No Show Salt Lake City, Utah 2012

This little art deco building was an architectural gem in the middle of a design wasteland–a neighborhood of prefab and nondescript warehouse and related industrial buildings.]]>

Measures of Anonymity #24 Helena, Montana 2012

A vintage building up Last Chance Gulch in Helena. Lots of personality in the curtain arrangements.]]>

Monkeyshine Helena, Montana 2012

A wall mural in Helena. For some reason the red fire alarm bell seems to add to rather than distract from the composition.]]>

Kaleidocrow Bozeman, Montana 2012

The result of trying to keep busy working through the discomfort (aka pain) of heart surgery. Some might suspect I’m actually working through the drugs they gave me for the pain, but this particular effort anyway was pretty much only as drug-inspired as acetaminophen and ibuprofen can get you. The relevance of the resulting shape wasn’t planned but is certainly appropriate.]]>

Building Blocks Salt Lake City, Utah 2012

I was surprised to find a working grain elevator right downtown in Salt Lake City. One of the employees told me it had been there since sometime around 1920, so I imagine back then it was in a more typical setting for an elevator.]]>

Making Anonymity Salt Lake City, Utah 2012

A good intro shot to my Measures of Anonymity series of images.

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The Geography of Survival #4 Bozeman, Montana 2012

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. –Samuel Ullman]]>

The Geography of Survival #3 Bozeman, Montana 2012

I don’t really know what caused the deep grooves in this tree bark but I’m going with bear claw marks. They are about the right height off the ground for claw marks and, like my so-called shark bite scar, what the name lacks for in terms of defensible truth it makes up for in imagination.]]>

The Geography of Survival #2 Bozeman, Montana 2012

I lead a pretty normally rambunctious childhood I think, but never got a cut worthy of stitches until I was in graduate school in my 20’s and even then I didn’t bother to have the cut stitched up–opting instead for the cost-cutting treatment of applying some really tight band-aids for several days that prevented all but the occasional blood drippage. But still that cut yielded my first notable scar (probably a bigger one than if I had just had the stitches).

Since that time I’ve been gradually accumulating additional scars from unintentional and intentional (medical) applications of sharp objects to my various body parts. The most notable of those being the big surgery scar from the major abdominal surgery I had in 1990 which I fondly refer to as my shark bite. Anyway, now I have some new scars to add to my collection. My heart surgery involved what they call a hemi-sternotomy where they only cut half the sternum open instead of the whole thing. So that will add about a four inch accent mark above my shark bite. The more interesting new features on my chest right now though are the four puncture wounds where I had chest tubes coming from the areas around the heart and lungs. With their pinched nature and the sutures that hang from them like limp bolo ties, it keeps bringing to mind not-so-pleasant images of a drunken night of failed, poorly targeted nipple piercings. They’ll look a lot better once they’re healed but will still make for further embellishment of the shark-bite story.

The point, to the extent that there is indeed a point, of all this rambling in relation to today’s POTD is that shortly before I knew I was going to be having open heart surgery I was working on a series of mostly aspen tree images, showing how over time each tree accumulates a series of bends, twists, scars and patterns that leave a unique map of the events that made their lives, well, unique. Like the trees, myself and other of my species generate our own survivor topographies. I suppose one could do a photography project relating to these unique human geographies, but certainly in regard to my own topography, the art world is better served by the tree photographs.

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Gee But It’s Great to Be Back Home Bozeman, Montana 2012

First song I thought of when I walked in the house after getting home from the hospital yesterday. And with the happy horn riffs at the end of the song it seemed like the perfect breakfast nook and POTD music. ]]>