Having Photographed

I’m back. It’s been a while. In November I arrived home in Montara, California after a ten-thousand-mile cross-country road trip which took me to twenty-four states spread over six and a half weeks. I drove through California into Nevada, then up into Yellowstone, then down to Denver, then across the…

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Book Review: Mandel’s Zone Eleven

The reviews of Mike Mandel's new book, Zone Eleven, can make you want to write your own review. The photos in the book are made by Ansel Adams but sequenced by Mike Mandel long after Ansel's passing. The sequencing provides the real content of the book, the way one photo…

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San Pedro Mountain Road

Each Christmas I send members of my family a photograph. This year I made a set of six small images and wrote a text to accompany the photographs. When we moved to California in 2004, Lori and I looked all over the area south of San Francisco for a place…

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Chamberlin Rock, 2021

Most of my projects are made up of multiple images. This project contains just this one. Entitled, Chamberlin Rock, it is named after the geologist and once-upon-a-time president of the University of Wisconsin...but the photograph has nothing to do with him. Instead, the image touches on the changing nature of…

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What the Rock Leaves Behind

In deference to certain workplace environments, I've edited the quote (just below) to obscure an offensive word. Click on the link in the quote to see the word. The big boulder on Observatory hill, which is the largest of its kind in the immediate vicinity of Madison, is now out…

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Don’t Fear the Cliché

The standard advice to photographers is this: Avoid clichés. Don’t shoot what’s been shot so much before, don’t tread on the well-worn ground, turn your eye from that colorful sunset, delete those pretty clouds. Run away from clichés, they say. My advice is different. Don’t avoid that sunset—ponder it, feel…

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My Book, at a Library Near You

In the past year and a half, I've occasionally received e-mails that my book, Computational Photography, had been added to this or that library. In all that was going on--not just COVID but three cross-country road trips, and a busy roster of photo projects in progress, I haven't paid much…

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Book Review: The First Fifty of Lee Friedlander’s Books

Redmond O'Hanlon's basic writing strategy is to put himself in some remote and dangerous place and to write about how he overcame obstacle after obstacle to his very survival and found his way back. This is a strategy that will be familiar to many artists. Bill Bryson thinks the world…

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Essays About the Photographs, Part One (Tour of My Book)

Most of my photobook, Computational Photography, is made up of photographs. Shocker, I know! There are sixteen photo projects and along with each project is an essay. But not your normal essays, though they started out familiar enough. The original idea for the texts was that I would write a…

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