No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

– John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624

Murray Fredericks photographs the salt flats of remote Lake Eyre in Australia. See more POV. This video expires on September 18, 2010

In an era when millions of people are listing online the contents of their lunchboxes, publicly divesting themselves of their deepest secrets, and allowing all the world to spectate as they copulate on sites like ShareAdult, it seems improbable that there are also folks completely and utterly abandoning “the grid.” Then again, perhaps neither behavior should be unexpected.

The Daily Telegraph reported in 2008 that married couples composed less than half of England’s population and in 2009 that a mere 41% of British adults were projected to be joined in wedded bliss by 2031. Likewise, in February 2009, Germany for the first time saw “single-person and childless” households outnumber those composed of a wife, husband, and offspring. In the U.S. the divorce rate has been steadily rising; more than doubling for men and tripling for women since 1970. Over the same period the number of women between 30 and 34 years of age who have never married rose from just 6% to 23%. For men in the same age range the rate increased from 9% to 33%. Today at least 75% of women and 86% of men between the ages of 20 and 24 are single. (An interesting note: for every 100 unmarried women in the United States be they divorced, widowed, pregnant, parents, or simply very particular there are about 88 unmarried men.)

16,200,000
Number of unmarried Americans 65 and older as of 2009.

31,700,000
Number of people who lived alone in 2009. They comprised 27% of all households in the U.S., up 10% since 1970.

52,500,000
Number of households maintained by unmarried men or women in 2009. These households comprised 45% of all households nationwide.

96,600,000
Number of unmarried Americans 18 and older in 2009. This group comprised 43% of all U.S. residents 18 and older.

53%
Percentage of unmarried Americans 18 and older as of 2009 who were women.

61%
Percentage of unmarried Americans 18 and older as of 2009 who had not been married in the past.

According to a 2006 United Nations study which included 195 countries, worldwide population growth is slowing significantly and at a progressive pace. Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are the only two nations in the Top 10 Most Fertile managing to maintain pace.

Like it or not, the Western World will see more and more “only children,” marriage and procreation will diminish startlingly when compared to today’s numbers, and as a result of both we will in the not-so-distant future watch our populations whither. Math is math. Cultural attitudes are what they are and the unavailability of resources (willing parents) leads unavoidably to a dearth of births. Like it or not, we’re watching a lonelier Earth come into existence.

For all of these reasons we can find it equally reasonable that some are reaching across the planet in search of virtual friendships as others endeavor to embrace solitude. Perhaps, in the not-so-distant future, becoming an island will no longer be a foolhardy, elusive goal but an inevitable state.

When you live in a quiet place, like a cell, and you are not busy with anything but God, you start to hear yourself and to see yourself.

– Coptic Reverend Maximous el-Antony (a.k.a. Abuna Maximos) – discoverer of the oldest Christian monastic cells ever uncovered – speaking in 2005 of his 27 years of residence at St. Anthony’s Monastery located in an oasis deep within Egypt’s Eastern Desert

“In our culture, there is this mythic individualism that we cherish,” said Dr. John T. Cacioppo, a U.S. specialist in the cognitive and biological ramifications of seclusion, during a New York Times interview early this year. “That’s particularly true for [American] men – they are supposed to be an island unto themselves. They take that myth more seriously and try to pursue it.”

Nick Fahey, 68-years-of-age today, moved to Cypress Island in the San Juan archipelago north of Puget Sound, Washington in 1994. The cabin in which he lives, including the 100 surrounding acres, has been family property for eight decades. That cozy, idyllic, wood plank structure is bereft of refrigeration but not electricity. Solar panels serve to provide all the energy he needs or prefers.

When he requires goods he cannot efficiently produce himself, he fells a tree or three, continues chopping them down to firewood, and rows to neighboring communities to negotiate exchanges and/or secure money that will allow him to acquire niceties like shampoo, toilet paper, and his favorite chicory coffee.

Clothing is regularly of no concern. Modesty is not a consideration. “But the weather is such that it’s a good idea to wear some clothes,” he says.

Elaine N. Aron, psychologist and author of The Undervalued Self and The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You, said in April of this year that the drive toward solitude might be intrinsic to those who “really need their downtime.” In other cases the subject may have unconsciously acquired during childhood an “avoidant attachment style” which manifests in adulthood as “a need to prove to themselves that they don’t need anybody.”

According to Fahey, he moved to his family’s isolated cabin after his divorce not to alleviate depression or trauma, but because of the “feeling of freedom when you’re by yourself. You don’t have to answer to anybody.”

“I’m not a misanthropic recluse sort of guy,” he says. “I just know that I’d rather be here by myself.”

Hikikomori (ひきこもり): A term used to refer to acute social withdrawal prevalent among teenagers and adults. The term hikikomori is most commonly used in Japan, where the phenomenon is well-documented. The common equivalent terms used in the English-speaking world are shut-in or hermit, though some English-speaking people refer to themselves as being hikikomori.

– http://hikiculture.tumblr.com/

“People use the word ‘sustainable’ a lot, especially if they are in business, and it means nothing.”

Edward Griffith-Jones, a late twentysomething Brit who had previously supported himself as a nightclub and bar employee, spent 1998/1999 in an igloo-reminiscent hut fashioned from stray materials in one of Sweden’s snowbound national parks. It was his testament to environmental sustainability.

“We live in a world where everything is so specialized. Now people don’t know how to make anything. They don’t know how to survive. I’m not completely self-sufficient, but I’m learning,” Griffith-Jones said in an interview with Sarah Maslin Nir.

During his year in the Swedish forest Griffith-Jones survived by eating throat-stinging prickly nettles, tasteless tubers, roasted rodents, bitter berries and, when he was lucky, pike and perch he’d fished from lakes close at hand. Occasionally he would make the trip to the nearest town to scavenge edible garbage. It’s fair to say he was committed to making his point.

Gathering that his manner of living was considerably more unappealing to the opposite sex than he had initially supposed and that the feasibility of expanding such a lifestyle into a widespread cultural movement was therefore severely hampered due ironically to its reproductive unsustainability, Griffith-Jones understated, “Women weren’t willing to live there or raise up children in the forest.”

Edward has since redirected his attentions to establishing a sustainability-centered and Earth-aware commune on a nearby farm.

“I have to collect firewood, rather than do some job that I have no idea what is the point, which I hate, and from which I am completely alienated,” he said. “Everything in my life feels full of meaning.”

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

– Aristotle, 384 BC – 322 BC

“Everything you’ve ever learned means nothing till you come to a place like this.”

David Glasheen, once an entrepreneur in multiple industries, entertained an idea back in the early 1990s common to countless couples at the time. In 1983 British adventuress Lucy Irvine had authored an autobiographical book entitled Castaway. It details her decision to answer a want ad placed in Time Out London magazine that solicited a “wife to live on a lonely island for a year,” how she was selected from more than 50 applicants, as well as her experiences over the course of the 12 months she spent on and about the secluded island Tuin near Australia with journalist and adventurer Gerald W. Kingsland. Irvine was 25 years old when she traveled to that Torres Strait island with the 49 year old Kingsland. Three years later the book was adapted into a Hollywood movie starring Oliver Reed and Amanda Donohoe. A few years after the release of the film, David Glasheen’s girlfriend proposed that they cast themselves away. Having previously suffered a series of financial failures and a divorce, Glasheen found the idea appealing. “I just wanted the idea of a less stressful life,” he said in a recent New York Times interview. “I figured there had to be something better than this out there.”

By way of his latest company, Longboat Investments, and a driven real estate agent Glasheen secured the entire 90 uninhabited acres composing Restoration Island National Park at the rate of 20,000 Australian dollars per year. The island had a history. On May 29, 1789 the ill-fated Captain William Bligh had landed there after being set adrift along with 18 loyals following the historic mutiny on the Bounty led by Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian. Bligh christened the place “Restoration Island” as an honor to King Charles II on the 129^th anniversary of his Restoration and for the fruits and seafood that restored health and morale to the captain’s fellow castaways.

Six months after establishing permanent residence Glasheen’s girlfriend abandoned both him and the project. “We had a baby, we had no hot water, we had no washing machine. Things are not easy here for a woman.” His 11-year-old son now visits on school holidays… occasionally.

Sometime after his girlfriend’s departure Glasheen restructured his plan to include only a third of Restoration Island which he has subsequently transformed into an organic farm that earned a listing on World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.

Growing lonely Glasheen followed in Gerald Kingsland’s footsteps and began advertising online for companionship. He became a web sensation attracting the attention of media the world over. “There’s a lot of crazies out there,” he said after the National Enquirer covered the story giving rise to a plethora of responses from hundreds of women across the planet. In the end Glasheen focused his efforts on six women in his home country.

“A lot of people liked the idea of having visits, but not being able to go to the shops every month, that would be very hard for a lot of women.” He adjusted his romantic goals just as he had earlier modified his aims for Restoration Island. “There’s nothing wrong with having half a dozen very good female friends who see me as the most important man in their life when they come to this part of the world.”

In surprisingly candid epilogue Glasheen commented, “I guess I could say I’m desperately lonely sometimes.”

Above are three videos of men attempting to escape. Above is a succession of people trying their best to become separate. And yet they cannot. Not entirely.

Maybe they (and you and I) are a breed apart from the humans to come. Perhaps, like the ancient African storytellers well prior to moveable type who were capable of recalling word-for-word volumes of fables or the clockless citizens of Middle Age Europe who perceived the passage of time in a manner incomprehensible today, we and our notions will become half-remembered artifacts in the long story of homo sapiens sapiens.

