Six books:
Bluenose Physiognomy - Nova Scotia Faces: an exploration of photographs from Nova Scotia junk stores
In these vernacular photographs we see into a vanished world and look into the eyes of people who lived and died a century ago. By purchasing these images I was able to save a few thousand people from oblivion, and give them new leases on life within the structure of inferences and tales that is my ongoing enterprise. The individual photographs are fragments whose contribution to grander structures may emerge gradually, as people view and comment on them.Beyond 7000 Ångströms - More than our eyes can see: six months of infrared exploration
I've now been experimenting with infrared for about six months, and I'm beginning to develop an intuitive feel for subject matter that might work in IR. And it is just a beginning, since I barely understand how the magic works. Each of the images in this collection surprised and delighted me by challenging what I thought I knew about photographic vision...Forebears: Exploring Franklin Blackmer's photo archive
Every photograph is an entangled document, about which we may know some basic facts, but the instant of exposure is just an eye-blink in the cascade of a life. How are we to read and interpret what we see? Each generation in a family has the problem of what to keep and what to discard of what frmer generations kept and passed on. It's a considerable responsibility as well as a glorious opportunity to define and elaborate what 'family' means for descendants. And it is the 30-odd descendants of Franklin and Carolyn Blackmer who are the primary audience for what I'm laying out in these pages.Remembered: a graveyard book
Gravestones are memorials to loss erected by the living, and reading them discloses a typology of decedents, including infants, children, prime-of-life, the elderly. Ages of birth and death are often specified. Inscriptions run the gamut from near-anonymity to expressions of philosophical, theological, or poetic conviction. Texts are sometimes added, admonitory, elegaic or mourning. Many epitaphs summarize life stories -- tragedies often enough, in deaths at young ages, in childbirth, at sea...Order Up! My Life and Times at Home Kitchen Cafe
Soon after becoming a regular at Home Kitchen I began photographing the plates that appeared before me -- not every time, but whenever prompted by the little voice between my ears. The individual pictures are nothing fancy, just available-light grab shots with my iPhone, but taken together they make a satisfying catalog of first-hand experience and pleasure.Who Was Joe Wilner? a forensic farrago
We always work with fragments, sometimes able to join them into larger bits of the puzzle, but often enough the larger patterns are slow to emerge. Joe's photos pose a coarse-grained forensic puzzle, part cultural reconstruction, part domestic drama, part psychological excavation -- and, as I've come to realize, all anthropology, albeit of a heterodox sort. Joe Wilner is an Informant, and our task is to interpret what he tells us of his life and times. We don't get to ask him to elucidate; we have only the bare evidence of what he's disclosed, and we have the task, and joy, of decoding and then building a narrative.