Club Paradise →

Yesterday I was driving along through some backwoods nowhere place in rural South Carolina. I honestly couldn’t even tell you the name of the town. I was trying to outrun a storm, a silly proposition in my old slow van.

I passed a building for sale. Decrepit but decorated with a hand painted sign that said ‘Paradise Club’. I stopped to photograph it. I’m not so into ruin porn these days (click the link to read my thoughts on that subject) but this one was hard to resist. The blatant contradiction. Paradise Lost club? Har har.

There’s a yellow shopping cart parked out front. It’s full of detritus. An aged pile of pages held closed by a piece of asphalt in the space where a toddler or a carton of blueberries might have been placed once upon a time. I walk up, point my camera at it and a voice calls out from behind me.

“Are you disabled?”

No I think to myself, curious and a little bored but not disabled.

“Just looking around,” I say to the bent old man who I find behind me.

He’s wearing a red t-shirt that’s unintentionally short, a crop top really. Wire frame glasses, a lanyard with a plastic card on it, a little lavender container of what might be pepper spray clipped to the belt that holds up his baggy chinos. He squints even though it’s not sunny out. He spits when he talks and stands a little too close. It’s kind of disturbing but his words are clear and very interesting.

Turns out he’s a big fan of history, he starts rattling on about the greedy woman who owns the Paradise Club and tells me she’s asking for too much money. Says some people are so rich and they find it’s never enough. They cling to their wealth and worship it like a God.

He starts spouting facts and dates of historic events. Tells me the Columbine massacre happened on Hitler’s birthday 110 years after he was born. I ask where he’s from. He tells me about the first guy to win the Medal of Honor in Vietnam who’s from Saugerties where he grew up.

I’m a little unnerved but also a little intrigued. This guy could probably be the subject of a film. Marwencol all over again. A savant in the broke down backwater. How did he end up here?

I’m politely backing away from both the effluence and the weirdness. He’s following. He leans on the van and continues talking. Asks no questions about it, doesn’t even seem to notice it. I kind of love that. The van is low hanging fruit and he won’t pick it.

I can see the storm clouds behind him getting closer, the horizon is the color of bruised skin. I tell him I better get on with it. He tells me that today is the anniversary of Hitler’s suicide and that the Nazis fought for eight more days after he died. With that he connects the dots as to why he started talking about school shootings in the first place. I’m floored.

I say goodbye, he says sorry for taking up so much time. I tell him it was a pleasure to talk. That’s the truth.

His name is Bob. I fact check him with Google as a I drive away. He’s spot on. Hitler did kill himself on April 30. Columbine did happen in 1999. Roger Hugh Charles Donlon was the first to win the Medal of Honor in Vietnam and he is from Saugerties.

What the fuck…

I wish I would have taken his picture, but I was a little scared.

I did take a cowardly shot through the back window of the van as he walked away. At least I know he’s not a ghost, or was he?

Ça va?

My middle name is Marius. I didn't even notice that it was in the background of this photo until I saw it larger on my laptop.

So much synchronicity lately.

The wires are crossing, the simulation is breaking down, aliens exist, my favorite TV show character died in real life.


I drink coffee and Perrier at cafés on the coast of Normandy, I get so tired some days that I go on road trips and forget to bring clothing.

I'm cosplaying as a French even though I don't speak the language beyond a little "ça v?”.

I do say "kwah son" now, I butcher everything else to the point of laughter.

I don't stop trying.

I love it so much, all of it.

P.S.

Here’s a song I heard over the PA at a horse track a couple weeks ago. I had no idea what the words meant when I heard it because, as I mentioned above, I don’t speak French. I just liked the passion and the catchy rhythm. I later looked up the lyrics and they’re not so bad! You can read them here if you like.

Thoughts on scanning and the glory of film grain

For years this was my favorite photo. I’ve printed it a few times which is kind of rare for me even though I think that’s the best way to see images. Once someone even commissioned me to do it and I got to go through the process of working with a pro printing lab in New York City. That was real nice, I’d like to do that again.

