Happy to announce that Mark Jenkins and I have signed a contract to have This Land Press in Tulsa, Oklahoma publish “Oklahoma Drift”, coming in the Fall of 2026. We couldn’t be happier to find this great publisher to back the project, especially one based in Tulsa and steeped in the history and culture of the state. Over the next 4 months we will be editing the book, traveling back to Oklahoma to work on two more stories that fill some holes, re-writing, re-editing images. It will be a busy 6 months.

OKLAHOMA DRIFT - CHASING BOB DYLAN’S AMERICA

When singer and songwriter Bob Dylan turned over his lifetime archives to a small museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, we, like countless other fans, asked, Why Tulsa and why Oklahoma? The two of us - Mark as a professional writer/dramatist and Stuart as a professional photographer - set out on a journey to discover the answer. Three years and thousands of miles later, the answer to that question is this book with its blend of photography and essay that was consciously inspired by the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with writer and photographer working as equals, along with the chance encounters of Saint-Exupery's flying days, as well as Steinbeck's Travels With Charley. Stylistically, we attempted to emulate the vivid elegance of Joseph Mitchell's chronicles in The New Yorker of that city's characters and outliers, such as "Mazie," the ticket booth attendant at The Venice Theater.

The impulse for these photos below comes from when I was just 12 years old, in the fall of 1978. On holiday with my family, the home we stayed in had the latest issue of Time Magazine with the photo (right) from the terrible crash of PSA Flight 182 in San Diego, taken by Hans Wendt, a staff photographer for San Diego County. The fact that in a few days we would be flying back to our home in London probably didn't help my young, impressionable mind.

I obsessed about that magazine the whole trip, constantly sneaking peeks at the incredible image of the aircraft plunging to the ground, wing and engine on fire. A crash the year before in Tenerife of two 747s, with images also published in Time Magazine, all helped feed an obsession with planes and plane crashes as a kid. Luckily there's far fewer crashes today, but in the 1970s and '80s there were numerous large plane crashes every year. I still get a thrill from flying, and have a strange fear of it, but luckily I understand statistics and probability.

The photos here were all taken in Seattle between 2014 and 2017. A period I often call the "peak-parenting" period of my career, which meant it was hard to focus on long term photo projects but I could easily slip down to one of the three major airports in and around Seattle to take photos of planes coming and going for a couple of hours. Sometimes creative inspiration comes from strange beginnings.

I'm finally able to share some of the images I've made over the past 4 years of the amazing work being done at Panthalassa, who are literally working on a moon-shot renewable energy project in the deep, deep ocean. From Panthalassa's website, "The open ocean is Earth’s largest and most power-dense renewable energy resource. We’re harnessing that resource to produce the cheapest energy on the planet for clean compute at sea and renewable fuels to shore."

One of my favorite clients, Seattle-based landscape designers Site Workshop, recently converted some of my work into these cool National park style posters. Love it! You can see more of my landscape work here.

I still remember an editor in New York once telling me not to include a protest image in my portfolio. I understood their point - protests can be too easy to document, access is easily given (just show up) and the editor wanted to see longer term photo stories that showed a "greater commitment to storytelling" . Plus I imagine every other photographer editors saw after 2011 had portfolios filled with protest images, all pretty much the same.

On the flip side, though, I've known plenty of amazing photographers who have made incredible work covering protests over the past decade, Rian Dundon's work in Portland and Yunghi Kim's work in NYC, being some of the best. So take all advice with a giant grain of salt.

2011 was also the time I started to notice there were as many cameras at protests as protestors, and the lines between journalists, police and protestors pretty much vanished, as evidenced the day I was clubbed by an anarchist right after the photograph of me here was taken; it was the first, and only time, I’ve been assaulted doing my work. The images here were taken during what I call ‘the great unwinding’ - the Occupy Protests, in 2011, in Seattle.

