A couple of weeks ago I drove my sinus infection ten hours to St. Louis to photograph a story. I was scared and sick and tired and alone for much of the time, and shit was so beautiful it was borderline spiritual.

Something about watching all that prairie roll by. Something about whatever I wanted on the radio, the sun setting against rows of swaying turbines; something about the gnawing fears I had about my abilities and basic safety, and something about the fact I was doing it all anyway. When there was an abandoned house I wanted to check out off the highway, I pulled over, got out of the car and stood in the warm breeze. My shuffle picked up “Sweet Jane,” and I repeated it over and over, screaming along as I sailed down that empty road.

Some people, they like to go out dancing —
And other peoples, they have to work — just watch me now!
And there’s even some evil mothers . . . well they’re gonna tell you that
Everything is just dirt;
Y’know that, women, never really faint,
And that villains always blink their eyes, woo!
And that, y’know, children are the only ones who blush!
And that, life is just to diiiiie!

I was still sick — probably sicker, when I was done shooting the story — a long day ducking between sculptures and glass, a late night in rain and floodlights. But I was also thrilled with how it had gone, and a mere four hours from Kansas City. “Still want me to visit?” I texted Dennis. Yeah he did. I bought another box of Kleenex, got in the car, turned the music up.

More bed portraits: here.

We had beginner’s luck at first, maybe. They hooked the strings to our kites at the festival setup booth. “What did you write on yours — what did you wish for?” they asked us. “I wished for more art,” Steve replied.

I smiled as she handed my kite back to me, and after taking too long to debate the answer in my head wound up saying nothing. It had a been a tough week. (Surrender, I had written, but I meant something more than that. Open acceptance, but I’m not even sure what that could mean; to be honest I was in a hurry and tired of feeling so vulnerable and easily-read lately, for now I just wanted to get something into the sky. And kittens, I had added, an attempt to take the whole thing less seriously.) We stepped into the grass, holding the bright blue paper over our heads, and just like that — the wind took them.

We stepped backward, started to run. The string quickly unwinding from its spindle, our bright papers getting smaller, farther away. Each shift, each current a gentle pull, a lift from above. We were euphoric, uncontrollably grinning now, running backwards and lifting our arms to go higher. Maybe it would be like floating, I thought. Maybe if I could just fill my chest with enough air, I would rise to the surface.

More: Steve’s wish, going up up up, some tangled strings, and joy in black and white.

For our latest “Finding Your Voice as a Photographer” class, we were instructed to bring in five portraits with a repeated setting. We looked at Richard Avedon’s pure white backdrops (this was on a friend’s wall growing up; experimenting with stolen alcohol from her parents’ cabinet, we’d smoosh a line of tape into her carpet leading straight to this man’s stoic gaze and I’d think “I wish that was mine, I wish I knew how to make that” — a thought I had again just Wednesday evening), Irving Penn’s tiny corner, and Rineke Djikstra’s awkward beaches. Then we were released into the world, bleary-eyed from eight hours in front of the projector screen. Go do something like this! See you Saturday!

The awesome thing about these sudden, intense assignments is that it forces you to get moving immediately. As our instructor described the assignment I was making a panicked list in my head of repeated backdrops I had easy access to; also, ideally, I wanted that access to be easy to whomever I was shooting, too, because I’d be contacting them tonight and asking if I could shoot them tomorrow and were they free for like fifteen minutes.

A field, I thought. A certain bridge. I’d go to a fabric store and buy a shitton of chiffon, I thought.

What the hell would you do with a shitton of chiffon?

Quit stifling me I’m just throwing ideas out there this is due in three days AAAGH!

