Today's Flak Photo

Car Skeletons, Highway 163, Arizona, 2008 is featured today in Flak Photo's Collection thanks to editor and publisher Andy Adams. Andy is currently producing a digital exhibition of 21st Century American landscape views in conjunction with a show curated by Jan Howard at The RISD Museum of Art opening on September 20th, America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 - Now.

For more information about Flak Photo's project and submitting images for consideration, please see: Looking at the Land - 21st Century American Views: A Collaboration with The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.

Flak Photo's Winter Pictures

Thank you to Andy Adams for including Tree, 2003 in Flak Photo's Winter Pictures series featuring 20 photographs each weekday in January. All of the winter images can be found in The Collection.

Field of Sad Trees

Field of Sad Trees
Spanish Fork, UT
April 2008

Thank you to Andy Adams for featuring one of my images on Flak Photo today. I made this photograph during a trip to Utah in the spring of 2008 to explore the setting of the Gary Gilmore murders in 1976. The search for a sad tree was inspired by a passage in The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer.

One Sunday while she was digging away in her garden, Gary carved their names on the apple tree. He did it with a pocket knife, real nice, real neat: GARY LOVES NICOLE. Nobody had ever done that before.

Next day she had a lot of things to do, and kept wanting to get back. When she finally reached home, she cleaned out his car first, then climbed up the tree to a place above where he had done it, and carved out: NICOLE LOVES GARY. Then she went into the house just in time to meet him.

He came out into the backyard with a beer and she told him to look at the apple tree. He didn't see anything and she finally had to point it out to him. Then he was happy as a kid, and said she had done hers better than his. Told her it was a beautiful heart she had carved around the names.

excerpt from The House in Spanish Fork
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

Today's Flak Photo

White Horse, Riverview, Florida, 2007

Thank you to Andy Adams for bringing my White Horse to Today's Flak Photo. I found this mysterious creature - the daughter of a celebrated show horse - nearly two years ago on desolate farm near Gibsonton, a legendary town in Florida's swamplands where carnies and circus freaks spend their winters.

Taking this photograph was without a doubt one of the most romantic experiences of my life. My white horse ran up and down the driveway, towards me and away from me and towards me, and what passed between us felt like curiosity and shyness and wonder and beauty all at once. For that moment, I was fully alive and present in my dream world. Breathless, stunned, exhilarated.