I met Andrea while volunteering at an American Red Cross Temporary Evacuation Point (TEP) during the Valley wildfire. She is a volunteer Public Information Officer. Her role at the TEP was keeping the public informed about the Red Cross’ efforts in providing relief to the evacuees of the disaster.
We had decided to shoot a new headshot for her and were getting near the end of the session and just playing around. I was tweaking something on the camera and fired a shot from the waist. Sometimes the most interesting images just happen…
I met Gary while volunteering for the Red Cross during the latest wildfires in Southern California. He was working with the RC’s Feeding Services that was delivering meals to some 400 individuals evacuated during the El Dorado fire.
Bangkok Personalities — Tom Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch—fuck-me-that-hurts. That’s my response. Under duress. I’m responding to Tom, whom…
This is a photo of my friend Dirk taken with the Fujifilm X100T. This image is a Fine Jpeg straight out of camera, lens at f/2.0, no edits made. I love the Fuji’s image quality… I’d add a bit of contrast and sharpening, but not much. Awesome little camera.
I’ve always felt comfortable—if not occasionally a bit of a spectacle—in remote villages in Laos. When a Hmong-American English teacher asked me if I would like to visit her grandmother in her village about 15 kilometers outside of Phonsavan, I jumped at the chance.
And you are?
She was wonderful. Not only did she warm up to me quickly, she wasn’t shy about the camera in the least. I asked her granddaughter twice to make sure she didn’t mind, and it rapidly became apparent that she was at ease with the large (I’m a little over 6′ and about 205 pounds; I estimated her to be about 4′ 9″ and maybe 75Â pounds dripping wet.), strange man sitting quite close to her and pointing a very large camera at her. My friend thought that I might have been the first caucasian person to have ever visited her village…
Comfortable with me…
Nobody knows for sure, but she is most likely in her early- to mid-eighties. She had a wonderful vibrancy about her—curious and laughing away at her granddaughters’ chatter. When I showed her one of the photos I had taken of her, she said with mild disdain You should photograph younger people.
Laughing at her granddaughters’ chatter.
There was a cooking fire in the house that had turned to embers and tiny bits of ashes were blowing around in the hot afternoon air. We wandered off for a bit to visit the other relatives’ houses and when we returned she was asleep and snoring softly. I didn’t want to wake her, but she had instructed her other grandchildren to wake her up when we returned.
Thinking about the past, thinking about the future.
As we left I said to her the only sentence in Hmong that I know: Shii gii doua (roughly: See you later). I think she found that very amusing—a falang that speaks Hmong! She gave me a huge smile and wished me good health as we left.
Hmong Grandmother.
Related posts:
Leaving Laos! What was supposed to be a trip of a few…
Hmong Wedding Last year I spent twelve weeks working on a photography…
I’m always interested when a photo of me doesn’t look like me.
Robert said this to me when we were doing a rough edit of the images we had just finished shooting. I had been wanting to photograph him for a couple of years, but the timing was never right. I had had an idea of the exact composition beforehand—I wanted him dressed in the same suit that you can see him performing in here, sitting in a low chair (my friend Walter had this sun-bleached chair outside for several years; when he sat in it one day, a leg broke, so he sawed the other three to match—I’m obsessed with the color), with his pant legs being pulled up above his boots by the low position, and crouching forward with his arms on his knees. The pose came from the Greek statue called The Boxer of Quirinal, but I always associated with the name Thom Jones gave it in his blunt-force-trauma collection of short stories The Pugilist At Rest.
Bangkok Personalities — Tom Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch—fuck-me-that-hurts. That’s my response. Under duress. I’m responding to Tom, whom…
These nude panoramas are more of an experiment than a project, per se. I’m not sure I’m going to continue with the idea, but I may in one form or another. These panoramas are stitched from several portrait oriented images, so they can be printed quite large—up to 20″ x 60.” You definitely have a whole different experience when you see one of these printed large. They were shot with my Canon 85mm f/1.2 lens, and I love how it reproduced the model (thanks Kelly!) and the string of lights in the background. Check out the gallery here.
