Flow: Underwater with James Raymond Holbert

Raymond and I first met at a local café. We were dressed alike which seemed improbable to both of us. Equally improbably, we were each keeping company with a fat journal—inking/charting/adhesing artifacts from recent days onto fresh pages.

At his invitation, I joined Raymond at his table and the conversation bloomed. We were soon talking about what we loved about swimming and how it felt to photograph under water.

“Like a dance,” he told me. The movement, the breath, the timing.

Buoyed by happenstance we decided we’d meet at the pool next time. Now it’s our ritual—a morning plunge, the exhalation of thousands of bright bubbles, the wonder of what we might find under the surface.

Welcome Home: Housing First for Veterans in Beaumont, California

At Linc Housing’s Liberty Village, homes are sanctuaries—safe and stable places.

Supportive housing for veterans is often a quiet place after a season of chaos. It is sometimes a studio apartment where sunlight filters through curtains, where pink-filigreed furnishings welcome tired bodies after a long workday, or where there is space to host a small dinner with friends. Housing can mean an enduring welcome and a sense of belonging.

A photograph of home is not the happy ending of a story. It’s a fraction of a moment. But it makes evident the value of uplift to people who have risked so much and have much to look forward to.

Engineering Our Biophilic Future: UCSC'S Baskin School of Engineering

Photographing the staff at University of California Santa Cruz’s Baskin School of Engineering meant spending time on the lush campus surrounded by people researching big data, cyber-physical systems, genomics, and computational media.

A Place of Our Own: Stable Housing in the City of Angels

Linc Housing’s mission is to build communities and strengthen neighborhoods for underserved Californians.

Over the past year, we’ve partnered to tell visual stories about the ways people can thrive when they have stable housing. In our ongoing collaboration, I’ve dropped into creative play sessions and financial workshops; pizza parties and market pop-ups; resource sessions and apartment life, too.

I’m grateful to the many people who welcomed me into their homes for this photographic series—who introduced me to their parakeets or explained what the diplomas were for or shared early memories of childhood in Cuba. It’s difficult to understand the forces at work and the urgency of California’s housing situation without listening to people who have encountered its raw challenges.

Washed Up: Photographs and Erasure Poems from the Pacific Trash Vortex

I’m rooting for the fungi to save us from plastics. Until then, I’m collecting small, handsome shards, swishing them in the Pacific to remove the sand, photographing them, and creating erasure poems about their previous lives.

Hem + Jaleo: Upcycling and Flamenco with Fafafoom's Mira Musank

Hem & Jaleo sprang from the imagination of talented textile artist Mira Musank (of Fafafoom)—a way to interact with the work she created during her residency with Climate Creative.

Hosted at The Dome, the event invited the audience to participate in life drawing as models moved around the space wearing Mira's creations made entirely from textile waste—pre-consumer cutouts, sewing remnants, and pre-owned clothes.

Agua Clara Flamenco then brought Mira's upcycled textile designs to life on the stage transporting a rapt audience through song and rhythm through the music of Andalusia.

On Assignment: Knoxville, Tennessee

iPhone 13 | Knoxville, Tennessee

Most of my photography assignments begin before I arrive on location. First conversations with clients involve visual tone, lighting, and potential locations. Sometimes a photography session is shaped by early conversations with portrait subjects or by visual research about a neighborhood, or by a big idea we are illustrating.

On location in Knoxville, Tennessee for UMASS Magazine recently, my assignment was also informed by the gorgeous issue of Mergoat Magazine I picked up in a cafe and flipped through before walking through Old Gray Cemetery. It was changed by unexpectedly heavy rain as it was prevented from falling on a carefully groomed Smokies baseball diamond. It was flavored by my producer’s nostalgia that resulted in a late-night stop at the Waffle House.

My niece asked me how I think about the future of my work. She was wondering what AI-created imagery will mean for the kind of editorial photography I do. And I can’t quite know.

But making work that combines the sensation of rain-on-skin and the specter of invasive kudzu and the taste of a stack of late-night pancakes into a story about a very specific place might be my favorite kind of alchemy.

I’m grateful it’s also what I get to call my work.

Images from the Knoxville sessions are embargoed until the articles are published later in 2024; images included here are iPhone BTS

I Am First Gen: photographing in support of academic thriving at UMASS

The Body + The Land: Bioregional Belonging at the Albany Bulb

This spring, in partnership with Invisible International and Climate Creative, we kicked off a collaborative community-based research project exploring how were we live shapes our health. The Body + The Land project recognizes the connections between people, animals, plants, and a shared environment.*

The project hopes to surface and gather community knowledge that can be used by local organizations to shape local health initiatives. Over the next year we will be exploring how Bay Area residents see how where they live—the hills they walk daily, the commutes they undertake, the atmospheric rivers they weather, the gardens they grow—is shaping their health.

For the research project kick-off I developed a site-specific, kid-friendly photo walk to facilitate new encounters—with pollinators! with the bright superbloom!—between visitors and the Albany Bulb.

The Body

+ The Land Photo Walk

an invitation to explore the Albany Bulb

The kick-off party was an opportunity chance to gather input and engage the Bulb communally, but we will be working all year long, inviting community members to call in to leave their observations at (510) 519-1506. If you are local to the Bay Area, you can participate, too. Call in to leave your observations about how where we live is shaping your health.

*framework: One Health

billy mark: 37.45°N 122.17°W

Offering was born from what artist Billy Mark had begun calling, in phone conversations between Detroit and San Francisco, the low-down surveillance blues.

Our collaboration eventually bloomed into an interactive storytelling project and a book, but it started as a series of questions Billy was asking about what it felt like to be traced and tracked and monitored and to have what is known about us monetized by, among others, Google.

Composer Jon Armstrong, and I joined Billy for this collaboration, using a soundwalk app to map seven of Jon's compositions to seven sites around Google's headquarters in Mountainview, Ca.

Billy and I spent a day traveling clockwise around the Googleplex perimeter, seeing and being seen, in a kind of contemplative migration.

We moved from site to site, in the grooves of older rhythms of contemplation: 5 am, 7 am, 9 am, noon, 3 pm, 5 pm, and finally 7 pm.

Using an iPhone and a handheld speaker, Jon’s compositions were triggered whenever we arrived at a new site on the soundmap. Billy’s performance in each specific location wove together the sounds, our inquiry, and specific place we occupied.

For me, working with Billy and Jon to create Offering meant asking what photographs might become in conversation with music and movement.

What if I embraced the limitations of a particularly dark hour and let the representation go subtle and unfocused?

What if the combination of music and movement made me look away from Billy and toward something else?

What if—as happened during the making of the imagery at 3pm, I made images while being misconstrued by bystanders as a woman photographing a body she had found floating in Kaiser Creek instead of attempting to call out for help rescuing it?

Offering, is an story of our particular encounter, and the soundmap remains live—an invitation, as Billy says—for anyone who gets overcome by those low-down surveillance blues.

Sound + Color: in Dakar, Senegal

In Senegal, we soaked in the sun, the music, and the beautiful vibes under Baobab trees, in market places, on boats out on Lac Rose.

We painted with bright watercolors in the slant light while our loved ones drummed late into the afternoon.

We danced in celebration of a New Year and renewed love. We threw our arms around old friends and carried new babies on our hips. We shook off the slumber and constrictions of isolated pandemic years and shared community plates as our bent knees touched other bent knees and our laughter spilled down from the rooftop onto the streets of Dakar.