I’ve scanned the negative myself and I’ve had it scanned on the apex of scanners, an Imacon X5. These babies are the real dark arts of the scanning world. They don’t even really exist anymore, you have to know someone who knows someone or have access to an art school or live in Sweden or pray to an ancient pagan god I. And when you’re done with all that most likely your computer will be too modern to interface with it so you’ll have to delve into the world of obsolete technology and remember how to use Windows 95 or some strange early esoteric version of Mac OS. And you’ll hate yourself for spending thousands of dollars chasing a dream that should be dead but God Damn will your scans look great and you’ll be able to print as big as you ever wanted to but it won’t matter because everyone looks at your photos on Instagram or a monitor at best. I volunteered as a TA at the International Center of Photography just to get time with one and then I didn’t even use my little punch card after weeks and weeks of service. Are you also guilty of self sabotage?

But I digress…

Let’s take a closer look.

There’s that good good grain again and those impossibly milky tones. I mean I was lucky, the fog that day made the sky look just like the water. It was all one big beautiful beige swath and then this little figure hunting for shark’s teeth. Because it’s Venice Florida and that’s what you do there.

There they are, head pointed at the tideline hunting for ancient teeth and I’m just walking down the beach with a Mamiya 7 on Christmas morning for no good reason other than the fact that I had a hunch I’d find something cool if I got on my bike and took a little pedal around. And I did! The world gave me present! It’ll do that from time to time if you let it, you just gotta put yourself in the way.

Perpetual motion / Gas in the tank

Once upon a time I drove many thousands of miles across the country by myself and I didn’t even really post about it.

I had an assignment for Bloomberg Businessweek in Virginia. I asked them if I could use the money they would have spent on a flight for truck gas instead. They agreed, and that was the beginning of a long meandering Odyssey.

I went all the way up the East Coast to New York City, continued further north into Canada, crossed over to Michigan, dropped down into the Great Plains and ended up in California after a time.

I was just kind of following urges and dropping into a rhythm. I feel best when I’m a perpetual motion machine, life takes on a weird meaningfulness and the sense of meaning is enough to keep the motion going and the motion makes me feel good so I just keep putting gas in the tank.

I actually have a decent amount of photos from this trip but weirdly when I looked at them right after I got back they just sort of made me feel bad. What was all the mileage for? I guess you can kind of say that about anything. I feel better about them now so I think I’ll start letting them out into the world.

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Paragliders launching off the Oregon coast somewhere near Astoria. I had travelled out that way from Florida for a photography retreat. I was looking for direction, I’d been making images non stop for a few years at that point but I couldn’t really see how they all fit together. I was younger and a bit more sad and I figured having a group of folks tell me what my art meant would set me on a path.

I couldn’t even really tell the folks what the beginning of the story was though so the workshop ended up being less than useful other than the fact that once again I was on the road with that weird little Yashica TLR pointing it at things.

I got this image to show for it. The journey is the destination? Not all who wander are lost? Some other cheesy phrase that you might find on shabby chicified plaque at Marshall’s?

I’m still piecing together the little fractional seconds I’ve collected over the years, they’re starting to make a little more sense. I get the idea that I might be pulling on a thread that’s connected to a bigger ball of yarn. Hope springs eternal.

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This is a setup.

Literally. This shot was set up. It’s not an abandoned car in the desert.

Five years ago I agreed to be part of a music video shoot for my friend Dan Newman. I flew out to meet him in Philadelphia I think and then we drove all the way to Amarillo and back over the course of like five days although I think it might have been less.

We barely slept, we stayed in terrible motels, we drank excellent coffee and ate pretty shitty food. I took a weird Yashica TLR with me and pointed it at a couple things along the way. This was my most successful image. You can see me “waking up” in it if you click the video below. I can’t click the video below because watching it makes me cringe. But you go ahead, have a laugh at my expense.