At least they, our distant successors, will have the pictures and the videos. Our languages may become as incomprehensible as Etruscan, or Sumerian, or the fourth section of Sanborn’s seemingly impenetrable Kryptos but the images will, for a good while, still be available. Yes, those descendants might evolve so far beyond two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional space that photos and videos will be just as baffling as the same media are currently to some isolated tribes in Africa and South America, but we can take comfort in the likelihood that our far-flung heirs will almost certainly be smarter than us. They will ultimately decipher the images photographers (both masterful and hopelessly amateur) are producing as I write and you read.

Photography has always been about recording history. Whether it is an image of the hip and fashionable, or the glory of a gunslinger, or a child’s birthday party, or the atrocities visited upon a people, or a mesmerizing landscape as it used to exist, or the simple passage of light and shadow in some dazzling way over an otherwise mundane subject, that photograph is undeniably documentation of a thing as it once was. Never, ever again will such an image be possible. Never again will there be people like us.

Criteria for inclusion consisted entirely of what caught my fancy over the past several months. Do not attempt to pick the list apart on the basis of critical reception, box office receipts, or any other similar measure. The images (in motion or not, computer-generated or not) are presented exclusively as stuff that brought a tear or a twinkle to my eye. I hope you find your hearts, and spirits, and intellects as touched as mine.

↑ The volcano that brought all of Europe’s airlines to a standstill. The young, intrepid Mr. Stiegemeier complained he had but a day and a half to shoot this footage of Eyjafjallajökull. May all we practicing professional photographers never see a day when Sean finds himself blessed with an entire month to shoot. He very much appears to be Hendrix reincarnated with a passion for the camera rather than the guitar.

↑ Place yourself in Nicholas’ shoes and then read the full story. You’ll be terrified.

↑ Composed with his guitarist Dominic Miller, this song may be the first by which Sting subtly yet publicly disclosed his personal participation in some form of polyamory, polyfidelity, or at least support for certain flavors of Christian defined infidelity. On another note, listen for an out of tune word midway or so. In the manner of a true artisan, Sting fashions a recovery from the succeeding notes through inflection and improvisation.

↑ A little piece about secrets, how devastating they seem, and how they often turn out to be not that big of a deal.

↑ Renowned scientists Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan (my personal hero) rap… boiiii!

↑ Hope in animation.

↑ Hope by will.i.am and Barack Obama.

↑ Beauty.

↑ Unconditional love.

↑ Flat out fun. Toward middle age, Gene lamented that just as he was mastering his art his body was defying him. As the Everest of his creative expression finally came into sight, his bones and his muscles and his endurance rebelled. As so many of us often must, even a great like Kelly was forced to admit that his body could no longer accommodate what his boundless mind could conceive.

↑ I don’t care that it’s the middle of summer. This is a spectacular illustration of drive, rebellion, dedication, obsession, human nature, and competition wound out to the extreme.

↑ Another way to dress a building. It is a story of a dying artform and already obscure artists watching the opportunity to do the one thing at which they are truly proficient fade into history.

↑ Sour. Grapes.

↑↓ Two illustrations of natural, unreproducible beauty – one narrated by a fellow Native American and the other documented silently by a Norwegian similarly moved.

↑ Life in Haiti after the earthquake. First published Friday, March 19, 2010.

↑ A bit of enchantment then creepy discomfort.

↑ The Master playing one of my all-time favorites in my second home. When I first heard it I was traveling back from college and barely holding back tears over a failed affair. I played it over and over and over again in my little Karmann Ghia stuffed to the roof with clothes and liquor and anything else imaginable. My closest surfing buddy at my side; we spent the two hours of Clapton-colored travel exchanging tales of disappointment and broken hearts.

↑ Kelly at his universally hailed best.

↑ Another kind of dance.

↑ And yet another.

↑ Guitar luminary Jeff Beck with teenaged Aussie prodigy Tal Wilkenfeld.

↑ Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwo’ole left us on June 26, 1997 due to a weight-related respiratory illness. His greatest fame was achieved after his death. A consummate instrumentalist and vocalist, we will never know what he might have accomplished had he remained among us a little longer.

In tribute to the unforgettable Johnny Carson, his always respectful humor, the sheer class of his show for more than three decades, the nightly brightness he brought to many a life at the foot of their beds, and the comfort he lent me ’til I was 24, I recite his last broadcasted words: “I bid you a very heartfelt good night.”

Appropriately, six months after a devastating earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, a documentary by Tamra Davis about an artist of Haitian descent premiered Wednesday night in New York. It is so apropos because we’ve all become accustomed to thinking of Haitians as stewards to a Third World nation. Long before the Earth shook that tiny country off its foundations, we here in the bosom of the riches of the United States had come to regard the place as a lost cause with nary a thing of value to offer. While our hearts may have been wrenched at the sight of what became of the country on January 12^th, hardly any of us looked on and thought the world had lost one of its sources of creativity and artistry. Ms. Davis and her film about her friend remind us we were wrong. Her friend’s father was Haitian. Her friend was Jean-Michel Basquiat.

To Whites every Black holds a potential knife behind the back, and to every Black the White is concealing a whip. We were born into this dialogue and to deny it is fatuous. Our responsibility is to overcome the sins and fears of our ancestors and drop the whip, drop the knife.

– René Ricard, The Radiant Child, 1981

From 1977 until early 1980 a teenaged Basquiat, along with equally youthful collaborators Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson, developed and popularized what is now dubbed SAMO© Graffiti (pronounced Same-Oh). It popped up throughout a Lower Manhattan in a President Carter-era New York blighted by rampant crime and economic depression. SAMO© was so pervasive back then that art critic Jeffrey Deitch remarked, “…you couldn’t go anywhere interesting in Lower Manhattan without noticing that someone named SAMO had been there first.”

By early 1980 Basquiat had been placing SAMO© Graffiti solo and subsequently suffered a falling out with his former partners. In what might be considered retaliation, he began leaving the mark “SAMO IS DEAD,” at times writing over or crossing out earlier SAMO© Graffiti. “I wrote SAMO IS DEAD all over the place,” Basquiat said in a later interview, “And I started painting.”

It was not an act of professional suicide. For one thing, Jean-Michel was still very much a starving artist. There was only so much to lose. For another, according to René Ricard’s definition, Basquiat could not yet have been considered a professional because his artwork wasn’t producing enough income to allow him to support himself. He was at the time relying on the kindness of strangers, the charity of friends, and the love of women such as Suzanne Mallouk. Third, he was already famous in his own right within certain circles reverent of his irreverent, defiant brand of artwork. Had it not been for an earlier television appearance, fortune may not have favored him so.

Before he embarked on the SAMO IS DEAD campaign, Basquiat had been pronounced the author of SAMO© Graffiti on the underground Glenn O’Brien cable access show TV Party. With a single stroke O’Brien solved the mystery countless art fans had been mulling over almost since SAMO© first appeared. Luminary graffiti artist Keith Harring, upon learning of the character’s death, hosted an art world celebrity-filled wake for SAMO in his Club 57. Although Basquiat had earlier formed a surprisingly successful band called Gray, performing in New York’s hippest clubs in relatively short order, Jean-Michel never performed as a musician at Harring’s club.

“And I started painting.” In June 1980 Jean-Michel displayed work in The Times Square Show and signed with Annina Nosei’s SoHo gallery late in the same year. Renowned art critic/at-the-time-infamous-homosexual/author of the now legendary poem The Death of Johnny Stompanato/drug user/man-about-town René Ricard wrote the iconic, historic, erudite article The Radiant Child for ARTFORUM magazine published in December 1981. It thrust Basquiat directly into the faces and pocketbooks of New York’s well-heeled art investors and the far poorer aficionados who genuinely appreciated Basquiat’s unique ability to represent his political positions in work referencing not merely New York graffiti but the works of Cy Twombly, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Rauschenberg, and Pablo Picasso as well.

1981, it can be said, was Basquiat’s year. In January he made a cameo appearance – in that red room as a disc jockey unconcerned with… ya know… actually tending his turntable – in the music video Rapture by Deborah Harry’s and Chris Stein’s preeminent, now classic 80s rock band Blondie. The song became the first rap-influenced single to hit #1 in the U.S. Later in the year the very early independent film New York Beat was released starring Jean-Michel (and re-released in 2000 under new ownership as Downtown 81). The trade paper Variety called the film “an extraordinary real-life snapshot of hip, arty, clubland Manhattan in the post-punk era.” Art critic Adrian Searle said, “Downtown 81 captures that New York moment when punk, emerging rap, art school cool and the East Village art and music scenes were at their creative best.” ARTFORUM, not known for its attention to motion pictures, focused on Jean-Michel’s performance: “Basquiat is a joy to watch. He floats through the movie with cool grace and unflagging energy; he’s a natural in front of the lens…” Then Ricard wrote The Radiant Child. All the while Jean-Michel couldn’t get a taxi to stop for him if his life depended on it and was regularly forced to suffer bigots.

Everybody wants to get on the Van Gogh boat. There’s no trip so horrible that someone won’t take it. The idea of the unrecognized genius slaving away in a garret is a deliciously foolish one. We must credit the life of Vincent Van Gogh for really sending this myth into orbit. How many pictures did he sell? One? He couldn’t give them away. We are so ashamed of his life that the rest of art history will be retribution for Van Gogh’s neglect. No one wants to be part of a generation that ignores another Van Gogh.

