A Day in the Life of A Photographer

One of the things I love about my job is that I never have to do the same thing two days in a row. On any given day it can alternate from satisfying and frustrating to terrifying, and the next day will surely be different. This is not to complain, rather to confess that if I don't keep changing it up, I get bored with myself, then self-destructive.
And I have been very lucky to have two branches of my art for which I am so passionate: making portraits of some of the greatest artists and thinkers of our day, and then being feted for my own body of "artistic work" about a subject for which I care so deeply.

It's a real honor to be able to make portraits of these women and men who are the best in the world at what they do. What I want to show is that mixture of intelligence, ability, curiosity, tenacity, and luck that makes them unique.
I make pictures of environmental issues because I care so much and believe I can, with luck, tenacity, curiosity, and ability, bring a unique viewpoint to their urgency and ubiquity.
So I pursue these two branches of my craft with equal passion, which inform and enhance each other. The essence of photography is the capturing of the precise moment in time when subject, composition and lighting come together to make a magic picture, and then I just count myself lucky to be there with a working camera.

The World's Great Composers

as featured on the cover of Gramophone Magazine

Albany Terminal

How quickly we change from a world in which extracting a barrel of oil from some cold distant place and shipping it via a tenuous supply chain across a continent seemed like a great deal – until the price of oil dropped below $50 a barrel, far below the cost of getting that oil from the frozen North.
So who, in these giddy days of easy oil, wants to hear any grousing about old train cars carrying precarious amounts of oil through fragile regions of the USA?

Railroad tank cars at terminal for off-loading oil onto barges

America's new-found oil prosperity has a number of causes, one of the most productive being the Bakken shale formation in the remotest part of North Dakota, near the border with Canada which has pushed the USA up to the lead of world oil producers. So much oil is being pumped there, in fact, that they don't know what to do with it. There is no infrastructure to get it out of this remote location, to the point that drillers are burning off the natural gas found with the oil just to get to the oil. The only transportation infrastructure in the region is the railroad which had been used to haul grain. Now the grain rots at the terminal because the trains are hauling oil, to the tune of 50 trains a week, and that is just on one of the many train routes out of the Bakken. This oil is unusually volatile, and these trains are fully loaded and heavy. This, and the poor state of America's rail lines combine to produce a series of accidents waiting to happen. In summer 2013, a Canadian town, Lac-Megantic, was literally blown off the map by one of these "Bomb Trains." A ludicrous number of these trains have exploded, spilled, and crashed damaging lives, property, and the environment.

Long train of tank cars on Canadian Pacific train line

There are two main rail freight routes across North America, Canadian Pacific (the old Delaware and Hudson Line) which goes north of the great lakes, through Canada, winding down a precipitous cliff above Lake Champlain as it comes back into the USA, and CSX (the old New York Central line) comes through Chicago, and on the south side of the Great Lakes, both terminating in Albany, where it is off-loaded onto barges and shipped to refineries up and down the east coast.
Between the poor maintenance of the infrastructure, the laughable safety record of the industry, the volume of product being moved, and the fragility of the ecosystems through which the network passes, the only question is when will be the next disaster, not if. But perhaps we should wait until one of these trains filled with oil derails and plunges into Lake Champlain before we protest this nonsense, or another small town gets blown off the map (who cares if a few more Canadians die anyway), or perhaps we wait until one of those barges capsizes and spills its contents into the Hudson?

Children on playground next to railroad tank cars

This discussion is about the safety and reliability of the transportation infrastructure, and leaves aside the larger question of our overall reliance on petroleum. As a society, we are ignoring both questions. As New Yorkers, we should address this question of the reckless movement of a toxic, volatile material through our neighborhoods. The geopolitical anomaly of cheap oil is temporary, and soon those trains will once again be running down the Great Lakes.

InterCity

You arrive at New York's Penn Station fifteen minutes ahead of the train's scheduled departure, uncharacteristic of you, but your morning meeting in DC is important, and out of nervousness, you left the apartment a little early. While you stand on the platform, you shake your head thinking of the old days in which you would be biting your fingernails in the taxi crawling through traffic to the airport, and suffer the indignities of the security line for a flight, the door to door time being four hours. You never cease to marvel at the sleek white bullet trains as this one pulls into the station, or at the ease of the 2 hours door to door that your journey will take today.

