“The Aftermath Project is a non-profit organization committed to telling the other half of the story of conflict — the story of what it takes for individuals to learn to live again, to rebuild destroyed lives and homes, to restore civil societies, to address the lingering wounds of war while struggling to create new avenues for peace.

“The Aftermath Project holds a yearly grant competition open to working photographers worldwide covering the aftermath of conflict. In addition, through partnerships with universities, photography institutions and non-profit organizations, the Project seeks to help broaden the public’s understanding of the true cost of war— and the real price of peace — through international traveling exhibitions and educational outreach in communities and schools.”

It’s been awhile since I’ve done any music photography, but Spike, who I did this Sasquatch or Bust story on, invited all of us to see his son perform at the Sunset Tavern in Ballard, Seattle.

Bare in the Woods has only existed for about six months, and done about as many shows, but they rocked it at the Sunset. Two other bands performed–they are projects from a bunch of the original Seattle grunge bands–and Bare in the Woods was sandwiched right between them. The coolest thing about it was the family feeling, the mutual support, the casual air, and the shouts of “encore” after BITW performed…to which David (Spike’s son) replied, “Uh, we’ve never been asked for an encore…” but they gave us one.

Spike asked me if I could shoot some stills and video–band shots in a bar, something I haven’t done in ages! Normally, when I’ve shot Seattle bands in small venues, I used a strobe on an off camera shoe cord. At bigger venues, there’s usually better lighting (though you’re still probably shooting at 800 ISO, 125/sec and f2.8) but I was flipping between video and stills and loving the low-light capability of the Canon 5D Mark II. So I went with ambient light. You can see the noise in the files and because of that ambient light…I think I like the black and white. Or maybe it’s the nostalgia…black and white reminds me of grunge concerts, shooting Tri-X and TMAX 3200, and the smell of photo chemicals after hours in the darkroom. Yeah…all those toxic chemicals.

Check out more Bare in the Woods pix on my Facebook–both the color and the black and white.

Check out the Bare in the Woods Facebook and MySpace.

As someone who believes in decreasing sprawl by increasing density, I found Mohler’s approach very interesting. So, not only was I doing a portrait job, I had a chance to talk with an engaging guy about everything from his house to public transportation to important documentary films. I liked him immediately. He also teaches at the University of Washington Architecture department, so I think it’s no surprise he had an ability to tell engaging stories and feel at ease with a photographer.

If I had the money to buy a city lot with a tear down, I would probably do the same as Mohler: build two homes and rent one out.

Read the article here, at Builder Magazine
Read a Seattle Times article here.

The magazine editor wanted a portrait of Mohler that emphasized the exterior of the home. So, while the lead image for this post is more about Mohler (and my favorite of the take), the picture at right is what they editor chose out of the various locations and setups I provided. This was a simple portrait, using gear I’ve traveled with in developing countries (minus the light stands): two Canon 580EX strobes, Pocket Wizards, and the Canon 5D Mark II. Oh, and I put home made snoots on the strobes…made out of heavy duty aluminum foil, the kind you’d use for baking!

The interview not only looks at war photography and the making of “Restrepo,” but at cross-platform, long-form visual storytelling; ie. the evolution of documentary photojournalism. Hetherington operates in multiple mediums, using each as an addition to his storytelling tool kit, in order to reach as broad an audience as possible–something I identify with. He started with a Vanity Fair article, produced a fine art exhibit, gave to broadcast television, a book, and now a feature length film.

He and Junger self-funded the editorial production of “Restrepo.” I identify with and have much respect for that too. Together they are showing how important long-form, time-intensive documentary work by professional news gatherers is to informing the public; how those professionals must now be capable of using all the tools available to them, be it a still camera, video camera or whatever; and have the ability to distribute that media through platforms like Vanity Fair, a newspaper blog, a Facebook page, or through industry discussion like my re-posting commentary.

It is one of the reasons I spent the last three months in New York, learning to be a better producer, emphasizing multi-platform distribution, and working with visual journalists like myself–but from a production standpoint. The insight I received, not only from people like Brian Storm and Eric Maierson at MediaStorm, Pamela Chen at Open Society Institute, and from the projects I worked on, only reinforces what I believe, and what Hetherington is saying.

Click through to the jump for some excerpts from Hetherington’s interview, but I encourage you to read the whole piece at the New York Times Lens Blog.

Tim Hetherington:

“If you are interested in mass communication, then you have to stop thinking of yourself as a photographer. We live in a post-photographic world. If you are interested in photography, then you are interested in something — in terms of mass communication — that is past. I am interested in reaching as many people as possible.

“I am interested in visually representing something in as many ways as possible, exploiting as many different forms as possible, to reach as many people as possible.