In this town one is at the mercy of the recognition factor. One’s public appearance is absolute. I consider myself a metaphor of the public. I am a public eye. I am a witness. Part of the artist’s job is to get the work where I will see it. When you first see a new picture, you don’t want to miss the boat. You have to be very careful because you may be staring at Van Gogh’s ear.

What is it about art, anyway that we give it so much importance? Artists are respected by the poor because what they do is an honest way to get out of the slum using one’s sheer self as the medium. The money earned is proof pure and simple of the value of that individual…The Artist. The picture a mother’s son does in jail hangs on her wall as proof that beauty is possible even in the most wretched. And this is a much different idea than the fancier notion that art is a scam and a ripoff. But you could never explain to someone who uses God’s gift to enslave that you have used God’s gift to be free.

– Julian Schnabel’s paraphrase of René Ricard’s The Radiant Child for the movie Basquiat

By 1985 The New York Times Magazine had published on its February 10^th cover Lizzie Himmel’s penetrating portrait of Jean-Michel (perhaps the best ever done) accompanied by the Cathleen McGuigan article New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist. The next month Basquiat was given a one-man-show at the Mary Boone Gallery – the same venue which displayed the work of David Salle and Julian Schnabel as they rose to international success. In October of 1992 the Whitney Museum of American Art finally got on the boat as well by hosting Basquiat’s first posthumous exhibition.

To this day there is heated debate over Basquiat’s importance. While some consider him to be at least the most talented artist of the period others deride him personally and discount his work quite vociferously. I’m a fan. I can’t tell you why. I’m not one who will sit down and invoke explanations of how the man’s work “[examined] the legacy of the colonial enterprise and his relationship to that legacy” or point out how he “presented a vision of a fragmented self in search of an organizing principle.” For me there is simply something arresting about his work.

The quality, I admit, can be difficult to see initially. Too often it’s just as easy to call his paintings a bunch of scribbles as it is to call an exhibition of fine photographs “just a bunch o’ big blowed up pictures.” (Yes. Someone actually said that to an old friend of mine.) But if you give the images time, the humor and cleverness and possible brilliance begin to emerge. If you stand there and imagine yourself attempting to paint in the same style you’ll start to see how your own visual solutions wouldn’t cut the mustard next to what Basquiat did. Trust me. If you devote the effort, you’ll see what I’m talking about. For me it took about 20 years if you consider reading that New York Times Magazine article my first introduction to his work.

At the risk of belaboring the point, I’ll say one more thing about Basquiat’s disputed ability and motivations. When I hear people dismiss his paintings as childish, talentless efforts I can’t help but recall what was first said of Jackson Pollack’s “drip paintings.” (That term, after all, was originally one of derision.) When I read pieces calling Jean-Michel a showman out for nothing but fame I find it hard to resist comparing their comments to those that dogged Salvador Dali. Whether the eccentric, oddly moustachio’d gentleman had a taste for celebrity or not, there’s nary a soul today who would accuse Señor Dali of lacking exceptional, extraordinary gifts.

Whatever you might believe about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s level of talent, his motivations, or his lifestyle it’s quite difficult to claim at this point that he was bereft of importance. The simple fact that there are literally thousands of allusions to him and articles about him by default establishes him as quite the substantial cultural figure. The fact that the last person to purchase a Basquiat (to my knowledge) spent nearly $15 million for the privilege, the fact that JMB is now in your kid’s art history book, and the fact that even today, three decades after Basquiat put it aside, graffiti artists are still paying homage to SAMO© all over the walls of New York pretty well chisels in stone the Haitian-Puerto Rican-American’s name.

Jean-Michel’s mother was named Matilda. She was of Puerto Rican descent and living in Brooklyn when Gerard Basquiat arrived there from Haiti. They married. Gerard worked as an accountant as Matilda taught Jean-Michel French, Spanish, and English, encouraged his fascination with art, history, mythology and symbolist poetry, and regularly took him to view his favorite painting; Picasso’s Guernica.

The man that had ultimately been his closest friend, Slovakian-American Andy Warhol, died in New York City on February 22, 1987 at 6:32 a.m. of complications from a routine gallbladder surgery. Warhol had always eschewed the use of illegal drugs and, just prior to his death and at the end of his tolerance, severed his relationship with the marijuana-smoking, cocaine-sniffing, heroine-experimenting Jean-Michel. Basquiat went into what was likely clinical depression after Warhol’s death, became an ardent heroin user, took a vacation to his ranch in Hawaii, returned to New York proclaiming his drug-free status, and then promptly died on Friday, August 12, 1988 of a heroin overdose.

A reading of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life plays like a schadenfreude-laced Greek Tragedy for his detractors. His existence followed a spectacularly clear bell curve from beginning to end. It is in the years and decades following his demise that his name has become genuinely distinguished. As the years roll on, that will fade away utterly and we will collectively forget the details of his life. All but the most dedicated will lose sight of what he did, why he did what he did, the controversy attached to his name, and who he knew and who knew him. He may become Hiroshi Murata or Gilbert Stuart or Ida Applebroog – artists of verifiable contribution with whom almost no one is familiar. He might rise to the stature of Pollack and Dali and capture our attention for some extended period. Basquiat may even breach the ceiling and be mentioned in the next millennium with Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, but the human race will with all certainty no longer identify with his experiences, his influences, or have any concrete sense of who he was as a fellow human being. He will, at the very worst, evolve into an overlooked footnote and, at the best, a mythic being hardly anyone can fathom as a living, breathing person. He will, finally, become yet another entry for art students to memorize.

The moment of real appreciation is now. Now while we still remember Basquiat’s celebrated affair with fêted songstress Madonna and the incumbent, inevitable generation of widespread comment both jeering and jubilant. Now while we understand what “Walking While Black” means. Now while we have footage of JMB in action. Now, of all times, while we recognize the fact that if a tiny, poor little country called Haiti encompassing no more than half of an island hadn’t persevered, Jean-Michel Basquiat never would have existed.

The story of how I came to spend my life behind a lens is one not so easily boiled down into an anecdote. It is true that I was suddenly and unexpectedly gifted the ability to “see” a photograph after coming across a print by a fellow photography student. However it was years earlier while studying graphic design at VCU that I first noticed no matter how clever a piece of graphic design might be it was doomed to mediocrity or worse if the accompanying photograph was substandard. It was at that precise moment I first thought, “I don’t wanna do this. I want to be the guy that makes the pictures.”

Although I was growing increasingly enraptured by the medium by the time I saw that peer’s gelatin-silver print, only hesitantly did I consider actually attempting to make a living with it. The documentary Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light is the reason I decided to pursue photography as a profession. Without the film I have no idea what I may have gravitated toward during such a morphing, fluxing period as my 20s. Avedon said in this film, “When you’re 21-years-old, there’s a movement and humor and vitality and a sort of open, free sexuality…” For those of you old enough to look back on your 20s from a distance, his words should ring quite true. Often, in our exuberant enjoyment of simple existence, our lives pivot during that decade all on their own in complete defiance of whatever it was we’d planned to do.

Under the influence of Helen Whitney’s beautifully realized semi-biography of Avedon, I checked out virtually every volume on photography in my area’s largest library. The effort resulted in a literary Twin Towers – each stack of books very nearly my height – swaying in a corner of my bedroom. That same library provided me my first opportunity to lay hands on a sadly tattered, stained, and beaten copy of Avedon’s In the American West. Damaged or not by thousands of thumbs, Avedon’s magnum opus drove me irrevocably into a profession that, if we’re all honest, is really a particularly addictive drug to those of us sufficiently vulnerable to the allure of control.

Obviously, without Avedon’s and Whitney’s influence, The Children of Grandy Park series would never have come to be. It would not even have existed long enough to be an aborted project. I cannot however hand over to them all of the credit for persuading me to push forth. Oddly enough, interviewer extraordinaire Charlie Rose plays a role as well. While I feel what some might consider an inexplicable debt to him for his interview of Avedon and Whitney – a snippet in time of one great artist we nearly lost to heartbreak and another lost to the ages – it is Rose’s inexhaustible curiosity and drive and deep understanding that “proper preparation prevents piss poor performance” which inspires me to do the very best job I can every time I heft a camera.

There’s more to come on The Children of Grandy Park series specifically addressing the thought behind some of the images, but it seemed to me both appropriate and prudent to provide a bit of context first. That is what the last installment was about. That’s what this installment is all about.

I wholeheartedly encourage you to set aside an afternoon or evening to watch Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light in its entirety. Maybe, for you too, it will be a transformative experience.

This is the third installment of a look back on the award-winning Children of Grandy Park series.

The Children of Grandy Park series drew inspiration from several sources. Cartier-Bresson should of course be assumed. The media distillation of Henri’s wandering, anarchic intuition down to the so-called “Decisive Moment” continues to this day to mold photographers and critical opinions of their efforts through the sheer force of repeated publication and quotation. Man Ray’s experimentations too deserve at the very least a nod. While most of his fascination with using harsh light to create abstractions was ignored, strong illumination in the form of sunlight certainly found its way into the Grandy Park series regularly. A desire to emulate Edward Weston’s superb, masterful modeling and Robert Doisneau’s insightful depiction of human nature is also present. Walker Evans is there. Irving Penn is there. Helen Levitt and Lisette Model are there too. Despite them all, it is Richard Avedon’s reportage and portraiture that most prominently figure and are most readily visible in the portraits that compose The Children of Grandy Park.

