Happy rainy April. About to embark on a trip to California this week for a wedding and hopefully to photograph a few more people. We were in Niagara Falls yesterday. It's odd how it seems that at every amazing natural wonder, humans have somehow managed to accentuate things with the most tacky and sad offerings. In a place with such wondrous natural splendor there is countless cheap motels and broken down remnants of better times.

So, today, I'm going to include another person I photographed last year. Stan Chedlak lives in Bloomfield Hills, MI. He was originally from the Czech republic. He' a former champion kayaker and still paddles all these insane trips every year in some really gnarly places. I first met him about 12 years ago up in Lake Superior in a November Kayak festival where we all watched from the beach as Stan tried to surf some swells on a prototype kayak he designed. He was repeatedly getting hammered into the beach by the waves but would emerge each time from near drowning with a smile and twinkle like a kid after riding a roller coaster. He also worked as an engineer for many years and even taught at various universities all over the US. He is a guy with a really storied past who went through incredible adversity to come to America. We met up on a drizzly day and spent the afternoon kayaking on a small lake 20 minutes from his house. I shot lots of stuff with Stan laughing and paddling in his ocean kayak..but for some reason I liked this photo..it's odd and he was just talking about his feelings on Michigan and how there are too many people jet-skiing and ruining the "natural" order of things. 

I'm posting a picture from last summer of a woman I photographed in rural Pennsylvania. Her name is Joanne Landis and she's a really intriguing woman. She lived in NYC and garnered some attention for being a promising up and coming artist. As life happens however, she went through some twists and turns. Fast forward to present and she now lives in a really remote area of the mountains in a beautiful area of the state. She lives alone on a wonderful piece of land where she paints and writes. Her house is modest and feels like it's out of a movie set really. It's incredibly eclectic and has the sense of organized chaos. She has no t.v, no computer, no Internet.  Her studio is an adjacent barn across the road where she paints really mesmerizing large canvases. We spent the afternoon drinking coffee and talking about art, music, New York;  Sept 11th and how it really impacted her, the loneliness and solitude of living alone in the woods and the ideas of success and motivation of one's pursuit of artistic expression. She is not someone who likes getting photographed (like most people!) but after a few hours of talking she agreed to let me take her picture and we ended up having a really wonderful time. 

I sent her some copies of the pictures and she wrote a beautiful note back thanking me. She thought they were the truest and most honest pictures she's ever had. I like this one here.