Time in New Zealand

I’ve tried to write this post for a few days now, but I’m not sure exactly what I want to say.

When you spend too much time away from a thing, it can be difficult coming back to it. You start to overthink it. You begin to wonder why you ever did the thing at all, or why you even want to do it again. You can paralyze yourself with worry and doubt.

I’ve kept this blog for well over a decade, but I don’t post nearly as often as I used to. Things change. At some point, I got bored with my photographs, and with whatever I had to say about them. I began to feel like just another voice, clamoring to be heard over all the noise. I prefer the quiet.

I still take a lot of photographs, I’m just a bit quieter about them. I’m trying to do things differently when I can, experimenting and taking more risks, but it doesn’t come as easily as it used to. There’s something to be said for youthful abandon and misplaced confidence. It’s more difficult to posture when you’re more aware of your shortcomings.

I spend a lot of time thinking about art and photography and what it means to have your own voice in a thing, and how that voice can change over time. How it becomes weathered and more comfortable with itself, but also, for me, how that comfort has inversely affected how much I want to talk about my work.

In the simplest terms, I’ve tried to be a sponge, to soak up beauty and to put that beauty back out there in whatever small and unique way I can. And maybe I don’t need to talk about anything more than that. Maybe that’s the post.

So here are a few pictures I think are beautiful and that showcase a bit of beauty in the world, from the north and south islands of New Zealand, and one or two from Australia, while I was skipping through. Let’s not make too much of it.

Diary 01 | Ways of Seeing

It’s been a strange few years. Since the start of 2020, I’ve lived in Charlottesville, Bangkok, Sydney, and New York. Three continents in as many years. Then, in March, I moved back home to New Orleans. I’ve felt uprooted and unbalanced for a while now, but things are starting to settle in. I’m starting to settle in.

I mention all of this because I think my photography has suffered for it. I’ve been preoccupied and distracted and I’ve lacked focus. I’ve been lazy as well, and I’ve used the past few years as an excuse for that laziness. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut. It’s much more difficult to dig your way out of it.

So I’ve been trying to change the way I see things, to relearn some things about seeing, and to recapture some of the wonder I felt when I first picked up a camera. I’ve been photographing clichés. Reflections in puddles. Landscapes out of plane windows. Temples and riots of wires above old shophouses.

As artists, we’re often told to kill our darlings, to not fall in love with a thing because of our experience with it. But I’ve always found those platitudes disingenuous. All art is personal. Some clichés are really beautiful. Show what you love and hope that it resonates with even one person.

I didn’t set out to make these photographs anything more than what they are–a document of the past nine months. I tried to pay particular attention to things I would normally walk past. I tried to point the camera at anything even remotely interesting. I tried to see in layers and to simultaneously embrace the obvious and move past it. I took a lot of bad and boring photographs. I love them all.

There’s no narrative here, no through line or connecting thread. Just a small collection of small pictures. Personal, but also maybe more than that.

Sydney Seascapes

I take a lot of walks in Sydney, mostly around the many beaches. It’s nice being in a city so close to the ocean, like living on the edge of a calming abyss. Here are some simple photographs from last weekend, nice and contemplative, around Bondi and Manly. Surfers waiting in the waves and all.

Buriram Before

Earlier this year, I traveled to the little-known province of Buriram, in northeastern Thailand. It’s a quiet, rural region residing on the Khorat Plateau–largely featureless and dusty, with cool morning air and a sun that sets golden and warm each evening. A thousand years ago, Buriram was the far reach of the Khmer empire, and several well-kept ruins–including Phanom Rung, on the edge of an extinct volcano–serve as reminders of its rich past.

We were there on a magazine assignment that fell dead in the water once the pandemic hit, though we had no way of knowing it at the time. We spent a week hovering around the main town and the Cambodian border, where most of the ruins are located. It was tough to photograph, and I imagine even tougher to write about, because it’s a place where nothing really happens. A few golden buddhas. An occasional monk in the forest. Lots of gold-flecked statues. A night market that felt sleepy by 8pm.

That isn’t to say it was unlovely. It may be the only place in the world where you can stroll through the preserved, sprawling ruins of an ancient empire utterly alone. We explored forest temples and countless crisscrossing streets in the town proper. We never found much, but in hindsight, maybe that was never the point. It was a strange and prescient place to be just before the world inverted itself.

I like to think it’s alone in being largely unchanged in the world, but I’m sure that’s not entirely true. The pandemic has touched everyone and everywhere, even the remote corners of the world where places like Buriram thrive. Things I found boring at the time are turning more beautiful, and Buriram stands as testament to a way of thinking I should return to. It was an intimate and privileged glimpse into a place not many people will get to see for a long while longer. Maybe it wasn’t much, but it was generous in its way. It just took me a while to see it.

Sketches of the Former World

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Some serene scenes from across the United States along Interstate 80, following road cuts and rocks scars, old pioneer trails. Various American migrations. Some ups and downs. All in all the project is still percolating, incomplete. There’s a lot to say and a lot of time to say it, but I’m just putting a few images down for now, seeing what they look like. Starved Rock, Winterset, the Old Lincoln Highway, Land’s End, the Great Salt Lake, Snake River, and more. My thoughts are a chaotic deluge at the moment, an entangled beginning. More later.