Here we are again, thanks for the attention as always. You've never looked as good, if you don't mind me saying.
2010 marked my 12th year as a newspaper photojournalist, and my 8th at my daily. I've been doing this just about as long as I've done any one thing in my life. Looking back, this was a year where my work has turned more introspective. I've seen and photographed an awful lot of people and situations by this point, and while its a mistake and a cliche to say people and events are all the same, I started to see that my approach to them was starting to be the same. Frankly this was pretty dispiriting at times, it was a rough year. You want to think your work is an endless stream of god given talent, but you start to see that there's more a pattern in the craft then you had let yourself believe. Faced with this, I saw two options. Quit or look deeper. And by quitting, perhaps thats the road to new projects, more fully realized art. And by looking deeper, perhaps you risk finding that there is indeed nothing further to express, that the feeling of futility is more then a feeling.
The truly wonderful thing about newspaper work, though, is that you don't have a of of time to dwell on such nonsense. There is another deadline coming up fast, there is a hole that needs to be filled with art. My job is to fill the hole, whether it is an earnest expression of my concept of our time and life, or a meaningless cute animal photo. So my approach to 2010 was to dig in, fill the hole and see where approaching my work from the inside might lead me.
Here's a good example of that, and a fitting image for the start of the year. The windows need to be cleaned. Someone's got to do it so we can see out. No much more to it then that, except that maybe I'm projecting a little of myself out there into the cold.