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Talk to any photographer and they will tell you their "unpublished work" is usually far better than their published work - it's mainly our bruised egos talking, though, wondering why some photographs never got the attention we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.

After three years, and a long summer of writing and editing, writer Mark Jenkins and I have crafted what we are still calling an idea for a book. We’ve printed out 30 copies using Blurb’s self-publishing tools and have started sending them out to agents, editors and publishers. We used their trade book format, suggested by Blurb’s print evangelist, and my old friend, Dan Milnor, which I highly recommend for anyone looking to make their own books. We are always open to any ideas and suggestions on places we can submit.

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. We hope to find an agent or publisher who sees its potential and can bring their own passion, along with editing and design skills, to the project. Its blend of photography and essay 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.

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".

On every photographer's bucket list should be covering a good protest in Paris - mace, clowns, late night coq au vin, airborne cobblestones, washing teargas out of your eyes in fountains at Notre Dame at 1am. Watching them unfold again this month after President Macron's government rammed through retirement age changes, sent me archive digging for the riots that rocked the city in 2006 when the government attempted, and failed, to change labor laws. A month of tear gassing and macing later, the government backed down. We were still living in Paris at the time with our then 8 month old kid Zoe, so every evening I had to be careful not to wear maced or tear gassed clothing into the apartment; I'd bag it up at the apartment entrance before jumping into the shower to wash off any residue.

Travel writer and TV host Rick Steve's recently wrote that experiencing a strike or protest in France should be viewed not as a frustration, but as a cultural experience. The riots I covered also took me all over the city, late at night, and taught me how to copy protesters and learn to spot fountains in case I had to wash my eyes out after getting maced. Late night brasseries offering a glass of wine outside also allowed quick breaks when the action slowed down. Very civilized rioting by any measure.

....the more they stay the same. Except for the Duran Duran hair. I miss that. Photos taken in Ann Arbor, MI in 1987 and Seattle, WA, in 2023. One with a Nikon FA, a camera I used for a full decade. Most recent camera is the mirrorless Nikon Z7ii. It's not, of course, the camera (or hair) that makes the photographer.

Another question I always get asked as a photographer of a certain age (say, over 50) is whether I miss film. The answer is no, nope, never. I feel no nostalgia, no sentimentality, nothing. I realize that film is becoming cool again, and I say, go for it kids, but I used it for 25 years, mainly shooting slide film with an exposure latitude of about 1/2 stop, maximum. What does that mean? It means shooting in terrible, contrasty light, like the Cambodian jungle in December, was hard. Very hard. It meant having to carry multiple cameras with different speed films because you can’t simply change your ISO when the light shifts and the sun sets. Does well exposed film have lovely grain structure and colors? Sometimes. When the light is good and your exposures are perfect. But take it into tough situations, and you better have some serious skills.

The photographs below are from my last real film assignment in 2008 for Geo Magazine in Germany. I traveled with a Cambodian and French archeological team by car, motorcycle and foot through former Khmer Rouge territories in Preah Vihear that had been cut off by nearly 40 years of war, to map Angkorian temples and sites. For two weeks we humped through the jungle, me carrying bags of Provia 100 and Kodak E200 slide film, searching for and mapping sites, some only a few cut stones, some entire temples, still lost in the jungles. We used local guides to find the sites (and take us through mined areas) since these temple and sites were never really lost to the people in the area, only to scientists. The light was horrible once the sun came up. Dark and bright areas falling as the tropical sun fell through the trees onto people, trees and temples. I always worked my a Sekonic light meter around my neck, always updating light readings, bracketing by 1/2 stops when unsure.

My friend, and awesome photo YouTuber Dan Milnor, often teases me as the last “Nikon man”. Seems I’m a dying breed but I didn't stick with Nikon because I’m a gear fetishist; as I often joke, it’s simply because I know where the buttons are.

I bought my first Nikon in 1982 at age 16, an FM2, after working in Kingston Market in London for the summer to pay for it, and have stuck with them ever since simply because I’m just too lazy to learn a new camera system. So don’t ask me which is better, Canon or Nikon (add Sony and Fuji to that mix now) because I simply don’t care. I know what I like, and I'm a Nikon man! That and I've beat the hell out of them for 40 years and never had one fail on me. Good enough.

Photo here of that FM2 and one my latest Nikons, a Z7ii, bought 40 years later.

Feeling the Top Gun vibe this week! Photos from a shoot on the USS Kitty Hawk, as it prepared for deployment to Afghanistan in November, 2001. I was flown out to the Japan-based carrier for a two day assignment for The New York Times as part of its coverage of the aftermath of 9/11. To this day I'm impressed with the men and women who worked on the flight deck, keeping me safe, all while launching F-14s and F-18s. Yet the pilots get all the glory.

My now 12 year old daughter always loved to say, "you never know!" when we asked her as a little kid if she'd be coming to our bed that night. Turns out, it's also a handy expression for photo assignments that you accept begrudgingly, mainly to keep a client happy. This assignment was on car salesmen during the economic crash of 2009 - The New York Times asked me to drive 3 hours on a Saturday morning to Wenatchee, WA to photograph Ford salesman Chad Lee. Not exactly a dream assignment, especially at the old NYT day rate, especially on a Saturday.

I walked away with this image below that has stayed in my portfolio ever since. Chad making the hard sale to the Burchett family while their kid sits on the ground behind, bored. I decided to climb into the car at the last minute, desperate to get an interesting image and managed to get a photograph the NYT thought was good enough to run 4 columns, above the fold, in the business section. I've always believed to be a good photographer you don't need an interesting story - you just need to work hard to make an interesting image.

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, near Lake Iliamna, where opponents say it would threaten nearby wild salmon runs from Bristol Bay into nearby watersheds.

I traveled to the region in early August 2008, towards the end of the salmon runs which meant a week of pulling out my hair because I wasn't able to photograph any actual salmon; kind of important when they are the heart of the story. Our last day there we met a research team from the University of Washington who knew of one river where the salmon could be seen; early the next morning we headed out with them by car, boat and then on foot until I looked up a wilderness stream and saw a sea of red. Salmon!

One of the things I've learn over 25 years of doing this work is be patient, focused and persistent and you will get the images you need. We spent a week in the region talking with mining executives, folks working on sample drilling, activists & opponents and native Alaskan fishermen; what's amazing is how small the images ran on the NYT's website back in 2008 so I'm happy to run them larger here.

