Alter Ego

Todd Edelman sends me the best links. Today, I finally caught up with a link he sent a while back, the Denver Post's Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943. Check out these resonant dust bowl imagery from the Library of Congress. This one, my alter ego. Thanks, Todd.

Apples to Onions

Guess which apple and which onion came from my CSA share.

Hint number one: It's fun to get a gob of random produce every week in our CSA bag. No matter what surprise awaits us, it will be in season and small "D" delicious. This year's crop of Gravensteins is just starting. The crunchiest, tartest apple on the plate.

Second hint: One of the (capital "D" delicious) apples came from the Fillmore. At the end of a show there the other night, we showed our teenager the basket Bill Graham always filled with free apples for any hungry hippie to have something to eat. Happily, they still give them out to house audiences. Love the 1960s tradition, but does anyone know the Fillmore's produce buyer these days? Let's get them to buy fresh buy local!

Third hint: The small onions are also crunchier and sweeter than the big kahuna onion.

The Shirt On My Back

People ask, "What's your most important piece of equipment?"

Of course, there's the fave lens, fave remote, fave whatnot. But during the summer, one of the most important things in my bag is a flimsy, white cowboy shirt. It's the longest lasting sunscreen, mighty delicious air-co on a hot day after I drench it with water, and when it gets too stinky, it's easy to wash and quick to dry. Plus, it weighs nothing. I always travel with three. Without them, I'm an overheated, burned gringa. No good at'all for shooting pics.

This morning, I started packing for my next photo junket to the Four Corners area.  Yeah, it's three weeks away, but I saw my white shirts in the closet and got inspired. Pulled 'em out, rolled 'em up, I'm ready to go.

Low Tide

Low tide. My favorite to shoot.

International Museum of Women ~ Please vote ~

Dear Peeps: Please visit the Economica show online at International Museum of Women and "recommend" my pictures of diverse women who grow food around the USA. Merci!

Economica ~ Picturing Power and Potential

 
Here I am at the Economica: Picturing Power and Potential opening with one of my subjects, Lady Shanju, originally shot for the SF Victory Garden project. Thank you San Francisco Arts Commission and International Museum of Women for providing the space and sponsorship.

Fab group show.  Go see. SF City Hall, lower level. Through September 4, 2010.

The Folks I Get to Meet

While scouting a Silicon Valley location this week, my tour guide insisted I meet one of the company gurus, Jim Williams. His desk is not full of "junk," thank you. He simply has a big resource pile. OK, a couple big resource piles.

Watermelon (without) Sugar: A Recipe

In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.
-Richard Brautigan, "In Watermelon Sugar"

My family hates when I use the sink as a veggie scrap holding tank. I admit, it doesn't bother me at all; the stuff eventually makes it to the compost bucket.

Here's a particularly happy sink clog before I moved it all to the pail.

A fine and messy recipe:
Watermelon chunks ~ blend, then strain
Lime juice, to taste
Crushed ice, recommended
Sugar, not necessary
Mint sprigs, optional

Olivia

Yesterday's shoot with the fabo young Olivia Lee, aspiring actress. "She's gonna be big," says we.
Boundless gratitude to Chris McDonald makeup and assistant Stefanie Renee. You guys are the bomba.

Selected for ASMP Best of 2010

I'm thrilled that my work made it into American Society of Media Photographer's Best of 2010 show. Thanks for the honor, ASMP, and thanks for all you do for us media photogs. Here's what I wrote:

A year ago, my friend Amy Franceschini asked me to shoot some West Coast farms for a book about sustainable agriculture around the United States. Yes, definitely, this is my passion, but I had one request. I wanted to shoot all the farms, across the country. Happily, she gave me the green light and I had my dream project. No need to mention the insane deadline, I was thrilled.

I pieced together a jigsaw puzzle of sixteen farms and 13,000 miles of connecting roads, mapping a big loop around the continental United States. I fit harvest schedules into my own furious timeline, and somehow it worked. I was one happy camper. Literally.

