Houston. Oleanders. Collision of textures -- painted metal, painted brick, poisonous flowers. Conjuring up sharkskin in green and gray and pink and red.
Houston
35. Amateur Urban Archeology
My internal label for what I do, wondering the city, eye drawn to accumulation, accretion, sedimentary layers of signage. Accidental evidence. Inadvertent poetry.
This Bell + Arrow in London pairs with the Bell + Arrow in Pasadena (part of "23 Very Short Stories").
London
34. Harry on Santa MonicaPier
As if in a posture of prayer. Looking through a slit in the (for Santa Moncia) ancient creosoted wood.
Santa Monica
33. Dot
Principal photography on our movie together was completed last night. Dot celebrated by smashing a cupcake in my face, echoing the scene in the movie where Richard sticks his face in a birthday cake, which is a revisiting of me sticking my head in my birthday cake at age 15.
Dot (London)
32. Dot in Black on Balcony with Unbalanced Socks
Does the title take away from the mystery?
London
31. Guarding Against Sitting on Feet, London
London
30. Behind Bellaire Broiler Burger
Amatuer archeaological exploration of low density urban space...accidental poetry behind buildings...this is the landscape where I came of age...
Bellaire, Texas
29. Dot Reading and Writing in the Underground
London
28. A Strip Mall Stripped Bare
This is the landscape I grew up in. You already know me as a fan of the missing sign. I like how the symmetry of the building is disturbed by the mismatched symmetry of the parking lot. For me this picture gets stranger the longer that I look at it.
Houston
27. Missing Sign, Houston
I love empty sign frames, and there seem to be a lot of them in Houston, perhaps because of the periodic hurricanes. Nothing like a little rust and some bougainvillea to make for a bit of Southern Gothic.
Houston
26. Roman Way, Hertfordshire, UK
This photo was taken at the end of family hike through the kind of picturesque countryside I never find photographically picturesque. I'm much more interested in a collision or the intrusion or at the presence of the humans. This cul de sac looks like a stage set. On some level it is. I was shooting with my Lumix pocket camera and I was damn lucky that the dog's paw is so perfectly posed. I count the triangulation of the three central figures as dumb luck and good fortune.
Roman Way, Hertfordshire, UK
25. Mohawk Fishing Bugbrooke
The room likely remains white and silent. I'm getting ready to shoot a movie, start date is five weeks from Monday, so not a time of great loquacity.
I took this picture in Bugbrooke, on the canal by the train tracks. Something about the Mohawk and the stocky body and the angle of the rod and the delicate lure and the harsh surface of the water. I always wonder if I can really describe what is fundamentally intuitive about why an image works for me.
Bugbrooke, England
24. Trapped on Tottenham Court Road
Wandering London, impecunious, deluded that I was a flaneur, I packed my camera, a bottle of water, perhaps a sandwich, an Oyster card, a map, and something to read on the tubefor a day of wandering. My curfew was to be back in Queens Park by 3 PM to pickup my kids from primary school (the only white man in a sea of berkas). As a point of prideful asceticism, I took a private vow not to spend a nickel on my wanders, or to perhaps indulge in a candy bar.
London
23. Never Mow Or Water Again!
This is the companion photo to "Learn Stand Up Comedy" which is in the "23 Very Short Stories" series. In fact I shot this photo on the same stretch of hardscrabble Thousand Oaks roadside. It's spatially and tonally contiguous.
Never Mow Or Water Again! (Thousand Oaks)
22. A last family photo on Queensloch
The house on Queensloch (Houston, Texas) is for me the defining house of my childhood, though we moved there when I was 13. I left when I was 17 to go to college, though I lived there for over a year in my thirties when I came back to Houston to raise money for my first feature film, "The Trouble with Dick." My Mom kept the place so clean that the only marks on the carpet are indents from chair and sofa legs.
The presence of absence.
Queensloch, Houston
21. Dwight Eisenhower's Butt
Grosvenor Square, London. The only interesting image (that I could see) outside the American Embassy.
London (Dwight Eisenhower's Butt)
20. The Conversation (stairwell, London)
As the photographer I cannot detach from my memory of the moment this photograph was taken. For me this image evokes Magritte's painting of a woman's head shrouded in white. Is that association entirely idiosyncratic?
The Conversation (London)