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 filed out your negative holder to show the frame of the film for printing (including the film's sprocket holes if you were particularly vigorous), the more "truthful" your image. It was rooted, in part, in the fanciful idea that the photographer is a truth teller, a hangover from the days of Walker Evans, Life Magazine and the FSA (Farm Security Administration) photo-documentary project of the 1930s, that saw photographs are reflections of reality. Images could not be tweaked after being seen and taken by the “truth teller”. They were immutable.

It was all nonsense, of course, based in great deal on the culture of photographer as hero that the modernists clung to. It was an argument that ignored all the choices photographers make before and after snapping the shutter: lens choice, film choice, exposure choice, filter choice, developer choice, developer temperature choice, paper choice, dodging and burning choices and now, all their digital manifestations. All elements that can radically affect how we read an image. To say nothing of subject choice, the “why” you’re there with a camera in the first place. As if cropping in the darkroom or in Photoshop somehow erases any "truth" after all the other editing choices we make.

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 Yardley. Bill had researched some 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA) travel guides and the first in the series on American roadtrips the NYT did was on Washington State's Highway 20, the North Cascades Highway, following the route of the Depression-era guide.

The hardest part of a road-trip assignment? Not simply regurgitating all the thousands of other road-trip stereotypes we've seen over the years. Look, old motel! Look, old gas station! Look, Cadillacs buried in the dirt! One thing I made sure I did was engage with people on our trip over the mountains; listen to their stories, get in their faces and take photos. What most road-trip photoessays lack is that kind of engagement with the people along the way.

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!

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 Magazine Cambodia in 1996. I was on assignment covering the end days of the Khmer Rouge, who despite committing one of the worst genocides of the 20th century, were still holed up along the Thai-Cambodia border. The image showed a government helicopter leaving the Khmer Rouge stronghold of Phnom Malai, where I came to photograph Ieng Sary, the Khmer Rouge's Minister of Foreign Affairs and brother-in-law to Pol Pot.

Over two days I shot nearly ten rolls of Fuji Provia 100, carefully writing captions on film envelops, dropping the film inside. To get them to New York? I had to cross back into Thailand, with guides to avoid mine fields, hire a driver at the border (cash) to drive straight to Don Muang Airport in Bangkok, 6 hours away. Every evening there was a 10 pm Air France flight and I had to find their cargo department in the airport, fork out $500 cash to have the filmed bagged and tagged, and listed as bound for New York via Paris. In New York, Time Magazine had a messenger service meet the film after customs and rush it to their lab in Manhattan. Voilà!

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 this week.

Growing up my parents had a collection of old cameras in a small closet under the stairs. All inherited from my grandparents, it was a mixture of Brownies from the 1920s, a Zeiss camera from the 1930s, the first Polaroid, a Realist Stereo camera, and even an early Leica 35mm. My mom was given a Yashica-A medium format camera by her mother as a gift in 1960 so she would take photos of the grand kids, a camera she used from 1960 until the mid 1970s when, as she put it, it was too hard to carry while also supervising 3 boys. The Yashica still sits on my shelf in my office and I used it from 1994 until 2007 (bottom image) when the shutter finally gave out and I went all digital. I didn’t become a photographer out of a vacuum apparently; hours of fiddling with these old cameras as a kid, learning about shutter speed, aperture and playing with old light meters laid the groundwork for what would become a career. The seed, though, was planted by my mom.

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 times to get the light right for the opening shot and on my third attempt there was a stunning sunset with warm tones flooding over the city. True light-stalking, and nice to see that image in opening spread!

"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 sir.

The only lesson here is don't listen to your teachers and assume they are always right. Don't be pigeon-holed. Explore all your options in life. Unless it's your Latin teacher in your General Classics report ("It's probably for the best that he and this subject now part company"), they may well be wrong. It wasn't until I was in grad school in Chicago working on an MFA in photography a decade later that I learned about pictorialism and photography's early struggles to be taken seriously as an art. I guess the message still hadn't made it to British boys schools in 1980 and it was as if "creativity" is only limited to certain designated arts, and never to be found in science, business, sports etc etc.

I didn't become a full time working photographer until I was 28 and often wonder what would have happened if Mr. Gilliam had embraced my interests way back then. It's hard to know if creativity is born out of resistance or nurturing but either way, I ignored his advice. A lesson I pass onto my kids. Trust yourself. Trust your instincts, most importantly, don't worry about your Latin report.

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 insult a photographer.

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 1990s.

In this case it was the family of Mark Mok, seen dancing in the image below at a house party in Chicago, who saw the book and reached out to me via text.

I’ll take this kind of acknowledgment over a photography award any day.

Nice write-up in the Tacoma Tribune, focusing on Tacoma native Silong Chhun who helped edit and contextualize the work in my new book "On the Corners of Argyle and Glenwood", as well contributing the book's text.

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 children in Phnom Penh. Dance classes, as well as English lessons are offered at the center, with other deportees helping KK run the program.

The kids at Tiny Toones have been taken under KK's wing as he teaches them the art he brought with him, break dancing, as well as hard lessons in life he learned in the US justice system. KK is not in Cambodia because he wants to be. He is one of over 500 Cambodians who have been banished from the United States under a law that mandates deportations for legal residents, but non-citizens, who commit felonies.

Hundreds more Cambodians are in the US fighting deportation and like many, KK is a non-citizen only by a technicality. He was not an illegal immigrant. He was a legal resident and refugee from Cambodia's Khmer Rouge "killing fields" who found a haven in the United States in 1980. He was an infant when he arrived. In fact, he was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and had never seen Cambodia before he was deported.

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 lasting tribute to his talents and compassion. I first met A.K. in Cambodia and was immediately taken by his kindness and humanism. This quote below is from an email he sent to James Whitlow Delano a few weeks before his death and encapsulates so much of his life:

“I don’t care about being recognized, and I don’t care if I go through life with no fame to show for my efforts. What bothers me is if people don’t take my latest work seriously. Not for my sake, but for the sake of the people who allowed me to photograph their lives."

"When was the last time you saw a 4 year old sucking down heroin? Is it not a tragedy? If I can’t do anything to bring attention to their plight, and if nobody cares, then what am I doing with my time and in fact, my life? It was never about awards or anything like that. I thought it was about being out in the world, witnessing things that others don’t see, and sharing these stories with a larger audience. I always said that I do what I do because I only have 2 hands.”

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 and Silong Chhun together to reflect on the work and the collaboration of bringing this work together nearly 30 years later. The book explores the complexities of the early diaspora, not only the streets but also the tender moments of a community in transition, held together by family (គ្រួសារ, “krousar”) and tradition."

គ្រួសារ - KROUSAR - FAMILY

"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 stru led to adapt to life in America while burdened with the trauma of war and genocide.

