I photographed writer George Pelecanos a few weeks ago in the alley behind the house where he grew up. As I was setting up and testing the lights, it began pouring rain, adding an unwelcome layer of difficulty to the shoot. Trash bags were brought out, lights and battery packs were covered and all was ready by the time Mr. Pelecanos pulled up in his limited-edition 2001 Ford Mustang GT.
As we began shooting, the rain stopped and the sun came out, forcing a quick readjustment of the lights and some beautiful backlight.
Pelecanos's roots run deep in DC which is clear from the historical richness of his crime novels. One of the heritage trail markers in DC even has a photo of the Pelecanos family Thanksgiving, circa 1962, showing a young George Pelecanos smiling at the camera. The excellent story by Carlo Rotella can be read here. 
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It's a rare treat to get the monthly envelope of tearsheets and see a magazine using your absolute favorite image from the shoot as the lead. I spent a day last month with Maxime Verhagen, whose position was described to me as "the Condoleezza Rice of the Netherlands." Despite the typical stage-managing that follows any politician being covered by the media, I felt like the photos showed a bit of the inner workings of the Dutch government. It's not often that I get these more pure photojournalistic assignments and this one was particularly enjoyable given the range of photo opportunities and the crash course I received in European perceptions of the American government from the writer (which were not dissimilar to some of the issues John Kifner touched on in the excellent first issue of Dispatches).
Edward Lovern for Stern Magazine
A story I worked on last October was just published last week in Stern, a German news magazine. I've worked on dozens of stories since then, but this one held a tragic resonance and I still think about the short time I spent with this grieving father who lost his 15 year old son to MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).
I remember sitting in the noisy country restaurant as we ate fried catfish and the reporter asked questions. On the table was a large photo frame that Ed brought with him, with maybe twenty photographs of Ed's son, Jon. Jon was a normal healthy kid who liked playing basketball with the children at an orphanage nearby where Ed spent his childhood. Within a week of feeling sick, like he had caught the flu, Jon was lying in a hospital bed while doctors told Ed and his wife, "There's nothing else we can do."
On one level, this was a public health story, as it was clear that doctors had missed the diagnosis from the beginning. But the core of the story was about this family who had lost their only child. I remember Ed's eyes welling up as he traced his fingers over the photos of Jon and I listened, holding my breath as I shot a few frames.
I remember thinking that for whatever brief satisfaction there might be from telling Jon's story and letting a broader audience know about him, that moment was harshly tempered by the deep loss I saw in Ed's eyes, and felt again when I looked through these photos. It was the last image I saw that sticks with me most, of Ed walking away from us after politely shaking my hand and thanking us for our time. He carried the large photo frame securely under his arm as he walked through the dark parking lot in a light rain, as street lamps cast gleaming white reflections in the growing puddles of water.
As a final post about the David Iglesias book (I promise), I caught his interview with Jon Stewart last night on the Daily Show, and I think the few seconds the book was shown may be the widest viewing audience a photo of mine has ever received.
The past few weeks have brought the first taste of the heavy, wilting heat that we're in for this summer. Charlene and I spent this weekend screening (and plexiglass-ing) our side porch with dreams of summer barbecues and mint juleps while we watch the sun set.
The past month brought some new clients and a wonderful trip out west. While in Portland, I shot a quick travel feature for the Boston Globe that ran on Saturday and can be seen here. After a few days visiting our old haunts including dinner at the best thai place ever, we headed up to Vancouver, BC to see my cousin Jon get married on a beautiful, sunny afternoon.
I came home to a new tearsheet from The Scientist Magazine
Sean Eddy for The Scientist Magazine
Yesterday, I stopped by Borders and saw that the David Iglesias book is finally out (I talked about some of the challenges of this shoot here).
The next month will bring the resumption of a personal project I've been researching in New Jersey and new portfolio meetings in DC and New York. Also keep an eye out in your mail box for a new postcard mailer to go out next week.
