Looking for a feature the other day and I decided to stop at the Leaning Tower of Niles and make a few pictures. I love these quirky, American landmarks and I’m inspired to make a map of them and have a little road trip fun.
Back in August I had the pleasure of photographing a local pregnant mother for a feature the paper was doing called Oak Park: Our home, our lives, our stories. Each of us found a few people to interview and photograph and everything was put together as a separate paper full of the stories. I met Lisa and her son Jackson who were both really wonderful.
I just got back in touch with her to catch up and meet the new baby Sam. I spent an hour or two hanging out with Jackson and the rest of the family and made some portraits at their house. It was such a wonderful surprise to see one of the photographs I had taken earlier framed in their house. How great!
I was recently asked by my friend Rob Clearfield to shoot the photos for his upcoming album release. I was really excited to be part of the project and we headed over to LaSalle St. Church in Chicago. I really love the classic, high contrast jazz portraits from the 30′s and 40′s but I wanted to add a bit of a modern twist. These are some of my favorites.
The album, A Thousand Words, will be coming out later this month. Rob just sent me the layout for the cd and it looks great! It’s always interesting to see which photos of yours other people choose. Here it is…
I recently went back to Detroit to scout some more ideas for a project idea I have there. This trip was mostly spent exploring the downtown area which included many trips on the People Mover, Detroit’s elevated transit system. It’s so strange to go back to a place where you once spent so much time and feel like a complete outsider.
Also, sorry about the lack of posting. I was doing a redesign that consumed way too much time. But I’m back!
This was the first thing I encountered at my assignment today…
One of my assignments for the day was a sand sculpting contest along Lake Michigan. Even though it was a gorgeous day, there were only a few participants, mostly under the age of 12. It was still great fun and who can complain about getting paid to spend an afternoon at the beach? My favorite kids were the ones pictured in the first photo who explained, “We really don’t know what we’re going to make. We’ll just wing it and see what happens.” Fantastic.
“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.” -Georgia O’Keefe
thanks for looking!
First in color, then in black and white. Fancy.
One of the projects that the paper seems to keep coming back to each year is ‘Day in the Life’. The idea is that you send out your photographers all over one of the communities that they cover, make a lot of pictures and create a newspaper entirely of photos showing life in that area. The first one this year was Lake Forest, a city in the north suburbs of Chicago. I spent the day with a family, a local sexton at a cemetery, hung out in a barber shop and wandered into restaurants and shops. Random fantastic fun.
