Blog Archives

the strongest remain

You know your guide and driver are reading the room when they make non-routine stops (without even being asked)  – for important things like roadside ruins or newly blossoming almond trees or the light hitting a hillside town in just the right way – so the photographers could pile out and do our things.

near Enna, Sicily
photographed 2.3.2025

bus

As some point, people had been living in this bus. By the time we found it, the household’s items were strewn about and it’s seeing the things left behind (one tennis shoe, a kid’s homework papers, a tube of SuperGlue) that speak to me the loudest.

Pyote, Texas
photographed 2.18.2025

jesus and roses

The thing about traveling in a group of photographers is that sometimes they get clumped up because everyone needs (Needs, I say!) that shot from that angle in that light of that Duomo. Or whatever. It can (and did) get frustrating. But if I hadn’t been all pissy way back there at the back of the clump, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the shrine in the wall. And I still got the obligatory shot of the Duomo.

Ragusa Ibla, Sicily
photographed 9.7.2022

there wasn’t even time to pack the applesauce

I’ve been a fair number of abandoned places and they generally have the same elements: busted furniture, caved in ceilings, dirt, junk. But this was the first place I’d ever seen fourteen jars of baby food that did not make the leave-or-take cut when the family cleared out. There were other signs of children having lived there (toys, a framed portrait of a little girl) but it was this applesauce that grabbed at my emotions.

Quitaque, Texas
photographed 12.29.2024

eventually they became each other

It seemed like it was at the point where it was hard to tell the castle from the cliff. But to be fair, the castle has been abandoned since the 1730s so it’s not like all this happened in a few year’s time.

Duntulm Castle
Isle of Sky, Scotland
photographed 11.7.2023