From space where the soil is sand.

Ten years. In my coming-on-early-mid-lifetime, I’ve expe­ri­enced a few ten year anniver­saries. Ten years after the space­ship Chal­lenger. Ten years after high school grad­u­a­tion. Ten years after 9/11. And now, ten years after Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina dec­i­mated the gulf coast across three states.

There are many, many, many remem­brances and notes and sto­ries and tes­ti­monies that will be shared today. I don’t have much of a tragedy to share — all my fam­ily sur­vived, nearly all our homes were intact, and although I was with­out power for three weeks, it was a small price in the larger pat­tern of destruc­tion. I don’t carry much in the way of per­sonal sor­row or loss.

What I do carry with me is a brick. One brick I’ve kept from the mil­lions and mil­lions that once formed thou­sands and thou­sands of homes that were dam­aged or lost in the storm.

The facts have been known for so long and the analy­sis of the fail­ures so detailed that it’s almost rote at this point to dis­cuss the day. I do have my own mem­o­ries and emo­tions from the day and what hap­pened after­wards for sure. But I think that a bet­ter story is one of a sin­gle piece of masonry that was in a home for year and years, then ripped away from its place and left in the mud by nature being.…well, nature. We can’t be mad at nature and we can’t fault storms for grow­ing into mon­sters, but what we can do is exam­ine at a piece of what remained to see if we have bet­ter pre­pared our­selves for the next time cli­mate comes knock­ing at our door.

One a recent short-notice trip to the Mis­sis­sippi Gulf Coast I was with­out any cam­era but my cell phone (LG G2). There was one last bloom on my family’s back­yard hibis­cus, a bril­liant pink with orange and yel­low pollen. But the chance to explore the black and white capa­bil­i­ties of the tool du jour called so strongly, and I’m taken with the results.

Taken with the default Cam­era appli­ca­tion, and mod­i­fied in the Android Pho­to­shop app, but just crop­ping and lev­els. Amaz­ing what portable elec­tron­ics can do these days.

A visit to my high school board­ing school, with some of the drive between Nashville and Columbus.

Mis­sis­sippi is a bit of home. There isn’t any­where I’ve spent as much time, and very few places I’ve done as much pho­tog­ra­phy. I tend to tread care­fully with that imagery how­ever. It’s a loaded space to pho­to­graph — nearly every­one I’ve known has his­tory there, and not all of it pleasant.

How do you go from broadly painted strokes to per­son­ally vivid, nar­rowly focused work? Where is a start­ing point, maybe a touch­stone for focus­ing in on a sin­gle moment? If that can be found, then we can work back­wards and build a nar­ra­tive that involves the his­tory and the pres­ence of the area. Instead of a few vague thoughts, we will have cre­ated a solid con­struct to han­dle all the infor­ma­tion and emo­tion from engag­ing such an over­pow­er­ing entity.

I had the excep­tional oppor­tu­nity to pho­to­graph in two dear places in late Feb­ru­ary. One, the town of Natchez, was where I was born and spent a great major­ity of my early life. Walk­ing around down­town and vis­it­ing my grandparent’s old home and church, tak­ing pho­tographs of places I’d been pho­tograph­ing since nearly my first roll of film. It was remark­able in the quiet and noth­ing­ness of a sunny Tues­day after­noon. The other loca­tion was around my in-law’s fam­ily farm house. My wife’s great-aunt passed away in the late 1990’s and the house had been untouched in many ways since. Although the prop­erty is occu­pied with equip­ment and horses, the house itself has been devoid of per­ma­nent res­i­dence in over a decade. Being granted per­mis­sion to pho­to­graph the rooms as I found them was a lux­ury — the insight into what is still a very accu­rate por­trait of life there was amazing.

Using those two loca­tions as the gen­eral map for track­ing a path across Mis­sis­sippi, I gath­ered mate­r­ial for a series ten­ta­tively titled “Where the Dust Set­tles.” Below is one of the pho­tographs from that series. All film, either Ektar 100 (120) or Ilford HP5+ (35mm).

The sim­plic­ity of a bath­room — a heater, a cab­i­net. Left ajar for a dozen or more years. To be hon­est, I don’t even know if the cab­i­net is empty. There could very well be med­i­cine, band-aids, old mag­a­zines and Maalox wait­ing for a bit of light to shine in. But it was not my turn to dis­turb the scene. I set up, metered/focused and exposed the film.

It’s a new year, we made it to 2013, another arbi­trar­ily marked trip around the sun (with a few course cor­rec­tions along the way)! OK, I’m not really that cyn­i­cal and I’m cer­tainly glad to be here. And with that in mind, and keep­ing in mind that I haven’t always kept up my promises for reg­u­lar updates, I’m going to try and add a new fea­ture here with this blog.

Weekly wall­pa­per sets. But not just any wall­pa­per sets, oh no. These will be cre­ated from a photo taken in the last week. So it’ll be hot and fresh and as heart warm­ing as baked bread. Unless you are gluten free, then it will be as heart warm­ing as fresh GF banana muffins.

With the intro­duc­tion out the way, here is one from a visit to Mis­sis­sippi last week­end (photo from Sat­ur­day, so still in the last week but barely). It is (one of) the mail­boxes from an old fam­ily home in Mis­sis­sippi. It is actu­ally my in-law’s fam­ily house, and I am grate­ful for their shar­ing some time explor­ing the property.

Click here for the Wall­pa­per as a .zip file. It includes files in a vari­ety of aspect ratios and a small Readme.