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This is a little boat called the Hornblower. How do I know it’s called the Hornblower? Well, it happens to be written right there on the stern. I know that because I’m looking at this on a big monitor rather than a little phone screen. I also know this because it’s a medium format photo shot with a Mamiya 7 and scanned by me on an ancient black magic machine.

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Here you go, take a closer look. This is a crop of a 100% zoom. What else do you see? A bunch of cold Canadians braving the mist that blows off of the thundering Niagra falls? Yeah there’s that, but there’s also something else. Grain. Delicious, tasty film grain. And seagulls. Holy shit, there’s little tiny seagull right there in the middle of the foreground.

It’s sort of tacky and worn out to wax poetic about the beauty of film but it’s also just really really beautiful stuff. It looks like life looks or at least how I want life to look or how I want my memory of it to look. It’s expensive and finicky and a little try hard sure, but I just can’t quit it and I hope it never goes away.

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I’ve got a couple images in the July/August issue of Condé Nast Traveler. One was shot with a beat up old iPhone 5 and the other was shot with a Mamiya 7. I guess the takeaway is that it doesn’t really matter what you shoot a photo with, all the cameras are pretty good these days and magazines will run your images if they’re nice to look at.

Above is the fancy medium format one. I was walking along the shore of my favorite beach when I happened upon this little umbrella fort. Who takes this many umbrellas with them to the beach? Why are they being used as a wall rather than for shade? What’s up with those giant yellow wheels? I pointed the camera and took a photo. At the sound of the shutter an overly tanned man adorned with lots of gold jewelry popped up from behind the barricade and yelled “Hey! We don’t want our picture taken!” I replied saying I was sorry, “You’re not in the photo and I can’t imagine it’ll end up anywhere anyway. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Oops…

This one was shot in Chokoloskee, one of the strangest towns in all of Florida. I was youngish and sort of lost at the time and when I couldn’t figure out what to do I’d just get in my truck and cruise the Florida backroads hunting for things to photograph. I took US 41 all the way south to it's terminus in Miami. I wish I could say it was worth it and that I saw a ton of cool stuff but in reality about seventy five percent of it is sketchy strip malls filled with vape shops and questionable massage parlors.

Oh Florida…

A million billion years ago at the nicest hotel in a town whose name I can’t remember somewhere in Bolivia.

The room cost like $20 a night. I bought the camera that made this photo a couple days before I got on the plane and it broke halfway through the trip. It was bitter cold and I was underprepared for the weather. I don’t know why they didn’t drain this pool. Shortly after I took this, a huge dust storm rolled through town and we hid inside our tiny room punishing ourselves with a Hannah Montana movie because it was the only thing we could find in English.

My memory works off of visual cues from photos. I don’t remember people so well, places I’ve been, things I ate, just photos of them that I took or looked at. I don’t know if this is some kind of learned response from reflexively taking pictures for more than a decade or if my brain is a little broken.

The downside is that all the gone people are flat laid in my mind’s eye. One dimensional fractions of seconds instead of flesh and blood and movement and sound. I guess it’s better than nothing but it feels a little sad and a little empty. I guess I’m glad I’ve got memories at all.

Does your brain work this way? What does a memory feel like to you? What does it look like?

Moments. Timing. Light. Sometimes you just get lucky. Sometimes the world sets itself perfectly in place.

I wish I knew who this person was so I could give them a copy of this photo.

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In my opinion the springs are the best wilderness Florida has to offer. Cold water, lush vegetation. They look other world and the most interesting array of humanity tends to gather at them.

 

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At the end of March I headed up to Orlando to shoot some photographs for Bloomberg Businessweek.  They wanted me to to document the impact that Covid-19 was having on the tourism and restaurant industry. 