Sequenced by Pin, with words from Chhun, this book explores the complexities of the early diaspora, not only the streets but also the tender moments of a community in transition, held together by family (“krousar”) and tradition.”

Available from Catfish books in the UK. Below is a much larger edit of the images from the project.

So I went to the Washington Post's website today to see it open with a 25 year old photograph I took in Yangon, Myanmar (Rangoon, Burma) of Aung San Suu Kyi while on assignment for the Associated Press. Part of a story about the coup in Myanmar this week and Suu Kyi's failures as a leader.

What was strangest for me though was the quality of the image - shot with Fuji 800 negative film, using flash because the light was so low, developed in low quality photo labs in Rangoon and scanned in on AP's Leafax 35 scanners, the photograph reminded me how far technology has come. The original AP file is probably only 1200 pixels across, saved as a JPEG to create a small 200-300K file for transmission. The worst part of transmitting was the time it took send the the files over Burma's creaking phone system. If the line dropped (which it often did) you'd have to resend the entire file, so I spent many a sleepless night by the Leafax waiting for the files to go through. All the while, international calls in Burma in the 1990s cost around $5 a minute. I also had to travel with crocodile clips, screw drivers and wire cutters so I could pull out hotel room phone lines and connect the Leafax with the clips to the peeled back phone wires. I'd then call NYC (through the hotel operator because there were no direct international lines in Burma back then) and told editors I was ready to transmit. Crackle, crackle, whizz whizz and you connected and the files started to upload. Reds first, greens next, blues last - the full RGB.

Do you want to impress your kids? Point to giant wrap around ads on city buses with your images on them while you're driving them around! This one taken recently for the Lake Washington Institute of Technology.

A couple of frames I captured Monday buzzing around Seattle and Puget Sound in a helicopter for a client. Another heavy metal day in the air! On the left, the USS Sampson undergoing sea trials. On the right, grounded Boeing 737 Max at Boeing Field.

Buzzing my house on the way home from an aerial photo shoot of a US Navy ship, I decided to check-in on the kids, home alone for Spring Break. Serious helicopter parent!

After 25 years of working as a documentary photographer one skill I've learned is to enter a space to work quietly and effectively, making people I'm photographing comfortable with my presence. Skills that work really well when I get asked to create what I call "corporate documentary" images, photographs of real employees at work, created with minimal impact to the work day that allow companies to show their staff in the best and most natural light. Here are some recent samples below for Pushpay, a New Zealand based company with offices in Seattle, that creates payment solutions for non-profits.

Recent corporate work for Mainland Construction Materials in nearby Vancouver, Canada.

My work on the cleanup at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in this month's High Country News. The magazine is a real gem of a publication and in an era of shrinking print media, it stands out for its coverage of the American West.

While I do far less editorial photography these days, it's always good to occasionally have a newspaper assignment thrown at you at the last minute, to test my editorial chops. On Monday I drove up to Mt. Rainier National Park on assignment for the Washington Post to photograph the first day of the end of the federal shutdown, as National Park employees literally had to dig their way out of the whole created by the closure of many government offices. 5am wake up, 3 hour drive, remote location with lots of unpredictable factors, same day deadline. No problem.

Work from earlier this year with Herrera, a local environmental consulting firm. Nothing more fun that being invited to photograph at the county garbage dump! The images here were taken at the King County waste site with team members from Herrera helping the county protect the local environment. Not paid actors, real employees, at work; the kind of photo shoot I love. Plus, after a long, cloudy day, the skies cleared and Mt. Rainier appeared. It doesn't get more Pacific Northwest than that!

My work on the Amazon Spheres in this month's Landscape Architecture Magazine. To see more images from the shoots, click here for exterior images, here for interior work.

Final selects from an awesome shoot with Alaska Air Cargo, shooting their new 737 cargo conversions in Anchorage, AK. Pretty much a dream photo shoot since I've been a plane nerd since I was a kid, plus it was a great team to work with. Now I only have to convince them to return in the dead of winter to shoot the planes and cargo being loaded!

Work from an assignment in Novyy Urengoy, in Siberia, Russia, for BusinessWeek Magazine photographing a new pipeline bringing gas from Siberia to western Europe.

Work from 2018 shot across the country for Summit Materials is finally on their new website. Great project to work on with a great team.

One of my favorite stories to work on over the years was on Yashiro Island, a tiny goldfish shaped island in Japan’s southern Seto Sea, south of Hiroshima. The island was one of the last places in Japan to get regular electricity in the 1970s, and the eastern half of the island, Towa district, has the distinction of being "Japan’s oldest town" with the highest average aged population in a nation with the world's oldest population.

It's been 28 years since I decided to pursue photography as a career. In the spring of 1990 I returned from a trip to Thailand after spending 4 months teaching english and photographing in Cambodian refugee camps for the American Refugee Committee in my spare time. I had already spent a year in Thailand in 1988 studying the language and teaching english with the plan of becoming an academic, but 1990 was the point where I decided to change tracks, and try to become a photographer. I returned to Chicago, where my brother lived, and with little idea of how to do that, enrolled in classes at Columbia College, then a small liberal arts college downtown with a strong and respected photo program. Those few classes and a couple of inspirational teachers quickly lead to their MFA program which I finished in 1994. I returned to Thailand that year to teach English and start a career.

In between, of course, I had to learn how to be a photographer. I came from a family of hobbyists but no professionals to speak of. The first project I worked on was in a small Thai buddhist temple outside Chicago but I soon discovered a neighborhood Cambodian temple 5 minutes walk from my apartment. It was a first generation temple, filled with Khmer refugees, that welcomed visitors. Luckily many spoke Thai after years living in Thai refugee camps, so I was welcomed quickly.

I often get asked what’s the hardest story I’ve ever had to photograph. In 2008, I traveled with New York Times correspondent Bill Yardley to Chewelah, Washington to interview Jeffrey Schrock, 39 at the time, and a devout Mennonite. Mr Schrock and his wife had lost all five of their children in a car accident when a truck driven by Clifford Helm crossed a median on U.S. 395 and drove into oncoming lanes, hitting the Shrock family's truck. Mr. Schrock later befriended Mr. Helm, who was never convicted for the accident, and forgave him for the deaths of his children.

Killed in the accident from the Schrock family were Carmen, 12; Jana, 10; Carrina, 8; Jerrill, 5; and Craig, 2.

