick Rofihe, is an impressively energetic guy. Just talking to him on the phone for a few minutes made me tired. In a good way, of course.

The journal doesn’t do much photography, and also doesn’t do hyperlinks, but otherwise worth a look. Check it out.

This is what I do

Colleagues from my former career, the ones who work with words, are not really sure about what I’m doing.

How to explain to them that words betrayed me? That, somewhere among the mis-translations, the cultural Nazi-ism, and the unread reports to headquarters, I became disillusioned with the whole approach to training journalists in developing countries? Not with the journalists themselves – who I miss terribly – but with the system of nonprofits who are more interested in making themselves feel good than in actually improving the skills of their foreign colleagues.

It’s a long story and maybe someday I’ll make a separate blog about it. [See my previous blog, "Last Days First Days," for a taste of my final training assignment, in Timor-Leste.]

Meanwhile, I don’t do words. All my life experience morphs into the dance of camera and eye and hand and light, and this is what I come up with:

Rain, From Below

It was the first large canvas print that I sold in Big Canoe, where I live now. The buyer, who is a designer in New York, saw it in a 16 by 20 and said, “This needs to be BIG.” So I did it as 30 by 40 canvas, and we both loved it. And after reviewing my portfolio, he told me, “This is what you should do. The textures.”

This morning I learned that “Rain, From Below” was a semi-finalist in a photography competition and will be published in the summer issue of the Adirondack Review.

I shot this one morning in Bali after a rain. It’s straight from the camera – no Photoshopping. I was mesmerized by the way that the light glowed through the rain and through the leaf, and took this photo from underneath.

This is what I do.