Several months ago I photographed a really interesting assignment in my own neighborhood for the New York Times. The Music Box, a ’shantytown sound laboratory’, is a musical house built from found materials that serves as a prelude to the building of ‘Dithyrambalina’, an interactive sculpture in the form of a three-story house. Co-curated by the Brooklyn-based street artist Swoon, The Music Box is a platform for collaborating artists to develop the instrumentation that will eventually be built into the Dithyrambalina’s walls, ceilings, and floorboards.

Campbell Robertson wrote a great piece describing the first performance I attended called A Symphony of Floorboards, Pipes, and Stairs, and several of my pictures accompanied his story in a slideshow titled House Music in New Orleans. I really liked the way our story came together, and meeting a bunch of cool people throughout the process was an added bonus. I went back to photograph the third and final performance at the Music Box at the invitation of New Orleans Airlift, the organization that made the whole project possible.

Today’s edition of New York Magazine features a travel guide to New Orleans that focuses on the Marigny and Bywater districts that we call home. Titled  ‘The Urbanist’s New Orleans‘, the article refers to the neighborhood as part alt-college town, part faerie-anarchist commune, and takes readers on a crash course through galleries, bars, and restaurants on the downtown side of the French Quarter. It’s a funny glimpse into the ways that the rest of the country thinks about New Orleans these days, and they used one of my pictures (below) to lead the entire travel feature.

I added an edit from both Music Box performances to my portfolio site here: Recent Work: The Music Box.

Wo Wirtschaft spielt – Where Business Happens

February 2 – March 10, 2012

stilwerk limited edition design gallery

Hamburg, Germany

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I’m participating in a group exhibition produced by brand eins Magazine in Germany. I’ve been happy to work with them for several years now, and am consistently impressed and inspired by the importance they place on visual language — the 11″ x 14″ magazine is printed on heavyweight matte paper and they assign a single photographer and writer to cover each story, regardless of location. I’ve traveled all over the country (and to a few places in England) for brand eins stories with my good friend and talented writer Steffan Heuer, who works as their US Correspondent. While I cannot read the stories, I flip through the pages of this magazine like a kid with a picture book… it’s that good.

To mark the 10 year anniversary of the magazine, brand eins invited several of their contributing photographers to participate in a group exhibition that draws from images made while on assignment during this period. They requested the following three images from a story we worked on about New Urbanism and different models for life within American cities. The first picture is from Earthworks Urban Farm in Detroit, Michigan and the other two are from New Town at St. Charles, Missouri… quite the contrast.