Genres: short

  • Sightings

    During my childhood I spent countless hours daydreaming. Often about boarding an alien spacecraft where they would ask me about life on Earth. I would enthusiastically tell them my thoughts and observations about this or that, which the space aliens always seemed to find interesting. In retrospect I was engaging in a transference of my frustration that no one on this planet seemed particularly interested in my opinions. At that time, I was a voracious reader of science fiction novels, in particular Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov. After watching Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” I was certain…

  • Shadows from Magnets

    I not only want to locate my place, but I also want to discover where my place is in that place. I desire to experience the illuminated moment, moments which for me can only be perceived when one calms the memory to pierce the shadows and to lift a veil. The story for me is in how light contrasts the absence of light in shaping forms within a given frame of time and space. The presence of shadows for instance on a landscape is largely determined by three factors: wind speed, the distance of the clouds from a particular location…

  • Fire & Water

    For many years I lived near the village of Volcano, Hawai’i in a native Ohia rainforest. My house was about ten kilometers from the entrance to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park so I would go there whenever I could. Here was a place that displayed the essential forces of earth, air, fire and water, the very elements that form our existence. This had quite a profound impact on me, especially when new land suddenly appeared when only moments before it did not exist. Once the new land was established, birds, insects and seeds would establish themselves beginning with Hapuu ferns (a…

  • Air & Earth

    There are certain places that sustain me. Places where the elements of nature are so evocatively displayed, that my desire to return and experience them again never loses its hold. The Big Island of Hawaii is 20 degrees latitude north of the equator giving it a climate with a narrow range of temperatures along with continuous prevailing winds. Above 30 degrees latitude north and 30 degrees latitude south of the equator cold air from the Arctic and cold air from Antarctica mingles vigorously with hot air from the tropics. It is largely this interaction of cold air from the poles…

  • Burning Farm House

    While driving down Highway 13 in Saskatchewan, Canada I noticed some unusual black smoke on the horizon which turned out to be an early 20th Century farmhouse. I quickly found an empty field nearby and positioned my camera for about an hour until the farmhouse merged into the prairie landscape.

  • The Birth of a Beautiful Butch

    “The Birth of a Beautiful Butch” is a story about Alex, a gay high school senior, caught between who she is and what she’s supposed to be. On the day of her school pictures, Alex feels struck with an appearance that doesn’t fit right with her body. When she retreats into her mind, she is able to imagine the person she wants to be. Ultimately, she transcends the judgement of others through fashion in an authentic expression of herself.

  • What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada del Muerto

    Visitors and residents of the Tularosa Basin, site of the first detonation of an atomic bomb, contribute to the production of public memory as they offer philosophical reckonings, logistical advice, and plaintive texts after making “the journey of the dead.” Between 1945 and 1992, the United States federal government exposed people to the radioactive fallout from over 200+ detonations of above-ground nuclear weapons. Made in remembrance of the 75th anniversary of the detonation of nuclear weapons in the US and Japan and the 340th anniversary of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, which forced Spanish colonizers out of New Mexico and returned…

  • Atomkraftwerk Zwentendorf

    Forty years ago Austrians voted against opening a nuclear power plant that had already been built. Atomkraftwerk Zwentendorf is a monument to the power of public protest and the potential of a democratic vote. After catastrophic flooding across Europe, Hope Tucker visited the nuclear power plant outside of Vienna that would have been powered by the same model reactor as Fukushima. Atomkraftwerk Zwentendorf has an edit structure based on the chain of action in a boiling water reactor power plant and the path of protest that kept this plant from opening. Sound design incorporates a recording of the Tohoku earthquake.

  • Handful of Dust

    Prussian blue can be used to render images and counteract radiation poisoning. This obituary is composed of sequences of cyanotypes, exposed in the sand using paper sensitized with handmade emulsion and negatives from a 1954 Hollywood film. Rates of cancer in the film’s cast and crew reflect that it was shot downwind during the period of above ground nuclear testing. Handful of Dust, produced in the Utah canyon where the 1954 film was shot, is designed as an antidote to recover the memory of the downwinders. IMAGE AR: 2.35:1 NOTE ON THE SOUND: The integrity of the original –a dirty…

  • The Sea [is still] Around Us

    Rachel Carson is dead, but the sea is still around us…This small lake is a sad reminder of what is taking place all over the land, from carelessness, shortsightedness, and arrogance. It is our pool of shame in this,’ our particular instant of time.’ E.B. White, 1964 A postcard usually enhances the reality. The contrast is more stark in Corinna, Maine, a former woolen mill town on the shores of Lake Sebasticook, where years of dumping industrial waste contaminated the water. In 1964, the author E.B. White mourned the death of fellow Mainer Rachel Carson and the altered ecology of…