Unwritten Notes, Kelso Dunes

Kelso Dunes is one of those places in California in the middle of nowhere that only really shows up on a map if you know where to look. It’s desolate and remote and absolutely stunning, a 45 square mile patch of sand 100 miles East of Barstow in the Mojave Desert surrounded by what appears to be endless, empty, sun-baked country.

Kelso Sand Dunes, the Mojave Desert, California.

No. #0510_14A - Kelso Sand Dunes, California. January of 2017.

It became overwhelmingly apparent that afternoon that I’d become a City boy and there was no going back, having made the two and a half hour drive from Palm Springs into the deep desert with little more than a single bottle of water serving two adults (and a small dog), though miraculously I was traveling with three cameras and at least fifteen rolls of film, just in case.

Anyway, we made out in one piece. No sand worms to speak of.

Excerpts from the series “Unwritten Notes” - Photographs Made Elsewhere.

Comprised of work spanning nearly 15 years, the series is largely autobiographical and draws entirely from images made on the road, away from home...

Prints available upon request.

I've Been At A Loss As of Late...

Summer. It’s been a strange start. There are Marines in LA and the other night my six year old told me that it’s time to trim his eyelashes. Sly Stone is dead but The Rolling Stones are still touring. The 1920’s were a riot, I suppose it’s only fitting that the 2020’s are a dumpster fire (with riots).

I’m at a loss as of late, unclear as to how I make sense of everything that’s been going on. Having trouble organizing my thoughts and focusing on much of anything. Nobody wants to live through history. Seems as if we’ve been left with no choice. Buckle up…

Excerpt from a journal page, summer collage 2025

Bits and Pieces from Summer, June of 2025.

Attempting to remember what’s important. Have decided that social media is decidedly dumb. Doing my best neither start nor end my day with the news. Still, things feel generally out of sorts. Being a full time S.A.D. (Stay-At-home-Dad) has it’s privileges. Yet, when posed with the question from a child ‘why does the president hate brown people…?’ I’d almost prefer a day job. But not really.

My son was roller skating in Golden Gate Park a few weeks back and in a freak accident was bowled over by a full grown man that was not at fault and who felt terrible about the entire thing. The resulting injury kept the kid on the couch for week with a pulled muscle (in his ass…) and all of a sudden things become clear. At least for a moment. What’s important. What isn’t. What we’re here for. Making new people comes with both baggage and benefits. Sometimes a little perspective.

I met with an old friend the other day. We made some pictures and had a couple drinks and caught up on our lives. We’ve been making pictures together for near 16 years now and we aren’t done yet. Sometimes a little perspective is good.

Not going to burden myself with obligatory patriotism today. I’ll be at the park, roller skating with my family. Remembering what’s important. As always, drop me a line if you want a postcard, no charge, no strings, and don’t forget to #Resist…

Women’s March, San Francisco.

Unwritten Notes, Lake Tahoe

I don’t ski, never really did, for a whole slew of reasons, but especially now, seeing as I have become quite brittle as I’ve gotten older. I’m more of a “ski-lodge” enthusiast, things involving fireplaces and bourbon and not snow I must interact with at high rates of speed. Either way, we ended up in Tahoe in February at what was billed as a cozy log cabin in the woods.

No. #0433_06A - Lake Tahoe, California. February of 2016.

What we found upon arrival was in fact a two room mobile home, with a fake log cabin facade, in a trailer park, surrounded by other fake log cabin mobile homes, in what I can only assume was someones idea of a practical joke. The queen size bed could only be exited from the end on the left side, which should paint a picture of the square footage we were dealing with. There were some trees, not exactly what I’d call a woods. False advertising would be an understatement.

No. #0432_15A - Fallen Leaf Lake, California. February of 2016.

We had a fine time, accommodations not withstanding, we took some long lovely walks, Tahoe is quite beautiful. We found a casino across the border in Reno with a penthouse bar that made the entire excursion much more bearable. No fireplace, but plenty of bourbon, and no snow to interact with. Don’t think I’ve been back to Tahoe since.

Excerpts from the series “Unwritten Notes” - Photographs Made Elsewhere.

Comprised of work spanning nearly 15 years, the series is largely autobiographical and draws entirely from images made on the road, away from home...

Prints available upon request.

Unwritten Notes, Islamorada

I found myself in South-West Florida in January and somehow convinced my step-father to let my wife and I take his Corvette down to the Florida Keys for a long weekend. It was the first but not the last time I’ve been down to the Keys. I should’ve learned my lesson.

No. #0420_18A - Islamorada, Florida Keys. January of 2016.

We stayed at a place lovingly referred to as the Pines and Palms Resort. It was essentially a glorified motor lodge with no pines and very few palms and could hardly be considered a resort. It did have a pool and a bar and a guy with a gray pony tail playing Jimmy Buffett and Grateful Dead covers on an acoustic guitar. In fact every place we went seemed to employ the same leftover deadhead with a guitar playing cover tunes, like they were part of some local leftover union of musicians.