Talk to any photographer and they will tell you their "unpublished work" is usually far better than their published work - it's mainly our bruised egos talking, though, wondering why some photographs never got the attention we think they deserve. Taken from 2011 until 2021, the images below show the final years of production of Boeing's iconic 747, in its final iteration, the Dash 8. None of these images ever got published, even though I pitched them all over the place, from The New York Times to aviation magazines to online galleries. Boeing doesn't often give this kind of access to their factory floors to outsiders and when they do, it's usually brief and well supervised, so navigating around the Everett plant while trying to get interesting images is a huge challenge.

I'm particularly proud of this work, especially since as a 6 year old I flew on the original Pan Am 747 Clipper from London to New York and the plane fascinated me from then on. Maybe one day these images will get published.

I try to avoid showing my age, just because I don't think it's relevant to my work. But then I realize it is very relevant to my work, and the foundations it was built upon, so finding 25 year old work is still up on the internet is one such moment.

Imagine my happiness when I recently discovered one of my first online exhibits is still up nearly 25 years after it was posted? With the tiny file sizes and basic design and fonts that only worked in the age of dial-up Internet? Zone Zero was one of the earliest portfolio websites, created by Pedro Meyer in Mexico, and that's still going strong today. The work he showed was from a 3 year project photographing Kyoto called KYOTOLAND, a project I plan on self publishing soon - the edit shown in 2001 was from the earliest stages of the work and only a few of the images have made the final book design.

I built my first website in 1997 shortly after moving to Japan, using HTML 1, uploading to the Japanese web service GOL - I was, in the world of photojournalism, a pioneer! That site has been lost in time, I always wished I'd saved it, but my URL and email have remained the same for 28 years now. One of the great things about freelancing is you often get weeks, sometimes months, with little to no work so web design, and some self-promotion, often filled those hours. It's something I wish more editorial photographers understood - most commercial photographers understand design and the need to promote themselves beyond their little bubble but such concerns are often anathema to many editorial photographers.

Recently found footage of me at work in Rangoon photographing Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. So odd seeing this after 28 years. We spent many days outside Daw Suu's house, in the sweltering heat, crushing crowds, juggling rolls of film and racing to make deadlines transmitting or shipping film out to New York.

Even though I don't do this kind of photojournalism work anymore (I still work on long term documentary projects), it was an excellent training ground for the work I do today.

"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now"

- Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages".

Sapeoun, aka Gino, posing (left) on the side of a road outside Bakersfield, California in October, 1993. In the photograph on the right, Gino stops briefly to let me take his portrait in Tacoma, Washington this week, almost exactly 30 years later. Stories like Gino's are why I became a photographer - a survivor of America's war in Southeast Asia, the Khmer Rouge genocide, a refugee, a member of some of the toughest Cambodian street gangs in the US. Someone whose life was shaped by war, genocide and trauma, but who has survived despite the odds stacked against him. Continues below.

When your work gets immortalized in manga! Singapore based sneaker customization artist Bob Ng at No-Brainer*, recently turned one of my images from a 1999 bozosoku biker gang riot in Hiroshima into a manga. Needless to say, my 13 year old kid (and a manga fan) is impressed! read more about Bob's design work here.

The view 100 feet above my home in Seattle after rains passed through. I am loving my new Mavic 3 Pro drone - greatly improved file size and tonal range, good colors. Manually stitched panorama, shot with RAW files and assembled in Lightroom. Onwards and upwards!

By the spring of 1995, I was already a year into my so-called photography "career". I had started well apparently - fresh out of a photography graduate program in 1994 in Chicago, my first assignment was a three week assignment with the legendary editor Kathy Ryan at The New York Times Magazine, hired on the basis of a project on Cambodian gangs I did in the US. By June of 1994 I had moved to Bangkok with my then girlfriend, and now my wife, Jennifer, and I had plans to base myself there and learn the ropes. Within weeks I had assignments with The New York Times in Malaysia, Thailand and Burma. Wow, this is easy!

