2024 11 04

Remember that eclipse? Vincennes, Indiana. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

It turns out I got a couple decent shots of the eclipse afterall! Yeah, that thing that happened way back in April, which feels like a lifetime ago. I wrote about feeling frustrated after the experience (see: 2024 04 11) in that I hedged and neither fully enjoyed the moment nor committed to making a nice image of it. That said, it was an incredible experience nonetheless and I’m so grateful that we made the effort to be there in person for it.

A nice little bonus was that months later, when I finally got my film developed, there were a few nice exposures on it that I had completely written off as not likely to be worthwhile. This frame above I’m quite sure I made through the highly filtered solar glasses, which helps give it a darker appearance, while the on-camera flash illuminates the tree. It was all happening so fast that instincts took over and most of what I remember is the feeling of frantic and chaotic awe.

Fittingly, my plan today was to post a quote. When researching the below quote (so many famous quotes are inaccurately attributed), I was pleased to learn this was indeed said by Einstein in an interview about his theory of relativity, which was proven correct through measurements taken during a total solar eclipse.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

— Einstein

-Clayton

2024 08 05

“The cat’s on the roof again.” Vincennes, Indiana. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

It’s days like today that worry me about the future. Last night, I started seeing alerts about a huge market selloff in Japan. Sure enough, stocks around the world took a massive dump and made losses of historic nature. Sure, down days are normal, healthy even. Lower prices mean stocks are cheaper and younger people are better able to get in and enjoy larger returns. I get the logic and agree with it! What worries me isn’t the general up and down nature of stocks, it’s that we, in America, have decided to completely outsource our retirement funds to the stock market. Everything and everyone is now so reliant on the market to perform, and if it does not, for any number of reasons, many people will suffer later in life.

What’s that, you don’t want to work at McDonald’s into your eighties because the market is tanking and you can no longer afford to cover your grocery bill? Well, you better let us invade Iran to expand the friendly western economic markets! This country will eventually be forced to make drastic decisions out of financial necessity and we’ll gladly do it because we’re all tied into the same system, a system based on future growth and earnings in a world trending towards less growth and less stability. And our livelihood depends on it.

But what do I know? *heads to Schwab to buy more Apple stock because it’s down 6%* Oh wait, Schwab is down and I can’t access my funds. How reassuring!

-Clayton

2024 06 07

Bare tree in spring. Vincennes, Indiana. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

I have a ton of photos of bare trees still in the queue, but now that it’s summer and the trees are full, it feels weird to post them. Perhaps I will hold on to them for next year and keep things more seasonally-appropriate. What this blog even is is still being considered. Is it a photo blog? Is it a words blog that is photo-centric? I’ve been thinking more about how words pair with images since the Alec Soth video I talked about a few days back. Generally speaking, I am enjoying this blog simply for the fact that it is allowing me to consider these things at all. These days, I don’t have time for watching baseball because my daily blog is keeping me in line. Also, the Chicago baseball teams aren’t helping their cause — I tuned into the Cubs vs Sox game a few nights back and it was borderline unwatchable.

Anyhoo.

-Clayton

2024 05 29

Street cat in Vincennes, Indiana. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

I’m a huge van of Vuhlandes. He’s a filmmaker whose youtube channel has been influential in convincing me to get back to my roots and shoot video again. Seemingly every video he drops has some nugget of influential coolness that just looks like a ton of fun and makes me want to emulate his style. His recent video release is as powerful as ever, while also being sad as can be. I hope Vuhlandes makes a full recovery as soon as possible and this is just a small roadblock in his journey to bigger and better things ahead.

If you’re not familiar with his work, go give it a watch; and if you’re able, consider donating to his gofundme.

-Clayton

2024 05 27

Middle America vibes in Vincennes, Indiana. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

I love simple photos like this. I could’ve spent all day photographing this little neighborhood which was full of detail — and full of stray cats!