A few years back The New York Times asked that I follow the cast and producers of HBO’s “Game of Thrones" around for a couple of days while they were on a tour to promote the new season of the show. Apparently I’m one of the few people who hadn’t seen it (and still haven’t, I don’t have cable!) so I knew little about the show and even less about the actors. This probably helped because unlike the thousands of screaming fans who showed up everywhere we went, I was not at all starstruck and had no problem doing my job, taking images as I pleased, not worrying about egos and overly protective PR flaks.

Well, I worked almost as I pleased, because eventually actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime Lannister on the show, got a little fed up with me, picked up a chair and waved it at me. Playfully of course! I backed off, after all, he just gave me the image I wanted - my first, last and only "paparazzi" attack image. Instead of bothering Coster-Waldau, I headed off to shoot Kit Harrington waving scotch on the rocks while he belted out a tune in a karaoke booth nearby.

The first time I saw Kyoto I didn’t realize I’d seen it. Staring out of the hermetically sealed windows of the Nozomi Super Express bullet train, there was no end to the miles of factories and sterile, cookie-cutter housing projects that sprawl from Tokyo to Osaka, via Kyoto. Occasionally I spotted a rice field or the roof tops of small Buddhist and Shinto temples. At nearly 200 mph they could just be glimpsed through the webs of power lines, often squeezed between pre-fabricated homes, golf driving ranges and parking lots. Returning at night, the concrete landscape faded away and was replaced by the lights of the Japanese night: pachinko gambling halls, love motels and massage parlors.

After nearly a hundred runs to Osaka on the train, the ‘Liberty Hotel’, ‘Lucky Pachinko’ and ‘Happy Health Massage’ parlor became my distance markers. I eventually learned to sit on the train with the dazed look of an exhausted Japanese salary man, oblivious to a landscape that did little to interest passersby.

These images were taken from 2000 until 2003 while I was living and working in Japan. After a few trips to Osaka on assignment I started to hop off the train in Kyoto to spend 1 or 2 days walking the city, photographing what I saw, trying to get beyond the view from the bullet train. It turned out my first glimpses of the city were pretty inaccurate, because even behind the widespread destruction of the heart of Kyoto, the city still thrived and fascinated me. This was a 'personal' project in the truest sense; I never had a commission to photograph any of the work and I only had vague plans to try and publish a book later. It turned out trying to publish a photo book about Kyoto with only two images of real geisha and maiko was hard! The work was exhibited in the USA and Korea and who knows, someday it may make a nice historical view of the city as it continues to change.

After spending a day earlier this summer photographing the interior of Amazon's new bio-Spheres here in Seattle I finally started shooting some exterior work for landscape architects Site Workshop. Working from dawn 'til dusk I tried to capture all the shifts in light and activity that happen around Seattle's newest urban hub.

I'm still not 100% satisfied, though, so hope to return during the winter months to capture some differing light and activity. The possibilities for light and people in this space are pretty endless so I'm not sure I'll ever capture enough, especially since new buildings are still going up around the Sphere's blocking and shifting the light.

I guess this is why photographers are also called lightstalkers!

I got to enjoy every 3 year old kid's dream of playing with life-size Tonka toys this month, visiting another of Summit Materials quarries this time their largest one in British Columbia Canada, just north of my home base in Seattle. Sadly I could only photograph the machines, not drive them!

Our gorgeous Seattle Augusts have lost their deep blue skies only to be enveloped in a smokey haze. Still, it may have helped this image, flattening out the depth from Seattle's Space Needle to the nearby towers in Belltown. Taken today between assignments.

With my daughter Phoebe, summer solstice day, playing airplane and hoping my back can still hold her up. Shot on iPhone 8.

I'm sad to hear about the fire at the Aberdeen Museum of History that destroyed most of the building including the Kurt Cobain exhibit. Apparently destroyed was the couch Cobain used to sleep on, which I didn’t realize was part of the exhibit until fellow photographer Josh Trujillo took this snap of me (right) and let then let me know. I suppose it was the grunge thing to do.

The tiny exhibit was mocked by many in the press, but was in many ways a perfect reflection of the town and place he grew up in. Somewhat ad hoc, definitely unpretentious, imperfect. More images from my 3 days in Aberdeen below for a story that appeared in The New York Times in 2014.

These photographs below taken around Aberdeen, Washington in February 2014, including inside Cobain's childhood home, under the Young Street Bridge and at the opening of a new exhibit in the now destroyed Aberdeen Museum.

Images from an unpublished story I photographed in Shanghai in April, 2004. Sometimes it happens, I’ll run across an interesting story, spend a few days shooting it, then get tied up with other work and shelve it. 14 years later you rediscover it and see something interesting in the work. The photoessay was on the Xujiahui Cathedral (or St. Ignatius Cathedral) built in 1851 in Shanghai where in the 1960s during China's Cultural Revolution, communist Red Guards smashed its original stain glass windows as part of Chairman Mao's radical efforts to preserve 'true' Communist ideology in the country by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements within Chinese society.

After the attacks, they were no photos, drawings, or records showing the windows in their original state. In 2004, Shanghai's Catholic Bishop, Aloysius Jin, a Shanghai native who spent nearly three decades in jail, labor camps or other forms of detention for his faith, started a project to replace all the windows. The Bishop hired Beijing native and glass artist Wo Ye to design and supervise the manufacture and installation of over 300 square meters of stained glass into Shanghai's century-old French gothic cathedral, using modern Chinese-influenced designs. Working in her studio near the church, Ye also trained Catholics nuns in window making. The project was finished in 2006 about two years after I worked on the story. Bishop Jin in 2013 died at age 96.

In the spring of 2002 I traveled to the North Korean border, near the Chinese city of Yanji, for Time Magazine to report on North Korean refugees fleeing the country across the Tumen River. Here, a young North Korean boy, smuggled into China by human traffickers, enjoys some sunlight on his first morning in China. The hills behind are North Korea. Most of the refugees I met were in terrible shape - malnourished, lice infested, many with rotting and missing teeth from years of starvation. The women lived in constant fear of being trafficked. This boy's moment of sunshine, though, gave me hope if only because it was possible the worst was behind him.

Video grab from a shoot I just did in Anchorage with Alaska Airlines Cargo, using my favorite new piece of kit, a cherry picker!

There is, apparently, a hashtag for gear porn photos. I've never been much of a gear-head, and have never done such an image myself, but I'm about to head up to Alaska for an industrial, corporate and aviation shoot with a lot of variables and a ton of unknowns. What gear should I take?

All of it.

This photo was recently found in an old shoebox of mine. Taken in 1986 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while a student at the University of Michigan and back before I knew I wanted to be a photographer or even how to be a photographer. But I know I liked Nikon glass! Using a Nikon FA and sporting some serious Duran Duran hair.

