2024 10 23

Chased a waterfall. Starved Rock State Park, Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Something that always fascinates me is how fragile life on Earth is. We are doing our best to disrupt the planet’s fragile ecosystems, and we do a great job of it, but beyond our own stupidity, it’s remarkable that life on Earth exists at all! We would not be here without the moon, for example, which stabilizes and calms our planet’s orbit and allows for the seasons, giving us time to grow crops and smell the flowers.

This morning, I read another fascinating bit of information that would also be a deal-breaker for us had science decided to act just a bit differently. That is — ice.

Most of the time, when an element in a liquid state transforms into its solid state, it gets much smaller and more dense. Water (H20), on the other hand, expands when it solidifies. This scientific anomaly is another in many that allow us humans to exist at all. Had ice followed the rules and shrunk as it formed, it wouldn’t float. If ice were to sink, the world’s oceans would’ve fully solidified and life on Earth would not be possible, or at the very least, would have been a whole lot more difficult and we would probably be single-cell organisms, frolicking in the ice while attempting to figure out how to migrate to land.

-Clayton

2024 06 14

Bare trees prior to the additional of leaves for added visual pleasure. Starved Rock State Park, Illinois. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

While browsing Hulu’s user interface to put on some background news television, it hit me that today’s news channels are essentially reality filters. Users are given a choice which filter they want to use in order to view the world in their ideal vision. This is something I already knew, but hadn’t previously thought of it like Instagram filters. Increasingly, we are using technology to warp the reality around us.

I’m someone who enjoys all four seasons, but I also understand why so many people move south to avoid them. Seasons come with drawbacks. It’s cold. It’s hot. It’s muggy. It’s buggy. It’s snowy. It’s wet. Why put up with all the inconvenience when you can simply relocate to San Diego and enjoy three-hundred-plus days of 70-degrees and sunny? They’ve even shipped in a bunch of palm trees from elsewhere to add visual appeal.

It doesn’t seem like this trend of re-shaping our personal world to better suit our desires is going to slow down anytime soon, whatever the unknown costs may be.

-Clayton

2024 06 04

Bare trees at Starved Rock, Illinois — Massively compressed jpg for the sake of your bandwidth. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

This video below entered my life over the weekend and I’m really glad it did, though my bank account took a hit as a result.

Alec Soth discusses two photobooks and how words relate to their pictures within. Tim Davis’ I’m Looking Through You and Gilles Peress’ Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.

Tim’s book is incredible and has been in heavy rotation lately at the studio, however, Alec’s video sort of rudely reminded me that my habit of fully avoiding words in photobooks is something I need to address. Even as someone who fancies myself a wanna-be writer and values good writing above maybe even photography itself, my instinct is to completely cut out the words. Perhaps it’s because my brain goes first to the words and then to the images, which minimizes the visual impact. Or perhaps it’s because they typically don’t serve a valid purpose in most photobooks and I’m forcing my brain to connect solely with the images without changing their meaning. But that’s not really my choice to make! Books are put together with much work and consideration, and if the artist put the words in the book, I shouldn’t ignore them. Now, I’m excited to get my ass back to the studio and head straight for Tim’s book to take in the words he put into it to compliment the images I have already consumed.

Gilles’ book is set to arrive today. This is an insanely deep photobook project spanning 1,000 pages of images and an accompanying book with another nearly 1,000 pages of words and images. Plus it comes with a tote bag to contain everything! Normally, hearing about a project like this, I’d get super curious and then see the $456 price tag (marked down from $750 on amazon), then immediately move along to other distractions in order to turn my mind to different things; But this time Alec did such a great job talking about this book and how good it is, I mustered the courage to plop down the money and have it delivered.

Lately, I’ve been “listening to the universe when it tells me something.” This is a bit of a new approach to how I might normally operate and I’m not yet quite sure how it will play out. It’s a long-term process, afterall, but I do strongly think these small everyday decisions I am making now will compound into something bigger and more meaningful a decade from now. I bring this up because this video was the second time in a week I’d encountered a photographer whose opinion I trust mentioning this expensive book. Typically, I’d tune it out, as I’m quite stressed about money these days, however, I’m listening to the universe and the universe wants me to spend $500 purchasing this photo book.

I’ll let you know in a decade whether or not it paid off.

-Clayton