“When you and I look at a photograph or watch a film, it’s all about time. It is the amount of time you spend. That is everything. That is what it’s about. Full stop. No short cut. Eugene Richards does not make amazing work because he is in and out. It’s because he lives it. That’s why the best work — we all know — speaks of time.

“My strategy is, initially, to build a bridge to people rather than turn them off with really tough images that challenge them. By making a film about a group of soldiers you get to know — that you are intimate with, that you laugh with and end up crying with — is a way for you to engage with what is really going on.

“I hope “Restrepo” is the kind of film that does that, that engages people from the left and the right. People have responded very positively to it. Those who have been stirred up are the people who think we should be doing overt political commentary. It makes them angry that we are not.

“The very fact they are riled up shows you that it is impacting them. They need, perhaps, to analyze why they feel how they do. How they can actually talk about the war in a way that isn’t so cemented? If we can engage each other in a nonpolitical and nonpartisan way, we may actually agree on how to move forward with the war.

“We are asking an 18-year-old guy from, say, Arkansas, who has never been out of his state before to not only go to Afghanistan, but also to learn Pashtu and Dari, and be empathetic with people who he thinks may be killing his friends. It is a lot for even the most aware person to deal with.

“We should maybe put some other training procedures into place, and be a little bit more supportive of what they are doing. I have a lot of respect for them, because I think we ask them to do too much.

“I encourage [young photographers] to look at many different forms. Not to say, “I am a photographer,” but to say: “I am an image maker. I make still or moving images in real-life situations, unfiltered and un-Photoshopped. I am going to look into how I can put this into different streams for different audiences; maybe some on the Web, some in print.”

“That’s why I think the most important thing for our industry is not style, it is authenticity. It is: “I go to you because I know you have an authentic voice in the work that you have been doing.”

“But you need to have professional witnesses, people who go out there and do this as a living. What you do – the way that you make an image, the way that you make a story – is different than partaking in that story, like citizen journalism.”

Chad is an incredible planner; give him a goal and he’ll start ticking backwards from the deadline and have a schedule laid out down to the minute. He is also a machine. Having been run into the ground by him, I don’t say that lightly. If anyone can do a single oxygen-less push on Everest, solo, it would be Chad.

A couple mornings ago, while home in Seattle for Mother’s Day weekend, I was sitting in the sunshine with T talking about the important things in life like Legos, Batman, and Bakugan when I showed him a picture of the Baltoro glacier. At the end of it was K2, the second highest peak in the world. Then I mentioned Everest, and I mentioned Chad. T has met him, and remembers him, so we talked about the climb. We then watched a video of Chad on the Outdoor Research Verticulture site, including footage from his helmet camera on the South Face of Aconcagua. Looking at the steep ice and overhanging seracs, T grasped the gravity of Chad’s endeavor, and expressed it in his own terms. “Does he have kids?” T asked.

“No,” I replied, and then tried to explain the concepts of risk assessment, planning, and trusting yourself and your decisions. I think Chad will laugh when he finds out I’m using him as a role model. Or, at least, a partial one. I held back on something Chad has said to me many times since Lara’s death: you better make the most of the here and now, because you don’t know what tomorrow may bring. I understand and struggle with the thought; it’s a tough concept to bear even for adults, much less a six year old. So, for now, I’ll stick with the simpler and more upbeat of the life skills I can share with him.

Read Chad Kellogg’s Everest dispatches at Outdoor Research’s Verticulture.

Over a month ago, when I ran 20-something miles, I wasn’t very kind to my ilio-tibular or “IT” bands. Chiefly the left one. They are the casing, or fascia, of your butt and thigh muscles, on the outside of your legs, that narrow down to a band of connective tissue, inserting at your knee as a tight band of fiber. On me, they’re really tight (ie. painful), so I haven’t run that much lately.

Click through to the jump for a couple more pix and “Map My Run” in action.

However, over the weekend, I headed out into the humid 85 degree spring weather thinking I’d run to the United Nations and take the train back. Or, as it happened, I ran across the Manhattan Bridge, saw the Williamsburg bridge and decided to come back over that. For me, running is not only exercise, it is mental therapy and exploration all rolled into one.

What are some of your runs?

“These were Bill’s when he was young,” she said. “Isn’t that something? Especially now, knowing he’d be the least likely to be a boxer.”