Often working on a stark white background that became signature, Avedon consistently produced portraits at once startlingly beautiful and painfully unflattering. Through the counterintuitive procedure of underexposing his negatives while shooting his subjects then overprocessing the film once it reached the darkroom, he achieved an exaggerated contrast and illusion of exquisite sharpness otherwise nearly impossible during the era. Many times his photographs were composed with a minimum of direction given to his subjects. On other occasions, he studiously refrained from looking through the viewfinder as he made his exposures.

RichardAvedon.com describes his method while shooting the renowned The Family (a Rolling Stone Magazine launched project to record the U.S. Presidential campaign coincidentally occurring during the nation’s 200^th anniversary) this way:

Avedon avoided expressing his personal opinions of his subjects by allowing them to choose their own pose and clothing, so that his biases would not skew the resulting photograph.

Nine years later Avedon provided a personally penned, brief but invaluable description of the technique he used for In the American West. That book too was a commission. Mitchell A. Wilder, Director of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, noticed a photograph Avedon had made of a ranch foreman known by the name Wilbur Powell as part of a series shot in Ennis, Montana in 1978. Seeking to expand the museum’s collection of notable 19^th and 20^th century photographs of western culture, Wilder offered Avedon an Amon Carter Museum sponsorship should he elect to continue the project. Avedon accepted and, despite Wilder’s death the next year, continued photographing for five summers. So far as I’m aware, even an excerpt of Avedon’s essay on his approach to shooting In the American West has only been available in the difficult-to-obtain book itself until this blog post.

This is how these portraits were made. I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long that is secured to a wall, a building, sometimes the side of a trailer. I work in the shade because sunshine creates shadows, highlights, accents on a surface that seem to tell you where to look. I want the source of light to be invisible so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things.

I use an 8 x 10 view camera on a tripod, not unlike the camera used by Curtis, Brady, or Sander, except for the speed of the shutter and film. I stand next to the camera, not behind it, several inches to the left of the lens and about four feet from the subject. As I work I must imagine the pictures I am taking because, since I do not look through the lens, I never see precisely what the film records until the print is made. I am close enough to touch the subject and there is nothing between us except what happens as we observe one another during the making of the portrait. This exchange involves manipulations, submissions. Assumptions are reached and acted upon that could seldom be made with impunity in ordinary life.

– Richard Avedon

Avedon’s intention in mentioning manipulation is not simply to costume his methods in mystery. He was in fact known (some would say notoriously so) for his capacity to quite expertly toy with the emotions of his subjects when he saw fit. Celebrated celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz said of him in retrospect in 2008, “Avedon seduced his subjects with conversation.” Avedon speaking on the topic in the 1996, Helen Whitney directed PBS documentary Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light said, “There are times when it’s necessary to trick a sitter into what you want. But never for the sake of the trick.”

I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.

– Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David or Edward VIII

Six decades prior on November 16^th – while “Dick” Avedon was an unknown, skinny, twelve-year-old avid autograph collector – the famously dim, amorous, hopelessly romantic bachelor King Edward VIII privately revealed, to thoroughly dismayed British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, his plans to wed an American, twice over divorcée-to-be named Wallis Simpson. Once informed, the British government and all its Dominions (save the indifferent Irish) found Edward’s proposed marriage an affront. The very notion flew in the face of the Church of England’s religious teachings and ultimately challenged, through emerging legal technicalities, the British Cabinet’s right and the right of all governments under British Dominion to have a say in such matters pursuant to the Statute of Westminster 1931. What made His Highness’ designs yet more abominable to his subjects (who by now were well-informed) was the fact that both of Mrs. Simpson’s ex-husbands would still be alive when the King wed her. The former Prince of Wales had three choices left in hand: refrain for all time from marrying Simpson, enter into nuptials with Mrs. Simpson and thereby most assuredly inspire the resignation of the entire British government in protest, or abdicate his Throne.

On December 10, 1936, as part of a progression of formalities carried on in a fashion reminiscent of a Shakespearian play, Edward VIII placed his signature and seal on documents confirming his abdication in the presence of his brothers Prince Albert, Duke of York, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Prince George, Duke of Kent. Two days later, the newly ascended King George VI (formerly Prince Albert) announced his plans to restore Edward to the British Orders of Knighthood while simultaneously creating him “Duke of Windsor.”

I am certain through him permanent friendly relations could have been achieved. If he had stayed, everything would have been different. His abdication was a severe loss for us.

– Adolf Hitler in 1937 commenting on Edward’s departure from the British Throne

A few days shy of seven months later Edward, Duke of Windsor at last married the Duchess at Château de Candé in Monts, Indre-et-Loire a few miles south of Tours, France. The Duke, in exile from his former Kingdom and barred as a Royal from running for election to the House of Commons or expressing his political opinions in the House of Lords, the Duchess formally deprived of the title “Her Royal Highness” along with the respect incumbent, and the both of them excluded from the “Civil List” (a kind of multi-million dollar, government funded welfare program for British Royals) they spent their retirement-like time touring France and meeting Adolf Hitler at his retreat in the Obersalzberg in Bavaria – Edward greeting Hitler with a full Nazi salute.

In September of 1939 Lord Mountbatten summoned Edward back to an England embroiled in WWII. Promoted promptly to the rank of Major-General upon return, Edward served his country a mere four months before allegedly leaking to Hitler the Allied defense plans for Belgium. The Windsors soon after fled south to the estate of a wealthy countryman with mixed Axis and Allied loyalties. Along the way the Windsors requested that the German military protect their homes in Paris and the Riviera. Hitler complied.

After Edward granted an interview as rife with inflammatory comments as General Stanley McChrystal’s very recent Rolling Stones magazine piece, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a British warship to French shores under orders to retrieve and convey the Windsors to the Bahamas where Edward would serve as Governor and hopefully inflict significantly less damage on the overall war effort. While there Edward cast aspersions on the intelligence of the brown-skinned populace as well as Étienne Dupuch editor of the Nassau Daily Tribune saying, “It must be remembered that Dupuch is more than half Negro, and due to the peculiar mentality of this Race, they seem unable to rise to prominence without losing their equilibrium.”

In the 1950s and 60s the couple spent the last part of their lives in “café society;” hosting parties, granting brief interviews, gambling in world-class casinos, flying to New York from Paris and back, posing for photographs, and dutifully appearing at parties hosted by socialites of sufficient stature. It was during this period that the Windsors met a 33-year-old Jewish-Russian American who had “emerged as fashion photography’s brightest star.” His name was Richard Avedon.

I would go every night to the casino in Nice and I watched them. I’d watch the way she was with him, the way he was with her, the way they were with people. I wanted to bring out the loss of humanity in them. Not the meanness – and there was a lot of meanness and a lot of narcissism – so that I knew exactly what I had to try accomplish during the sitting.

I photographed them in their hotel suite in New York, and they had their pug dogs which they adored, and they had they’re Ladies Home Journal cover faces on. They were posing royally and nothing, not for a second, was anything that I’d observed when they were gambling presented to me. And I did a kind of… its like living by your wits. I knew they loved they’re dogs. And I said, ‘If I seem a little hesitant or a little disturbed it’s because my taxi ran over a dog.’ And both of their faces dropped because they loved dogs… a lot more than they loved Jews.

The expression on their faces is true because you can’t evoke an expression that doesn’t come out of the life of the person.

– Richard Avedon speaking on his controversial 1957 portrait of the Windsors nearly forty years later

Avedon was relentless and unforgiving in his pursuit of a telling portrait regardless of whether his subject was a polished celebrity or an anonymous coal miner. A twelve-year-old Coloradan girl named Sandra Bennett and a soot-covered mine worker named James Story and a Texan trucker named Billy Mudd were portrayed with the same revealing, perhaps violating examination unleashed upon Dorothy Parker, Oscar Levant, Marilyn Monroe, Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, President Eisenhower, President Reagan, Baroness Blixen aka Isak Denison, Charlie Chaplin, Andy Warhol, and even Avedon’s own father as he lay near death. To say “the picture’s the thing” when attempting to explain Avedon’s arguably obsessive behavior would be an oversimplification. There was much more complexity, consciousness, and tooth to what he did.

In 1996 Avedon addressed what many people saw as an uncomfortable peculiarity about him – his tendency to stare. “Different animals have different kinds of eyes for accomplishing what their goals are,” he said, “An eagle has a literal zoom lens in the eye so that from way above he can zoom down on the rodent that he’s going to attack. In the same way I think that my eyes always went toward what I was interested in; the face.” It is, to say the least, interesting that Avedon likened himself to a wild predator swooping in from above to take the life (or its accumulated affects) of whomsoever he chose as target.

Prominent author and photography critic Owen Edwards said of Avedon, “To sit with Avedon and have him look at you is a fairly disconcerting experience because you realize that he’s studying you.

“I don’t know whether he’s seeing inside you or not. I guess he would say he’s not. But he wants to see everything there is to see on that surface… and this has been the making of him as a photographer.

“The strongest thing that Avedon’s portraiture represents is a belief that finally in the end there’s nothing but the face. And the truth is that the power of the landscape of the face – the crevices and the valleys and the promontories and all of the things that they represent – it’s really how we know each other. There’s nothing on Earth more fascinating than the human face.”

