It was a cold day in November when I arrived at the Union Temple Baptist Church for Tim Spicer's funeral. I was working with reporter Matt Cooper whose story about Tim can be read here. The family's openness and kindness in allowing me to photograph this aftermath of a senseless murder was humbling and I thought the least I could do was to work as hard as possible in bringing away something meaningful from the service.
The saddest part of the ceremony was watching Tim's son who was sitting right up in front of his father's casket. He would get up off his mother's lap and walk back and forth in the front of the church as speaker after speaker shared stories of Tim's kindness, his warmth and his bright future. It was only after I was editing the photos that I saw he was wearing a t-shirt that read "I Miss You Daddy."
day 3 in South Carolina
My time in South Carolina was spent in fog and overcast skies, driving down highways lined with pine trees growing in the sandy soil. 1100 miles covered over two and half days and the constant struggle to distill political theater into substance.
sunrise on Siem Reap, Cambodia
What does it mean? We don't get to know. Even if it means nothing, we don't get to know for sure that it means nothing. - Miranda July
A magazine called today asking about photographs from Cambodia, a country I visited in March of 2004. Looking at my photographs brought me back to a time before I really began earning a living as a photographer.
I remember sitting at my computer waiting for the phone to ring and feeling more than a little indignant that I wasn't getting hired to bring my unique talent and creative eye to assignments. In retrospect, it's a damn good thing I wasn't hired more. While I was learning my craft freelancing for the local weekly, I was consistently making some very bad photographs full of visual clichés and lacking in the lifeblood of great photos - moment, content and feeling.
But the other thing that hit me in looking at these photographs is that I still take the same kinds of photographs I took then, just better versions of them.
The more I've been asked to shoot portraits, the more I've realized the need for an assistant to come along. There's nothing worse than struggling to carry your gear on a hot summer day in DC and arriving to meet your subject in an air-conditioned government office out of breath and covered in sweat. But in looking over some jobs I shot in the past year, I'm reminded of the times when there wasn't any room in the budget for an assistant and hauling the equipment was left to me.
With that, here is a small selection of self portraits from a year in portrait photography.
