I very nearly threw all of those envelopes of negatives directly into the trash.

They’d been crammed together like trash, separated from their prints and randomly crumpled in one bulging envelope. Even when I was using film, (ha what? I used film once?) I had never understood why the drug store gave me these damn things. Negatives! For what, pictures I’d taken as some goofball kid in high school, 4x6s I’d already carefully pasted into collages and scrapbooks?

That’s exactly what those photos were good for, I thought. Negatives are for Real Photographers. Negatives are for the diehards of technology, the chemists, the artists, the luddite sages. But then I held one dented, tiger’s eye strip up to the light.

What! I’d forgotten about this one. And what’s this? I must have given that print away. Hey, I realized, I want another chance with these.

I got my first digital camera (1.3 megapixel) second semester of my Freshman year in college, and it was around then I started getting interested in photography just as a thing I wanted to get better at: being able to see the result immediately was huge in figuring out what worked. Since then I’ve gone through a few desk top computers, a few external hard drives, and in the processes a lot of those photos were lost. Data got corrupted, I didn’t transfer something correctly: for the majority of them, I honestly don’t know what happened to them. Even when present those photos were always intangible, disappearing with the click of a power switch.

But these negatives, randomly jammed together with no indication of date or location, managed to survive those haphazard, careless years. Instead of throwing them in the trash, I could just put them all in a ziplock bag and mail them to a scanning service.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, through the miracle of past technology meeting present, I give to you the fine results of my first photoshoot. (I’d like to say I took this around age eight, but I think it may have been more like thirteen.)

Full album of random life experiences, age 16-19: here.

Yesterday a few of us caravanned to The Art Shanty Projects on Medicine Lake. It was twelve degrees and nobody wore warm enough socks — only because after a certain point, warm enough simply doesn’t exist.

Enjoyed: hot dogs and coffee, the giant manipulable robot, Billy Joel and “Thriller” in the Dance Shanty, ice bikes on skates and skis, cold letterpressing with the MCBA, and watching all of the basketball players fall, at some point.

I have no idea who the girls, pictured above, are; but we had a pretty excellent time together in the twirling shanty until we all wanted to hurl. Earlier, Will was holding someone’s child on his shoulders so she could reach the robot’s arms. People passed out tweeted newspapers in the dance party, passed donuts to the artists in the letterpress house. “Would you like your naughty fortune read?” someone asked me. “Would you like to know how we built this?”

“Yes!” I replied, over and over.

What is it about the unbearable cold, that makes us all so eager to connect with one another, strangers?

From my first gig after graduating from Salt, Brian and Wilson’s wedding in Cambridge: perhaps this asks the question, “do you really want a documentary-style photographer shooting your wedding?” This is still one of my favorite images from that day.

But lest you get the wrong idea of how the day generally went — that’s not good documentary! — here is this picture, also.

Did I cry at this wedding? Of course, always.

What a strange, lovely thing we do, promising something as elusive as feelings, guaranteeing something as uncertain as the future. The potential for my own marriage has always alarmed the hell out of me, but weddings make it look so . . . natural. If you can love and give yourself to someone, you should. Just be there, take his hand. We create rituals for this kind of thing, so that you know what to do. We grant symbolism to the shape and materials of jewelry (forever, forever), to the weather that day (good luck, bad luck), to the color of your outfit (purity, beginnings). Everything means something today, if you want it to; everything can predict something else.

And everyone else you love is here too — like the circles we would form backstage in high school before opening night, chanting I will hold you up.

Obviously I was going to take pictures backstage at The Slutcracker when I visited Boston. I emailed the director — aka, my friend, my mentor, my former troupe leader — as soon as we realized I’d be in town during the show’s run, she asked me when I wanted to be there, I showed up, and at one point I was on someone’s shoulders while everyone cheered.

I knew almost the entire cast. I had been on a stage with them before, I had been naked with them and ripped adhesive off my chest with them and made out with them and mock-humped them with a sock stuffed down my booty shorts. And usually, I’d also had my camera with me. It was just part of my hand, part of my face, a given.

When I saw that the troupe I’ve performed with just a couple of times in Minneapolis was also doing a subversive “Nutcracker” — at the Ritz, one of my favorite theaters, and collaborating with Ballet of the Dolls, one of my favorite dance companies who have a long history of beautiful, eerie (occasionally to the point of being Lynchian) and often hilarious shows — I contacted that troupe leader too. “Hey! Shooting backstage is kind of my jam. Want me around?”

They were cool with that. I rejoiced. I packed my things, I showed up.

And then, faced with the dressing room of the Dolls, I broke into a sweat.

I don’t really know any of these people, I realized. Not just that this was socially stressful, but from a practical standpoint: I don’t know who the camera whore is, who prefers privacy, who is more selective with their personal space, who might be annoyed by my mere existence in the room. And I deeply admire all of them. They’re professionals! Oh god, I was going to have to act professional.

I would announce my presence, start from a distance. I use a wide angle lens, so these photos were mostly useless, they were just warming me up, normalizing that shutter sound echoing in the room. Hihihihihi.