Recent work for Summit Materials and Boxley. Shooting in Lynchburg, Virginia, documenting their operations from the mines to the roads. When ever I see their plants I can't help but imagine that pounding big rocks onto little rocks was probably one of the earliest businesses ever created!

I just returned from a two-day scout for a client, in Alaska at Anchorage's Airport. One important lesson I learned, it's always best to get off the runway when a Boeing 747-400 cargo is approaching for a landing! This photo, though, was taken as we drove across the runway with permission from air traffic control. But still, move quickly in such situations!

No, I'm not a product or table top photographer, unless you need your products shot in context, being used by real life folks, in natural settings. That was what Stanley tools asked me to do for their Proto line of professional tools, working with an awesome team of Alaska Airline's engine mechanics at Seatac Airport. The shoot also let me introduce LED lights into my work, which are great fun to work with in tight situations where you need quick setup without getting in people's way.

More images from the shoot can be seen here.

After 2 1/2 hours flying in a two-seater R22 helicopter, with one door off, in the train and cold, shooting a US Navy destroyer in the Straits of Juan de Fuca, north of Seattle, I was ready for a beer. We left Seattle in the rain hoping that the weather and light would be better as we flew north. luckily the gods cooperated on this one otherwise I'd be out there again next week!

The return trip included a brief layover in Sequim to surprise visit my pilot's parents and remind me why flying is still the coolest human feat ever.....

I often feel isolated living in Seattle. Stuck up in the far northwest of the country, it's not the center of anything. Living in Tokyo, Bangkok, and Paris before moving here, we had a constant stream of friends coming through town. Not so much in Seattle. An extraction city built on the water's edge, surrounded by mountains, it's taken nearly decade to actually begin to appreciate our isolation, captured well, I think, in this image I took flying back in a helicopter last week, from an aerial shoot on the Olympic Peninsula.

Images from a recent shoot in San Diego for Portland-based design firm Walker Macy. I studied photography in Chicago where you learned very quickly about the marriage of photography and architecture, so I love shooting for architecture and design magazines & firms. I'm not hired as an classical architectural photographer though, but asked to use my documentary skills that show spaces being activated and reanimated through design. I go to record the real life application of architectural design, especially in urban spaces that were often struggling or dying.

In this case, the redesigned Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego is an effort to revitalize the core of the city, away from the more popular waterfront areas that tourists populate. Under the classic U.S. Grant Hotel built in 1910, the new space mixes the original plaza, with its art-deco fountain, with a new space designed for public events, and day to day use by residents.

It took many months but work I did earlier this year is finally up on Concur's homepage. Great team to work with, you can see on their homepage here.

My first assignment in Seattle was at Microsoft, assigned about two days after we moved here, by The New York Times. I suspect, one day, my last assignment will be there too. This time I went back to document how the company is redesigning office spaces in order to compete with Amazon and other local tech companies, for millennial talent. Apparently they need places to walk their dogs and cannot be further than 50 feet from a coffee shop. You can read the full New York Time's piece here.

I got a nice spread in Taschen's new book "Explorer" on the Alaskan wilderness. Originally shot for The New York Times and edited, many moons ago, by the great Lonnie Schlein, who sent me off to the wilds of the Tongass National Forest on a wing and a prayer.

I have probably shot for 50 different newspapers over the years, including many overseas. It was a great honor this week to finally shoot an assignment for The Boston Globe; an honor because of the Globe's famous photo department and some of the incredible photographers and editors that have worked there over the years, including a friend Yunghi Kim. Story is on Amazon's plans for a second headquarters which meant heading down to Seattle's South Lake Union and Belltown neighborhoods to document the impact the current headquarters has made on the city.

When I tell clients I don't do product photography what I mean to say is I don’t shoot heavily stylized product photography. The kind of shoots that take an entire day setting up lights to shoot a single object. I respect photographers who have the patience for that, it's just not for me. Having said that, I do shoot products in their working environment, organic images of tools or food in the real world. What I lack in patience for an all day single image shoot, I make up with what I hope is a good eye for context, light and detail. Images here below are from a shoot last week for Stanley Tools photographing their tools at work on $15 million engines off of Boeing 737s.

I don't shoot as much for The New York Times as I once did, but when I do, I get a nice big opener in the Friday Business section!

Yesterday, in a stunt about removing statues, a small group of alt-righters and Trump supporters decided to protest the infamous Lenin Statue standing in Fremont, Seattle, right near our home. The protestors failed to noticed a few big differences with the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, of course. 1. It's privately owned (and for sale) and on private property, 2. It's left hand has been repeatedly dipped in red paint to symbolize blood, paint that has not be removed and 3. There's a plaque next to it outlining very clearly Lenin's crimes and communism's tragic and brutal failures.

But never mind all that, I propose a deal: Fremont removes Lenin, the alt-right removes the monuments to the Confederacy. The addition of the two actual Socialists, in the back ground of this image, defending Lenin made it a uniquely Seattle moment I think. The gentleman on the left was a passerby arguing about racism with one of the "MAGA" protestors.

I was driving back from my storage unit when I heard about the kerfuffle, stopped and took a few images. I later emailed the Seattle Times later asking if they were interested and was told the paper had a "minimum threshold of attendance before we consider covering a protest" which makes sense in this town considering protests compete with the rain as part of our daily lives.

I finally checked out one of my most unusual image usages - a photo of the opening of Cannabis City, Seattle's first legal marijuana store, used by the owner on a commemorative brass plaque outside the store in Seattle's SODO district.

I probably didn't charge enough but I'll be honest, but how often do you get an offer to turn an image into brass outside a pot shop?

The original photo of James Lathrop celebrating his store's opening is below, part of the coverage I did for The New York Times.

Photographing art installations around the Allen Institute for Brain Science's new headquarters in Seattle's booming and rapidly changing South lake Union district.

Watching my daughters playing I sometimes hear the Tom Wait's song "What's he building in there?" in my head. Here Phoebe was acting this out in the doll house my grandfather built in the 1930s for my mom. Refurbished in 2010 with all new wiring, floors and paint, the girls always building something in there. It's not a playhouse for the children.

The forgotten story of Cambodia’s Lost Boyz in AmericaWelcomed to the U.S. as children, deported as adults - featured in Timeline

Just got back from 4 days in Las Vegas. Like a lot of folks, I have a love/hate relationship with the city; it's America's "ID" manifested in many dubious ways. However, hidden among all the tricky-tack and neon, the city has some real gems. One is architect David Rockwell's 80-ft. tall "treehouse" restaurant, called Mastro's, at Las Vegas' City Center. Here a 8-frame image of the structure, stitched together in Adobe Lightroom, shot on a Nikon D810 with 24mm lens.