This was before the real chaos had started. Everything was terrifying, I guess it still is. I remember driving around in my truck listening a Sporkful Podcast about whether or not you could contract the virus from takeout food We still knew so little, we still know so little. 

The morning was cool by Florida standards, no clouds in the sky. I got off I-4 and started drifting through Disney World at random. It was eerie. Normally everything would have been packed to the gills with a mass of humanity eagerly seeking congress with a giant smiling mouse, on this morning however that world had been deserted. 

I was having trouble capturing the strangeness of it all. How do you photograph what’s not there? I snapped some photos of empty parking lots and empty roads, a drive by frame of someone jogging on the side of an empty highway but they weren’t translating. 

I couldn’t get access to the parks or even anywhere close to them. I eventually gave up trying and headed to the hotel from The Florida Project mostly because I like that movie and it gave me a target. 

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I was standing in the parking lot when I heard a helicopter getting closer and closer. It ended up landing almost right in front of me. Helicopter tours! One last hold out amongst a sea of shuttered businesses. 

I got the okay from my editor to go up up and away. The ride was only fifteen minutes but it really put the situation into perspective. The parking lots of the parks are much larger than I realized, larger than the parks themselves. They are massive expanses of gridded black top stretching as far as the eye can see, and they were almost completely empty on a temperate Sunday in spring. 

God’s eye view of an unfolding world scale disaster. Every empty parking spot a physical representation of a job that went away, of a vacation that didn’t happen, a big headed mouse that didn’t get their hug. 

Happy mother’s day mama. 

Wherever you might be...

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I wish I got to know you better. 

I wonder who I would be if I did. 

We never got to have “real” conversations. 

Your voice got softened to a murmur before we could. 

I remember once upon a time, in a moment when your speech was good enough to hear, you told me the whole thing kind of felt like drifting off to sea while everyone you knew was still standing on the shoreline. I imagine their outlines getting blurred, their words getting harder and harder to hear. But no pain, you’re held in the arms of the Gulf of Mexico when it’s warm like a womb in the middle of the Florida summer. 

You loved this weird messed up state so much, the idealized version of it at least. We came here to hide out from the cold when the northern winter’s got too hard for you. 

We briefly got to live a version of a dream you had held onto since childhood. You painted our house in Chicago turquoise and pink, and then you painted your cane those same tones when you needed it to walk. 

Always creative, a writer a dreamer. I guess those are the parts of you that live in me. I wish I could know for sure. But, I guess very few things in this life are certain, and I’m thankful for the pieces that I do have. Journals, photographs, hordes of strange vintage objects. Sacred fragments that let me know you were real. 

Remember when I’d leave with dad for the weekends and you’d say, “see you later alligator” every time? 

I do. I got an artist to piece your handwriting together from your journals and now it lives on my left wrist. The hand you favored. 

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So, see you later alligator. 

Thanks for the memories. 

I hope you’re warm and safe, wherever you might be. 

Back when work was still happening, when people had these things called jobs, I was fortunate enough to assist Atlanta based photographer Kevin D. Liles on a shoot with the Braves here in my home state of Florida.

Kevin is a genuinely great guy. He’s friendly, funny, hard working, talented and a fellow seltzer addict like me. We’ve stayed in contact, and yesterday he asked me to submit an image for the ATL Photo Night Community Quarantine Photo Project.

The idea is to submit one photo of your quarantine experience. I gave it some thought and decided on a still life even though that’s not what I typically shoot.

My life has been whittled down to a weird kind of deja vu, I’m used to wandering around freely and exploring wherever I want to. Now I’m staying home most days and explore the inner space of my own head.

