Here are some of my favorite images from a really compelling story I worked on with Catrin Einhorn. The Markums are a wonderfully kind and welcoming family in South Georgia. It breaks my heart to think about how many families have to fight through hardships like theirs long after our soldiers return from foreign wars. Catrin's article, Looking After the Solider, Back Home and Damaged, is really touching, and the audio she gathered drives it home. View our audio slideshow on NYTimes.com: After War, from Wife to Caregiver.
I felt a small sense of triumph when I read this story last week about a Florida couple foreclosing on a bank. It reminded me of a Florida foreclosure story I worked on last year but never blogged. It's always inspiring to see folks take back power and make a statement after being foreclosed upon.
Last year, writer Matt Shaer and I met a local artist and professor named Jack Stenner who turned his foreclosed house into an interactive public art project. Matt's story, Open house: Foreclosure art meets the whims of the web, describes our visit to the house and includes encounters with squatters, Mormon missionaries, stray cats, and a spider 'the size of a child's palm'. Definitely not my typical CSM assignment, and well worth the read.
These portraits are part of a personal project I started last year about Islam in Northeast Florida. After spending much of last summer in the Islamic(/secular) countries of Turkey and Bosnia, I was shocked to return to my hometown and learn that an angry evangelical pastor was threatening to burn the Koran right in our backyard. I thought back to the one Muslim girl I knew in high school, and to the rhetoric she had to endure as we discussed the War on Terror in our US History class shortly after 9/11. Although I'm unfamiliar with Islam, I am all-too-familiar with feelings of alienation and religious discrimination. I decided to shift my focus away from the controversy and anger in Gainesville. Instead I spend some time with Muslims in Jacksonville during their annual Eid festival (which is delightfully redundant), marking the end of Ramadan. The celebrations were full of color, joy, gossip, and family. Here are pictures of some of the girls and women I met. I'm not sure what's in store for this project after this post, but it was time to start sharing these images.
Here are a few pictures of two of my oldest friends, Meghan and Lee, getting ready for a night out. Besides being hilarious and fun, they are two of the most stylish people I know. Lee works for a local interior designer and always seems to have a pulse on the latest trends ("Popsicles are the new cupcakes"). Meghan is a thrift store maven who runs an adorable Etsy shop and occasionally acts as my personal shopper. I'm always proud to be seen with them.
Here are a couple of "family photos", featuring two of my favorite models here in Jacksonville: my friend Lindsay and her daughter Madeleine. They've grown up so much since their previous blog appearance, just after Madeleine was born (almost three years ago!) I made these using window light in an adorable ice cream shop in Avondale.
Here are some pictures of people I saw and met in Sanski Most, a town in northwest Bosnia and Herzegovina. It's friendly and lively and full of beauty and good humor mixed with grief and lingering frustration from the recent war. Beautiful and complicated, full of photojournalistic fodder. I hope to go back someday. I'm jealous of my host, who works as sort of a cultural ambassador there. I recently contributed photos for him to use in a website promoting tourism and cultural opportunities in the region. It seemed like a good excuse to share some of them here, all shot during my visit in August.
