Photojournalist Thomas Lekfeldt is simply amazing and tells a powerful story with his images. A Star in the Sky is especially moving!

Coquelicots by Au fil de. I love these photos available on Flickr and Etsy!

Social distance is what makes it possible for the US to have the world’s highest incarceration rate. As Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie has pointed out, it is harder to be punitive when you know people well, in all the complexities and nuances of their real human lives.

Social distance is also what makes it possible to neglect crime victims so profoundly. We turn them into abstractions and stereotypes and symbols instead of real people.

Interestingly, it’s through social distance that offenders do what they do as well. They can victimize others because they do not empathize with them.

This effort to reduce social distance has guided a number of my photo book projects. Doing Life: Reflections of Men and Women Serving Life Sentences encourages us to see and listen to life-sentenced prisoners as real people rather than stereotypes. Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims does the same for victims of severe crime. To be released shortly, What is Going to Happen to Me? shares the perspectives of some of the 2.4 million children in the U.S. who have a parent in prison. View it online.

The goal in much of my photography and in restorative justice is to find a way to reduce social distance. This is also IGVP’s goal and that is why I am encouraged by their commitment.

Another intersection between “healing photography” and peace/justice work is the cluster of values that underlie both. I often identify a number that are central: respect, responsibility, relationships, humility, wonder.

Albert Renger-Patzsch, an early 20th century photographer, said that “photography seems to me to be better suited for doing justice to an object than for expressing artistic individuality.” That’s my goal: to “do justice” to my subject, and to do so on the healing edge.

The cool air has arrived. Tomorrow is Labor Day which has always symbolized the end of summer to me. It was a great summer and I only wish I could have captured more of it with my camera.

Well known in the West, Clyde Butcher’s successful landscape portraits of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Badlands provided him with money and acclaim. But, in something of a midlife crisis after a personal tragedy, he moved to Florida’s Gulf Coast–and lost himself in the Everglades and black-and-white photography. These stunning photos present a wonderful keepsake record of Butcher’s time in this beautiful area.

Notes

He knew it had something to do with black-and-white. Black-and-white wasn’t real. You can’t look at a black-and-white photo and simply think, That’s what a swamp looks like. There’s something missing. The viewer has to get involved, supply the missing element himself. Clyde decided it was like the difference between watching a movie and reading a book. A movie creates the illusion of a reality you can sit back and watch. A book makes you a participant in the author’s reality.

But there was more. Clyde’s reality drew more people in, shocked them even. His images are view as if from inside the photograph, scanned from left to right, top to bottom, with new discoveries at every angle. This was the secret. In most photography, the entire composition is built on the fact that the human focal point spans only seven degrees, a mere spot in the center of vision. Most photography is reductive; it works because the photographer is able to screen out the clutter and dissonance of a scene and frame those seven “good” degrees.

In the Everglades there is no chaos or imperfection or mess. The entire compass flows together. Everything fits. Which is exactly why the swamp is so hard to photograph. Most pictures just reinforce the expectation that the Everglades are visually boring. Any single span of seven degrees encompasses only a clump of trees, a swath of grass – isolation doesn’t make them more beautiful, it makes them seem bland.

But Clyde’s favorite wide-angle lens and large-format camera produced a focal point of 116 degrees – more than twice as wide as a standard setup – a panorama too sweeping to absorb in a single glance, flawless in detail. Every square centimeter was perfect, each blade of grass as sharply etched as the convolutions of a distant cloud, magic achieved with a combination of virtuosity and technique. Black-and-white film absorbs more information than color; large negatives many times more than the tiny postage stamps in 35mm cameras. And Clyde closed the camera lens to a pinhole so he could leave it open for minutes, rather than the infinitesimal blink of a standard camera in daylight. The slightest wind would blur the image, but the long exposure etched the image richly, and Clyde helped by bending the bellows of his box camera, tilting the lens so the plane of sharpest focus extended from the extreme foreground to the extreme background instead of vertically in a single plane. In Clyde’s pictures, you could see forever.

Of course, none of that would have had such an impact if the subject weren’t pure. Clyde wouldn’t take a picture if there was the thinnest remnant of a jet contrail in the sky or the faintest footprint in the mud. His photos were about a world without human impact, a world inexhaustible and eternal. That’s why people thought his grandfather had taken them. They’d grown accustomed to a planet being worn down and used up, and the contrary notion had tremendous appeal. Overnight, Clyde became a star of the art circuit. He had no idea that, in sense, his photographs were beautiful lies. (85 – 87)

Check out Seeing the Light by Tom Shroder and more of What I’m Reading…

The melancholy and mirth in the art of Blanca Gomez. I love her simple but beautiful illustrations, especially Monsieur III.

TheeSatisfaction. My new find from the best hip-hop program on the planet – KEXP’s Street Sounds. I love their song Reagan.