Then the phone stopped ringing. For a year.

I had to sell my workhorse 80-200mm lens to pay rent. I went back to teaching English at the same school I had worked at in Bangkok in 1988 when I lived there as a student studying Thai. I did a few random assignments for the Associated Press but had no clue what they needed or how to deliver the work and was clearly not cut out for wire work. Even though our rent was only $160 a month, by May of 1995 I was close to quitting photography when a friend suggested I go to northeast Thailand, often called Isarn, and photograph the rocket festival they have there at the beginning of every rainy season. I had so little money, I had to take the cheapest, non-air conditioned bus from Bangkok, the one that stopped at every village along the entire ride, which was close to 14 hours. But the bus was filled with Isarn farmers returning home, drinking, singing and reveling the whole time. I was on the right track, and on the right bus. I was also part of the whiskey-bottle-and-fork rhythm section while my traveling companions sang and did ramwong folk dances in the aisle for most of the journey.

Ode to our neighborhood coffee shop, Herkimer Coffee shop on Greenwood Avenue here in Seattle. We’ve been taking the girls there since we moved to the neighborhood in 2008 - nothing like a hot chocolate and a sweet treat for them to allow me to take a few photos.

It's a lightstalkers dream too - large windows facing west on the top of a hill. The space is flooded with light, I've even used for an occasional photo shoot. The girls are older now and the sweet treats aren't enough to get them to let me take photos, but I saw a young dad in there with a 1 year old, and went archive digging for some of the better of the hundreds of images I've taken there.

Herkimer also serves the best damn coffee in Seattle.

Happy to see Catfish books release a second edition of my book 'On the Corners of Argyle and Glenwood', this time with a beautiful yellow/gold outer sleeve! Order yours here.

"As a young graduate student in photography in the early 1990s, Stuart Isett found himself on the corners of Argyle and Glenwood streets in Chicago, photographing Cambodian refugees who had settled on the city’s north side near his apartment. Isett entered a world which would define his practice, spending much of the next 25 years working in South East Asia, often returning to work on issues affecting the Cambodian diaspora.

Nearly 30 years later, in collaboration with Cambodian-American activist Silong Chhun and Pete Pin, a Cambodian-American photographer, Isett revisited the Chicago work. Together they re-sequenced and contextualised the series. Chhun and Pin would have been the young boys in the back of the room in many of Isett’s images, watching their older siblings who were Isett’s main focus, as they struggled to adapt to life in America while burdened with the trauma of war and genocide.

Boeing's last 747 jumbo jet took off today from Paine Field, next to the Everett plant where the first 747 rolled out in 1969. I've spent hundreds of hours flying around the world on them since I was a little kid. The last plane may be out the door but we'll get to see them in the air for many decades to come. Bon voyage!

My new bride after our honeymoon in New York, June 1997. Jennifer and I headed to the airport and our return flight to our home in Bangkok; a few months the later we moved to Tokyo. I've always loved this image but only recently got a decent scan of it, and love it more. My love, the light, the Twin Towers; our lives totally in limbo as we prepared to take the plunge and live in Japan.

Now it's two kids, a cat, mortgage, college 529s, bed by 930 pm. But watching a dear friend losing his wife of 30 years to cancer this week, puts it all in perspective. Jennifer is still fearless though.

• My love she speaks like silence

• Without ideals or violence

• She doesn't have to say she's faithful

• Yet she's true, like ice, like fire

- Bob Dylan, Love Minus Zero

Proud to have joined Dorothy Chan on her podcast "Death in Cambodia". Dorothy created the podcast to interview her father and talk about his experiences under the Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian genocide, exploring issues of trauma among Cambodian refugees in the US. It was in that context she wanted to talk about my work on Cambodian refugees in the early 1990s, along with Pete Pin and Silong Chhun who both helped create my book "On the corners of Argyle and Glenwood".