• August Sander While I was in Khorog at a USAID funded project at UCA, this man reminded me of so many portraits by August Sander. I had the work camera in my hand, a Canon with a cheapo lens, but I took the shot anyway. My head is so full of......
• Langar On our trip we visited the town of Langar, just a handfull of houses on the Panj river. Afghanistan is to the right. The Pamirs are on the left. A German couple on tour bikes rides through on the way to China. They took 7 months off from work to......

The tiny village of Burunkul lies between Khorugh and Murghob in the Pamir region of Tajikistan, forgotten by civilization and clashing empires, bypassed by truckers neglected by time.

This meditative study of village of life is about sound and the passage of time, about life cycles and about technology, about the ebb and flow of civilizations and those who get lost on the cobwebs of the Silk Road. There is no narration. There are no interviews. There is nothing more that this one morning in the Pamirs.

Shot with a Sony DCR TRV27 on MiniDV. Edited in iMovie ’09. Original score composed in GarageBand.

• Nurek Hydroelectric Power Plant The dam, the central feature of the Nurek Hydroelectric Power plant, stands 300 meters high, and supports nine hydroelectric generating units. The facility provides as much as 98 percent of Tajikistan's power (as of 1994). Designed as a pyramid straddling the Vakksh River canyon, the dam measures over 700......
• China Road and Bridge [/caption]Pei and I are the only ones who stop and talk to the Chinese workers. We drive up to the mountains on weekends, and when we see them we pull over and chat. They don't mind at all, actually I think they like to have someone else to talk to.......

• Find the Fear and make Big Scary things Happen in your Life
• Why Surfing?

• Darfur Wedding Here is an image I didn't include in the my Darfur project. I shot it after I had finished the final edit on the project, in fact I had already printed the exhibition prints. But Omar called me and invited me to a wedding, and I had to go.......
• Khorog A burnt out Russian APC stands watch in Khorog. Russians guarded the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan until 2005. They completed the withdraw, blew up the equipment and left. Now, the fossils remind us of what strength used to be. Like dinosaurs bones, they are a curiosity to children......

• The Panj Tajikistan shares more than 800 miles of border with Afghanistan at the Panj river. Alexander the Great chased a Persian army to this river, stranding him on one side while his opponents fled to safety. But Alexander ordered his men to slay the pack animals and made rafts out......
• My Son My parents asked me if I was going to adopt him. I had never even thought of that before. Maybe some bureaucrat in California needs to mark something on a piece of paper, or maybe some civil servant in Washington will give me some sort of bonus if I do.......

bane, ruin, curse, imprecation

This is the first in the series WAR. We are the victims. Yet victim implies powerlessness, guilt, and the shadow of blame. The dead blame no one.

• Khorog A burnt out Russian APC stands watch in Khorog. Russians guarded the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan until 2005. They completed the withdraw, blew up the equipment and left. Now, the fossils remind us of what strength used to be. Like dinosaurs bones, they are a curiosity to children......
• The Swimming Pool I'm back in Dushanbe, even though my mind is in the Pamirs. When in the Pamirs, I thought I was going back in time. But now, here in Dushanbe, I see that this city is stuck in 1991, entrenched by nightmares of the civil war of 1995, trapped by ancient......

Here are snapshots from my family vacation in Riga. I took my D700 and only my 20mm lens, and tried not to bore my wife and kid by stopping every two seconds to shoot.

• My Son My parents asked me if I was going to adopt him. I had never even thought of that before. Maybe some bureaucrat in California needs to mark something on a piece of paper, or maybe some civil servant in Washington will give me some sort of bonus if I do.......
• The End of the Earth Our driver was happy to take us to the village of Javshanguz. It is on the map, just barely. But he wasn't particularly happy when I told him that I wanted him to go farther. I wanted to go to Langar. I wanted to go to the moon. Javshanguz is......

• FTF @ TGIF
• Strawberry Farms Golf Course, Irvine, CA

Riga Storefront

Shattered Beauty

• August Sander While I was in Khorog at a USAID funded project at UCA, this man reminded me of so many portraits by August Sander. I had the work camera in my hand, a Canon with a cheapo lens, but I took the shot anyway. My head is so full of......
• Murgab mosque Lenin's statue stands in the center of town in Murgab, one of the highest cities in the Pamirs. A few mosques dot the town. There are no trees, and the security details warns us not to go out at night. "It seems normal," they say, "but really there are a......

The Doctor's Office

Phe cut his knee, so we went to the doctor’s office. As always, he was the star of the show, which helped me get these shots.

• Photo Composite SVA changed my vision. I've always been a documentary photographer, but in the past I tried to use my camera to capture reality. Now I've come to realize that my job as a photographer is to pass my perception, my emotion, my story, on to my audience. In this......
• Langar Something just happened in Tajikistan. No one is quite sure what. I cherry bomb? A car bomb? An atomic bomb? In Dushanbe, everyone lives behind cement walls. Mine are 9 feet high. In Langar, people live in mud huts. "Pamiri houses" they are called. There are five pillars holding......

• Tobacco Companies and Selling The Lie
• How to Recover from an ACL Injury

The Candy Store

Rudaki Avenue

Dushanbe is very quiet this time of year and all times of year. By six, everything is closed. Girls don’t walk the streets alone. They hold hands. Kids buy candy from a kiosk. Sometimes, the president’s motorcade roars by.

• The Bricklayer The Ambassador wanted to cross into China a Kulma. The Tajik government won't let third country nationals go into China, not yet, maybe next year, they need to work out a deal, sign some forms, have meetings, shake hands, agree, sign, stamp, negotiate again, argue, come up with reasons as......
• The Swimming Pool I'm back in Dushanbe, even though my mind is in the Pamirs. When in the Pamirs, I thought I was going back in time. But now, here in Dushanbe, I see that this city is stuck in 1991, entrenched by nightmares of the civil war of 1995, trapped by ancient......

• How To Graduate From College Debt Free...Or Close To It.
• The Charlie Brown Christmas Tree

The Southern Rail

The Overpass

The windows of the passenger cars are mostly shattered, cracked, pockmarked with holes and scars. As the trains tremble through Uzbekistan, I am told the Uzbek children throw stones at the trains. Now, the windows are protected with metal grates and bars to guard from the flying stones. Many of the passengers are labor migrants, making their way to Russia to do seasonal unskilled work. Russia both hates these laborers, and needs them to survive. This was all one country once.

• The Panj Tajikistan shares more than 800 miles of border with Afghanistan at the Panj river. Alexander the Great chased a Persian army to this river, stranding him on one side while his opponents fled to safety. But Alexander ordered his men to slay the pack animals and made rafts out......
• My Son My parents asked me if I was going to adopt him. I had never even thought of that before. Maybe some bureaucrat in California needs to mark something on a piece of paper, or maybe some civil servant in Washington will give me some sort of bonus if I do.......

• Train for Your First Triathlon
• Swim League