letters from provence

dear provence,
will you marry me? I can't live without you.

letters from paris, part 1

dear paris,
i love you. on a scale from 1 to 10, how much do you love me?

looking back at what we did makes me want to go back.

The biggest gift that extreme emotion can give us is that the most intense beauty can emerge from it. This sounds ridiculously cliché, but once you experience it first hand, you’ll know. You’ll know. Within the core of the core of the self lies something deeply awesome, but no one ever wants to go there because it can be really painful. Once you enter this 'awesome / painful' area, all you can and should do to feel in control is grab as much inspiration as possible. I had a writing teacher in high school give me the best, shortest advice: ‘don’t think about it, just write’. That is what I’m doing when I’m writing this paragraph: no stopping, just banging my fingers on the keys. I then go back and change, tweak, whatever, but when I’m writing, my head is separate from my body. My heart is doing the word purging, my head is off to the side, waiting to weigh in when necessary. The struggle to create is as important as the creation itself.

And I end with: my camera is the greatest relationship I’ve ever had: it’s always been there for me, it always delivers, it waits patiently without judgement, it’s always honest, it will never leave.

on the way to something else.

One summer. 12 round trip Southwest flights. Put your child's oxygen mask on before yours! 24 mini bottles of terrible Sutter Home wine (to and from destination). 24 mini bags of peanuts. Turbulence. Excitement. Recycled air. Seats and tray tables in their upright positions.

new project: plum gorgeous

Hello again. Working on a new project with Nani Steele, and she creates the most simple, incredible tastes and flavors with her dishes. And she works like a true artist. It's like a Jackson Pollock painting in your mouth. Or like that scene in 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory', where Violet eats the three-course meal piece of gum and is shouting names of the dishes she tastes. Like this: cinnamon! cardamom! fennel! honey! spicy! sweet! delicious!
All these polaroids with a poem by William Carlos Williams:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

(old) letters from France

I’ve been thinking a lot about France. Not just the food, but having these elaborate daydreams of shutting myself in a three room apartment, writing (most likely about shutting myself in a three room apartment in Paris and how romantic it can [or should] be) and photographing objects of memory. It can be something so simple as the smallest bit of peeling paint on the ceiling, but it’s peeling paint “in France”. I wish there was a way I could capture old, squeaky, wood floors in French apartments.

There are days, like today, where I feel like I want to stop time and live in the photos. I’m always looking to the next thing, one day ends faster than the next, and the only time it seems I get to really experience what I’ve seen is after the fact, in a photograph.

And there are other days, when I wish my eyes were cameras, and every time I blinked I took a photo. At the end of my life, I look at the hard drive in my head full of these subconscious memories, and it will feel like living a life all over again, but for the first time…

pancakes

This idea popped in my head while sitting in traffic on the Bay Bridge. What better way to spend a Saturday then to make pancakes the size of steering wheels doused in a bucket of maple syrup? We ended the shoot in a sugar frenzy, running around the park. Zing!

letters from athens / crete / evvia

I have many places on my long list to visit and eat and drink (noodles in southeast Asia, ham in Spain, Australia, more Argentina, Chile, Africa, anywhere and anything to eat in Mexico, Saag Paneer in India, Turkey, more Malbec in Argentina, Alaska, sushi in Japan, Peking duck in China, camp food in the Westy all over the US making stops at funny diners and useless tourist destinations) and I couldn't think of anything in Greece that would suck me in. Then comes my assignment to Crete and Evvia, and all of a sudden I taste the ocean in everything I eat. And eat. And eat. And the food doesn't stop coming until you really say 'I honestly can't fit another thing in my stomach'. It's good, healthy food, full of fish and greens. Heart disease is virtually unheard of over there, yet smoking a pack of cigarettes a day seems like the norm. Give up your lungs, but you have a healthy heart full of vitamins and omega-3.
Crete is one of those places where I would throw the map out the window. Where are we going? Who cares! Look at those sheep with giant bells, and the pine trees, and narrow alleyways, and abandoned structures, and that guy with a speedo, black socks, loafers, and a cigarette dangling! He looks like a sexy Henry Kissinger.