This year, I’m going to push myself to get out into the world simply with the task of making photographs. While this image is outside of my scope, the boundaries I’ve given myself is Illinois and all of its towns, cities, farmland, countryside, and anywhere in between, but excluding Cook County (Chicago), as I’ve spent my entire life living in this county and want to explore new landscapes less familiar to me. I likely won’t be sharing images from this project here on the blog as I’m aiming to make them come together as something that exists on its own. But we’ll see. Things change and I’m already finding myself stressed about missing out on capturing early summer, as I’ve been busy working back home in Cook County. Likely, this project will span multiple years as I grow and shape a larger body of work.

Happy Memorial Day, America.

-Clayton

2024 05 21

The scene out back in rural Haubstadt, Indiana. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

While navigating rural Indiana/Illinois on my way to catch the solar eclipse the following day, I stopped to charge my fancy electric vehicle. As I navigated into the parking lot, I needed to dodge random debris on the road, along with what appeared to be a downed power line. After pulling into the charging spot to juice my ride, I got out in search of a bathroom, having held my bladder the last fifty miles. Ominously, the building appeared simultaneously new, abandoned, and very much closed. A generator sat outside with cords and cables running in through an open window. A half dozen other fancy EVs from parts unknown sat next to mine, their drivers milling around the immediate area and keeping to themselves.

Needing to urinate quite badly, I ventured out to check the building and sure enough, it was closed. Grump and annoyed, I continued scouring the area thinking maybe there was some private spot out here in the middle of nowhere to relieve myself. After rounding the corner, in back of the building, I came upon this scene pictured above. A brilliant sun shining through the clouds onto farmland and junk and trash and an unattended fire pit.

“Fucking Indiana,” I thought to myself judgingly while trekking back to my car, still holding my bladder and without Slim Jims.

Once the charge was complete, I headed down road to the nearby McDonalds to examine their facilities. Upon pulling into that parking lot, I began to notice more debris along with downed trees and power lines, which made me think back to a conversation I’d had with a local a few days prior in which he told me about the tornadoes that hit this general area.

Ahh yes. What I’d been witnessing was not just busted infrastructure blocking my need to urinate and buy beef jerky to subdue my raging hanger, but the remnants of a fucking tornado which had rolled through the area just a few days prior.

“Y’all from here?” I asked a family heading into the McDonalds, hoping to get confirmation.

“Yessum.” they responded, in my head.

“Did a tornado hit here a few days back?” I asked.

They confirmed it and my judgmental city slicker perspective was shattered and I was just thankful nobody was hurt and the Tesla charging station was still working, because if it hadn’t been, I’d be living in Haubstadt now!

-Clayon

2024 05 12

Flowering tree in spring. Vincennes, Indiana. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Happy Mothers Day! Apologies for posting late, mom. Yes, everything is fine… I’m just falling behind on my blog post scheduling. Hope you had a great day, moms!

-Clayton

2024 04 11

Totality is approaching, but will he capture it? Vincennes, Indiana on the state line with Illinois over the Wabash River. April 8, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

When living in the moment and anything to get the shot conflict, things can get complicated.

Having just returned from experiencing the first and possibly only total solar eclipse of my lifetime, I’m sitting on my couch consuming everyone’s eclipse content and finding myself regretting the whole living in the moment mantra I was doing my best to practice during my time spent directly in the path of totality down in Vincennes, Indiana. I am a photographer, afterall, so getting the shot is kind of my thing. Yes, I did still make dozens of photos and thoroughly enjoyed every moment during what is maybe nature’s most amazing show. However, suppressing my urge to strictly focus on capturing the moment in favor of being present in the moment and experiencing it through my own eyes (I even had a 200mm lens and tripod with me but left it in the car!) is something that is harder to justify the next day when you’re looking at everyone’s amazing eclipse captures and comparing them to the lackluster results you made only after the natural impulse to document took over midway through (because it was so amazing I felt like I just had to make some photos!). Instead of doing one or the other, I ended up attempting to do both, which doesn’t really work when you only have four minutes. Sure, I’ll always have the memories seared into my brain, but perhaps this is why people like myself are driven to create beautiful images in the first place — it’s a sort of visual evidence that these moments did in fact happen and you’re not simply fabricating them in your mind.

