max s. gerber(the latest shot)

the charming and incomparable maggie soladay has written about me for the december “editor’s choice” column on PDN’s photoserve website! thanks, maggie!

see the article here.

last week kim and tashena visited me. tashena lives in san diego now, where she takes amazingly lovely, ethereal and poetic pictures. kim was visiting from tucson.

kim is micah’s father. tashena is micah’s sister.

it’s hard to believe it’s been almost ten years since the last time i saw micah, almost ten years since he died. it suddenly struck me that micah would’ve been twenty-one years old this past summer. somehow this realization hit me kind of hard. maybe it’s the fact that we’re passing into a new decade in a couple of weeks, maybe just a realization that all these kids don’t stay kids for very long. in my head micah will forever be 11 years old, the only age at which i knew him. i wonder what he’s like in the memories of tashena and kim?

photographing micah was one of the first times i remember thinking to myself that a picture i took could actually be good for something, could actually mean more than it seemed. in the picture that kim is holding above i remember being especially struck by this. micah was home from school that day with a respiratory infection. at the time this photo was taken it was just micah and me in the house. he was sleeping most of the time, and i remember listening to the sound of his breathing, which was more deliberate and more labored than anything i had ever heard before. every so often he’d wake up and we’d talk for a bit, or take a few pictures, and then he would doze off again.

micah passed away on april 16th of 2000. he was always the coolest guy in the room.

i just found out late last week that the story i shot for the american lawyer magazine earlier this year on anthony harris won the gold in the 2009 ozzie awards for “best use of photography” in a magazine under 100,000 circulation! my deepest thanks to maggie, joan and martin at ALM for taking a risk and going with a very unusual choice for the feature spread.

see my original post on anthony here.

read the story on anthony here - it’s an amazing story.

see other 2009 ozzie award winners here. the ozzie awards bills iself as “the biggest contest in magazine design”, so that’s not too shabby.

alex is the VP of business development at media temple, a web hosting company that deals with sites that large numbers of people actually visit. he’s also one of those rare subjects who actually went out of his way to make the photo session easier, more fluid, and more pleasant. this is a rare thing. he even bought us excellent cupcakes at the end.

[ed note: paul just said to his girlfriend "hey, honey, remember that red velvet cupcake i brought you? or did i eat that?" classy.]

alex works in a building that’s cooler than the building you work in. unless your office also looks like a cross between cerebro and a concrete beehive.

thanks, alex.

steven pinker is a psychologist at harvard who specializes in the evolution of language. in an appearance on the colbert report he was asked to explain how the mind works in five words or less. his answer: brain cells fire in patterns.

he is a charter member of the luxuriant and flowing hair club for scientists. and yes, that’s a real thing, if not entirely serious.

you can see steven’s brain here.

you can see steve’s genome here.

buy steve’s books 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.

last week i was contacted by a woman named hilary gooding. hilary is a textile artist working on a project involving quilts of prominent scientists with the aim of displaying them in museums in the UK next year. hilary wanted to use one of my 2006 photographs of james d. watson (nobel laureate (with francis crick) for the discovery of the structure of DNA) in her project. it was such an odd request i really had no choice but to say yes, and i admit i’m very curious to see how the finished project will end up.

hilary sent me photos of the result (below). the other people pictured are marie curie, charles babbage, michael faraday and francis crick.