High speed train in Hamburg Station











Though this may seem like a fantasy, it is the reality today in Europe. Germany, especially, has made tremendous investments in its high-speed rail system, and is reaping the rewards. The world marvels at the German miracle, but it is no miracle, it is the result of smart investment. The Deutsche Bahn connects Europe, creates a very efficient place for people to work and live, and, not coincidentally, binds the continent together. Germany is also making major investments in renewable energy, investments that will pay off many times in the future, as have the investments in high-speed trains.

Evening storm clouds over wind mills in Baltic Sea










In America while our politicians debate the reality of climate change, scientists, unless they are under the pay of climate deniers, unanimously stress the urgency for action to reduce carbon release. Investments are never easy when they are made, but they pay off. As the world changes, the conditions will favor new industries, and the old interests will resist that change. It has always been so: carriage makers undoubtedly fought the dominance of the automobile. The world will change, and carbon energy will be obsolete. Those that have invested in alternatives will come out ahead, those economies that have been dominated and directed by obsolete industries will stumble.

Humans are not good at reacting to threats that they cannot see. When there are opposing information sources, one saying to worry, change will happen, the other saying not to worry, one wants to believe the voice of inertia. But the time has come to act, and get that fast train to DC.

Images from the Bakken

I can always count on myself to do the wrong thing.
Often I act even knowing that it is the wrong thing, but usually it's just a reflex.

As a visual artist in the digital age, one struggles with the questions of reproduction, rights, usage, and of course money.
Reflexively one wants to limit access to images, and thus make every use more dear, yes? Isn't that the basic model of supply and demand? And we have all watched the media giants struggle with that question, losing their shirts more often than not.

Then there are the respective policies of the web giants with whom we entrust our oeuvre, all of whom claim unlimited usage of our property.
All these factors have caused me to limit the exposure of pictures on the internet.

But there are stories to tell, and social media provides a great platform for so doing.
And, these stories won't be told if the pictures stay interred on hard drives.

Letting go and resignation are often inevitable aspects of contemporary life, a two-step that we seem to do automatically in this world. Because who can question every issue, read every notification, check the ingredients of every product?

One story that burns to be told over and over is the source of the petroleum we use so heedlessly. As we have exhausted the easy access resources, we must now exploit the remote, and they are generally located in more challenging topographies and at greater distance from help.

One of the fruitful new exploits in the USA is the Bakken Shale Formation in the bread basket of North Dakota, from which we are extracting a goodly amount of oil using unimaginable volumes of fresh water, while, like a junkie that prefers the drug to even food, we allow grain to rot for want of transport to market. The trains are all busy carrying the oil to refineries.
Meanwhile the farms that once fed the nation are left with piles of radioactive drilling waste and contaminated water.

One wonders how to tell this complex story with a visual narrative, whether to create a story board and illustrate the process step by step, or perhaps lay out my method and timetable, thus my slice, and then show the pictures as they were taken.

Given the arbitrary schedule of social media viewers, we have opted for a more random presentation, and will post these pictures more or less as they were shot, hoping that anyone who is interested will go back, look at the totality, and formulate their own impression of the process.

The Real Reward

Among my working artist friends runs a common joke about the hardships of a career that forces one to sleep late, while away most of the morning drinking coffee and complaining about galleries, then spend a few hours attending to the mundane business of life, only to reconvene over some libations and resume the discussions. But in actual fact, the life of the artist is a burden: one works long hours for minimal remuneration in pursuit of some nebulous vision. Most of the time is spent alone, testing that definition of insanity which says the sane would not repeatedly try the same thing and expect a different result. And there is the humiliation of constantly needing to sell yourself. The only reason to be an artist is if you can't do something else.
Some few are lucky enough to get their reward monetarily, but for most the recompense comes from seeing others enjoy the fruits of the artist's frustrations.

An artist works with a chosen medium to express his or her vision, a process that usually involves a struggle between imperfect materials and over-exacting specification. And that is when the variables are within reach and controllable to some degree. To arrange an exhibit in a remote location, collaborating with an unfamiliar team, using unknown materials, can be an arduous process. In this situation, one can only pray to be lucky enough that the new team comprises exacting professionals, and the standardization of processes in the modern world will lead to an unexpected good result.

Such was the case with a recent exhibit in Bolzano Italy, and it was a great pleasure to finally travel there, meet the team, and see the result.

But the greatest reward was to see visitors, especially children, enjoying, and really contemplating the work. One of the most interesting aspects of the visual arts, perhaps more than any other form, is the Rorschach Effect: each visitor will take away something different. These pictures are about pollution, and straddle a line between abstract and literal, and even with captions that identify the subject, every viewer brings different preconceptions and opinions that will shape his or her impression. Thus children are the most interesting audience for me, and it was a great reward to see so many and that they were so captivated by the work.

