I know I’ve been on “silent running” for the past few months-  as you might remember, I mentioned I would be “pressing pause” on my Life is Art correspondence this year as I was shuffling around some new commercial work responsibilities, but have recently shuffled them back, and what better day to reconnect!?

To catch you all up, here are a number of things that have happened or are currently happening now:

1. I finished work on a photo series entitled “What Remains”, from my time shooting an abandoned resort on the island of Kauai, that I’ve been working on and off ever since I shot it in 2019. I’ve shared some of these photos in the past few years, full colour versions and then a number of B&W conversions. What I’ve settled on as “definitive” versions for this series are photos reworked with a usage of selective colour, done in a thorough process with intentionality to emphasize the colour that best tells the story in that image. (I also like how that gives the title an additional meaning).  What I will do with this series or how I will present it remains to be seen. I am exploring some options.  In the meantime…

2. … I am creating a new gallery on my website for my Abandoned images.  A few of these are from the aforementioned What Remains series.  I already have a large photo gallery of my abandoned places photography you can see on my website, but so far these have been unavailable in the print store.  Generally, most of these images of derelict buildings don’t seem visually desirable in the traditional sense to want them up on a wall, visually striking though they may be.  But not only are some of these newer ones appealing enough, trying to capture the poetry of these kinds of places will be something I will continue to focus on, as it’s a subject that combines so much of what I love to do, so look for more of this in the future!

3.  Speaking of photographing abandoned places, I will be doing a trek to do a shoot at an old ghost town near Whistler, BC this month- I’ll let you know how it goes!

4.   Work on Part Two of my Ghosts of Forest Future series will resume shortly!   After some creative problem-solving, I now have the materials I need to repair and restore my robot bear photo model/sculpture, and will begin documenting the process.  Hopefully I will be able to share a video of this on my Youtube channel (something else I plan to do more of).  My goal is to shoot a whole other series, more varied this time around,  taking much more time to shoot in various locations.  I have some new surroundings in mind, so I just need to get the restoration work done and hopefully begin shooting in later September.

I do have more I could share, but I don’t want to write a book here.  That will come later.

Thanks so much for being a part of Life is Art,

-James