…the Shadows reign. The roar of the mighty machine subsides, and the strangled cries of untold longings rise from dark alleys and dimly-lit streets. Slipping in and out of the shadows, the underworld comes to life in a ragged dance of inebriation, desire, loneliness, and abandon…

Life is a dance, as my mama says; and those who live it well move with a certain grace: an undefinable, often even unnoticed, way of being-in-the-world that separates the charismatic among us from the rest of the great human herd..

On Saturday the winds blew hard from the south all afternoon.  Crazy, gusty, warm wind, smelling of springtime…

In Venice, as in any ancient city, history is etched upon the walls and the walkways.  Centuries of the slow creep of decay–a history of floods, storms, deep freezes and crackling summer heat–have painted abstract passion-plays upon the stone and stucco of the city’s architecture.  

A prose-poem. Excerpted from Legends of the Sandbar. Buy the book here

…But on the other hand, time and the universe are linear, and the entities within them are finite. There will never be another season like this particular season, and when it is over, it is over for all time…

It may come as a surprise to the casual visitor that forty years ago there was not a single mask shop in Venice, nor even a single craftsperson who made masks. And there was no Carnival….

I had a great time doing this interview for Photo Brazil Magazine’s end-of-year special issue some years back. The article was in Portuguese, so I’m just posting the answers as I gave them in English…

…Here’s to the first sunburn of the year, the first stubbed toe, the first bite from a black fly, the first flat spell, the first pair of flip-flops lost at a bonfire…bring it on, y’all, bring it on… 

You never get much sympathy from people when you’re on a travel assignment…

What those unfamiliar with New Orleans failed to understand was just how important the culture of the Crescent is to the soul of American culture at large, though its influence might be hidden and indirect.  This is a hard thing to explain in a few sentences; it’s even difficult to explain in several hundred pages…  

Sometimes in a creative life, you find yourself out on a precariously thin limb, and looking forward all you can see is a proliferation of branches, each one of them thinner than the one it shoots off of…

(Originally published on National Geographic's "On Assignment" blog)

For this trick ski shot of championship waterskier Thibaut Dailland at Swiss Waterski Resort in Clermont, FL, shot from the water, autofocus was not a practical choice…

The Art and Peril of Unplugging

Ah, Venice…that ancient warren of crumbling churches, oily canals, a thousand and one mask shops, and lord knows how many bridges.