The other great reward was meeting the team that produced and assembled the exhibit at the Museum Südtirol. So many thanks to Massimo and Vito for the great work.

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Please check out my current exhibit: Abstraction of Consumption: A Dream of Plenty

North Dakota Landscape

I'm sitting on a rise in North Dakota (it's pretty flat out here) and admiring the rolling farmland that has supplied our country with grain for so long. After the beauty of the landscape, so different from where I was raised, in the Deep South, what strikes me first is the constancy of the wind. In the three days I have been here, it is always there. From my perch, I would expect windmills as far as the eye could see. After all, who could argue with free electricity? Instead, I'm surrounded by drill rigs, each a tremendous industrial zone on its own "pad" cut out of the farmland. The traffic on this small dirt farming road is constant, most of it being tanker trucks hauling fresh water to the sites and contaminated water away, the process of "hydro-fracking" being such a thirsty one.

Discussions with local people orient mostly around the jobs the industry has brought to the community, and everyone wants prosperity for themselves and their neighbors. Then they might wistfully speak about how the town has changed from a place where no one ever locked their doors to a Wild West boom town with crime and infrastructure overload. There is a tremendous influx of people who have come here for work, from the oil field workers to the waitresses. At a point in history when our country has actively exported so many of its manufacturing jobs overseas, and gutted the middle class, leaving your family to come to ND for a well paying job seems like a good opportunity.

And we are told this is the way it must be. "Progress has its costs." But it's only this way because the people that are making the real money from these extraction industries are preventing any change. The senators who give impassioned speeches about climate change being a hoax, and decrying the conspiracy of the scientists who would impose world government on us are not stupid. They are venal.

Our economy will change. Will it happen at our behest, and evolve into an economy of sustainability, or will it happen in reaction to multiple catastrophic weather events that destroy coastal infrastructure and completely disrupt agriculture, and rising sea levels which force us away from the coasts?

Like all economic booms based on extractive industries, this one will end. The irony is that this could be a boom based on implementing a new paradigm, and that boom would not end. Windmills need constant maintenance, but they don't need water, and they don't cause climate change.

Red Tide

As summer is finally upon us, I can't help but think about an issue I encountered in a big way while shooting along the Jersey Shore last fall.

Red tide is a (usually) toxic to humans and animals algal bloom caused by a combination of warm water, sunlight, and nutrient overloading (from fertilizer and sewerage). It can cause rashes and other manifestations in people coming in contact with it, the most severe being death for those who eat infected seafood.
Since bivalves and crustaceans continuously strain water, they accumulate large amounts of the algae, which, being toxic, is a real problem for shellfish consumption, both those who consume it, and the economy that provides it.

Red tide is also catastrophic to marine fauna because, when it dies, the bacteria that consume it absorb all the oxygen in the water, thus suffocating the other marine organisms. There have been red tides throughout history, the difference being that now we know the causes and how to decrease the occurrences.

So it was with some astonishment that, while doing a photo flight to look at Post-Sandy construction on the Jersey Shore, I saw a giant red tide in New York Harbor.
Given the health and environmental hazards, I would assume that such a thing would have been newsworthy. Did I miss something, or is it just not "news"?

Algal blooms are one more sign of a natural system in distress, and those come so many and so often these days that such a seemingly insignificant one is hardly noticeable. In fact, we seem intent, as a society, on ignoring them. Facebook posts about nice breakfasts, cute animals, or smiling children garner tremendous response, while those warning about clear and present danger, either to our life support systems or the transparency of our government attract the attention of only the like-minded concerned audience. And certainly many of these issues are complex, seemingly intractable, and come with the erroneous impression that the individual can do nothing about them.

The runoff from excess fertilization causes a surfeit of nutrients in the water, which is the starting factor in the chain of events leading to an algal bloom. The New York Harbor bloom actually posed a serious local hazard to anyone consuming shellfish. But New York Harbor is the least of the problem. The Great Lakes are dying and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico covered nearly 7,000 sq miles in 2011, and grows larger every year.

Reducing that nutrient loading is a vital but complex issue involving regulation and education. Farmers and homeowners must decrease their fertilizer use, an outcome that will only evolve with a mixture of persuasion and coercion. Success in that goal will require that all the stakeholders realize their contribution to the problem and their gain from the solution.