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22:40:27JAN:2021-19:40:29JAN:2021

The following photographs were taken over a series of walks around the grounds of a fishing lodge in Iceland. The lodge is situated in the countryside to the north of Reykjavík, about three hours drive away. Taken about a month after the winter solstice with a full moon, the light is all twisted around from what would be a normal winter landscape in any other location not so near the arctic circle.

Study 1.0

Is it boring to see the same photograph (more or less) over and over again? I once read about a school in Germany where the students are required to photograph the same subject for an entire year. Whether this method is similar to Bernard and Hilla Becher’s studies, or if it came from The German School of Photographers, I’m not sure, but this always fascinated me as a concept. I felt that the purpose of this was to slow your work down and make sure that you are considering all versions of the same subject before deciding what to present to the world. But what happens when all versions of the subject become as interesting as the a single version? Is there a holy concept that forces the artist to present one single photograph? What if the light is as much the subject as the landscape?

Terminator

A terminator or twilight zone is a moving line that divides the daylit side and the dark night side of a planetary body. The terminator is defined as the locus of points on a planet or moon where the line through the center of its parent star is tangent. An observer on the terminator of such an orbiting body with an atmosphere would experience twilight due to light scattering by particles in the gaseous layer.

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Summer of Green (Zine, 2023)

Where are you being thrown out?

Where is the last

memory

of

you

being

discarded?

I was asked this by a man on an island; someone from the past. It rang true as everyone is being consumed by the digital black hole that is memory. We lose more to it by the passing day. We gleefully send information into it at an alarming pace.

Think of where the last memory of you will end. Entropy? Singularity? So where are your memories being lost? They are being thrown out by something at this very second. A brain somewhere is losing the memory of your first whatever it is and it will never come back. Post it to wherever, it will disappear at some point. Only tangible things last into the future long enough to change the way the memory of you survives.

If you don't produce a single tangible thing, the memory of you dies with the last person to think of you. You end.

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Thought I would share these portraits of students graduating from LHÍ. Incredible to work with 150 students over the course of the week and produce results that everyone (seemingly) were happy with.

Photographs to Remember.

As a Photographer I am taking photographs as much for the ability to look at them two hours later, three days later, four years later or fifty years later. The point is, as it has always been the base objective of photography: to freeze a moment in time. Thus, the viewer is meant to look deeper — scrolling past belies the entire concept of my work. Consume it. Inhale, exhale. Scan the photograph from left to right, up to down and back again. Inhale, exhale. Draw it into your memory. Now you understand my work. 

Twenty Twenty-One, You were Fun.

I’ve made a Zine to look back on this year and the good times had in Iceland.

It’s called, Twenty Twenty-One, You Were Fun. It doesn’t come close to showing everything that we did in the last year, but it does represent another year well spent.

In taking a look back at the year, I wanted to highlight the, well, highlights.

Moments that can’t be described, they have to be seen.

The times when the everyday is especially beautiful.

And of course, the things that make life a whole lot of fun.

See it here: Twenty Twenty-One, You Were Fun.

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I made a Zine called This is Portrait.

Take a break...

Beyond all polarities I am

Let the judgements and opinions of the mind be judgements and opinions of the mind

And you exist behind that

Ah so

Ah so

It’s really time for you to see through the absurdity of your predicament 

You aren’t who you thought you were

You just aren’t that person

And in this very lifetime you can know it

Right now

The real work you have to do is in the privacy of your own heart

All of the external forms are lovely

But the real work is your inner connection

If you’re quiet when you meditate

If you truly open your heart

Just quiet your mind…

Open your heart

Quiet the mind, open the heart

How do you quiet the mind? 

You meditate

How do you open the heart?

You start to love that which you can love and just keep expanding it

You love a tree

You love a river

You love a leaf 

You love a flower

You love a cat

You love a human

But go deeper and deeper into that love

Til you love that which is the source of the light behind all of it

Behind all of it

You don’t worship the gate 

You go into the inner temple

Everything in you that you don’t need 

you can let go of

You don’t need loneliness for you couldn’t possibly be alone

You don’t need greed because you already have it all

You don’t need doubt because you already know

The confusion is saying “I don’t know”

But the minute you are quiet you find out that in truth you do know

For in you, you know

Plane after plane will open to you

I want to know who I really am

As if in each of us, there once was a fire

And for some of us there seem as if there are only ashes now

But when we dig in the ashes we find one ember

And very gently we fan that ember

…blow on it 

…it gets brighter

And from that ember we rebuild the fire

Only thing that’s important is that ember

That’s what you and I are here to celebrate

That though we have lived our life totally involved in the world

We know

We know that we’re of the spirit

The ember gets stronger

Flame starts to flicker a bit

And pretty soon you realise that all we’re going to do for eternity is sit around the fire 

Visual Diary: An Explanation

I recently ditched my iPhone in favor of a Nokia 3310. With this comes the freedom to get away from some social media that was feeling more like an advertising platform than a sharing platform as of late. Bye bye Instagram.  But the question remains: how do I, as a photographer, continue to share some choice photos that might not be representative of my professional work? 

The answer, it seems, is to return to something that I was actively pursuing from 2006-2017 over at kingoden.blogspot.com.  So, in that spirit, but updated a little for the times I live in now, I give you this space.

The photographs here are going to be an attempt to go a little more in depth than an average Instagram post. I want to talk a bit about my process, what the photo represents, and why I took it the way I did. Hopefully, the results will be satisfying to you and I, alike. 

Self Portrait, 2018