Okay, I’d breathe in, act casual, get closer. Now closer again. They’d look up at me, smile, or not, they had things to do. God, they were so awesome! What if this was obnoxious? What if I was in someone’s way? What if this wasn’t professional? I bumped my butt into makeup trays, broke a chair. Closer.

Full album: here.

From a portraiture class at the MPLS Photo Center; most of mine came out pretty goofy, but I did kind of love this one. Afterwards we opened a window, threw off our shoes, and crawled onto the roof.

“Look like you’re about to jump off,” this one commanded the other student; a man maybe ten, fifteen years her senior. He eyed her nervously, then ran to the edge.

“Jesus,” I said.

It’s always hard, at first, going into a foreign situation with a camera. You want everyone to be comfortable with your presence there, which involves some self-explanation or announcement and at least the illusion of your own comfort — but you also want to be invisible.

I’m always worried about weirding people out. Hi! I just recorded that! Like two inches from your face! This will go on the internet!

There’s a tenderness in recording anything, in defining it as a memory, claiming it to keep. And there’s a kind of devotion in selecting and editing that recording afterwards: bringing the light up on your face, adding some blue where tungsten became too yellow, removing saturation. I don’t know. Is that actually kind of creepy?

Each time I take your picture, I’m really asking you: “hey so is it okay, if I love you for a while? Just like this.” And there’s this moment when you could say no — but never seem to.

And hours later I pack up and go home, my chest expanding yeses.

Full album: from The Haunted Basement here.

There was a moment, when I was standing in the flickering green light in front of one of the coffins (someone trapped inside), that I turned my head a certain way, and peered out from the eyeslits in my giant pig mask, and I was overcome with not so much déjà vu as pure memory: I had dreamt this, I thought, just maybe six months before.

I had woken up from the dream thinking “where could that have taken place? What was I doing, standing in front of that coffin, why couldn’t I see quite right?” but what had really stuck with me was how the dream had ended. Something was happening outside of the basement, something awful that I had no power to stop while I stood in front of that coffin, and I would not find out what that was until all of this was over.

Slideshow of full album: here.

When I moved home to Minneapolis, one of my best friends was about to leave.

“I got accepted!” she said one day. “Grad school, getting my masters in teaching for special needs. California. Then maybe I’ll move back to Israel.”

“. . . Yay!” we chorused. “That’s so . . . great, for you.”

Last week I found out she was visiting. In a couple of days, were we free Saturday? Did we want to meet at the State Fair, or afterwards?

“I HOPE YOU LIKE THE HAUNTED HOUSE,” I wrote back. “AND ALSO BABY ALPACAS.”

Adelia and I planned on meeting up with her around 2, and just staying a couple of hours. On our shuttle ride from the parking lot she told me about her own graduate school work: a paper she was writing about Walter Benjamin. “Basically the modern city and society is our downfall,” she said, as the bus warbled around another curve. I gripped the seat in front of us and focused on non-barfing exhales. “We have too much demanding our attention, just walking down the street: so many strangers we approach and pass, red lights, stop signs. We are constantly on alert for our own survival. And with the loss of craftsmanship, we lose the habit of telling stories. We no longer have the luxury to daydream.”

“Sooo, he wrote this in the ’20s?”

We stepped off the bus and into the masses.

It took us a few hours just to meet up with Jamie, due to the cellphone service/textsuck black hole that generally surrounds any area containing cows. We stoically watched a greyhound adoption presentation, twice, and remained unconvinced. I was attempting a gluten-free diet as of a few weeks prior, and I pulled out a list of the booths that would serve me. “Too bad everything’s deep fried here, even the fruit,” I said. We decided to get out of the Pet Center and meet Megan by the entrance. “I need coffee,” Adelia said, “and some breakfast, and a different eyeglass prescription, and a lot less ragweed, and fewer people around me, and where’s Jamie, and agh agh agh.”

Things weren’t looking up. “Meet me by the hammocks,” Jamie’s text bleeped.

It’s funny how mood, and with it, reality, can change in the span of twenty minutes. We got coffee. We swung on the hammocks, hiding within their billowing cotton like toddlers in a clothesline and pointing at the stuffed parrots overhead, until politely commanded off. We could see Jamie, but she couldn’t see us. “Tee hee,” we said. “There you are!” she cried. “Hooray!”

“Hooray!” we said.

And we stayed another four hours, creeping through the haunted house, gnawing cupcakes (they’re better with gluten, guys), patting animals on the head, taking ghost pepper challenges and screaming through the sky on the flying chairs. Because that’s the way we roll.

The next day, she was halfway across the continent again.

Full album: here.

We’re pretty scattered, as family goes: Minnesota, Arkansas, Nebraska, Ontario, Japan, sometimes Australia. So a couple of years ago we had a cousin reunion in Wisconsin over July 4th. It was so great we figured we’d do it again. Explosives! Spiked cheese dip! Little Rock!

Full album: here.

Then we came back to Minneapolis and went to a creepy antique store/barn off the highway and Janaka got a creepy bunny mask and we took some creepy bunny pictures in Tiny Tim’s cemetery.

Full album: here.