Recently I had a chance to cover the protests outside the G20 summit in Pittsburgh for the Associated Press.  I also contributed to a new blog started by a group of my friends and I.  We will continue to have new material up there so take a look. www.pangeaphoto.com

I spent the past summer in Los Angeles completing an internship for the Associated Press.  The experience was overall pretty great and I learned quite a bit working in a major wire service office.  These are a few of my favorite frames from the work I did.

I recently moved to Los Angeles from Bowling Green, Kentucky for a summer internship with the Associated Press.  My dad flew out and helped with the drive.  I got a week to relax and spend time with him, as well as catch up with some old friends, see a giant ball of twine, photograph some tourists, and wander around a rocket factory.  Here are some images from the road.

“The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”
-Hunter S. Thompson

 

I just spent 5 days with my new friends Patchwork and Zero.  While making these images I learned a lot about myself and my work.  To say that the experience was life-changing sounds a bit cliche, but it really was.  We operated off the grid for a week, spent virtually no money (except on booze and food) and were able to travel hundreds of miles on the back of American industry.  This is just the beginning of a longer term project and soon I will add a copy of the story my friend Corey Paul is writing alongside these images.

I decided to go head down to Panama City Beach last week to work on a project that had been on my mind for quite some time.  This quickly became by far the hardest thing I had ever photographed.  Socially, I felt very out of place and it was difficult for me to connect with the people I was photographing.  After I was able to get over myself though, and start making images, I really enjoyed the work.  Making these images taught me a lot about myself and who I want to be as a photographer and regardless of the quality of the final product, i feel the production of it helped me immensely in both my photographic and personal development.  Unrelated to that, I’m still trying to come up with a title for this work, any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

This is me. I asked if I could shoot his picture and he didn’t here me say picture.  He preceded to load the gun and hand it to me.  I really love eastern Kentucky.

I spent a few days in Appalachia during my Spring Break.  I wanted to continue a project on the timber industry and extraction in general, but logistics and bad weather got in the way and I ended up with only one real day of shooting.  This is my favorite frame from the day, its tough to run around those mountains, especially carrying a chainsaw, and this lumberjack was taking a moment to survey his progress.

The work was part of Western Kentucky’s ongoing photojournalism workshop, the Appalachian Culture Project.  The week produced a lot of great work, and it was relaxing to see old friends again.  Check out the entire site at http://www.acpworkshop.org/

I’ve got to say, being on the mall, in the city I was raised in, with 2 million of my fellow Americans, was truley a surreal experience.  I really feel that we are about to witness one of the most historic and revolutionary presidencies of our lifetime if not in the history of our nation.  I tried to sum up how i felt about the event with pictures, Garrison Keillor did it in words better than I could ever do.

2009 The 20th of January
I was there at the Capitol in the freezing cold
with 2 million others, feeling very
warm and emotional as the big drums rolled
and the man said the oath, so help me God
and cannons boomed and all of us, oh God we cried
we cried, old black ladies, you and I applauded
and we wept America for you justified
at last as a nation of by god true ideals,
our true beginnings to which we now return
created equal, justice under law one feels
that even on a cold day, these fires still burn
and that the man and his wife walking down the street
and the country moving to an old and steady beat

I heard this on the radio on my trip back to Kentucky and it really resonated with me,  it seems that poetry, like photography, can be seen as formulaic and limiting; but these formulas are merely a platform on which we can let our own emotion be built and shared.

I had the opportunity to spend a week up in New York this month.  I filled my time meeting with photo editors kind enough to see me and friends kind enough to let me invade their Brooklyn apartment.  These are a few images I shot along the way.