About 8 years ago, I quit a job to co-write, art direct, shoot, and produce a cookbook with @dimitri.photo , about his inimitable grandmother, Elda. Over the course of five years, I made memories with Elda and was lucky enough to be warmly welcomed into her world. To know her, to photograph her and write essays about her, and then to compile all of it with her grandson and watch it come to life in print has been one of the more distinct privileges of my artistic life.
Making art with someone, and also for someone, is a gift and a risk and it can go a hundred different ways. And you should make it anyway. I cannot recommend it enough.
@dimitri.photo and I will be honoring Elda's memory and celebrating our book about her, Heart-Shaped Tomatoes, at @bufalinapizza on Sunday March 8. Hope you join us, tickets for the event are available on their page.
if you are not regularly huddled around a table with your friends discussing all the ways in which we can and should— bit by bit...conversation by conversation...yard by yard...skill by skill... — reclaim our hours and days, thereby pushing against a system designed to profit from our attention and divorce us from our essential nature... lol, then what are ya doing, bud?
I met Meriwether Hardie on windy day in Cody, Wyoming this summer, while they were part-way through a horseback journey across the Dakotas, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana to commune with and learn from ranchers, farmers, and other land stewards…all with the aim of putting the learnings into a book about our collective agricultural future.
Meriwether and I have mutual friends, which afforded us the chance opportunity to swap stories, talk art, and have dinner— but it also afforded me the privilege of photographing the whole trail crew (Meriwether, the horses George and Stryker and Thistle the dog).
In our brief time together it was clear that I was in the presence of an inimitable and gentle force for all that is good in the American west. Hell of a thing to catch a writer in a chapter where they are actively doing the thing they aim to write about.
Until we meet again, my friend!
happy birthday to one of the most original people i know.
dad, you are a druid-gardener-alien-mad-scientist and i'm grateful for you. i love how much you love sad songs, how you are always thinking of your next meal and your next adventure, and that when you come around no thrift store or historical marker is safe.
thank you for always being down for a cross country road trip, and for telling me i can be whatever i want. thanks for instilling in all of us a reverence for wilderness and the cosmos, a profound distrust in government, and the importance of a daily walk, a book at the bedside, and an updated passport.
