Music juju: he is out there too, creatively, writing grant applications and pitching media and heading cross-country fuelled with Timmy's double-doubles and gas station banana bread. The shed sends cheerful smoke into the tree canopy as I shoot, humming.
Read MoreOld Man Luedecke hired a backhoe to shovel a path through chest-deep snow to his woodland cabin, where everyone tumbled inside with gourd banjos and mandolins and fiddles and drums, and me and my camera, too, to capture a bit of it all.
Read MoreWillie Stratton is loud. And it makes us quiet. Everyone-there-with-their-mouths-hanging-open quiet. He wails and stamps and even on his own, it's blistering. He's a really nice guy. But not when he plays. When he plays, the whole world smiles and shakes.
Read MoreTea parties and dance halls and lemon yellow picnic gingham, made by hand, with scissor snips at the seams. They find me in antique barns and Frenchy's bins. I am their Josephine Baker, and they are my rainbow tribe of orphans.
Read MoreWorkshop participants gave so many gifts that day. To themselves, each other, and the people who landed in these woods. We had so much fun, all of us so invigorated to create images together and in parallel. I rang the bell: BONG! Go grab a soul.
Read MoreThere's a three-legged cat, a 1960s cocktail bar. She is never without Pimm's. She wears mustard-coloured tights and bright teal pumps and a black and white checkered miniskirt. Inland, she's rare to the point of scandalous. I certainly hope so, she says.
Read MoreI've been wanting to share the lazy, lovely day I had with singer-songwriter Kim Harris for ages. We poked our way through the woods across the creek on one of the fall's last golden days, bringing with us a bag of Billie Holiday and soft things and sparkly things and we played while the last leaves drifted to the ground.
Read MoreWe went for pappadums and chutney and samosas. We talked about Charlie Chaplin, Lancaster Bombers, and swing dancing. We went to the most peaceful place I know because their great-grandfather never visited a cenotaph.
Read MoreWomen come to the Serendipity retreat from all over, from Californian ranches to the Texan panhandle. They bring everything with them. Duffel bags full of ideas and grief and husbands and sons and daughters and love affairs and crippling doubts. They bring journals and paint and everybody eats too much.
Read MoreThese two, since they were two. Her mom and me sitting with mugs of tea, thumbing through cookbooks. We didn't finish more than three sentences in one stretch for a good five years or more. Someone was always, suddenly, too high up in a tree.
Read MoreAmsterdam was an infinite diorama with roses on vines and the indecipherable, en masse murmur of another language all around. It was the first time I was an outsider. It unfolded around me like a giant pop-up book, like magic.
Read MoreIt was some kind of emotional bomb that went off, this constant state of disbelief and grateful overwhelm. How is it possible that a weekend this special happens at this little house—this crooked, paint-peeled, lost and abandoned place that I found when I felt just the same—how can it be mine, any of it?
Read MoreEverything came out, stuff I've been collecting for years. Not one boa but two. Not one gypsy skirt but two. A soft pink 1980s prom dress. A witch hat. A woodland fairy, a hippie, a go-go girl. A disco-dancing alien witch. A woodland-fairy flapper.
Read MoreI start off heavy, with a cast-iron pot of the required stuff of aperture and directional light and focusing modes. I begin as a school marm, a hardass, because inspiration is rootless without the language to self-diagnose. Then we play.
Read MoreThe first SHED workshop was teaching, cheering, running around shooting assignments and creative prompts at the beach and the public wharf. It was a bunked-in, slipper-wearing, sunshiney bunch of people meant to be together.
Read MoreToronto! One week from tonight, I'll be there. Will you? Impressed Photobooks is bringing me to the big city help them celebrate their launch, the first family photography roadshow event of several across the country. This means sociables and creative mojo all around.
Read MoreStealth to catch kids who evade the lens because they are unaware of it (bubbles and worms are more interesting) and to catch grown-ups who are too aware of it. Worrying about what nobody else sees, we flinch in front of unblinking glass.
Read MoreWhat if evil thinks that it's good? Doesn't it always? … Never mind. I stare at a 90 year-old empty bottle of Kentucky Tavern Straight Bourbon Whiskey and wonder about the friendship, love, stories, and clouds on the night it was tipped dry.
Read MoreA Month of Sundays, my first published photography credit, is on the Stash Books layout table right now—this summer, it hits the shelves. Pre-order here. In the meantime, here are a few moments—some landed in the book, some on the floor.
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