On assignment on the roof of the Komo Plaza building, next to Seattle's iconic Space Needle. Thanks to my awesome assistant and photographer Hannah Wahl for the snap!

What's my best selling image over my 25 year career? Exclusive photos of Burmese Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi I took on the day of her release? Nope. My exclusive portraits of then up-and-coming actor Joseph Gordan-Levitt, taken during a one minute shoot in a Seattle hotel? Nope. Exclusive access I’ve had with various legendary CEOs in Seattle? Nope.

My best selling image, one that gets licensed at least once a month, even a decade after I took it, is of Wendy the Bully Whippet. A dog. Wendy lives on Vancouver Island and has a rare genetic defect, a myostatin gene, that basically turned her into the Arnold Schwarzenegger of otherwise skinny whippets. For genetic researchers, especially ones studying human aging, Wendy is a gold mine of scientific importance. When I met her, I just thought she was a dog.

My original photos ran in a The New York Times series on genetics that went on to win a Pulitzer (although my photos didn’t!). So what I thought at the time was a pretty ridiculous assignment, chasing a dog around a field in Canada, turned out to pay for several camera bodies and then some. It's also the one image that is most often used without my permission on the internet.

I shot one of the installations at the Frye Art Museum for their "Genius" series. The beautiful final book just came out with a double page spread of one of my images included. Many thanks to the editors.

A lull in commissioned work has let me add to my aircraft collage, tentatively titled "Underbelly". Only problem is now I've photographed too many of the same types of plane and need more variety. Seattle's Boeing Field often provides that but the city's official airport, SEATAC, is an endless stream of 737s most days. Maybe a road trip is needed.

Some aerial shoots go smoother than others and I now know my limit for a single ride out over Seattle with Take-san, by favorite pilot in his R22 out of Classic Helicopter. My limit is apparently 2-3 subjects, not 6. When you reach out to clients and say you'll be in the air and whether they need anything, remember your Dramamine limit! Mine is apparently 3 head-spinning shoots. The first was easy though, the new Washington State 144 car ferry, the Chimacum, out for sea trails. Photos for the builder, Vigor Industrial, built right here in Seattle.

I took this photograph below in late January, 1996, while covering the last days of the Cambodian Civil War on assignment for Newsweek Magazine. It’s another of my favorites, and also luckiest photographs, just scanned in on an Imacon scanner. I was standing on the side of Route 57, the main road from the Northwestern provincial capital of Battambang to Pailin, a Khmer Rouge stronghold to the south, when the tank appeared out of the bushes and raced down the road. The image is the final in a series of 5 frames I shot when the tank blew past me, unaware of how close it was. The film was shipped later that week directly from Bangkok to Newsweek and I didn’t see the slides until many months later - somehow my final image in the series managed to frame the tank perfectly. The slight blur attesting to its speed and the sharp face of driver, all make it one of my best, and luckiest images. We didn't have "data" back then attached to our images, my best guess is this was with a 28mm lens, 1/125th second at F11.

After years of using a Nikon Coolscan LS-4000, bought in 2001 in Japan, I recently was able to use one of Hasselblad’s Imacon film scanners. Thanks to my friend and fellow photographer Charles Peterson, I’ve been able to go back and rescan old negatives and slides from the 1990s and early 2000s. The quality is mind blowing; it's like seeing the images again for the first time. 10,000 pixels across, sharp edge to edge, the texture, grain and tonal range is amazing. If only I had $15,000 to spend!

The image here was taken in Yasothorn, Thailand in 1995. It's an annual rocket festival held just before the rainy season starts. The image was taken on a Nikon FM2, no motor drive, using Kodak Tri-X. It's always been one of my favorite images, taken early on in my career, and one of the few that gives me confidence to say I'm a "decent" photographer! From the rocket flying up center of the frame, with the single isolated rocket maker leaping and pointing directly up the trail of his rocket, to all the leaping hands and the man on the left pointing with a cigarette that mirrors the rocket, all the elements of the frame come together perfectly. With my old scanner I was never able to get a full frame scan showing all the rocket, plus I was never able to get a scan that was sharp edge to edge.

Just spent another morning between assignments hanging out in the back streets around Seatac Airport, this time photographing incoming aircraft with my new Nikon D810 and it's monster files. Flying used to mean adventure, and as a kid, risk, but as I’ve gotten older the adventures have been tempered and flying is, well, just so safe. The thrill is gone. This recent series is shot from straight under and the dirtier the plane the better. The streaks of mud and oil somehow make the planes seem more real to me, now that flying has become so mundane.

The impulse for these photos comes from when I was 11, in the spring of 1977. On holiday with my family, the home we stayed in had the latest issue of Time Magazine with the photos from the terrible crash of two Boeing 747s at Tenerife Airport. I obsessed about that magazine the whole trip, constantly sneaking peeks at the incredible images of the burning 747, wing and engines still intact (photo at bottom). The crash of a Boeing 727 in California a year later, also caught on film by a photographer, sealed this fascination. I guess that has always been part of the ‘thrill’ of flying for me; the chance you might stop flying. Maybe my fascination with airplane crashes acts as a talisman for it happening to me but at a minimum, it potentially makes the boredom of modern air travel more interesting.

Last autumn I spent a day James Lindley, 34, a former Marine and undertaker who today volunteers his time to provide proper military funerals for homeless and indigent veterans. Article by Michael Phillips:

"Each year, some 250 people die in King County without money or family, some after years in nursing homes, some after years on the street. The Medical Examiner’s Office searches for relatives, then waits as long as two years for someone to claim the body or ashes.

If no one steps forward, the remains go to a mass grave. Indigent veterans are an exception. When the Medical Examiner’s Office receives a body, the agency’s investigators search for clues of military service—a veteran’s ID card or a war story shared with another homeless person. Those remains are set aside.

Over the years, dozens of urns with the ashes of unclaimed veterans accumulated at the Medical Examiner’s Office and at a private funeral home that for a while had agreed to have them interred. Over the summer, 32 black-plastic urns were moved to the basement of the Columbia Funeral Home."

Recent work for The New York Times on Weyerhaeuser's new urban office in downtown Seattle. After years in one of America's most beautiful suburban office campuses, Weyerhaeuser decided to move into Seattle's urban core as the company reshapes itself from a forestry and timber business to a real estate company. I was lucky to catch one of the last sunny fall days in Seattle for the shoot, with leaves thin enough on trees to show the new building, and some actual blue skies! The building was designed by Mithun, a Seattle-based architectural firm.

