Mining the archive and coming up with a mining story; a 2008 story shot for The New York Times on the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska. The proposal to build the mine is controversial and 14 years later, still ongoing. The mine contains large deposits of copper, gold, and molybdenum and is in the Bristol Bay region of Southwest Alaska,...

Maybe it was a 1990s thing, but I knew photographers who were quite literally crop-nazis, especially in the end days of film and darkrooms. Slicing off so much as a hair of your frame in the darkroom was a photographic sin. Anyone who worked as a documentary photography in the late 1980s and and 1990s was exposed to this - the more you...

Every photographer's dream assignment is the road-trip photoessay. They're lying if they say otherwise. Hop in a car, hit the road with a camera (and "your" writer), a beat up copy of Kerouac's "On the Road" (confession: I've never read) and search out the small town America of your imagination. I've only done a few such shoots, mostly in Asia, but in 2008 I hit the road with New York Times writer, and a neighbor here in Seattle, Bill...

Sometimes you get home, upload your images, and see an image that means you nailed the shoot. One such image below, the kind of image that goes straight into my portfolio. Photo is from a shoot for Crowley Marine who needed both beauty and working shots of their new tug the Athena. Shot with a Mavic drone near Tacoma, WA, I had about a minute over the vessel before high winds forced me to bring the drone home. Nailed it!

Honored to be interviewed Dan Milnor as part of his Shifter talks on photography. The longer interview is here.

Someone recently asked me how we used to get our film processed and out from war zones in places like Cambodia, and get it to New York or Paris for a deadline. I had to explain, we didn't process the film; back then Time Magazine had their own in-house photolab and all we had to did was get the film to them. That, of course, was often harder than finding an E6 lab in the Cambodian jungle.

This slide was shot on assignment for Time...

After a week of scanning in some old family photos I finally figured out why I may have become a photographer. The four scanned images below were all shot by my mom in 1966 using a medium format camera and slide film. These color photos of my older brother Chris could have been taken yesterday - the tones, colors and detail are stunning. All they needed was a proper scan and some TLC in Lightroom and Photoshop to come to life, which I did...

Recent work for Preservation Magazine, published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, on the Urban Grace church in downtown Tacoma, Washington. The history of the congregation that would become Urban Grace dates back 140 years and the church traces its lineage to the First Baptist Church (1883), founded on Pacific Avenue in what was then known as New Tacoma in the Washington Territory.

I had to go back to the church three...

"A rather unsatisfactory term's work, and I fear not 'O' level material". B.T.G.

This was my school report for "Art" in the summer of 1980 at King's College School in London. "O" levels are standardized exams in British secondary schools and apparently a life in the arts was not in my future. When I suggested to my art teacher that I enjoyed photography, I remember his retort:

"Photography isn't an art, Isett".

Yes...

I've never been much of a gear head (for the love of god, don't ask me why I've always used Nikon!) but I'm also smart enough to see the writing on the wall. The DLSR camera was always a stopgap between the worlds of film and full digital, so I finally made the leap to mirrorless cameras with new Nikon Z7ii.

Amazing cameras so far, however you're still not allowed to say, "Hey Stuart, your cameras take great pictures". No better way to...

New work for First Mode, building hydrogen powered engines right here in Seattle!

Nice write up on my book at VOA's website, translated from the regional Khmer article.

Always happy when works goes live! Always happy to be around airplanes. Images taken for McGee Air Services for a complete website redesign done by the awesome crew at Blackwing Creative here in Seattle. See more of the work here.

A recent interview with Siemny Kim of Kiro TV in Seattle about my collaboration with Silong Chhun for my book On the Corners of Argyle and Glenwood. I'm very grateful for yet another great opportunity to spread the word about the project..

A text message, right, I received earlier this month from some Cambodian American folks back in Chicago who saw my recent book, with my photographs of the Cambodian diaspora in Chicago in the early...

Nice write-up in the Tacoma Tribune, focusing on Tacoma native Silong Chhun who helped edit and contextualize the work in my new book "...

I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with Hello Chluy, aka Phanit Duong, a Cambodian American comic based in New York. Along with my collaborators Silong Chhun and Pete Pin we talked about my new book On the Corners of Argyle and Glenwood.

The Tiny Toones break dancing troupe was founded by Tuy Sobil, a.k.a. "KK", a 44 yr old Cambodian-American and former gang member from Long Beach, California who was deported from the United States in 2004. Working out of the Toul Tom Pong neighborhood in Phnom Penh, the Tiny Toone's house runs a drop-in center and community center for at-risk youth and street...

My first copies of "គ្រួសារ - ON THE CORNERS OF ARGYLE & GLENWOOD" arrived today and it looks beautiful. Reproduction of the images is stunning.

Buy your copy from Catfish books here!

Thinking about my old friend A.K. Kimoto who died 11 years ago this March from unexpected, natural causes at the age of 32. A young and talented photographer, with a heart of gold, AK impacted every life he touched and is dearly missed. After his death The New York Times published his work on opium addiction in Afghanistan, a...

Read more here.

"To mark the launch of ‘On the Corners of Argyle and Glenwood’ an intimate series of photographs of Cambodian refugees who settled in Chicago’s north side in the 1990’s, we brought Stuart Isett, Peter Pin...