How Narrative Works in Serial Photography and How We Look at Pictures — To look into a Kirchner picture is to enter a 20 x 20-inch space rich in possible narratives and depths of meaning that stay with you long after you have moved on. …

“It’s not a picture of you; it’s a picture of me.” — Richard Avedon — The body of work that an artist leaves behind can be a collection of objects or sounds that reflect the pieces of the world that they absorbed and that absorbed them. Precisely what that world was for each artist can be challenging to decipher. But not always. For one thing…

The lines between the good guys and the bad guys are human beings — “Executions? Yes, we have executed. We execute, and we’ll continue to execute.” — Che Guevara On my last day in San Cristobal, I stopped by the NGO to say goodbye to my friend, Rudy, but I was early, and he’d not yet arrived. Rudy’s father was there, though, working on…

a poem — At eighty-one she lived alone and stayed up late to watch old movies on tv. Occasionally, after looking out her window, she would leave voicemail for her children asking simply…

“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” — Mark Twain — There are parts of Kearny, NJ that consist of noisy, grimy factories and warehouses. The town is not too far from Newark or from New York. Incorporated in 1867, it was named after a Civil War general killed in 1862. It seems that all you see and hear in these…

The portraits of Diane Arbus, Phillip-Lorca diCorcia, Katy Grannan, and the Three Fs of working on the street — The woman leaning in the doorway didn’t ask for money. We just had a friendly conversation while I waited for an Uber. She told me that her name was Juana Maria Gomez Soto and that the doorstep we were standing on was where she slept at night. …

Photographing a stranger’s house during magic hour — An angry-looking man who drives an old beat-up truck and has tattoos on his neck lives here. I did not know that until I knocked on his door one afternoon. I go by this house a couple of times a week on my way to my printing studio. …

The Passion told with pictures of trees, grass, stone, and water — At one time, this collection of landscapes was meant to be about entropy. Evidence of this process that nature goes through on its way to disorder and dissolution happens continuously everywhere, of course, but it is so obvious in the woods and creeks near where I live.

The craft of photography has made me far more money than the art of photography. — Many people who decide on a career in art they’ve dreamed of since they were young retain naive notions of the profession’s lifestyle and processes based on what it’s like in books or movies. I did. It was a very romanticized assumption of what it was going to be like. …