I held the two gloves in the palm of one hand as she looked inside one of her many pieces of antique furniture. Bill died when I was five or six. All I remember is my parent’s sunlit bedroom in California, my mom hanging up the phone, sobbing. Of Bill, himself, I only have freeze-frame images of his faded jeans from my seat on the kitchen floor. All the other images are of pictures, the real kind, printed on photographic paper. I’m chubby, he’s long-haired, and we’re smiling. (at right, the canyon of Treman Park in Ithaca, NY)

In my grandmother’s “cottage,” at an assisted living facility in Ithaca, New York, is the remaining clutter of 89 years of life. “Oh, how I miss my three barns,” she kept on saying. They sold the farm, auctioned off many of their possessions, and moved into “the place where we’ll spend the last years of our lives,” as my grandfather had said. He died several years ago. There was a memorial service in August of 2001, just before the World Trade Center fell. My grandfather got pneumonia and, as my grandmother said, he saw his chart and gave up. He was a doctor and knew what it all meant.

Since then, my grandmother’s life has become an exercise in minimalism, in everything but “stuff.” Letters are stacked on tables, boxes, baskets. Magazines; she has a vintage 1948-ish Time magazine, with Churchill on the cover. She likes Churchill. She also likes all her empty boxes and miscellaneous things that might be useful one day. I understand, I’m like that too, which is why I gave up on trying to clean up her place. I mean, just what do you do with the baby-sized boxing gloves of your dead uncle?

Over the weekend with her, I realized I could know her as a person, not just my grandmother. She was a tough woman–still is. Back in the day, she took on the Catholic Church to help bring contraception, family planning, and women’s reproductive health to upstate New York. She was president of what became the Upper Hudson Planned Parenthood. She kicked ass. Especially for someone who is a staunch Republican in everything except her environmental stance and her views on women’s rights.

She continues with that environmentalism: she’s up in arms over the local hydrofracking of shale for natural gas. We even watched a lecture her endocrinologist gave on how the chemicals they’re using can alter our hormonal development. It’s scary stuff, but she kept on falling asleep, as she says she’s prone to do at her age. She lived through the depression, World War Two, the death of her second child, Susan, who succumbed to leukemia, and the death of her youngest, Bill, whose baby boxing gloves I’d held, from complications related to mononucleosis.

And now. Now she is reflecting on the illness of a third child, Carol. As I write, I’m on a plane flying to a small family reunion in Walnut Creek, California, to celebrate Carol’s 60th birthday. She has liver cancer. When I called her on her birthday, I told her grandma took me to where she and Doug were married. That afternoon, my grandma walked me through the Tolkien-esque canyon near their wedding reception.

“I love that place,” Carol responded. Their wedding was on a hot and muggy day, and as a five year-old I spent most of it playing in the cool of the creek.

“I wished I’d been able to do what you were doing,” Carol laughed. Yes, to be a child. It definitely was much simpler.

Today I am merely re-posting an update from his blog. After a stint in Patagonia, he is back in Chamonix training for Alaska, following the seasons. He re-climbed a route he and I did in 2006, this time as part of an enchainment of north faces. He’s done some pretty hard ski descents, something I tried with him as well, and he’s been involved in two helicopter rescues so far.

Here is Colin Haley’s most recent post from Chamonix

What I’m re-posting is more a blow-by-blow with gorgeous pictures except for the last one, where he narrowly missed death and his partner was seriously injured. It is here, as he evaluates the day, that you get an insight into the calculations an alpinist makes in judging conditions, weighing risk, and determining just how close you can get to the edge without going over.

I’m glad no one died and that Colin came through, again, unscathed. And yes, I’m a bit nostalgic for those weeks in Chamonix.

At Right: In 2006 I made this traverse with Colin, over the top of Les Courtes, except I was sucking wind while he was calling his girlfriend on the summit.

Read my 2006 posts from Chamonix:
On Alpinist Magazine
Luggage
Vallee Blanche
Roommates
Les Droites
Chamonix in Conclusion

I live this way at home, in Seattle, but there I have a family to come home to. In New York, it’s not uncommon to return to the apartment and find neither roommate home. I walk in to the shrill warning of the house alarm, flip on the kitchen light, lock the door, and settle in to whatever task I have. Cooking dinner. Lunch for tomorrow. Maybe personal work. All of it alone. But I can call home, where it’s three hours earlier, and tuck everyone in to bed.

Sometimes the anonymity amongst all these people is nice; I can float through the city, focusing on why I’m here with minimal distraction. After all, I’m only in the city for three months. I can observe and absorb, but don’t have to engage, as I prepare to take advantage of the second half of my stay here.

On 3 April, someone was stabbed in the subway. Lu and I saw the dozen or so cops, the blood all over the floor, the police tape. My subway station. The next night, a block away, someone else was shot.

At night, I watch the rats skitter through the park, or nose about the subway station, down between the rails and across the platform. Depending on the day, garbage is piled on the street. Mounds of it, awaiting pickup. I guess these old buildings don’t have storage for rolling garbage cans or dumpsters like Seattle.