I camped on the banks of a coyote-howlin’ Colorado irrigation ditch, in a candlelit yurt on the side of an Appalachian herb garden, on the dusty floor of a Bakersfield farm workers’ dormitory, and beside a roaring freeway outside Chicago. The miles were fluid, the farmers amazing, the deadline met.

This image is from Joel Greeno’s organic dairy in Kendall, Wisconsin, the last farm on my loop. I followed him up into the haymow, lurching with my tripod over bales of fresh alfalfa. When I saw the cathedral ceiling of the old barn and the way the slats and knotholes filtered light into the dusty air, I clicked for the joy of it. When we were done, I loaded the car, stopped in town, bought a purple Western shirt with pink pearl snap buttons, and drove North.

People Who Volunteer to Dig in the Dirt

Sneak peak. More to come.

How to Make (Soup) Stock Video

Thanks, Melinda Stone for showing "Stock" to the How-to-Homestead crowd at Southern Exposure Gallery.

To save me from the dizzy method of clenching the Flip in my mouth while slicing vegetables, I called on my pal Josie Iselin to shoot some of the footage.

In case you missed the world premiere, here it is. Go ahead, slurp it up.

Farm Together Now: Spring Letter from Joe at Mountain Garden

Joe Hollis walking through his wasabi patch, high on an Appalachian mountain in Burnsville, North Carolina

Hi Anne,

I'm glad to hear from you. Daniel has alerted me to the book's progress, and I am very much looking forward to seeing it. I looked through the new website and noticed the back-to-back 'gorgeous book' comments. I love the photos you sent of me and Steve and am eager to see what else you've chosen.
There is quite a lot going on here, very productive year so far. Six apprentices plus usually a WWOOFer or two. Best group of apprentices ever. We've got a large food garden planted and moving along with Chinese herb and native wildfood projects. The big excitement at the moment is wasabi: after about 20 years, starting with one plant, I now have about fifty large flowering specimens and a thousand seedlings, and I'm about to launch a wasabi industry in the area. The greenhouses, coldframes and many spots in garden are filled with a beautiful violet-magenta mustard from China which I randomly acquired years ago. The flowers are big and bright and tasty, as are the greens; and this year I'm trying to grow a really big crop of seeds. I think this plant will be in every seed catalog in five years. The apprentices have about finished a new Steve dome, and one is set to move in - he's a mushroom man, so we're growing mushrooms of many kinds all over the place.
This is looking like the year in which many projects which I've been working on for 15-20 years are coming to bearing fruit, and the book will be a big part of the overall Mountain Gardens project coming to fruition.
And it has been the best spring in my memory for the plants: some close shaves, but no killing freezes. Plants I established 25 years ago are going to bear fruit for the first time. I'll write about all this and attach pictures for your blog (and mine) as soon as the spring rush subsides.

Joe

Farm Together Now: Bonsai's Tree

The view from atop Bonsai's evergreen, and my view of him under the plum, for the Farm Together Now book.
It was the middle of the hottest day of the century. Not having the luxury of golden afternoon light, I was chasing my minuscule noon shadow around the garden at Tryon Life Community, a rural oasis in the middle of Portland, Oregon. Bonsai Matt, a resident at the intentional community, came to my rescue while I was shimmying up the tallest tree to get an establishing shot of the landscape. When my courage came to its end, I handed my 5D off to him and he scampered on up.  He sent this note after I told him the news that one of his high angle images got into the book with credit given. wonnnnnnderfulll anne.... thanxomuch for the love and the sweet sweet images... i'm so glad that the picture from the tree will be in there! great work and please, for the love of the children and their children's children's children, keep up your good work...thanks again and much love to you and the gang ~ bonsai!

Farm Together Now: The Sell Sheet

This just in. The book's getting more and more real.

Curiosity is What We Share

Yesterday, my assistant Garry and I were shooting a tricked out, all electric Mini Cooper developed at the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Davis for Sierra Magazine.

We were working in a tucked away corner of the university's arboretum, near one of the biggest collection of oaks in the world. We were just wrapping up, when a curious fellow photographer stopped by to look at our 10 foot scrim. I persuaded him to stick around while we gathered our subjects' model releases and said our goodbyes. Then I nabbed this portrait of him with his homemade portable studio rig.

