Last week was a hard one for New Orleans, with a shooting at a Mothers Day second-line parade injuring 20 people. I was at the parade with many of my closest friends and we know several of the club members who were parading — all of us were just mere steps away from the gunfire. I worked on a followup story for the New York Times which helped to keep me grounded and busy while still processing the experience. Along with images from a community rally against violence that occurred the day after the shooting, my editor included two older pictures I made at the Mothers Day parade in 2011 to provide some visual context for the story. It made for a great layout in the National Section of the paper, and you can read the excellent story online: “Celebrating, in Spite of the Risk“.

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This week has been much quieter — I went camping on the beach in Florida. I’m wandering shaded streets around town shooting a (sweaty) travel assignment, and sorting through old stories and revisiting some of the things I absolutely love about this city… like MARDI GRAS MARCHING BANDS.

This past Mardi Gras season, Katy Reckdahl wrote a fantastic piece for the NYT on the trials and triumphs of The McDonogh 25 High School marching band (the “Roneagles“). I had an awesome time tagging along with the band one evening as they played in the annual Krewe of Hermes parade down St. Charles Street. The experience reinforced my love for New Orleans as one of the many ways this city really comes together.

Redux Pictures just sent me a tearsheet from a story that appeared in Gioia Magazine last year. From what I can tell, Gioia appears to be a higher-end women’s publication a la Marie Claire or Vogue, and like Marie Claire, they sneak some real journalism into each issue through feature stories and photo essays.

Two images from my This is Home series appear in a story about LGBTQ homeless youth. I worked on this story in San Francisco over the course of an entire year during grad school, and grew pretty close to several of the traveling kids who let me hang out with them when they passed through town. It’s always nice to see older personal work take on a new life through publication. Redux Pictures does a great job of distributing my stock archive and finding venues for pictures to live while keeping their original context. I’m happy to be working with them, and pleased to contribute some pictures to illustrate this story. I just wish I could read Italian.

A few months ago I traveled to South Carolina for a corporate client to shoot at a Boeing plant where the new 787 Dreamliner jet is being assembled. I like walking into assignments like these, not really knowing anything about the subject matter, and just looking for pictures along the way. Unfortunately our time at the Boeing plant was limited to one hour for portraits and a tour of a factory floor that is larger than a football field. We had escorts pointing out the things I could photograph, which seemed vastly outweighed by the things I could not — I actually shot one of the images used for the title page out of a moving car. Despite the time constraints, I felt good about my take, and was happy to see the layout when the magazine arrived in the mail.

Hochtief Construction keeps a digital archive of their CONCEPTS magazine online, and the issue with this story is located here (p. 36-40).