Oh hey!
I used to keep all my pages on google sites, but now I’m moving them over to github and netlify. Moving out of google sites has been a nightmare. I need to do a lot of work to extract the text, translate into quarto / markdown, and manually insert images.
This page is still in transition.
I go to a lot of places and I take a lot of pictures. I started with simple documentation: what did I see? how can I share it with people who weren’t there? how can I remember it later? As my equipment improved (and my wall space increased), I started taking pictures to make prints for my walls.
Broadly speaking, my photography moves from urban inscriptions and signs to sweeping landscapes. I am particularly interested in how humans communicate their values in their durable goods and architecture, and the ways they set aside physical space for public enjoyment.
Do you want a print? I can make sizes from wallets to posters. Email me.
National Parks worldwide
Above, left to right: Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada; Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada; Akagera National Park, Rwanda; Bako National Park, Sarawak, Malaysia.
Below, left to right: Niagara Falls (US falls viewed from Canada); Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, Maine.
Nature in the midst of urban life
As an academic traveler, I spend a lot of time in or near college campuses. The rainbow over Kansas State University (bottom right) came on my morning commute just as the sun peeked over the horizon to illuminate the tops of campus. At the other end of the day, the sunset over the University of Calgary (top left) came as I left my building.
I visited this park in Cologne (top, middle) with my long term collaborator during a field school we ran at the University, on a short break to stretch our legs. The sunflowers at Konza Prairie (right, middle), just minutes from my house in Manhattan, were part of a tour for a visiting scholar from South Africa.
I visited the Parliament Building in Ottawa (top right), framed here with overhanging branches, during orientation for Fulbright Canada for my sabbatical in Calgary.
Urban scenes
Churches and cathedrals are perhaps Western civilization’s most enduring monuments to beauty and devotion, inspiring us to be our best selves within a narrow range of governmental and liturgical edicts. They get the best architecture.
In contrast, public memorials are deliberate, secular artifacts to help us remember who we were and what we did. While figural memorials to specific people are more common, abstract ones are more powerful.
Between these two spaces, everyday majesty in urban spaces is always available.
Top: Cloudy day at the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin, Germany. True color
Bottom: Cathedral in Cologne, Germany. True color.
Left: slide on a playground in Vancouver, Canada. B&W
Right: Reflection of a cathedral in the paving stones, London, UK. True color.
Signs
I love signage and inscriptions, from beautiful to inadvertently hilarious and from strictly utilitarian to whimsical.
Left: sidewalk in the Twin Cities; right: street in Singapore.
left to right: Vancouver, San Diego, Calgary
Signs are supposed to be noticed, read, obeyed. They are public declarations of belief, warning, provenance, and contents.
Clockwise from top left:
Above: sewer access port in Vancouver; public grilling in San Diego; transit station in Calgary.
Right: Ice cream shop in Minneapolis; Coffee house in Cologne.
Bottom: Kansas-Nebraska border; County road, Iowa; Lake Louise, Alberta.
Left: Covington, KY
Right: wall in Cologne, Germany