This is the second installment of a look back on the award-winning Children of Grandy Park series.

With all New Orleans has been through and the creeping, viscous, bistre nightmare now threatening to engulf her, the town’s longtime unofficial motto “let the good times roll” seems like an especially bitter bit of sarcasm.

Five years ago we all watched in horror, sometimes guilty, morbid fascination, as a national treasure fell victim to many of the things that so clearly distinguish it. Both the famously high water table (which is still giving rise to endless tales of caskets floating eerily to the surface) and the nearness of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi Delta in concert with an annually angry Gulf of Mexico finally yielded a Big Easy dis-eased. As early as 2000 the American public was beginning to hear hints of just how devastating a hurricane’s direct hit on New Orleans could be. In a coincidence that turned out to be prescient, NBC Nightly News aired a piece in early 2005 reiterating many of  the concerns in the above linked article and bringing the point home with computer animations. While our beloved home of jazz and the most distinctive accent in the country had seen serious damage from the likes of Betsy in 1965 and Camille in 1969, Katrina promised to be far worse – not only because she seemed hell bent for Cajun shores but also for the fact that every year the “City that Care Forgot” sinks further. By 2005 New Orleans was so far below sea level that experts considered it a foregone conclusion the storm surge from a major hurricane would yield flood waters reaching twenty feet.

The years of foreshadowing delivered as reliably as any popular piece of femme fatale fiction. In those dank, half-impoverished neighborhoods tourists were advised to avoid were also clubs – legal and not – overflowing with the sort of genuine, Cajun and Creole and Black Indian derived, spectacular New Orleanian culture that gave the town and the surrounding region its true value. Of course, almost all of those structures were built with spit and a prayer. When Katrina came a-knockin’ those dingy, dirt-floored yet sparkling monuments to etouffee and gumbo, Dixie and zydeco, muffalettas, voodoo, and fais do-dos – places that would have been homogenized by the infusion of capital, governmental oversight, and less Caribbean-esque standards – all splintered in the wind or died watery deaths. Every living resident, every single one excluding the sixty thousand trapped in their homes or on their roofs, went scrambling for the Superdome sometimes leaving their dead where they splashed as a matter of personal survival. When they did, when those living shrines to the heart of the Crescent City took flight in the only way available, we were forced to witness many of them dying dehydrated, beaten, starving, raped, and in their own excrement. When a few tried to escape that fuming hell to the neighboring town Gretna, they were fired upon halfway across the old Greater New Orleans Bridge (now the Crescent City Connection) by Gretna police.

A year ago, we all couldn’t help but admire the resilience of this most unique group of Americans. Lagasse was a bit less prone to “Bam!!!,” New Orleans and Cajun jazz seemed appropriately spiced with a touch more melancholy, and the populace as a whole appeared to have shed their attachment to unrestrained self-promotion. Instead they were concerned with recovering their dearly loved pets, rebuilding the remnants of their family homes into houses that paid homage to their former selves, rescuing waterlogged and battered landmarks, and finding the money to bring home wives and daughters, husbands and sons, grandpas and grandmas and great-grandmas who had been dispersed all over the country in a Federal rescue effort – organized by the now infamous former FEMA director Michael Brown – that was bereft of provisions of any kind to one day return the Crescent City’s refugees.

Our products and services provide the freedom to move, to heat and to see.

– BP, plc

I find myself reflexively staring at this map of the oil spill. Transfixed by the sheer girth of that great gray mass representing millions of gallons of unrefined fossil fuel, I’m compelled to compare it to Lake Pontchartrain at center top with her comparatively trim figure. I think of what that relatively small lake did to the Lower 9^th Ward and wonder what that same neighborhood (or what remains of it despite the impassioned efforts of well-heeled folks like Wynton Marsalis and Brad Pitt) would look like painted top to bottom in brown, cloying goo. With such scientific mainstays as specific gravity seemingly falling wayside in this baffling, averse-to-alleviation disaster, one is forced to wonder what plot the oil has mapped out. Should that giant oil slick manage to snake its way up the Mississippi and into the lake with sufficient presence to displace the native waters – as it appears capable of doing despite such things as thoroughly peer reviewed, accepted-by-consensus, scientific precedence – “NOLA,” I’m afraid, could be done for.

Should it get anywhere near(er) to the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain while an engorged, inflamed, global warming-enraged hurricane dances about in the gulf, I fear the damage wrought by Katrina and the efforts to cope with it will soon come to be viewed as a mere practice session for dealing with the genuine, all-encompassing devastation of a truly catastrophic environmental disaster.

How bad is it really? Google, Inc. quietly launched a site called “If It Was My Home.” In the first few seconds of the page resolving – depending upon your connection speed at the moment – you’ll see the breadth of the disaster superimposed over its home location in the Gulf of Mexico and above the outermost shores of Louisiana. An instant later a harmless IP tracker built into the site will zero in on your real world location and display the overwhelming extent of the spill splayed across your own neighborhood, city, and likely most (if not all) of your state in addition to portions of its immediate neighbors unless you live in a boundless gargantuan like Alaska or Texas.

I may be worried more than necessary. I may be letting doomsday scenarios get the better of me. But, despite BP’s seeming recent success with hampering the flow of oil, I think it better to be overprepared if only mentally.

Those estimated 100 million gallons of oil are still out there and the slick is continuing to grow. Restaurants nationwide are already finding creative ways to inoffensively advertise that their seafood comes from any place on Earth other than the Gulf. In doing so they inadvertently crush the livelihoods of countless New Orleanian fishermen, oystermen, shrimpers and their families while simultaneously casting a pall over the mere notion of visiting Emeril Lagasse’s place much less the lesser known yet quite excellent restaurants in NOLA’s every nook and cranny. Boycotts against BP, plc (at one time the British Petroleum Company) have begun if falteringly. For the most part, participants seem unaware that patronizing an Amoco or Conoco – the former an acquisition and the latter a re-branding – is equivalent to continuing to finance BP.

As always, the story here in the real world becomes more complex. A boycott or sit-in or “be-in” in 2010 is not what it was in the 1960s. Depriving BP, plc of income in the U.S. compromises its ability to meet its responsibility, as mandated by Federal Law, to clean up the monumental mess it has made. “Docking” BP’s check forces the company to reconsider the amount of manpower it has committed to cleaning Louisiana’s shoreline and shoveling tar balls from Florida’s beaches. Giving BP a “pink slip” is sadly nothing other than also depriving many thousands of everyday, working class, Louisianian rig workers of the means to support themselves. Even more sobering, everyman has virtually no ability to substantively influence his target. BP is so massive, globally entrenched, and financially and politically powerful that only multi-lateral government action could make a dent.

President Obama is poised to make the speech of his life tonight. It is said it will be more important than the keynote address he delivered at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. According to all the pundits, his legacy and (most importantly of course) his chances at a second term may hinge on his ability to not only introduce a heroic plan to clean up the oil spill, save the affected wildlife, and rescue the Louisianian, Alabamian, Mississippian, and Floridian livelihoods quashed by BP’s astronomical blunder, but to also follow through successfully on the strategy over the coming two years. Should he fail, according to the wags, he’s as good as done and might face a more intense flavor of the sort of retroactive revulsion his predecessor experienced for his response to – poetically enough – Hurricane Katrina.

I congratulate BP’s engineers on their tenuous success (nevermind the neverending public gaffs of BP’s outrageously-paid Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward), but this game of spilt oil, and devastated wetlands, and ruined livelihoods is not over. Despite the American public’s understandable exhaustion and wavering interest, it’s nowhere near over. It’s only just beginning.

As the newspapers prove again each day, there is something fascinating and subtly disturbing about a photograph of a person open-mouthed in speech. The effect can be comic or ludicrous or tragic, but the root cause is the same. Life has been arrested.

– John Szarkowski speaking on Richard Avedon’s experimentations with portraying time

When you shoot an image – especially if you’re someone who makes a living doing it – there is some sense that you’re recording time. It is however a fleeting sensation if one feels it at all. As in most things involving commerce, the practical soon becomes paramount and such esoteric considerations as the historical significance of a single photograph out of perhaps hundreds shot on a single day fades from consciousness faster than oil spraying out of the Deepwater Horizon well.

All other concerns I may have had back then set aside, shooting New Orleans in August 2004 was a singular, thoroughly educational joy. While the foliage was surprisingly, comfortingly similar to what I’m familiar with here in Virginia, the heat and humidity was… simply shocking. Businessmen strolled the streets sans jacket in sweat-soaked shirts and ties. City workers and pedestrians alike went about their business with white hand towels hanging over the backs of their necks in order to more easily free their eyes of blinding perspiration. My Jeep’s engine – well-accustomed to often oppressive Virginia summers – came dangerously close to overheating during short sprints around town. Only time on the interstate and the steady flow of wind it provided seemed to supply my poor, beleaguered vehicle enough relief to survive. (I swear I heard it sigh gratitude when we passed back into Mississippi.)

The exquisite, painful, motivation-sucking sear of the sun even in the shade was as omnipotent as T.J. Eckelburg. It was an entity that whispered its influence of what you were doing or viewing or eating into your subconscious. Within a sphere of apparently hot-rodded yet strained air-conditioning, one could never for a moment forget the predator laying in wait outside.