No. #0422_26A - Hotel. Islamorada, Florida Keys. January of 2016.

The Keys are beautiful, but when you start looking closer it get’s pretty weathered and a little grim, a theme park that never really caught on, then ran out of money, and the employees all decided to hang on until someone shuts the power off, and that was back in 1968.

Let’s be honest, Florida is weird.

Excerpts from the series “Unwritten Notes” - Photographs Made Elsewhere.

Comprised of work spanning nearly 15 years, the series is largely autobiographical and draws entirely from images made on the road, away from home...

Prints available upon request.

On Being Obsolete: In Defense of Analog Things

My fathers Minolta X-700, circa 1981, with 50mm f/1.7 lens and motor drive, on my book shelf at home.

My first “real” camera was a 35mm Minolta X-700 SLR that I borrowed from my father when I was in middle school. He never got it back. Today it’s been retired and sits on a shelf and reminds me of him.

I learned the craft on film, in the darkroom, with wet hands and stained clothes and the odd chemical smell that used to follow all photographers around. Everything changed, it was slow at first, then sort of all at once, I was halfway through college, with two Canon digital bodies and handful of microdrive memory cards that cost a small fortune and held 500 mega-bytes (you read that right, mega-bytes).

Things got lost along the way. There is a large amount of work that I produced late in high school and throughout most of college that I have no access to. I’m not saying any great masterpieces were thrown away, though I wonder what I would find in that work if I did have the negatives and scans and original files that now exist only in the form of digital dust, ones and zeros on some zip disk (100MB each) at the bottom of a land fill or a hard drive that crapped out too soon or the CD-RW disc (750MB at most) that is now valuable only as a coaster. Granted a great deal of this could have been avoided by better “archive management” but let’s be honest, I was in my 20’s, I couldn’t manage much of anything. Just digitize it they said, it’ll last forever…

No. 0001_15 - Mission Street. San Francisco, Ca. May of 2003. The 15th frame of the first roll of film I’d exposed after consciously deciding to change the way I was approaching my work.

Around 2003 I gave up, or least began the process of giving up, on digital capture (I don’t ever want to think about custom white balance or firmware updates ever again). It was slow at first, then sort of all at once. It started when I really began to look at the work I was doing, and quite frankly, I hated it. It was cold and flat and precise, and none of those things interested me. I began to approach what I was doing as an aesthetically minded visual archive of materials that needed to be managed, and it changed everything. In May of 2003 I bought a used Leica, borrowed a lens from a friend, and essentially started over, roll No. #0001.

I understand, it’s all horribly cliché at this point, this whole film thing, the return of analog, the retro rebirth, whatever the influencers are selling now. But I realized somewhere along the way that as much as it was about photographs, what drew me to the work was also the objects themselves. I’m a collector; of images and negatives and prints and things that I want to remember and think about and keep close. Things I’ve deemed important, for whatever reason. Aesthetics notwithstanding, there is an argument to be made for the analog in a world that is continually accelerating technologically. I enjoy making things with my hands. Every single print I’ve exposed and dodged and burned and washed and toned and retouched and signed. It exists because I made it, not the result of some piece of software.

Retouching, captioning and signing silver gelatin darkroom prints, made by hand, by the artist.

The former vice president of google said some years ago “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.” This resonates now more than ever, especially in these days of “rented spaces” that are entirely out of our control. The “Enshittification” of everything online destroys all platforms (flickr, tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, dead or dying in terms of usefulness). The web at large has become “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.”

What do we lose when we no longer have pictures to see and share and revisit outside of whatever platform is dominating the digital landscape? How will we access those platforms in the future, if they even exist? I don’t want to rant about how “it was better when” (maybe a little). After all, I’m writing this on a computer with several orders of magnitude more computing power than the first space shuttle, and I’ll publish it to what is essentially a worldwide audience by pushing a button while at home. Technology is great. But what happens when the lights go out…?

What happens when Square Space gets bought out or goes under or just decides to pull the plug because of something offensive I wrote? What happens to all the photographs I’ve made and things I’ve written and the drivel I’ve put out into the world? If nothing else, it’ll be in a box, in the negatives, in the prints and the books and all the things that I’ve put on paper, part of the archive. Like so many creative folks from Gen-X and the Elder Millennial generation I’ve become obsolete and I’m ok with that. There will be a record of what I did when I’m gone. One that you can pick up and hold and smell and feel the textures of in your hands. At least until they toss it out with the rest of the trash…

Things I’ve been reading lately…

The Gen-X Career Meltdown
Just when they should be at their peak, experienced workers in creative fields find that their skills are all but obsolete.

A Long Hard Look at America
As the transatlantic alliance falters, a major exhibition of U.S. photography offers Europeans a dizzying array of perspectives.

Safety Off
It might have something to do with being in proximity to people that are comforted, one could even say thrilled, by footage of humans being shackled and imprisoned.