Orange Ya Glad...

Insert bad knock knock joke here.

Krantz Revisits Katrina

San Antonio Express-News photojournalist Lisa Krantz has been drawn back to New Orleans several times since Katrina. In her most recent endeavor, she's using audio, video and stills to tell the story of those who have been deserted since Katrina. Through the eyes of those in one neighborhood, you see how they truly struggle to find home, without a house.

Press Park was built in the late 1960s as a pathway to the American Dream for low-income residents. But the neighborhood hid a nightmare. The homes were built over a landfill that environmental testing showed was leaching dangerous chemicals. In response, the federal government placed the neighborhood on the nation's infamous Superfund list.

In 2005, Mother Nature did what chemical contamination and a wave of litigation couldn't. It wiped out the neighborhood. With the hope of rebuilding, four families have returned to the only place they've called home. That rebuilding is nowhere in sight.

Krantz is a good friend and a great photographer. She is an insane work-a-holic and a bit of a perfectionist -- and it really shows in this Katrina stuff. She inspires me, so go check her stuff out.

Fuck These Photos That My Brain Makes

Photography is truly about secrets. The things we don't know & the things we forget. It is an enigma to me...the more I feel I understand, the less I really know... I want to turn myself upside down so all this head knowledge pours out my ears & runs down the sewers where it belongs. Fuck these photos that my brain makes. Well exposed, thoughtfully composed. Who gives a fuck? I want to make photos that people can feel, understand & walk into. I've got so much to learn & so much to forget.
-- Matt Eich

Alt Church

We did a quick hit on this local church that uses rap, hip-hop and breakdancing to get through to its congregation. Unfortunately the b-boys didn't get a chance to show their stuff, because the service ran long. I'd love to go back and see those guys bust a move for Jesus someday.



With his Bible open in his lap, Jarvis Jackson, 18, of Lutz listens intently to the pastor during Thursday night's teen service. Some describe Jackson as the epitome of Crossover, he raps, breakdances and loves God.



Holli Lloyd, 18, sits on the floor resting her head on her friend Evelyn Colon's lap, during an emotional moment at the Thursday night teen service at Crossover Community Church. "Some people come here and just break," said Lloyd. "I hate to see people cry, but that's God touching them."



Tommy Kyllonen, lead pastor at Crossover Community Church, opens the teen service with a prayer.

Help Protect Those Who Protect You

WIP: Wrap Up

The Women in Photojournalism conference was awesome. Amazing work by some amazing people. The NPPA already has a story up on the weekend, and my wrap up is below:

Rock star Preston Gannaway set the mood for the weekend, by opening with some really solid community journalism that she does for the Concord Monitor. What I got out of her talk was her commitment to telling the stories of her community and the importance of being respectful of it. She showed her work from a staff photo column called Teen Life as well as her incredibly intimate and touching story on Carolynne St. Pierre, a wife and mother with terminal liver cancer.

San Jose Mercury news photographer Pauline Lubens is a bad ass. I liked her immediately when she started her talk by saying that she's never made it easy for editors. Her passion is the Iraq war, covering it twice -- each time turning her focus to the impact of the war on Iraqi civilians. Even when she's home in California, she's still looking for ways to cover it. There wasn't a dry eye in the house after she showed her long-term project on Sgt. Frank Sandoval, who returned from serving in Iraq with a serious head injury from an IED. At the same time, she was working on a parallel story about Abdul Hakim, an Iraqi boy who traveled to Pittsburgh for surgery after being injured by a U.S.-fired mortar shell.

Philadelphia Inquirer photographer April Saul has been documenting the rise of violence in her city with a photo column, designed to put a face on the statistics. It was awarded a first place in POYi last year. And I recently came across a piece about why Saul decided to tell these stories. "I didn't choose to do this column; it chose me." She also had a great breakout session on long-term stories, and shared 3 that she'd worked on over the course of several decades and several generations of family members.

Washington Post web guru Tom Kennedy enlightened us some of his philosophies on life and journalism (specifically how we differ from TV). He shared some of the work of his staff, most notably, Travis Fox's piece on the Crisis in Darfur - the video footage is gorgeous and the testimonials are a powerful reminder in letting the subjects voices carry the story.

And then there was me. I tried to instill my belief that personal vision has a place in a newspaper, and as I was sharing pictures, offered a brain dump to show how my mind works in approaching things. This led to a half a dozen picture stories, and how lessons learned along the way built on each other. And it all culminated with the creation of APhotoADay, an online community of photojournalists who refuse to settle for the status quo -- where I shared the work of a dozen or so members of APAD, and read some awesome comments they sent me on what APAD means to them. Below is a video my friend Jen Friedberg shot of Krantzy Pants introducing me. And I'm not sure it really conveys just how fucking nervous I was. But the most important thing is that I survived (read: last month's WIP? WTF?! post for background!). The talk seemed to be pretty well received, at least among the students and young professionals there. Although I'm sure I pissed off an editor or two.