For me, yesterday was a vivid reminder that everyone experiences things from their own perspective and it’s best practice to live life in a way that best compliments your own viewpoints and impulses.

All that said, the moments that will stay with me forever are ones that can’t be captured on any camera because they require your internal vision and past experiences to fully appreciate: the friends and loved ones around you and their emotions being displayed; the roar of the crowd gathered in the park as totality took over and again as the sun emerged from behind the moon; the visible lights miles off in the distance that your brain knows you are only seeing because it’s now nighttime over there but isn’t, yet, where you are; the quality of light and the vibe that is surrounding you in 360-degrees as day turns to night and then back to day again, which one static image will just translate as a mostly ordinary sunset; the feeling of the scale of things, how you are both incomprehensibly small yet a part of something so grand and impossible to understand; when the skies turn dark and another planet is immediately and unexpectedly visible in the same sky you’d just been staring at for the past two hours, and then somebody mentions there is a comet that is also visible with the right optics in your same field of view—how layers upon layers of things exist and are only visible at the right time, with the right equipment, and the right tuning. Even in the void of space things are seemingly plentiful.

Almost as spectacular as the eclipse was the surreal feeling after it ended. Within an hour, even before the moon had finished transiting the sun, which by now was ordinary by comparison to totality, everyone had packed up a left town. The balloons were deflated, the band gone, the food carts moved off, the swarms of people and overflowing collection of cars nowhere to be seen. We stopped into a pizza spot to grab a bite to eat on the main street of this now mostly re-abandoned town and immediately encountered a woman angry about her reservation getting lost and having to wait for a table — the look on her face is one I will never forget when juxtaposed alongside the amazing life event I had just experienced. Was she not also there?! Did she not see what I’d just seen? How could you be so upset in this moment?

In our modern world of endless distractions and forms of entertainment, my thoughts turned to how this day might’ve be different a century ago when nobody had things to get back to so quickly. Maybe we’d hang out and talk to each other about what we’d just travelled to witness, instead of racing home to edit our content and put it out into the internet for a million strangers to hopefully notice. These physical places, town centers across the mostly forgotten Midwest, once the social medias of another time, are now mostly empty collections of run-down-yet-beautiful houses and more stray cats than human beings.

Driving home among a mass caravan heading back towards the big city, we talked about an acquaintance who avoids eclipses as part of her culture. Maybe it’s a long-forged human self-defense mechanism used to avoid the regret of not taking away from these magical moments any sort of wisdoms it deserves or great photographs to post on your social media for likes and follows. The pressure put upon a moment in time which you have absolutely no control over is quite dramatic. Sorry it rained on the day you had your only chance at experiencing God. Guess it wasn’t in the cards this lifetime. [update: last night I repeatedly dreamed that sunlight was now different that it was before the eclipse. It’s hard for the brain not to interpret such a colossal event as a sign that something far bigger and perhaps more dangerous has just taken place!]

In the end, I didn’t get the shot but I did get quite alright two-for-one buffalo wings, an experience I will never forget, and a nice reminder about how seeing the world from your perspective is all that we know, and making sure your perspective is a good one is the only thing we can kinda sorta control, if you put the effort into it.

One day we all look up at the same thing and everyone experiences it differently. 

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” - Anaïs Nin

-Clayton

PS - anyone want to go to Iceland or Egypt for the next few total solar eclipse viewings? I’ll bring the good lens this time!

2024 01 23

The Florida Tropical House. Beverly Shores, Indiana. February, 2022. © Clayton Hauck

Back in early 2022 I worked on a really fun piece for the Wall Street Journal which sent me down to Beverly Shores, Indiana to photograph some of the wild houses they have that were originally built for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. The Florida Tropical House, pictured here, is now on the market and available to rent for $2.5million (it’s on National Park property so residents to these unique houses can only lease, not own them).

More images from my WSJ assignment here 📸

Zillow listing for The Florida House here

Link to WSJ piece here (paywalled)

-Clayton