I get coffee beans from a contactless to go table that’s set up in front of a shop I used to go into almost everyday. I stress bake too many sweet things and marvel at how fast a baker’s dozen of anything can disappear into my body. I lean into Eastern thought and try to pay attention to my breath while thoughts race around my brain. I chase dopamine on my bicycle and listen to my heart beat in my ears as I run. I eat a little piece of a certain kind of mushroom most days to keep my demons at bay. I occasionally indulge my paranoia and wonder how rational or irrational my behavior is. I push seeds into the earth and cross my fingers for growth. I continue to keep my sourdough starter alive along with a million other strangers on the Internet. I burn incense and palo santo to clear out the bad energy that seems to accrue in a home when you spend too much time in it. I hang out with my friends online and sometimes it feels so real that I forget I haven’t been in a room with these people in more than a month. I lose lots of games of chess, but love the process because it takes time and time seems to be one of the things I have in abundance. I wonder about the future, I reflect on the past I do my best to “be here now,” and sometimes I even succeed.

I love this quote by Teju Cole, “The texture of memory and the texture of dreams are curiously similar.” It’s an excerpt from his book Blindspot, you can read the entire passage if you click here.

Sometimes memories really do feel like dreams, I think that’s what I like about analog photography, the flaws in it mimic the impermanence of dreams and the soft edges of memory.

The photographs below don’t feel like they were taken by me, I don’t feel like I was witness to those moments. They feel like some other person’s narrative, a dream I didn’t have.

Photos are tricky like that, they lie as much as they tell the truth. They give me a window into the past but the window is limited by the edges of the frame. I look at my compositional choices and I wonder what I was thinking at the time, or if I was thinking at all. I wonder if I should even open this window or if it should remain shut. There is a thin line between rumination and nostalgia.

Michael Hoffman, the former publisher of Aperture, had the idea that sequencing a series of photographs is akin to reading tea leaves. So here I present you with a little I Ching style grid of my past, leaves in the bottom of the metaphorical cup left for you to interpret. Take a deep breath and let it out slowly. What do you see? What do you feel?

I got to Tokyo just before Typhoon Hagibis made landfall. Japan shut down its bullet trains and the news was full of stories talking about the historic nature of the storm, the most powerful to ever touch mainland Japan. There wasn’t really much to do but shelter in place, I’d walk around from time to time and watch my umbrella invert in the wind.

I remember eating a lot of strange and delicious things from konbini’s and wondering if I had made the wrong choice putting myself in the line of fire of something so powerful. I didn’t feel like I was going to die, but it seemed like a vague possibility.

I ended up being fine even though it felt a bit terrifying while it was happening. I think the typhoon did something like $15B worth of damage and 98 people died. While it was causing chaos I was on the phone with a friend in the States discussing whether climate change was to blame and noting how strange it was that everyone was using single use plastic to protect themselves from an event that could have found its roots in that kind of behavior.

Once upon a time I drove to Paris Texas because I thought one of my favorite movies was filmed there.

It turns out none of it was, not a single scene. But it’s alright the town was pretty great anyway.

I saw Jesus in cowboy boots on someone’s tombstone. I watched a hawk tear apart a pigeon in a parking lot while I tore apart a cold slice of pizza. I talked to that guy with the beard and he said I could stay in his house, I wasn’t brave enough though. I got stuck in the mud in a cemetery and nearly had to call a tow truck. I bought a painting of the sea and a little print of the last supper, they both hang above the desk I’m typing at right now.

Yes, this is a copy of the Eifel tower with a cowboy hat on it.

Yes, this is a copy of the Eifel tower with a cowboy hat on it.

Roadside Attractions. New Mexico, 2018.

Jesus. Salt Lake Temple. Salt Lake City Utah, 2018

Last summer I had this secret job that I can’t really talk about. It involved going to a couple horse tracks in New York. Most of the time I was at Belmont Stakes a.k.a The Big Sandy. It’s a time capsule of a place full of all the tropes you might imagine.

The following is a selection of images of the crew over at Tampa Auto Stylists. I found them by following the bass. They were nothing but kind and schooled me on the art of juicing up box Chevy’s.

PLEASE PUSH PLAY BEFORE PROCEEDING