What I wanted to do occurred to me as I was driving home, all dangerously distracted from the road. What room in everyone’s home makes me a little uncomfortable to enter? What room’s meaning transforms with age, from your parents’ vision of you to the very fiercely defended expression of your identity to the cluttered sterility of dormitories to a room that’s almost in disguise, meant to look like the rest of your home, but holding secrets — sexual preferences, arguments had, weapons in the closet, family planning in the drawer, sleep and its aggravated lacking, all those books you’re meaning to read if you weren’t so tired, all of those books you’re staying up reading? Where do you prefer to be unconscious?

I asked some friends (also, Grandma!) if they’d let me stop by and take their portrait — wearing their everyday clothes, on top of the covers — in their beds. I was pretty excited when they said yes.

“Are you okay with me standing on your bed? Awesome. Now maybe, show me a weird way you woke up one time.”

It’s been the most fun assignment so far. Can I take your bed portrait?

Slideshow of all bed portraits here.

I turned 29 on Friday. “Ooooh!” my friend Macon said, “so that means you’re in your Saturn return!”

“That is not a thing,” I replied. “I mean, I am going through all of that for entirely Earth-based reasons. Hey, we planning a trip to Vietnam or what?”

(Larger.)

“Is there any way we could make this shoot useful to you?” I asked Joanna, another one of my super helpful friends willing to play guinea pig.

“I guess it’d be useful if I came away with a headshot? That could be cool.”

“Sure! Let’s try it.”

“Uh hey, what’s this weird cow sculpture thing?”

“Oh, that? Yeah. Just — dude! I just successfully unplugged a light! And neither of us is dead! . . . Right?”

More photos: here.

A couple of months ago, my friend Kristen found out that a new organization was acquiring the women’s health center where she so passionately worked. A lot of questions, sadness, and tumultuousness crept into the following weeks for many of the employees at Midwest: a tight-knit group who until then had joked with one another over their IUDs and braved the daily protestor, were suddenly required to keep things they’d learned about each other’s futures confidential.

On Monday, the new organization took over, and Kristen lost her job. As they carried their things out, new workers carried boxes in.

More photos: here.

Last week my dad emailed me a heads-up: he was going to set up a seamless backdrop and a couple of studio lights in a spare room at my stepmom’s office for a few days, did I want to experiment with using that? I immediately emailed pretty much all of my friends in Minneapolis.

Are you free? I have no idea what I’m doing! Can I use your face?

Surprisingly, I got a few takers.

Sarah and Adam were awesome in so many ways. First of all, they didn’t make any snide remarks about the fact that I am actually afraid of the lights (dude that electricity is intense) and at one point heaved a light behind the backdrop rather than unplug it. Second of all, they came with all kinds of ideas about costumes and alternate personalities they could take on during the shoot, which is just ridiculously fun and also kind of what I’m all about. Third, they are attractive people and difficult to make look bad.

“I brought an umbrella as a fun challenge for you!” Sarah announced. “Also can we do a Freaks and Geeks style yearbook photo?” (This may become a series: more on that by the end of the week.)

Full album: here.

Below: Sarah as rich and surly teenager, Adam as trustworthy businessman.

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. Resented as future trash, just another thing to keep track of until then. 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 with my prints. 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, cutting edge!) second semester of my Freshman year in college, and it was around then I started getting interested in photography as a thing I wanted to get better at: being able to see the result immediately was huge in figuring out what worked, and instant gratification has a way of becoming addictive. Since then I’ve gone through a few desk top computers, a few external hard drives. In the processes a lot of those early digital 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. Why not right?

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?

We were not prepared for the brute force of Niagara Falls. The wet wind, coming at us from all angles, billowing our flimsy blue ponchos from the ground up. The boat, heaving and churning in the cold, a cockroach dogpaddling its way toward a vomiting giant. We weren’t getting closer, were we? We were. Hold on to the railings, folks. The water’s about to get real choppy. I squealed and clung to your soggy arm; you squinted and peered into the mist, as buckets of water were thrown against our legs, my cowboy boots overflowing Niagara, the hood on your coat overflowing Niagara, we were happy.

Documentation (Larger)

The Approach (Larger)