I took this on Route 495 in Massachusetts a few days ago: 2-second exposure at dusk, the camera hand-held on the dashboard.
Jon Krakauer’s latest book, Where Men Win Glory, is currently number 10 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and has been on the list for six weeks now. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend doing so. I have a review of the book up on The Faster Times website. The first two paragraphs of the piece are excerpted below.
Chinook helicopter over Afghanistan. Photo used with permission.
Jon Krakauer’s latest book, “Where Men Win Glory,” folds two epic stories into one volume: it is both a biography of Pat Tillman, the NFL-star turned soldier who was accidentally killed by his own platoon in Afghanistan in 2004, and a history of Afghanistan beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, charting the horrifying Soviet presence there, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the ongoing U.S. war. The Army tried to cover up Tillman’s death and the Bush administration tried to profit from it politically. It is a large, damning book that takes aim at those who would manipulate the truth.
While Tillman’s life is the thread that holds the book together and his story is expertly told, I was most fascinated by the broader context in which it is set. Especially gripping is Krakauer’s telling of the chain of events preceding the September 11 attacks. Take, for example, Krakauer’s description of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center: “The bomb had been assembled, delivered, and detonated by a Kuwati named Ramzi Yousef…Yousef had learned the art of making bombs from a manual written by the CIA for the mujahideen to use in their struggle against the Soviets.” While anyone who has seen “Charlie Wilson’s War” is familiar with the idea of blowback, it’s still devastating when such connections are made as clearly as they are here.
I’ve loved Brazilian graffiti since I began photographing it in Sao Paulo in August of 2008. That project culminated in a slideshow for the Travel Channel’s website World Hum, but my passion for photographing it hasn’t abated. When I read in The New York Times that two famous Brazilian graffiti artists, Os Gêmios, had painted a mural in downtown New York City, I got on the subway and decided to check it out, and photograph it, for myself. (The accompanying slideshow to the Times story, by Justin Maxon, inspired me to take some of my own photographs.)
In photographing it, I tried to capture not just the beauty and colors of the mural on a large scale, but also the smaller, more intimate scenes depicted. I also wanted to photograph how people interacted with it: seemingly ignoring it as they walked past, or studying it closely.
And finally, the last photograph in the above slideshow comes from the subway nearby. As I was walking down the steps after photographing the mural, I took a photo of the interesting character standing at the entrance– I like that behind him is blue and white New York City-style graffiti, splashed on the wall in the background.
