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When Will Our Civil War End?
You might live a whole life west of the Rocky Mountains and not realize this: the Civil War never ended, not for an army of amateur actors recreating historical encampments and battles. The war has not ended for many other modern people alive now in the Old Confederacy, who identify with a disappeared way […]
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Luxor Madness
It begins when you hit pavement in Luxor — a city upriver in Egypt on the Nile, and home to the biggest religious complex ever constructed: The Temple of Karnak, a human cultural analog to the Grand Canyon. Many folks live here in poverty hustling for a living, and survive on money extracted from […]
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The Mask Is The Meaning
I was traveling by car with two companions along the Aegean coast near Ephesus. The driver — an Englishman with long experience in Turkey — suggested we detour through lush agricultural land. He knew this artichoke farmer personally; so when I asked to make photographs, the fellow was among friends and there was little […]
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An Essential Cairo Image
Along the streets in Cairo, Egypt wind always blows. It rarely becomes blustery, but rather oscillates between soft currents and vigorous breezes. Every flat in the city has a clothes line, either outside a window or running parallel to a balcony. Among the tender winds and the sunlight garments dry in an hour or two. […]
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Racetrack Emotions, Part 2
I encountered this pretty woman one Saturday at the track, upstairs facing an array of closed circuit television screens, as official results of a completed race began appearing. Prior to this, I made two frames of her jumping up and down with both arms thrown above her head, each image interesting and well-crafted in its […]
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Yellow, The Predominant Color
Yellows and light greens rule the color palette of wild desert gardens. Scarlets, pinks and purples sprinkled about make landscapes vivacious, but yellow shores up the foundation and forms the background. I offer two images for your happiness. Pictured above you find a robust example of the official pale green tree of Arizona, and […]
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Another Of Those Mysterious Sculptures
The pedestal-balanced rock above could pass as modern sculpture, a product of the human brain. In my mind it has balance, a designed aerodynamic shape with faceting, and an engaging aggregation of forms with different colors emerging from its crown. Its location, balanced on the edge of a dramatic canyon, seems beyond a random fortuitous […]
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Is This Spiritual Rage?
I had luck enough to travel along the Nile River to the Temple of Dendera, where these photographs were taken during a restoration project. The temple dates from Ptolemaic times — in the few hundred years before Christ — and was built beside an oasis to worship Hathor, goddess of many realms including Sky and […]
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My Personal Favorite
Of the spontaneous environmental portraits I have made, this is my favorite. He is a private tour guide, an Egyptian hustler with voluminous knowledge of travel by horse and camel in the desert. I could not have engineered this backdrop myself more perfectly. I thus caught his personality and his place in the world at […]
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Civil War Photographer, Irritated
I was attending a Civil War Re-Enactment of the Battle of Perryville when I encountered this gentleman. He was demonstrating vintage technique with an antique camera, impersonating a glass-plate photographer from the 19th century. I got interested in him as a human being, and not as the actor in a presentation, and so unobtrusively […]