*** Other highlights included: Knowing that the future of photojournalism will be bright with students like Joe Buglewicz and Alison Shuman. Getting to see my good friend Nicole Fruge's amazing images from Iraq during a workshop, and hear her talk in-depth about the experience. And getting to hang out with some incredibly talented people that I don't see nearly enough (like Lisa Krantz, Ross Taylor and Jason Arthurs -- as well as the previously mentioned Frooge, Friedberg and PGan). And of course, an incredibly outrageous night spent dancing with the gay cowboys at the Rainbow Cattle Company in Austin still brings a smile to my face.

Good times...

Toy Monger

Seriously. Cutest dog, ever.

The Face of Homelessness

"What am I supposed to tell my kids?" asks Nancy Soble, 38. She's currently living alone at the Marina Club of Tampa, a home she hoped would provide temporary transitional housing for her and eight of her nine children. The Marina Club has gotten an injunction from a federal judge to prevent Soble and her family from living there.

Eight kids... three of which are medically unstable... Possibly homeless soon... I think there's a bigger story here, and I hope to follow up on it soon.

.:beat:.

i'm having a jack kerouac moment. all my thoughts are blending together into one long scroll. random. furious. fast. uncensored. hurt meets the pleasure of a beer in the rain. thinking. feeling. wanting. needing. something. to take away this pain.

i stopped making sense hours ago.

Looky Looky

If you haven't noticed yet... there's a new look in these parts. I don't love it -- yet. There are still a few more things I'd like to tweak, but the most important thing, and the main reason for the redesign is that now the comments work. So, please... COMMENT away.

Rain, A Haiku

rain falls from the sky
every afternoon at 4
wet clothes and cameras

This Gives Me an Idea

ONCE YOU DISCOVER THE SALVATION OF TRAVEL, the way it allows you to escape the old, escape yourself, it’s a habit as tough to kick as any narcotic. But it wasn’t the thrill of the exotic that got me hooked. It was the shock of becoming exotic, too. Arrive from somewhere six hundred—or twenty-five hundred—miles away, without parents and school ties, as a stranger spouting certainties, and you are no longer bland suburban boy, heir of nothing. You awake suddenly imbued with unearned mystery, like that Czech exchange student who transferred into high school. Now you are different. You have done nothing but show up from far away, yet to the people you come upon it’s a distinction. You were like them once, restless and stuck. Not anymore. You moved. -- S.L. Price

Evel Daze

My recent trip to Butte, Montana was amazing in so many ways. It was therapeutic. It was laughter. It was a new part of the country to see. It was the joy of making new friends. It was a lot of shooting for myself. It was enjoying life. It was liberating. And then today it ran like shit.

Right now, I'm trying to channel the philosophy of David Alan Harvey:

a [newspaper] piece that does not live up to your expectations can be explained away....."well, they just did not run the right pictures.....i had a much better picture than THIS...what were they thinking?

It's hard to separate the means from the end though. So much of who we are as photographers is tied up in how things run, as if that validates our worth. But for me, more than that, it justifies why the newspaper sent me and spent money on me to make pictures for them that they couldn't get anywhere else.

But the way I have to approach it to keep my sanity is that the paper afforded me the opportunity to have a great trip, a great time on the company dime and make some pictures for myself. Everything else is a bonus.



I heart Butte.



I was sent up there for Evel Knievel Days, which featured all sorts of fun motorcycle-themed events, like stunt jumpers and the wall of death. And the entire town of 35,000 came out to watch, parking their trucks at the top of the hill to get a better view.



When in Butte, do as the locals do and drink at the M&M. Oldest bar in Montana, and rumor has it the country. The bartenders are awesome - like Tristan and Stephanie who couldn't stop dancing... And they serve Moose Drool and Fat Tire on tap.



Next door at the Party Palace, it's a different scene. A T-shirt is optional during the wet T-shirt contest, where we saw a mother and her two daughters compete for cash prizes. The youngest daughter, on the right, took home $100 for the win.



The big event was the parade around the Evel Knievel Loop. Unfortunately, Evel was unable to make it. But I had a blast shooting it anyway.



Robbie Knievel rode in his father's honor.



My buddy Sol Neelman came over from Portland to shoot for himself. He was the source of much laughter and the good times just seem to follow him.




Despite mixed feelings about him from the people of Butte, I did find one place in town where Evel was put on a pedestal.



After being rushed to the hospital earlier in the day (for high blood pressure) Evel made his first public appearance in Butte at a $100-a-plate dinner. 45 minutes later he was escorted out and taken home for the night. Just before getting into the car, he turned to say goodbye to the crowd gathered on the street around him... no one waved back.



The paper still liked the portrait I shot of him in his St. Petersburg condo best. Running it as the 6-column lead. Hopefully it was everything Evel wanted. As soon as I walked into his home, he told me I didn't need all that fancy stuff (referring to the lighting gear). "I'll tell you what you're gonna do.... I'm gonna stand here, and you're going to stand either tehre or there, and shoot me like this." I got 7 frames off before he decided he'd had enough.

Despite how difficult the interviews were, how little access we actually had to him, and how tough of a nut he is to crack....my partner-in-crime, Lane Degregory's story is definitely worth a read.

Don't Jump