i’m very pleased to be a part of collect.give, a wonderful site launched by the incomparable kevin miyazaki. collect.give is a place where photographers offer small editions of small prints (letter size or less) for a low price and donate the proceeds to a charity of their choice. as of the first of march the site has raised over $5000 for various non-profit organizations. i’m offering a print from my series of burned book pages, with the money going to support camp del corazon. prints could be yours for the low, low price of just $40.

thanks for including me, kevin!

you can see others from the series here.

most of us feel broken in some way. often this feeling is quiet and unseen, but even if we don’t admit it, even if it’s invisible, even if we’re totally wrong, in many of us there’s something that feels a bit incomplete. i don’t think this is bad. i think it builds character. it makes us strive for the things we need, even if we don’t really know what we need. it makes us look for the things that are broken in others and it brings us the capacity for compassion and empathy.

most of the time people feel incomplete in ways that would never occur to anyone but themselves, ways that would remain invisible (i.e., you feel unloved, you feel awkward, you feel clumsy). but sometimes there are very real physical manifestations. when something feels missing because it actually is missing, when it is plain to the world that something is missing, it can be a lot harder. most of us have only our own neuroses to contend with. when you have to contend with the questions and stares and reactions of strangers, that’s another thing entirely.

stefan knauss is a prosthetist. in the simplest terms he helps people to feel less broken, less incomplete. he builds artificial limbs; legs, arms, hands, feet, fingers, ears and eyes with such a degree of precision and beauty and accuracy that when i looked through his portfolio half the time i pegged the real leg for the fake one. stefan brings artfulness and dignity to us when we need it most. his work is equal parts function, art and compassion.

he made his first mechanical hand for a high school science fair twenty five years ago. it’s the one on the left (obviously) in the first picture above. to me that picture represents twenty five years of single minded effort, of striving to complete what feels incomplete.

while i was at stefan’s i met leslie. leslie lost her left leg to cancer eight years ago. some time later stefan made her a new one. after years of wearing long pants and boots to cover up the obvious prosethetic she used to have, leslie now wears skirts and sandals frequently. a casual observer would never know. even though the fact of being able to wear skirts and sandals might seem trivial, the result is huge. sometimes it’s a luxury to be able to keep to ourselves the things that feel broken.

the wildfires look much closer than they actually are, still far enough away that there doesn’t seem to be much fear of evacuation, at least not in pasadena where i live. i’ve been holed up with a summer cold the past few days, watching the flames burn over the ridge in the distance at night. today i’m finally feeling a little better; enough to be able to smell the smoke, at least. it’s hard to tell now if i’m congested because of a cold or because of the poor air quality. driving around town yesterday felt a little like being in a stephen king novel. everyone went about their business, but there was a red haze to the air and a giant cloud floating above the city. people would ocassionally glance nervously at the cloud, or stop to point at an area where they could see flames. people would take camera phone pictures. it was a strange combination of business-as-usual and wonderment.

last week i had a shoot that took place in a zoological laboratory. i’m not sure if the place was really appropriate to the subject, or if it was just available and really cool to be in. maybe a mix of the two. it was more interesting than any of our other options at the time, that’s for sure. i’d never been in a zoology lab before so it was kind of fascinating. as usual i’m impressed and amazed at the level of organization that goes on in places like this. i wish scientists could come and organize my office, but with less dead things or radiation or advanced mathematics.

my deepest sincere thanks to dr. john hafner who runs this lab for being so gracious in allowing us inside. i hope no permanent damage was caused. i really love listening to scientists talk about what they do, and to some extent i really love listening to anyone who’s passionate about their work. i think i sometimes confuse scientists because i tend to fixate on elements that are, to them, somewhat incidental. for example in this zoology lab i was really taken with the little tags used to mark all the specimens. they’re all written out by hand in felt tip permanent marker, even in this age of printers and computers. everything written out by hand, and it lends an old-time sort of aesthetic that’s really appealing. also it makes it sometimes difficult to distinguish immediately between specimens collected recently and those that are eighty years old.

paul was very impressed by a different thing. this involved pointing and exclaiming the following phrase like a little girl: “pickled bats!” (see above).

here’s corporal bennett, sitting in for a test shot that isn’t anything like what we ended up doing. sometimes it’s a drag to have a great location that’s wrong for the subject.