And yet, shooting New Orleans was still bliss. No city I’ve ever been to – not St. Louis, not Atlanta, not Chicago or even New York – served as host to characters as diverse and unique and occasionally disturbing as those found in the Crescent City. In 2004, when I visited, it was positively brimming with just as many oddities as described in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil… multiplied by a thousand. (Savannah, matchless as it may be, is simply too genteel to have the raw, sexual, nasty, to-the-bone peculiarity of the Big Easy.)

Walking through the French Quarter, it was impossible not to notice that it looked just like what everyone’s seen in photographs. Outlandish shop window displays and neon signs, absolutely politically incorrect in every way, were everywhere wearing overhead balconies of ornate, turn-of-the-century ironwork adorned in vertically descending greenery. The wet heat and ageless scum on the streets and aroma married to odor and blasting music converged with the bewildering scenery to create a dizzying, sometimes disconcerting, often dazzling array of all the far flung parts of Louisiana condensed into a kind of habanero-strength Cajun/Creole Disney World.

When I shot the place – one year prior to Katrina almost to the day – there was little thought given to the notion I might be recording a New Orleans that would never again be. Now that 100 million gallons of oil may be heading her way – perhaps surfing in on the shoulders of a storm surge born of another horrifying hurricane – I wonder if we may be forced to reach the quite reasonable conclusion that the Crescent City is no longer worth saving in the event major areas of commerce like Canal Street and the French Quarter become mired knee-deep in oil. I fret, more plainly, that we may be witnessing the last days and the first fall of a major American city. I worry that these images may turn out to be some of the last of her in an open-mouthed smile.

The gates of Heaven must be open,

I think I saw an angel just walk by.

Hey, the gates of Heaven must be open,

I think I saw an angel just walk by.

– Buddy Guy, What Kind of Woman is This

The remainder of this post is composed only of photographs I made of New Orleans in 2004. To my mind it is the best and most honest way I can pay homage to a great city that care seems to have once again forgotten.

As a child in the early 70s, I adored the sound of rain bouncing from a car’s thin roof. I’d lean back, ignoring the shock of automotive suspension back then, and listen to each watery smack and hiss and twinkle. On rare occasion I was left alone in a silent vehicle; free to revel in the feathery percussion and smell of wet leaves and soil and pavement. It was a momentary paradise then and one I’ve only briefly revisited as an adult.

This place is not Nantucket. It is not some far port of Louisiana overflowing with crawdads, nor Alaska brimming with king crabs, nor South Carolina shrimping as fast as its shrimp boats will allow. It is, nevertheless, a place of Chesapeake Bay blue crabs and bass and billowing sails and ornery fishermen and their sometimes eager-to-learn sons and daughters. It is a place of sailors and schooners, of sprawling aircraft carriers, of crusty old tales about how Cock Island got its name, and of seamen embarrassed to languish upon land while all the time longing for more time with their lovers.

Ironically, Tidewater, Virginia does not see itself as a great port despite even its dramatic, romantic Revolutionary War history. To this day the point is punctuated by an unexploded cannonball, courtesy of Lord Dunmore, wedged in the side of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church more than 230 years later. Scarcely a Tidewater resident alive is aware the munition is there or would care should it be pointed out.

In 1776, as an extension of that same effort by the British Royal Navy to avenge Lord Dunmore’s emasculating defeat in Chesapeake, the “Burning of Norfolk” very nearly removed the entire area from the map (an event echoed weakly in the far more famous Great Chicago Fire and its four square miles of damage or Sherman’s strategically targeted immolation of specific Atlanta buildings immortalized spectacularly as well as inaccurately in Gone With The Wind as an out of control, citywide inferno). By all accounts only 20% of Norfolk – what had been a pre-Independence jewel of culture, international trade, learned political discourse, and unbridled prosperity – remained unrazed. Eight of every ten structures, large or small, were with rigorous efficiency reduced to nothing. Norfolk, in a foreshadowing of what might have happened in a Russian nuclear strike hundreds of years later, was left a black, unending horizon of cinders. In 2010 we simply don’t remember whether by choice or indifference or irresponsible education. What must have been a terrifying 4 A.M. awakening by bomb blasts, what must have been sheer hell on Earth over the course of the following 48 unbroken hours of explosions and raging fires for thousands of Norfolkians, what surely, disturbingly, unbelievably makes a sunny September 11, 2001 in New York look like a modest plan poorly executed is today commemorated only with footnotes or a paragraph or two by the occasional historian in the rare, faded, tattered book or all but unknown website.

The storied Battle of the Ironclads just off Tidewater’s shores and dubiously saluted in Hollywood offerings both bad and worse, the amazingly still commissioned Fort Monroe alongside a wealth of modern ruins that played pivotal roles during the Civil War, and the designation of history’s single largest concentration of naval power, Norfolk Naval Base, as a prime candidate for Soviet nuclear attack had the Cold War ever gone hot today all linger as mere curiosities in the collective memory of the better educated. As I write, there seems hardly a soul who can be bothered with the fact that this has been for literally hundreds of years a place of monumentally historic maritime importance.

Rather, the most “hip” would encourage continued, sophomoric fascination with the locally available pop music venues, shopping safaris fueled with funds once reserved for servicing “underwater” mortgages, and attendance of guilt-relieving comic performances focused on the Virginia electorate’s most recent and most erroneous choices for elected office. Others honestly concerned with public safety would spotlight the accessibility of prostitutes, illicit drugs, and the prevalence of gangs (mind-bogglingly, in a number of upper-middle-class neighborhoods). And still others, richer with a greater stake in perpetuating their standing, would bring attention to the Tinseltown movies shot here, President Obama’s propensity to grace us, and the national celebrities that quietly live in our more secluded, placid, walled-in, and guarded high-dollar communities.

Its soul scanned deeply, darkly, or clearly under a litany of lighthouses, Tidewater is none of those tinfoil things. It is a place of regular hometown folks engaged in regular hometown things as they go about their regular hometown business. As in any other town anywhere at all on this pale blue dot, the folks in residence wish for some semblance of safety and a modicum of tranquility. As their politicians, and unelected P.R. people, and unchosen spokespersons strive to distinguish Tidewater as a promising place for prudent investment, the everyday population wants nothing more than to be healthy without risking financial ruin, to provide a lifestyle for their families flavored – at the very least – with joy, and to supply a reasonable chance for their offspring to experience an adulthood in which optimism receives reward rather than punishment. They, we, I wish for something approaching the bliss we’ve been promised since childhood in an oft recounted American Dream that increasingly seems to be drifting away.

~ ~ ~

Here, simply watching the tides come and go, is something you did as a kid. As one grows older you’re compelled to give more attention to which storm is predicted to cause problems and make the appropriate adjustments to outdoor potted plants, sculptures, and lawn furniture. When the forecasters claim a hurricane is imminent, you board up or tape your windows according to your disposition. If you’re brave or stupid (which the majority regularly appears to be) you also announce a hurricane party. If you’re a photographer you wrap up and plunge straight into the fury while dodging the policemen that would arrest you or send you packing.

The excitement is inescapable; intoxicating. Sixty mile-per-hour winds with blowing rain amounts to an opportunity to celebrate life for Tidewater natives. It is a chance to display our resilience, indeed our defiance of what Mother Nature may see fit to unbound. As unaware as the everyday native might be, their fervor and resolution and sometimes disquieting enthusiasm in the face of a brooding monstrosity is nothing other, in my opinion, than evidence of an ages old genetic remnant of sea legs. May our ancestors have been shipped (willingly or not) from Europe, Asia, or Africa, or braved the Arctic climate and the wrath of the Northern Pacific to cross the Bering Land Bridge, all we descendants lucky enough to be born here and continue to call this place home have sea salt in our veins.

Home is inextricable; even intrinsic. For better or worse, like family or a certain old lover or a pet’s grave, proximity brings inexplicable comfort. Sometimes decades may pass before it’s palatable to accept that attachment. Sometimes pride makes the blessing of peace impossible. Sometimes we must hate before we can love.

“Skunk” Baxter of Steely Dan fame commenting on the subject of guitar students once said, “To this day everybody sort of has to pass through ‘the Chuck Berry portal’ to get to the next step.” As the explanation of that statement goes, though Berry is popularly cherished there is an element to his guitarmanship most students would prefer to avoid. No painter longs to create images indistinguishable from works in Cezanne’s or Basquiat’s own hand (at least none that are planning to sign their own name). No dancer wishes to receive reviews noting how the audience was convinced they were watching Mikhail Baryshnikov or Julie Kent or the reincarnations of Rudolph Nureyev or Anna Pavlova. No photographer strives to fashion photographs so immersed in the influence of Cartier-Bresson or Penn or Nachtwey or Newton that even a connoisseur could not tell the difference. And yet, for guitar students, it is inevitable, as they progress, that they sound just like Chuck for at least a while. Because of that fact, every rock guitarist who’s come of age after Mr. Berry’s emergence has a torn relationship with his memory. There is a layer of sincere amazement and appreciation – akin to what all percussionists feel for the originators of drum beats like the Bossa Nova – and another layer of deep annoyance, even quiet hatred, for Berry’s inescapability. It is commonly only after many years of practice, or so the account asserts, that guitarists come to peace with Berry, their relationship with his work, and at last arrive upon the same sort of love for his music that the lay enjoy. Sometimes we must hate before we can embrace that many splintered thing.

