I love color photography, but every once in a while, I return to my roots in photography and convert images to black and white.
Sorbonne - Paris - 2024
Jardin du Luxembourg - Paris - 2024
Jardin du Luxembourg - Paris - 2024
Jardin du Luxembourg - Paris - 2024
Chloé Jafé - Okinawa Mon Amour
Published by the(M) editions
Book Cover
This year, I had the privilege of attending Les Rencontres d’Arles, a photography festival that spans the entire summer. During the festival's first week, a small French city is transformed into a multifaceted photography gallery. It was a grand and glorious experience.
I stopped by the Photo Book fair to browse through the books. There were books from dozens of book publishers who focused on photography. I must have looked through 30 or 40 books, but when I stopped at the(M) editions photo booth, I was immediately drawn to this book, which has a bright red cover and bold black French and Japanese text. Chloé Jafé’s Okinawa Mon Amour is the second book of a trilogy. The other two books in the trilogy are titled I give you my life and How I met Jiro.
Flipping through the pages, I was reminded of the early moments in my photographic journey when my obsession with photography books developed. As a young, broke twenty-something living in Chicago, I would visit the downtown Borders bookstore and spend hours flipping through photography books.
This book, as the title suggests, is about love. Specifically about the performance of love.
I had a book signed to me. I love Chloé’s signature.
The introduction text in the book reads:
In this photographic and sentimental wandering, the second chapter of her trilogy, the photographer paints a portrait with great accuracy of this island from the rest of Japan. In Okinawa, which was destroyed during WWII, time seems to have stopped.
Chloé Jafé commits to reveal the stigmata of a past that still binds the facades and faces and the dark corners of an island where pirates in distress and good-time ladies continue to flock.
Her work brings to light men and women ostracised from society who have established performance as a religion, unveiling their peculiarity in all its tenderness and its distress.
Jafe shares the multifaceted performance of love through people and places with the audience. The book's edit weaves through Intimate portraiture, noir cityscapes, archival images of soldiers printed on translucent paper, and love notes.
We can see the hand of the artist through the addition of red paint or what she calls the “stigmata of the past” to black-and-white photographs. I really enjoy this kind of documentary work, which expands the bounds of documentary practice with creative techniques usually reserved for more fine-art photographic practice.
After I asked to purchase a copy of the book, Jafe just happened to walk up to the booth where I was purchasing it. She had photographs in an exhibition space in Arles that weekend. She offered to sign the book for me, and I gladly accepted. She has one of the most unique book signatures I have seen. I would highly recommend picking up a copy.
Here more about Jafé on the podcast A Small Voice: Conversation With Photographers.
I love riding the train in places that are foreign to me. My mind wanders through the countryside, from farmhouses to factories to three-lane highways to small mountain hiking trails. I’m separated from the world by this thin plane of glass. I often daydream about all the lives that are flashing before me.
Some place between Paris and Arles, France - June 2024
Some place bwtween Paris and Arles, France - June 2024
My photography process has changed so much in recent years. I find myself more attracted to quiet moments, a significant shift in my approach from the beginning of my career. I have also become much more intentional with the images I create. Part of that desire is born from going through a MFA program. The rest comes from the visual fatigue of over two decades of working as an image-maker. It has been almost 8-years since I made a blog post. I’m excited to retreat from Instagram to a quieter space on the internet to share my visual musings. I’m going to start with sets of images from a recent trip to France.
The Notre Dame Cathedral was heavily damage by fire in 2019. It is in the process of being repaired and is surrounded by temporary walls topped with barbed wire. Its still a popular tourist site, when I visited in June 2024 is was closed off to the public.
Notre Dame Cathedral -2024
Outside the Luxembourg Palace -2024
Shadow and Reflections - Paris - 2024
Luxembourg Palaces - 2024
Near Luxembourg Palaces - 2024
I draw much of my photographic inspiration from the little moments the world gives me. I live for bits of magical time. Moments like these hammer on the wall of reality. The cracks created from this force opens a door to a world of surreal reverie. These types of images play on the human soul in the same way a guitar cord vibrates of the hands of a skilled musician. They can bring tears to your eyes or transport your emotions to a place far away.
Bassist - 6th Street, Austin, TX - SXSW
Cheerleaders - Milan Pusker Studium - WVU vs Oklahoma Football
Club Dancer - 6th Street, Austin, TX - SXSW
Musician - Hilary Kay - Wellsburg, WV - WVU Bluegrass Band
The past few years have marked a move in my photography from purely representational image making to a more motivated exploration of the constructed image. The natural place for this study has been with the portrait. Whether in the studio, the subject’s natural environment, or capturing someone in one perfect moment of light, making this type of work challenges my natural introvert tendencies and force me to engage with my subjects
From Top Left: Matthew Byrd, Karen Culcasi, Kate Lewis, Marc Besch, Paul Raines, Leslie Boorhem-Stephenson
These images images where made to tell the story of a little girl that haunts on of the buildings on West Virginia University campus:
“It is believed that an 8-year-old girl named Sally attended a party at Reynolds Hall, where the Mountainlair is now, at the turn of the 20th century and had a wonderful time dating around in her Victorian dress. Sadly, not long after this, she died in a typhoid outbreak. She was buried in a cemetery on the site of Stewart Hall. The graves are now in the East Oak Grove Cemetery.
Over the years, facilities workers have reported seeing a blonde girl in a yellow dress dancing in the hallways of the Mountainlair and the second floor of Stewart Hall."
These images are a decade old. I shot them in 2006, during the height of George W. Bush’s presidency. I remember feeling a certain bit of hope when I covered protests like this one. I was inspired by witnessing people from various backgrounds come together to form a collective voice for a more inclusive and peaceful America. These photographs focus on the faces and eyes of the protesters, to strip away the veneer that people use to mask themselves. In their expressions, I see hope and passion.
Mina Schultz, 30, stands in front of her mother's home on Wednesday, July 13, 2016 in Rivesville, W.Va. She was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer at age 25.
Bruce Perry, 62, from Charleston, W.Va, poses for a portrait in his home on,Tuesday, May, 24, 2016, in Charleston, W.Va. Perry has prostate cancer and has opted not to have radiation or chemotherapy treatments. (Raymond Thompson Jr for The New York Times)