One of the benefits of having a (then) girlfriend when you’re a student photographer is having a model to call on for studio lighting classes! Not that Jennifer (now my wife) enjoyed the experience. Like most of us, she’s always been self-conscious, but I can say she is still the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen and a stunning model for me to learn lighting with. A real inspiration.

Some of my latest work for Microsoft, photographing the work done by their Redmond based IT team for the 'Gears of War' gaming team based in nearby Vancouver, B.C. Shooting tech is hard, very hard. The first thing that you see is rows and rows of people sitting at their desks, staring at the computers. With a little patience & creativity, though, you can capture some interesting moments but the most important trick is making sure your subjects are comfortable with you and that you become that preverbal fly on the wall. The full article is on Microsoft's blog here.

It took just under two years of work, from the keel laying ceremony with Nate Hardy of the San Francisco Fire Department, to launching that city's new fireboat, built here in Seattle by my client, Vigor. The hardest part of photographing the construction of the new boat? The final beauty shots of her during sea trials in Elliot Bay just off of downtown Seattle. Luckily the weather gods cooperated as did the boat's powerful water canons - when they were fired up, even a few hundred feet above them in a noisy helicopter, we could hear their power.

After years of dull, poorly lit portraits that often look like mugshots, it seems companies are finally wising up and seeking out more imaginative, personal and intimate types portraits of their staff. One thing doing years of editorial portraits for clients like Fortune Magazine and BusinessWeek has taught me, is the ability to work with subjects quickly, help them relax and get images that capture their personality. Sometimes I call them "waking the dead" shoots - not because the subjects are lifeless but because they've only had portraits done in a mechanical and impersonal way. Photos here from a recent shoot with the Garden City Group and some of their Seattle staff.

Lukas and his daughter Lola, Cape Disappointment, Washington. No explanation needed.

On assignment in the small Eastern Oregon town of Redmond last week. As the sun set, hordes of people - homeless, bikers, rednecks, families with strollers, skateboarders, street punks, a couple in a BMW - all arrived in the town’s small park to play Pokemon Go.

I’m not sure if I’m appalled by this game or not, but after a month of terrible news in the US, maybe folks getting away from their TVs and Facebook and wandering around and talking to their neighbors isn’t such a bad thing. When I got home my kids wanted to play to - luckily after an hour they were bored and went back to their books.

I just came back from an assignment in New York, with a quote from a friend stuck in my head. Over dinner, talking about our kids, my old New York Times colleague and mentor, Howard French said, "Our children consume us". Two days after getting back, with that quote in my head, I shot this image (on my new Fuji X100T camera) of my daughter Phoebe and wife Jennifer getting ready for school in the morning.

Our children do consume us.

Long before the iPhone panorama swipe mode came along, there were actual panorama cameras that mechanically scanned across the view, capturing the image on a wide format negative. It's hard to image the technical skills needed to operate such a camera and process the negatives, but imagine doing it with a few hundred rowdy English public school boys, myself included. The threat of detention was the tool used to keep order during these photo shoots. I still have the original print from the negative from 1973 taken at Rokeby, an all boys school in south London where my brothers and I were the only American kids attending.

Ten years ago this month I was maced at work for the first time. It always sounds strange thinking about getting sprayed by police with mace but what was stranger was after the image here was published, the French police spraying me sent a charming letter, apologizing for hitting me and asking for a copy of the photograph. C'est la vie of a photojournalist!

Something I learned this week: fighting the wind, cold and a spinning head are needed to photograph a fast moving pilot boat from a helicopter. One of the things I love about my work is I learn something new every assignment. I've done numerous aerial photo assignments of ferries and ships for local shipbuilder Vigor Industrial, but shooting a slow, lumbering ferry in Seattle’s Elliot Bay, I learned, is very different from photographing a speed boat at low altitude. With careful planning, though, and studying work done by other photographers, as well as extensive preparation with my pilot, it turned out to be a pretty straight forward assignment. The best kind of on-the-job-training.

It was only later when I was editing the images I realized that my opening photograph was taken at close to 30 knots, about 20 feet off the water and flying sideways. Again, when doing something outside your comfort zone and skill set: study and plan, study and plan.

Oh, and hire a very good pilot with nerves of steel.

Another amazing day at the Vigor Industrial shipyards here in Seattle. After nearly two months of rain, the sun finally shone, creating some wonderfully epic light to document the company's work on the USGCG Healy, the nation's largest icebreaker. The U.S. Coast Guard currently has only three polar icebreakers: two heavy (the Polar Sea and the Polar Star) and one medium (the Healy), so there's a serious push by state and local officials for the Federal government to fund construction of 6 new heavy icebreakers.

So decided to really throw back, with an old photo I found in a box, taken by fellow photo student Chris Finger while at Columbia College in Chicago in 1993. Myself with my then girlfriend, and now wife, Jennifer. I love this image, Jennifer looks so in control!

Recent aerial work of the new Artists at Play playground at the Seattle center, featured in Gray Magazine.

Double page spreads in actual magazines are pretty rare these days. I managed two in this month’s Geo Magazine from Germany for a piece on Paul Stamets and his amazing work on mushrooms.

Even when I try to take a break from being a photographer, I can’t. The image above was caught while on a camping trip with my daughter Zoe in Mount Rainier National Park. I only brought my little old Fuji X10 but when I saw the light at Shadow Lake I knew it was back to “work”.

Earlier this month I got a tour of Shell Oil’s controversial Polar Pioneer, an exploratory oil drilling platform berthed at the Port of Seattle before heading to the Arctic to search for potential oil reserves. The rig was met by protests when it arrived and departed Seattle and helped coin a whole new word – “kayaktivists” – for the protestors who met the rig in their kayaks. If Shell plans on bringing these rigs back to Seattle, judging by the determination of protestors, this story will go on for years.

These kinds of shoots are always tough because besides being constantly guided, there’s really not much happening as you walk around. A lot folks sitting at computers all day just like an office! All you can do is constantly search for an interesting, but quick image. A ideal shoot would be a few weeks on the rig but few clients have those kind of budgets anymore.

After spending a day earlier this summer photographing the interior of Amazon's new bio-Spheres here in Seattle I finally started shooting some exterior work for landscape architects Site Workshop. Working from dawn 'til dusk I tried to capture all the shifts in light and activity that happen around Seattle's newest urban hub.

