Category: Photography
Push/Pull (2012)
Taking place on Saturday is the annual Push/Pull at Hyde Park Gym in Austin. Many of my good friends will be competing to outdo one another in the bench press and deadlift. I wish I could be there — it will be the first time I’ve missed the event in four years. Though I, too, was competing, here’s an image I managed to capture of Luke Goebel pulling what looks like 575 pounds. Best of luck to my friends in their attempts to lift heavy things.
Come and Take It (2013)
Mexico are playing Brazil in the World Cup, so I thought I’d share this photograph. I shot this image with my phone at the Austin City Limits Festival because the subject confused me. For anyone who knows anything about the origin of the “Come and Take It” flag, flying it with the flag of Mexico makes little sense — especially in Texas. Then again… irony is in.
Lucero (2004)
This past weekend I was in Austin for a wedding, and got to spend time with my friend (and former bandmate) Tim. It seems that any time I get in Tim’s truck, he is listening to Lucero. So this post is for him for driving me around town, buying beers and letting me crash at his house. This photograph of Lucero was taken at The Fest in Gainesville, Florida, at the now closed Common Grounds. Though the image isn’t spectacular, I just want someone to tell me what that is in the middle of the crowd staring at the camera.
West of the Pecos (2013)
Last September, I took a trip to West Texas, sidetracked to Carlsbad, New Mexico, and on the way home made a roadside stop at the West of the Pecos Museum in Pecos, Texas. It was a strange and interesting place. On the trip, though, I took my Nikon F100 and a few rolls of cheap film, which I cheaply had processed and put on disc at a drug store. The result was some flat, muddy, grainy image files, that seemed to represent the overall tone of the town of Pecos.
Down Goes Frazier (2008)
On this blog, I will continue to use Mondays to post images related to music. As many of the musicians I have photographed are friends from West Virginia, I also have their music to share. Here’s a shot of my friends’ band Down Goes Frazier, who were based in Huntington in the mid-00s. If you’re a fan of the likes of Hot Water Music, Against Me or Planes Mistaken for Stars, have a listen (or download for free) their first two EPs below. Nowadays, members of DGF who aren’t a college professor are playing in the bands Rat Ship and Station(s).
Brian (2005)
This is my good friend Brian — a fantastic photographer and even better individual. He died of cancer on May 2, 2013. I did not know I had this image until I came across it cleaning off a hard drive just now. As soon as I saw it, I had to post it on here despite it being past five o’clock on a Friday evening. Looking at the contact sheet, I took this photo as a lighting test in the studio. Brian and I were in our first semester of graduate school at The University of Texas at Austin. It’s the only frame I shot of him. It was a difficult image to edit just now, so I barely did, and it brought tears to my eyes looking at it. I miss him.
Night Out Against Violence (2004)
On Wednesday I referenced the Instagram hashtag theme of “Woman Crush Wednesday.” So today I go with the “Throwback Thursday” theme. I’m embarrassed to admit that I did a terrible job archiving my image files before 2006. Most were saved as small JPEGs on discs. This photograph — along with the image I posted last week — is one of the very few that remain from my stint in Charleston in 2004. The photo was from an assignment I did on the city’s Night Out Against Violence, which took place in a downtown housing project. When I saw this boy watching from the other side of a fence, I found it unfortunately ironic that he was holding a plastic gun and also blowing a party horn. That summer I had reported on half a dozen murders in the city, so that moment has always stuck with me.
Cecilia (2011)
From April 2011 until early 2012, my friend Zach and I produced a portrait project in Austin called Femme et vélo. The concept was simple — photographs of women on bicycles (with some vintage styling thrown in). It gave Zach and me the opportunity to be creative, but having to force the bike into all the images we published was limiting. So here’s one the last frames I captured on our shoot with model Cecilia — one without a bike. Click here for photographs with bikes.
Dana December Smith (2004)
In 2004 I was a reporter for the Charleston Daily Mail in the capital city of West Virginia. When needed, I was asked to be the photographer for other reporters’ stories. For one story, I was asked to go with a reporter to the Mount Olive maximum security prison to interview Dana December Smith. Thirteen years earlier, Smith had been sentenced to two life sentences for murdering a mother and her daughter. The story was about how Smith had discovered evidence proving his innocence, and I simply photographed him in a room in the prison explaining this to the reporter. Based on a web search, Smith is still in prison today, and still maintains his innocence.
(Pardon the quality of the image, which was taken on a Nikon D1 and poorly preserved as a JPEG over the last 10 years.)