There’s a tree near the apartment building, where all the car service people park. It reeks of urine. I guess that’s one of the compromises for having a car on-call, ready to drive you to the airport or wherever.

I was going to the climbing gym, Brooklyn Boulders which, after producing the workshop piece “Close to Home,” I realized is on the edge of a Superfund site. They are still building out the climbing space and it can be dangerously crowded at times, with people falling on each other. It is as if they’re so used to being around people they are no longer aware of them. I went for the peace of mind climbing can offer, but I’m a bit overwhelmed by the crowds.

It’s a similar thing on the subway or in the grocery store–at least, the ones I go to. People pile up outside the doors of the train, waiting to push in even before you get out. Navigating the platform, or in the aisles of the store, people often won’t even acknowledge you. They maintain their course, step in front of you, push their way toward the produce filled cooler. It’s as if I don’t even exist or, possibly, having this self-assured sense of entitlement is the only way to survive in a city of this size. I’m not sure, but I’ve found it in both the predominantly African-American PathMark grocery store, where stacks of meat, processed grains and gallons of soda fill the grocery carts, to the Trader Joe’s where mostly Caucasian yuppies, hipsters, and a few Jews pick over organics and other feel-good foods. My non-scientific cultural survey tells me it’s simply the city. I have to be careful I don’t throw broccoli at someone.

The other day it was raining heavily, so hard my pants were soaked. As I left the subway, on my way to the office, I walked by the umbrella sales guy. $5, his sign said, but ten steps later I watched with a smile as a woman’s umbrella blew inside out. I decided to suck it up.

That night, on my way back to the apartment, I was caught in another downpour; I stood beneath an awning talking with a grocery store owner as he closed up shop. My pants and boots were soaked, but beneath my jacket I was dry. Uncomfortable as I was, it was pretty funny. Maybe I should have bought that umbrella.

It is dirty, busy, crowded, and full of opportunity. There are priceless, odd, and definitely New York moments. The kind you hear about, the kind that make New Yorkers who they are.

Winter has turned to spring, and before I leave it will turn to summer. It seems it happened all of a sudden, but on that day I wasn’t alone. When Lu visited, she ushered in a change in season. We left the apartment in the morning to bare trees and returned to see them glowing, ghost-like, under the street lights. They were blooming, soft and white in the night.

Phone, skype, email…they’re a tough way to keep in touch with the family. The instantaneous nature of the communication is wonderful, but in a way it can also reinforce the distance as the immediacy is almost, but not quite, there. Lu and I talk regularly, but since she only has T part time, my contact with him is greatly diminished. It is tough, because he’s learning and growing and, guess what, I’m missing it. Lu had to buy him new pants the other day, he’s grown that much. (at right: an easter display at Dewey’s candy shop, a favorite hangout for the folks at the office–one of them is even getting a ‘friend’ discount these days)

It’s unfortunate that we can’t bring him out to the city, especially to the American Museum of Natural History, where I’ve got an inside connection, but he’s not allowed to miss any more days in Seattle Public School. Lu and I do not agree with this judgment, especially considering the educational opportunities he could have here on a long weekend, but we are only two of a three-person parenting team. And it’s tough to hear him ask why Lu gets to see me and he doesn’t. Recently, after we counted out the days until I return “forever,” he asked Lu if he could visit me every weekend until I came back. She explained to him the distance and the time difference. He paused for a moment, then asked if he could just come stay with me until it was time to go home. I can’t help but smile, one of those proud and flattered smiles, but it is tinged with sadness as I rationalize why I’m here and he’s there. Yes, I am the adult and I made the choice to leave.

Lu, on the other hand, is restricted only by parenting responsibilities, her thesis, and the finances, which affect both of us. So when T had his spring break (we had him for winter break), Lu came for a long weekend to do some thesis work at the office and spend some time with me. It was wonderful. I could make her coffee and breakfast again. I had a companion on the subway ride to work. She joined everyone at the center table for lunch. We went for evening walks around the city–one evening we chased happy hour from DUMBO across the Brooklyn Bridge nearly to midtown. But we never had a happy hour drink, as we were too distracted by everything else. (at right: catching the sunset from the Brooklyn Bridge)

Then went climbing in the Gunks with my co-worker Jessica and her partner Tony, who also set us up with a tent and sleeping bags–and great company. New York, and the Gunks, was our first travel date, and it was great to do it again. Maybe, sometime in the not too distant future, T will also be able to travel out here; to go climbing, get some pizza, and visit the museum.

See more photos on my Facebook Fan Page: http://bit.ly/964CXU