[wordpress does this strangely - i had to make them big so they're readable, but it only wanted to accept thumbnails. so please click on the thumbnails to see the larger pictures. thanks.]

[ed. note: i have now been asked many times if i set these up. the answer is no. i found these pages in the ruins of burned houses in san diego. i didn't move them, or place them, or bring any of them with me. they were shot where i found them. it has also been suggested that i should've brought a pre-burned copy of dante's inferno with me. that, i have to say, would've been a good idea.]

i’m relieved to report that i do not have high cholesterol. there was a period of time at the beginning of last summer where i suspect that i did have high cholesterol. i took lipitor for one month, and exercised, and ate lots of fish. my cholesterol dropped 100 points, and i stopped taking the drug. now, four months later, my cholesterol is still within the safe zone, even despite my being on the road the past few weeks and encountering a disproportionately high number of hamburgers and french fries. that short period notwithstanding, i eat fairly healthy. but it’s hard to escape genetics.

i used to be terrified of needles as a kid. this was bad news for a kid who had to deal wih a lot of needles. about six months after i graduated from college i was put on coumadin. i still say coumadin is going to kill me faster than whatever it is i’m on it to prevent. anyway, there’s nothing like being on a blood thinner to get you over your fear of needles. once after surgery in highschool, i had a phlebotomist fill up twelve vials of blood in one sitting. and then when i realized i forgot my hat and went back to get it, the poor guy said “oh, i’m so glad you came back, we forgot to read the back of the form!” and so they had to use the other arm since one was all tapped out.

several years ago i photographed a biologist named simon levay. simon levay delighted in telling me that what i was actually taking was rat poison. coumadin (or something similar to it) is the active ingredient in rat poison. it’s an overdose. they bleed to death internally. welcome to modern medicine. makes you feel good, doesn’t it?

still, part of the point of this blog (for me, not necessarily for you) is to inspire myself towards taking more pictures of things. that is, inanimate objects. from the first moment i started taking pictures there was never really any thought to what i would point the camera at. it was always people. or sometimes animals. things with eyes. i was only ever really interested in photographing things that could talk back to me. or get impatient, or vain, or shy, or angry, or say witty things, or could share some experience. and still, the best part of my job is being able to get small slices of the lives and experiences of a great many different kinds of people. i don’t think still-life shooters get that so much. but i could be wrong.

anyway. . . here are a couple shots from some of the miles traveled.

and while we’re on the subject of it. . i have one big gripe with las vegas. on my first trip to las vegas last month i specifically brought one quarter that i intended to use in a slot machine. i’m not much of a gambler, you can tell. i like the games, but not particularly the losing money part. slot machines were appealing only insofar as there was a tactile sort of quality to it – it’s satisfying to feed coins into a machine and to see moving parts whir around and hear the clink of the reward, should you actually win. also, winning at a slot machine has weight – coins are supposed to spill out, and you fill up a cheesy plastic cup with them, and it’s heavy and it’s noisy and you feel like you’ve done something.

imagine my surprise now, when i find that, carrying my quarter around the new york, new york casino, none of the machines actually accept coins anymore. it’s all paper money or special cards. there’s no more tactile feeling of dropping coins into a machine. there’s hardly any machine feeling at all – just electronic buttons and displays. i left without losing my quarter.

on my second trip to las vegas that week i spent exactly $2 on gambling. i put one dollar into a slot machine, and one dollar into a video poker machine, only to have my suspicions confirmed. this isn’t fun. now, i don’t have any problem with gambling. i have self-control, and i don’t have an addictive personality of any sort. so gambling isn’t ever going to get me in trouble. my gripe is this: these are supposed to be games and the truth is that they aren’t actually the least bit entertaining. i don’t mind losing my $2, but i’d like some entertainment value for that money. however, there wasn’t any.