Three months of trips took me through some of the coldest weather I've ever experienced and some of the most interesting interviews I've ever heard. The Guardian Weekend Magazine sent myself and reporter Ed Pilkington to meet some of the presidential candidates who have run and lost over the past thirty years. We went to Mitchell, South Dakota on a frigid January day to interview and photograph George McGovern. Continuing the pattern of visiting cold places during winter, we went to Minneapolis, MN for Walter Mondale and Boston for Dukakis.
The range of experiences shared during the interviews that Ed skillfully conducted gave us a fascinating narrative of what it's like to go through such an arduous, grueling process for months and months and to finish in second place. Quoting from Ed's article, I think Mondale touched on a sense of weariness that I saw in all of the candidates when he said, "....I think it took something out of me. I don't have a clinical explanation, but an edge was gone and I never got it back."
I winced a bit when I opened the PDF from the photo editors at Financial Times. While it's great to see one of my images used so large, the blatant Photoshop job to darken the background is a little hard to take. More images in the archive.
Now that the book is up on Amazon, I can proudly share a scan of it I lifted from the publisher's site. Back in October, I received a call about shooting a book cover. I soon learned it was for David Iglesias, one of the Attorney Generals fired by the Bush Administration for "performance-related issues." I couldn't help but think of another recent photo subject who unwillingly was made to stand up to the Bush Administration and suffered the consequences of doing so.
I arrived at our shooting location with a full kit of gear, knocked on Mr. Iglesias's door and was presented with our shooting location:
Taking a look around, I was reminded of Arnold Newman's great quote, "Good photography is 1% inspiration and 99% moving furniture." A rearrangement of the hotel room ensued as we cleared out a space and set up the backdrop while Mr. Iglesias was prepped by the makeup artist.
Shoots like these don't always encourage a tremendous amount of creativity (we were working from a book cover template that the publisher had sent us), but the setting presented its own set of challenges and I was glad to come away with a number of shots both the publisher and I liked.
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A few of my images from the China Adoption story I worked on last year have been published. This was a story a long time in the making, and I remember when I first became interested in the rise of international adoption and its implications in a world that is more connected than ever. It took almost a month to find a couple willing to let me come along with them as they began this journey. Karen and Bob couldn't have been more welcoming, patient people as I accompanied them from their home in California to China where they met their daughter, Kailee. I'm very grateful to them for their being willing to open up their lives during those life-changing weeks in March.
In the end, I was happy about the photos I made that told this amazing and important story, and I came away with some new friends and a new understanding about the idea of family. I'm hard at work on a multimedia version of the story with the audio collected along the trip and hope to have that wrapped up by March.
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."
As I set up for this shoot, the two subjects arrived, followed by ten more members of the DC Rastafarian community. We did one large group shot that my lights were maxed out to cover, but in needing to fill a vertical page the two person portrait won out.
Blue Planet Run: The Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World came out last week. Rick Smolan contacted me almost a year ago about using my China Water Pollution essay in the book. I've been looking for outlets to run this story and agreed to contribute images to this worthy cause. They also used my essay to accompany the photos.
Huo Daishan, the unofficial guardian of the Huai River and the man most responsible for bring this issue to the world's attention was also featured as a "Water Hero". He was a former newspaper photographer who was spurred to action after a friend died of cancer. Mr. Daishan escorted me to the villages where these photos were taken and helped me avoid Party officials uninterested in this story receiving any publicity.
According to a reporter I spoke to recently who met with him, Mr. Daishan's phone and email are now monitored, and the "cancer villages" are completely closed to outsiders as the people living there continue to suffer.
Mr. Daishan takes notes after speaking with a villager
book tearsheets
I asked Seth Goldman to throw the bottle in the air five times before one came out right. Not only was he willing to do it, he caught every single one.
When I asked Alan Greenspan the secret to his success, he looked up at me over the top of his coke bottle glasses and said "I just keep learning new things."
Somehow I had two separate assignments to shoot Alan Greenspan in a single day.