When I lived elsewhere it was the ocean I missed. I did not know the root of my discontent at the time, but I later came to realize I felt landlocked – trapped and choked. Approaching home for the first time from some real distance in my little Porsche Red Karmann Ghia, I smelled the Atlantic again and reluctantly, at last, surrendered to the adoration circulating through my marrow. The salt whisping about, the slightly stinging sickly sweet tinge of exhaust from gasoline-burning boat engines, the ever-so-faint stench of shellfish decaying on shore stirred my heart in ways I couldn’t have imagined in my teens or willingly accepted.

Like so many teens, when the time came for me to choose a college, my foremost goal was to get myself as far away from home as physically possible. That didn’t work out. A longtime family friend and head of the art department at a nearby university convinced me my interests would be better served by attending a school only a hundred miles away (not his own for whatever that’s worth). My acquiescence was a mixed blessing. There are a great many things from my years at VCU I could have lived the rest of my life happily missing, but there was also an array of invaluable experiences not the least of which was my ability to visit home with only moderate effort.

I don’t believe I made a single trip home during my first semester. Only Winter Break forced me to embark on the hour and a half return – the cafeterias were closed. Over the entire course of my second semester I traveled home once… to retrieve some of my artwork for an upcoming review. The trip as a whole took three hours and fifteen minutes. That extra fifteen minutes is accounted for by the duration of my stay in Norfolk. However, by the time I was in my sophomore year, excuses to drive back into Norfolk grew on trees. That period and the twenty or so years that followed clarified why embracing this place was the only right and natural thing for me.

While our sense of history here is a bit lacking (perhaps forgivably so due to the crushing pace in this Toffleresque present) I find for example the average Chicagoan’s impression about just why their home is nicknamed the “Second City” considerably more troubling than all of Tidewater’s misrememberings and non-rememberings. We, unlike those wayward Midwest souls, have at least a constant reminder of our close relationship with the Atlantic. We may not regularly make note of Harriet Tubman’s heroic midnight boat launches out of Portsmouth and Norfolk. We may only rarely celebrate her Underground Railroad for the African-Americans it rescued from slavery and horrible, tortured deaths. We may be virtually unaware literary great William Styron was a prodigal son, that the incomparable Pearl Bailey and irrepressible Ella Fitzgerald both sported the so-called “Tidewater accent,” or who “Old Fuss and Feathers” was or that he authored the Anaconda Plan which arguably brought the U.S. Civil War to its end… or that he too was a son of our shores. We may have no notion what role the Algonquin word Chesepiooc played in our history or from whence the city of Norfolk derived its name. But we have the storms – the ever present, increasingly-severe-due-to-global-warming storms. There exists an umbilical between the Atlantic, its tides and moods and vicissitudes, and how they can at a moment’s notice bring to a crashing halt any plans any given resident might make at any given time regardless of social stature. For us natives, in the winds, and the phases of the moon, and “the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil” lies true, unadulterated democracy.

My love, this place called Tidewater, is a demure yet spectacular beauty blemished. She is not merely a place of historic maritime battles, or lands trod by founding fathers, or little red spots on a map marking heroic feats in wars long gone by. She is so much more. She is… personable. To me she means little blue homicidal crustaceans crazed for spoiled chicken parts, laws that are perhaps culturally behind many of the other States of the Union and law enforcement that is often overeager, humidity so oppressive that renowned visiting surfers from California and Hawaii are obliged to comment… on the record, and public officials who achieve national attention only to immediately follow the accomplishment by making racial slurs without knowing what they’ve done until an aide sheepishly informs them of their incredible, inexcusable stupidity. She means biscuits with sausage gravy that’s fragrant, crab cakes so fresh that the ingredients were snapping at fishermen’s fingers a half hour ago, corned beef hash that will inspire you to exchange blows for a second helping, cheese grits that’ll make ya slap ya mama, and platters of Oysters Rockefeller that will have you questioning how heaven could be a bit better. She means strangers nodding hello on the street or opening a door for you without any earthly reason other than to be kind. She means random drivers willingly slowing down to provide opportunity to merge, lawyers polite to one another, and utility companies open to arguments that include the words “that’s just wrong” when you dispute a bill.

My lover is an enchanting swamp dubbed dismal. She is a sunrise dumbfounding. She is acres of sprouting gold, hugged in green, as far as the eye can see. She is a road wriggling riotously through troves of shade trees. She is a haphazard wooden stand stocked with freshly picked produce, a clear plastic cup full of money, no attendant, and a tiny sign declaring “ON THE HONR SISTEM.” Had my love legs, she would walk with angelic grace.

In the spirit of giving one last nod to Earth Day before the month has passed as well as doing a little compare and contrast exercise, I present a stirring piece called Space Monkey conceived by design firm Leo Burnett Worldwide (famous for creating the Jolly Green Giant, the Marlboro Man, Toucan Sam, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the 7up “Spot”, and Tony the Tiger) and directed by Steve Rogers for the World Wildlife Fund.

The just over four minute piece is airing not only as a new campaign for WWF but also as a music video to launch the single by Ben Lee called Song for the Divine Mother of the Universe heard in the film.

Time now for the exercise. Viewing this piece I couldn’t help but be reminded of the 1971 Keep America Beautiful Public Service Announcement featuring the famous Italian-American actor Iron Eyes Cody. Pay particular attention to the end if you’re unfamiliar with it.

One might also see a bit of thematic similarity between Space Monkey and the following two excerpts from the 1968 sci-fi film Planet of the Apes.

I have no idea whether Leo Burnett Sydney (the specific branch of Leo Burnett Worldwide responsible for Space Monkey), Director Steve Rogers, Executive Creative Director Andy DiLallo, Creative Director Jay Benjamin, Executive Producer Adrian Shapiro, and creative team Michael Canning and Kieran Antill referenced the two classics featured above unconsciously, intentionally, or because the impetus for such was out there bouncing around in the Collective Unconscious. I prefer to see what they did as an exceedingly clever hommage.

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

– Pablo Picasso

For many alive today – regardless of their ability to actually remember them from personal experience – the 60s and early 70s are a blur. The two periods have become caricatured as either the era of Flower Children, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin or the era of Nixon, Alice Cooper and The Who. Assuming the creatives behind Space Monkey exploited that fact, their accessing of President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Space Program as well as artistic, political and environmental statements dating to the approximate time of the realization of Kennedy’s goal of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him back safely to the earth” makes their four minute fifteen second video much deeper than it appears even after repeated viewings.

Honestly, I suspect that Leo Burnett had no such intentions. There are niggling logical problems in the brief storyline which they obviously decided to brush aside. It seems much more likely that the global firm chose to go straight for the heart; to manipulate emotion as they and so many other outrageously successful design outfits have in the past.

Whatever. Manipulative or not, referential or not, stolen or not, it’s a damned good piece of work and we should all be happy it has been added to the canon of photographic art from this period.

UPDATE: A few hours ago the creative team responsible for Space Monkey posted this Behind The Scenes video.

Some things can’t be explained. Like Miyamoto Musashi valiantly attempting to describe the Void or a patient parent passionately assuring their infatuated teenager that love is in fact not all you need, some efforts at illustration are from the outset futile.

For all of my life that I can remember I’ve been fascinated with the enormous, the expansive, and the astronomical – quite literally. As a child I loved to lie on my back staring at the stars like so many other folks that eventually became professional astronomers of one stripe or another. In my teens the Atlantic at night entranced me. Not only was there the majesty and beauty of the Milky Way overhead but also the awesome, foreboding power of an entire ocean rushing forth to ever so gently dance between my toes. In college I first saw The Powers of 10; a 1977 classic short that brilliantly brings a large part of the universe – and us – into startling, disturbing perspective. In my late twenties I found myself in the shadows of mountains for the first time. The Great Smokies. The home of some of my ancestors. It took my breath. For my 39^th birthday I was granted my wish to “see Glacier National Park before it’s completely denuded of the reason for its name.”

Getting there required nearly a full day of travel on three planes including the tiniest little commuter I’ve ever had the honor of placing boot upon. Boarding it was a throwback to North by Northwest complete with a set of mobile steps up to the hatch after a brief trek across the tarmac. There was, for me, a romance to it all that cannot be adequately expressed.

Arriving late in the evening at the last airport, there was little to be seen on the drive to The Lodge at Whitefish Lake other than headlights, taillights, and shop lights. But there was something else present; a feeling that reminded me of bodysurfing in an Atlantic the color of pitch. Suspended in that black, Montana air was an open, endless, wild expansiveness that silently smacked of dark waves crashing on a dark Virginia shore with jewels spinning overhead.

Stepping out the back door the next morning into the briskness, I saw the Rocky Mountains for the very first time. They were not in fact all I imagined from seeing them in a View-Master as a child, but they were nonetheless stunning. I remember thinking, “Here, at last, I am.”

After a short trip into town – away from the mountains – for picnic supplies, we headed for the park. The reasons for my feelings the previous night became clear: although, at that distance, there was a similarity to the Great Smokies and therefore a comfortable familiarity, the sky was another animal entirely. In stark contrast to Bowles’ Sheltering Sky, these heavens opened onto a fresh, bright universe. They inspired new thoughts on The Unbearable Lightness of Being and what Kundera and Carrière and Kaufman might have also meant. They gave the Earth itself unimaginable, almost oppressive weight.

Soon the bow to my present came in the form of that famous entrance to the park and a trip down Going-to-the-Sun Road. Most of what we saw early on was much like any tree-lined mountain road; beautiful, comforting like a warm blanket, peaceful, and endearing. Yet somehow it was not quite what I expected of a locale as storied as Glacier National Park. And then, in an opening, I caught my first glimpse of the Rockies reflected in glassy water. It was heart-stopping. In that fleeting glance I witnessed a beauty I’d only before dreamed.