I'm still not 100% satisfied, though, so hope to return during the winter months to capture some differing light and activity. The possibilities for light and people in this space are pretty endless so I'm not sure I'll ever capture enough, especially since new buildings are still going up around the Sphere's blocking and shifting the light.

I guess this is why photographers are also called lightstalkers!

Always nice to get an old style, double page spread (two!) in an actual paper magazine. Makes me feel young again!

Twenty three years ago I took a photograph of two young girls in an alley in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. Wendy Om (age 3 at the time) and her sister Olivia (age 5) where sisters to Ricky, an 18 year old member of a local street gang called the Loco Boyz who were, like Wendy and Olivia, Cambodian refugees who had survived the Khmer Rouge genocide. Ricky was party of an extensive photo-documentary that I worked on for nearly 4 years.

I’ve always loved this image of Om sisters. I often try to avoid photographing children on assignment, they can be easy and approachable subjects, ripe for cliches. But this image always speaks to me, showing Olivia with her protective arms wrapped around her younger sister, both comfortable enough with me to let me take the photograph.

I tried to keep track of Ricky and his family over the years but eventually lost touch with them. Most of the Cambodians in Uptown were pushed out by gentrification and it was only a few years, with Facebook, that I have been able to reconnect with some the subjects of the project. So this weekend I bowled over when a photograph of Wendy appeared in my feed; now 25 years old, married with two kids, she has just graduated college. She is the first member of her family to do so, a remarkable achievement for a family that fled Cambodia as farmers and survivors of one of the worst modern genocides.

There’s probably not a documentary photographer alive who hasn’t been influenced by Mary Ellen Mark. Mark, who died today at age 75, was a seminal photographer, especially for those of us who studied the craft in the early 1990s. She taught me how to embed myself with my subjects, how to listen to them and to be honest with them why I was there.

The photograph above is as close to a Mary Ellen Mark image I may have gotten. Taken in 1993 it shows Bobby Em, a then 19 year old member of a Cambodian street gang in Chicago, with his pregnant girlfriend. It was taken as part of a nearly three year project that took me across the U.S. with the young men of the Loco Boyz, but what Mark taught me was to seek out the quiet moments in people’s lives, connect and empathize with them. When I took this image I had Mark’s influence at hand; it’s as much about me as it is about Bobby. It was about being able to connect with him in a moment of intimacy, something only Mary Ellen Mark could have taught me.

I just returned from a 3 day assignment in Las Vegas, doing a travel story for a Spanish language magazine. It’s been 22 years since I was last in the neon-lit, desert town with a camera, working on a story with Gino Siang, a young Cambodian refugee and gang member who I spent nearly two years photographing as part of a story on the Cambodian diaspora. One of my favorite images was taken as we passed the famed Flamingo Casino on the Strip, in Gino’s beat-up Buick Century. This was back in my film days, using hand-rolled Tri-X b/w film, on camera flash, balancing that flash against the back light to make sure I recorded all the detail behind.

Technically, I’ve always loved this image but I also love its aesthetic qualities – the image shows Gino looking nervously over his shoulder, always on the lookout, always looking for potential threats. Gino was involved in numerous gang clashes in Long Beach and was again a refugee, this time moving to live with his sister in Chicago and escaping his past. Las Vegas was a stopover for us, and my first introduction to every photographer’s best friend – great light (continues below).

I first realized I could use my camera to protect myself from unpleasant realities while working on a story in Cambodia on land mines. Photographing in the Battambang Hospital I was confronted with the daily toll of war as people – young and old – flowed into the emergency rooms with horrific injuries caused by land mine explosions and other combat injuries. Looking through the viewfinder of my camera made confronting these terrible injuries easier, forcing me to focus on my job as a photographer to document what I was witnessing. I’ve always considered a camera to be a tool for enlightening people, but often it functions as a defensive tool for photographers, briefly giving us a protective prism through which we can confront hard truths. (Continues below).

And so it was this weekend I found myself at my father’s military funeral at the Fort Snelling National Cemetery in Minneapolis. My dad died last October but we decided to inter his remains on what would have been his 80th birthday. I had tried during my father’s final months to take photos of him but found it almost impossible – stricken by Alzheimers I felt I couldn’t photograph him without his approval. I wasn’t able to hide behind my camera as his condition deteriorated and only took images that hopefully maintained his dignity. (Continues below)

I finished my first plane spotting collage, working from the images I wrote about earlier. I have no idea where this will go, right now I’m envisioning wallpapering my office with a giant mural and letting my head spin. I guess I’m trying to bring the thrill back to flying, something I find very pedestrian these days. Some people complain about how painful flying is – the lines, cramped seats, baggage fees. None of that really bothers me, what bothers me is how boring it has become. Flying used to mean adventure, and as a kid, risk, but as I’ve gotten older the adventures have been tempered and flying is, well, just so safe. The thrill is gone.

The more I shoot and assemble these pieces, the more I’m incorporating ground objects into the frame, along with images that show close detail of the structure the aircraft, right down to the rivets. The impulse for these photos comes from when I was 11, in the spring of 1977. On holiday with my family, the home we stayed in had the latest issue of Time Magazine with the photos from the terrible crash of two Boeing 747s at Tenerife Airport. I obsessed about that magazine the whole trip, constantly sneaking peeks at the incredible images of the burning 747, wing and engines still intact. The crash of a Boeing 727 in California a year later, also caught on film by a photographer, sealed this fascination. I guess that has always been part of the ‘thrill’ of flying for me; the chance you might stop flying. Maybe my fascination with airplane crashes acts as a talisman for it happening to me but at a minimum, it potentially makes the boredom of modern air travel more interesting.

My daughter Phoebe enjoying Washington’s stunning Pacific Coast in Kalaloch, WA. My work usually slows down this time of year which means more photos of the kids than normal!

Would you pay $400,000 for this home that’s Zillow says is only worth $73,325? What if you knew it was the childhood home of Kurt Cobain, legendary singer for Nirvana, and that second floor window might give a glimpse into the struggles and inspirations of his life?

The Seattle PI reports today that the home is now on the market, looking for a owner willing to pay for those rock ‘n’ roll memories. I was able to get into the home for a New York Times story on Cobain, after putting in a request to his mother, who lives in California but still owns the property. I drove out mid week in driving rain to Aberdeen from Seattle and within hours finally understood more about Cobain and Nirvana than I ever did listening to their records.

I managed to miss the whole grunge era – when I graduated from college in 1988 I moved to Thailand, back in the pre-internet days when such a move basically put you in cultural cold storage. By the time I heard of Nirvana and Cobain they had come, and tragically for Cobain, gone.