Sunday my prints welcome

My work prints went to Europe last weekend without me and all they brought back was this lousy T-shirt. Grazie, Joni!

What To Do #27

79. SE 47th and Belmont, Portland, 2004

80. SE 33rd and Stark, Portland, 2004

81. Gilbert Museum, Salem, OR, 2004

(WTD? is a weekly installment of old unseen b/w photos)

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I will be on the road for the next several days, going here, then here, and finally to share cookies and prints with these folks. Expect limited posts for the next week or so.

Least Wanted

Just one more comment about passports and then I promise I'll stop. Compiling my brief history I'd scoured the web for passport images. I found a few but unfortunately I'd missed the motherlode. It wasn't until after the post that Mark Michaelson —aka leastwanted— sent me a link to his Flickr page of antique passports from all over the world.

Assorted passports from Leastwanted's Flickr site
But passports are just the tip of the iceberg. Leastwanted's full set of images compiles hundreds of badges, medical photos, and other miscellaneous documentary images. The common thread is that none of the photos was originally conceived of as "art" and so they offer a relatively unfiltered view into the past. The primary focus is mugshots, many of which were published as a book by Steidl in 2006.

from Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots
by Mark Michaelson and Steven Kashner, 2006, Steidl & Partners
For anyone interested in found photos, Leastwanted's Flickr site will become a mostwanted bookmark providing days of browsing pleasure. Any future histories of passport photographs should include it.

Payment plan

I'm a chronic photographer. If I'm walking around I need to be making photographs or I get restless. A lot of times I'll force a photo to happen when it really shouldn't, just to sate my habit. What this means is that I wind up taking a lot of shitty photographs, like this one from last week for example.


I shot this in a park in Corvallis while waiting for this photo show to open. Although there may have been a potential photograph in this scene I didn't get it. I wasn't patient enough or not in the right spot or missed the moment. I'm not sure. All I know is I wound up with yet another stillborn image. It wouldn't even be worth reproducing here if not for what happened next.

I walked around some more, checked out the show, bought a funny used book, and drove home. Tab had stacked my mail on my desk with the New Yorker on top.


Strange! Although the details are hard to discern in the photo, the statues are extremely similar. The same pose, the same bare limbs, the same round pedestal. To encounter this twice in one day was downright weird.

What does it mean beyond that? I'll probably never know, but it's reaffirmed my sense that there is a strange order to things not easily understood. We catch glimpses of it here and there, and occasionally our photographs can capture it and show it to us if we are receptive.

Pay attention to what you see. That's the lesson. Photographers above all others, pay attention.

Routine break

I fear that B is getting too predictable. I think what it needs, what every blog needs in fact, is a set-of-twelve-polaroids-shot-by-my-kids-some-of-which-have-inverted-colors-arranged-in-the-shape-of-a-giant-polaroid. So here it is:


There. Betcha didn't see that coming.