I’m done with landscapes. Who needs ‘em? All that natural beauty and soul-rending scenery is for chumps. I wanna take pictures of nondescript buildings in the dog days of summer. So I did.

Being a runner and a photographer is a real struggle in time management. The times of day with the most alluring light are also the ones with the greatest protection from my primary enemy, the sun1. And since I lose my battle with my other enemy (my alarm clock) on the regular, I often give up the evening golden hour to get my run in. That leaves me with all the other hours.

In my quest to take more new photos rather than just dig through my archives for content between trips, I’ve been taking my camera with me whenever I leave the house now2. Both of the shots I’m showing off from this week were taken during midday, which doesn’t produce the soft romantic light that the morning and evenings do—and which you can see from the archive photo this week—but does give you a lot of strong shadows to play with.

The through-line on this week’s photos isn’t just buildings. It’s that they all have the shades drawn. The buildings are locked up; they’re fortified against the sun3. No one around here is letting their guard down until the sunlight streaming in through the windows is something other than an increase in the power bill and a reminder of how miserable it is outside.

Photos

Photo 1

If I had to give just a single example of my photography style, this might be the image to do it. The subject is off-center, it’s not particularly remarkable, and there are a lot of strong lines to capture your interest. The form is more the subject of the photo than the actual subject itself.

I went up to get lunch nearby and parked further away than I usually do, but when I got out of the car, I was looking essentially straight at this, and knew I wanted to capture it. It was really that simple. I didn’t do much editing and only did cropped what was necessary to straighten the lines.

I tried to communicate the misery of the midday sun through the strength of the shadows contrasted with the brightness of everything else. The sunlight here during the say in the summer is so strong that everything gets whitewashed, at least to my eyes. Colors can’t pop because the sun just washes them all out. It gives things an almost dreamy feeling and I hate it.

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Photo 2

Is it really possible to see Christmas lights and not smile just a little bit? This house is wearing its favorite necklace even though it doesn’t go with its outfit and is woefully out of season. It’s defiant in its insistence on donning the little plastic bulbs. I loved it.

The cinderblock adds something to this photo that I can’t describe. I probably would have taken the shot even if it hadn’t been there, but the cinderblock sealed the deal. It’s right on the edge of the shade, and I can almost feel it sighing with reluctance, knowing that things are about to get a whole lot worse for the next five or six hours.

I decided on a small crop with this one after getting it straight, but again, minimal editing. I never feel like I have to do too much with shots like these. They are what they are.

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Photo 3

This shot is from the archives. I took it during Covid when all we had to do was walk around the neighborhood and avoid everyone else doing the same thing. This one was taken during sunset.

The tree and the flowers and the worn edges of all of the trim on the house held visual interest for me separately, but together, there was so much texture to play with that it was almost a challenge to figure out how to create a frame that wasn’t overwhelming to the eye. The colors of almost everything are so soft and similar in the greens and tans and browns that the orange of the flowers really have a chance to stand out and be noticed.

I think the crop helped focus the eye here, but I think I could have also done a short, wide crop and had a good image too. The light was so dramatic that I really warmed up the raw photo to reflect, if not what was entirely literally happening in front of my camera that day, at least what I felt when I took the picture. Warm, relaxed, at peace.

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Links

1. ‘The worst decision you can make’ from Meduza

In the summer of 2023, an unlikely trend began dominating TikTok feeds in Nepal: dozens of videos showed Nepali men bragging about having joined the Russian army. According to these foreign fighters, the service conditions were comfortable, the work was safe, and the salaries were higher than anything on offer back in Nepal. To many young Nepali men sitting at home, moving to Russia seemed like a no-brainer; all they had to do was take out a loan to pay a middleman for a visa and a plane ticket. What they didn’t realize was that they were only seeing footage from training centers, where Nepali recruits spend a few weeks at most before being sent into the line of fire.

A series of exceptionally sad stories coming out of an exceptionally sad war.

2. The Grove is closed, and Ole Miss football is open for business by Spencer Hall

That Ole Miss is the dad to my left who so badly wanted to tell his son that they were going to win. He was the one who looked at me with a 27-24 lead and two seconds on the clock and said, “THERE ARE STILL TWO SECONDS TO SCREW THIS UP.” That Ole Miss is the one who flipped out like a toddler when LSU’s last run ended, screaming around high off of the most powerful drug of all: survival.

I love when I have a link to a piece and cannot decide on one single quote to pull to try and pitch it to y’all. This was one of those pieces.

A friend on Bluesky sent this to me and I read it and immediately fell in love with it. It’s especially prescient now that we’re about a week away from the first Ole Miss football game of the 2024 season, which is the first season in a while where we have had stakes. We’ve gotten all the fun of the build and now we have to pay the piper and live through and up to expectations.

I started writing a whole lot more just now and then deleted it because I think I’ve nailed my topic for Monday’s newsletter. I’m sorry for two college football Mondays in a row4, but it’s about that time of year. Read this piece, though, even if you don’t want to read mine next week.

3. Paris Olympic Photos from Geoff Lowe

It takes so much talent and creativity to make the jump from simple photography to creating art, but these photos are definitely art. Incredible.