When we returned to photograph it, the lake was still as a mirror. The balance of that cotton ball, backlit sky hovering above those jagged, cold, hard peaks framed in stark black and contrasted by a psychedelic beach was nothing other than surreal.

I’d framed a shot to record the echo of the curve of a nearby tree in a cloud far above when a mysterious helper-hand sprung into view just as the shutter button was released. In its impromptu, eyeless acuity one digit pointed out a much more serene and perhaps more Zen image.

I’m enormously grateful for that intrusion.

Before leaving I stopped for a moment to photograph that beach all on its own. Many years ago, when I was occasionally operating what amounted to an unlicensed tiki bar in college, I enlisted classmates to bring me beer bottles full of sand from whatever corner of the world they called home. Rocks and glass ground to tiny bits arrived from Hawaii, California, Washington State, and all up and down the East Coast by the next semester. In none of them did I see anything approaching the kaleidoscope sprinkled everywhere in Glacier National Park.

That is a tight close-up but by no means microscopic. Those are pebbles uncomfortable to keep one’s balance on and large enough to skip across water. You can feel them through the soles of your shoes and watch them glint as you pass. They seem utterly incongruous opposite the gray and blue and white mountains they complement. One wonders how such a marvelous thing could come to pass.

At the next break we stopped at a charming log cabin-style lodge and discovered behind it the scene at the top of this page. To the left of it was the vista below.

I don’t believe there’s anything I can say about either of these places other than their beauty is not even in part represented here. As trite as it may be to utter, no photograph can ever accomplish that. Not Ansel Adams in all his fabulous disci-pline and painterly talent and sheer genius could portray what these mountains truly are. They are unspeakably stunning, frightening, and every bit as humbling as the Atlantic in twilight or the Milky Way itself.

It’s been said that we don’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children…

– President George H.W. Bush

Aside from these images and a few spectacular memories, I have very little left from that journey. The smell of the place is no longer with me. The chill and the altitude are more akin to caricatures now; more like my View-Master imaginings. Moments I thought I’d never lose have faded into obscurity. The gift-giver (and mysterious helper-hand) is long gone. There remains a single tangible thing of that entire, treasured experience: the mug from which I drink tea as I write.

On this Earth Day out of forty now, I wonder how much longer those mountains will remain snowcapped. I wonder how long it will be before that park’s name is ironic. I wonder what our great-grandchildren will think of their ancestors. At this very moment, Glacier National Park’s official site acknowledges that the majestic structures within its purview will one day share the fate of Kilimanjaro. The snows will be but a memory.

I only hope that we can – perhaps in a sudden burst of collective wisdom – gather ourselves together in enough cooperation to avoid leaving all those left to follow with little more than our own faltering memories and a souvenir or two.

I was well into my second day of covering the Open Books, Ltd. debut at the 2008 Printer’s Row Book Fair in Chicago when I stumbled across five masked demonstrators within a hundred feet of the Open Books tent. I suppose I was first drawn to them because, back home, it’s illegal to go parading around in a mask if you’re not a child Trick-or-treating or an adult plagued with a serious facial disfigurement or something requiring breathing apparatus like advanced COPD. I wanted to know more than anything else what those characters were up to and how they were getting away with running around looking like bank robbers. Photographing them was almost a secondary concern.

Even after I’d shot them (twice) and conducted an extremely cursory interview, I’d no idea whatsoever how closely their existence had already grazed my own in the past, how massive was the scope of their effort, or how much cause they and I had to be wary of one another. They were out there to communicate their message as openly as possible while maintaining their anonymity as best they could out of real fear. In the midst of their effort, I show up with a ridiculously large DSLR in my right hand, a big, black bag of gear on one shoulder, and a blatantly obvious pro-level tripod in my left hand. They must have thought they were done for. In fact they took precautions for the second shoot.

“They” are Anonymous and Anonymous is a difficult thing to describe. The members of Anonymous with which I was acquainted (through a fascination with an online game) might be said to be atypical participants in that global, internet-based community. They each identified themselves as individuals – albeit through the use of avatars with fanciful, fabricated names thereby preserving their privacy. In general Anonymous is highly anonymous. It is an ever-changing collective of internet users that in many ways saw its beginnings in the automated assignation of the title “anonymous” to people who posted photographs, drawings, and graphics to imageboards without identifying themselves.

By some estimates the membership of Anonymous numbers in the tens of thousands. It is without a doubt a multi-national movement and has developed what may be called a unique amalgamation of philosophies that would not have arisen outside of the environment of the World Wide Web.

Three and a half years ago (well before I made the photograph at the top of the page) I interviewed a member of the community that went by the avatar name “furseiseki.” At one point I asked, “Are you describing a sort of collective intelligence when you talk about ‘Anonymous?’ Could you provide an example of how Anonymous expresses a thought?” She responded:

Idiocy and genius; acceptance and ridicule; epic win and massive fail. Anonymous doesn’t have any well defined ‘opinions,’ but rather certain ‘tendencies.’ For instance Anonymous will always choose win over fail. Anonymous doesn’t think in words, but rather in memes, nonsensical images and text which form a language. It is with this language that Anonymous talks to itself, basks in the insights gained by thinking through its multitude of minds.
I think it’s of utmost importance to note that I am in no way anonymous at this moment. In fact I’d say this interview is the antithesis of anonymity, lol. To just inject a meme into the conversation would be pointless. That being said, I can’t say for sure that Anonymous is a collective intelligence. That’s how it appears to me but I can’t speak for Anonymous. My guess is that Anonymous thinks of itself as a story. A story about how my life got flipped; turned upside down.

On January 21, 2008 Anonymous declared war on the Church of Scientology with the following video posted to YouTube.

English speaking Anonymous members formulated and planned the execution of what came to be known as Project Chanology on the websites 711chan.org, 4chan, and an array of Internet Relay Chat channels in response to the Church of Scientology’s issuance of a claim of copyright infringement against YouTube. The complaint cited specifically YouTube’s hosting of a video of actor Tom Cruise speaking on the subject of Scientology.

In a similar complaint to Gawker.com, which was also hosting the video, Ava Paquette of the firm Moxon & Kobrin wrote on behalf of the Church of Scientology International:

This is a video work that is exclusively for the use of our client to be shown in its Churches of Scientology throughout the world. This work has never been distributed or authorized to be shown, other than by CSI’s sub-licensees, in Churches of Scientology for religious purposes only.
We were recently notified by my client that this copyrighted work had been stolen from one of its Churches.

As can be seen from the more than 67,000 comments accompanying YouTube’s alleged infringement, a large amount of ridicule was generated for both the church and Tom Cruise. Despite the timbre of sentiment popular in those comments, Anonymous then and now maintains that Project Chanology was not instituted as an extension of those attacks but rather as a protest against the church’s attempts to remove the Tom Cruise video. The project grew into a refutation of the church as a whole and an effort to bring “into the public eye hundreds of illegal actions, fraudulent activities, and human rights violations perpetrated by the Church of Scientology.”

In a move that would seem to confirm Anonymous’ allegations that the Church of Scientology seeks to censor unfavorable remarks, American Rights Counsel, LLC issued on behalf of CSI more than 4000 DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) copyright infringement complaints to YouTube in a single 12 hour period between September 4^th and September 5^th of the same year. All of the videos cited contained material critical of Scientology.

Roughly two years prior to the inception of Project Chanology, the Church of Scientology International sought to restrict the use of the terms “Scientology,” “Scientologists,” “L. Ron Hubbard” (the founder of the Church of Scientology), and “Hubbard” among others including references to L. Ron Hubbard’s wife in an Australin copyright infringement complaint. In early March of 2002, one month prior, the firm Moxon & Kobrin, again representing the Church of Scientology International, requested that Google, Inc. remove www.xenu.net (a website devoted to criticizing Scientology) from its listings.

Anonymous has, by its own admission, launched illegal DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks against the Church of Scientology’s various websites depriving the church and its members use of their internet resources for extended periods. Anonymous has disrupted the operations of the church through the use of black faxes and “Google bombs.” Anonymous has no reservations about claiming the given title “Cyber Vigilante Group.” They have, however, toned down the destructive aspects of their efforts since the “Wise Beard Man” Mark Bunker, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and long-time Scientology critic, posted a video on YouTube urging caution and responsibility on January 27, 2008.

The photograph at the top of this page was shot on June 7, 2008. The group shot below was made two hours later once I’d returned to conduct an interview. If I may say so, Anonymous looks here quite a bit tamer than the ominous presence they present online (despite the reaction of onlookers). Still there’s the fellow in the Guy Fawkes mask. You might notice he’s shed a remarkable amount of weight in two hours.

The black fellow I wonder about. I wonder how conscious he was of the brilliance of his attire. I wonder if he was completely aware of how keenly he was playing on stereotypes with his black suit, sunglasses, and kerchief. I wonder if he – the only one that identified himself as a former Scientology adherent – fully understood how thoroughly he was exploiting and promoting the fear those-in-the-know have for Anonymous. If I had to bet, I’d say he knew full well.

We are your brothers and sisters, your parents and children, your superiors and your underlings. We are the concerned citizens standing next to you. Anonymous is everywhere, yet nowhere. Our strength lies in our numbers.

– Anonymous