Allan Jones, our new friend here, takes close ups of specimens from the arboretum's oak trees when they blossom once a year. He's adapted a cardboard box to capture these flowering samples bathed in gorgeous scrimmed and bounced sunlight. My kind o' light.

Here's to curious, crazy shooters. Big, small, cardboard, aluminum. We love our gear, we love our light.

Hunter Joerger Teaches Me A Thing or Two

This year I mentored a student at my son's high school, Mr. Hunter Joerger, while he created his senior signature project.

In the project, Hunter illustrated his neuroscience research about the connection between brain growth and the development of identity with photographic portraits of young children. This week all the graduating seniors celebrated with a school wide party and display of their projects. Hunter's wall of photos rocked the audience. Compassionate, clear, and sensitive, his exhibition was sophisticated and riveting.

Here's my favorite quote from Hunter's paper:
"Photography can be used to examine the root of perception of identity because it can be analyzed both analytically and viscerally. And it is at the connection between the analytical and visceral that the importance of identity and the ability to perceive it can be understood."

Yes, Hunter's paper taught me how the superior colliculi and thalmus collect and pass visual information and non-verbal awareness on to other parts of the brain. But Hunter himself taught me a thing or two about being an educator. Like how much more important it is to listen than talk. That it's far wiser to be patient than insistent. And that there is great benefit in allowing a flower to bloom, rather than tear the petals apart in search of color. A project develops much as the brain itself does. One lives. One learns.

Thanks for the lessons, Hunter. =]

And bravo! Toss your hat into the ring of experts. You da bomb.

Freewheelin' Farm delivering in the City

Yesterday was Freewheelin' Farm's first San Francisco CSA delivery and the strawberries for the record, were scarlet, not red.

Here's beloved Amy helping Anya, a giddy new customer, select her treats for the week.

Heh, San Fran-ola! Sign yourself up here and pick your own bag of treats out at Garden for the Environment, corner of 7th and Lawton. Easy peasy.

Memorial Day: Love, Serve, Remember

Remember what? To love, serve and remember.

Farm Together Now: Strawberry Time Again at Freewheelin' Farm

It was a year ago I started the Farm Together Now project and circle, circle back around... just turned in the final images to our fabulous designer Brian Scott. Time to celebrate!

It's full-on strawberry season, so I got me a case of organic red juiciness from the Swanton Berry Farm and am gorging myself and goading my family to eat more, more, more with a drippy smile on my face.

Swanton Berry Farm is a story unto themselves. They strive for the complete sustainable package, providing a living wage and health insurance for the farmworkers of their profitable, chemical-free berry business. They have a union contract with their workers, a roadside farm store that houses a museum on the history of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, a successful U-Pick and wholesale operation, topped by a killer view of the vast Pacific Ocean. Check them out on Highway One, south of Pescadero.

One of my favorite local farms is featured in Farm Together Now: Freewheelin' Farm down Swanton Road - Santa Cruz way. I met Amy Courtney back a few years at my first Ecological Farming Associaton conference. Her tiny acre of ocean side heaven was a stop on that year's farm tour.

At that time, she ran the operation by herself mostly, without a tractor, on land loaned by Jim Cochran, (sustainable agriculture hero and owner of Swanton Berry Farm) and delivered her farm fresh deliciousness by bicycle into Santa Cruz.

Now, Amy has two partners, Kirstin Yogg and Darryl Wong and they've added a tractor or two, 8+ acres in production, and a brand new CSA in San Francisco. Heads up San Francisco! Starting June 1... next week... they'll be delivering to your house by bike, or dropping off the goods at Garden for the Environment on 7th and Lawton for you to pick up. Sign up now. You'll love these berries!

Freewheelin' posted a gob of the photos I shot on their farm. Check them out.

Read my older post about Freewheelin' Farm's annual fundraiser art party here.

Strawberries + bikes + documentary photography + public art. Ain't nothin' finer in my field of dreams.