Little Secrets

I've had rolls and rolls of film piling up since high school. All stuck in a plastic back with who knows what on them. Little secrets of my childhood. I threw them in a trunk a long time ago.

I started off shooting during family vacations with a cheap panoramic camera and eventually, my sister gave me our grandfather's old 35mm Minolta. I started dragging that around with me, shooting random pictures here and there. A lamp post, icicles, my brother posing with a snowboard. And once I actually considered trying to shoot for a newspaper, I picked up a digital camera and threw my old one in a trunk with rolls of undeveloped film. Thus began my photography career.

I pulled them out recently, brought them to the camera shop and scanned them with the kind help of my friend, Mike Belleme. Many were under or overexposed. Some whole rolls were black. Many showed age -- dirty, dark, grainy and mysterious. As I sift through them, I will post them here, show them to you, and remember.

I have only recently shot film again, with the kindness of Kenji at Nat Geo, who let me borrow a couple different film cameras. So, I will post film old and new, a delicious sandwich of sorts encompassing my digital life.

Hair for the WSJ

Matt Craig of the Wall Street Journal gave me a ring several weeks ago for a shoot about Dominican hair salons. Apparently they were posing significant competition to the African-American hair salons with less talk and speedier service. One of the ladies I talked to had been there for 4 hours already and wasn’t even done. “Speedier service?” I asked myself. I guess it’s all relative. I showed up the day before Easter and it was packed. I felt like a sardine in a school of mullet – a scrawny white male in the midst of a bunch of Latino and black women. It was hot and the fumes were intoxicating. But that’s what I like about this job, being thrown into totally foreign situations and navigating your way through. I took a deep breath and made some pictures.

Check it out here

Asheville: Lightness and Pain

"Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes." -The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera