Deep Freeze, TX

If you’re unaware, that is, if you were living on top of a faraway mountain with no access to national or international news, or if you’re reading this far into the future and have forgotten, the polar vortex slid down into Texas, all the way to the Rio Grande, late on Valentine’s Day, or early on President’s Day, 2021. The pleasant, if unseasonably warm weather here in North Texas, turned, became wildly and very unusually cold. In the wee hours of the 16th, the temperature dropped to 1℉ (-17℃), with a high on Tuesday of 7… 7. And between the 15th and 19th, the temperature hovered in the low to mid teens and we got about 10 inches of snow.

I knew it was coming, sorta. I mulched our younger trees the week before and we stocked up on some groceries early, but I had no idea how bad it was going to get, and it got really bad locally and all over the state. The power grid failed, water systems failed, water pipes burst all over. We had it easy, really, and made it through relatively unscathed; many others had it much, much harder.

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Keith Carter – ‘From Uncertain to Blue’

Many years ago, when I first got interested in photography (again), when Ted Forbes’ podcast was still published through iTunes, Forbes did a piece on Keith Carter. I’ve kept an eye out for one of Carter’s books ever since, but until January 2019, I’d only ever seen Ezekiel’s Horse, and wasn’t particularly interested in that work. And then, one day, I spotted From Uncertain to Blue, and jumped on it.

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#BIFscale 21

It’s been a long 3 years since I last took part in #BIFscale, the worldwide celebration of redscale film (color film exposed through the base), hosted by @filmdevelop and the #believeinfilm community on Twitter.

Honestly, I mostly forgot about it in 2019, but started watching for it late that year, and throughout 2020, but never saw anything about it, so late in January 2021, when I stumbled across a single #BIFscale21 post, and then one of my tweets from 2018 got retweeted, I grabbed my last roll of Lomography Redscale XR, popped it into the still new-to-me Olympus OM10 with the 50mm F.Zuiko and got to shooting.

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Alan Huck – ‘I Walk Towards the Sun Which is Always Going Down’

More the the longest and most unwieldy title for a photobook ever, Alan Huck’s I Walk Towards the Sun Which is Always Going Down is his partially fictional chronicle of some amount of time spent living in and roaming around Albuquerue, NM, turned into a sort of novelistic meditation on place and photography.

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Anne Golaz – ‘Corbeau’

I found Corbeau, Anne Golaz’s portrait of her dairy farming family in eastern France, thanks to Jörg Colberg, and picked it up during a period where I fantasized about making a book sort of like it, something combining text and image to create something greater than either could be on its own. Colberg praises it as a model of the form, and I just had to see for myself…

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