When I think about the vocation of a photographer, I think of the words of Simone Weil, saying that “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Paying attention is what gets most photographers into their profession. They pay attention and capture a moment and then linger in the darkroom, spending hours waiting to see an image develop from the blank white of a sheet of photo paper, the details slowly emerging in a chemical bath.
Read MoreWe gathered in a living room of earthen walls painted mint green with a dirt floor covered by tarp. Our hostess sat aside from the group on a bench lining one of the walls so that we could all have a seat in a circle of sunk-in couches and ottomans. Alemaz Bola is a mother of five and an entrepreneur. She wore a head wrap striped with the green, yellow, and red of the Ethiopian flag and sat meekly aside as if to stay out of the way, despite the fact that we came to hear her story.
Read MoreI had been craving some good country biscuits for a while when the Autrys invited me over for breakfast one Sunday. Marcie told me that her husband, Jamie, makes excellent biscuits and, man, was she right. “One of our dreams is to have a biscuit truck at the farmers’ market. We have a lot of dreams, though,” she said laughing in their kitchen. In fact, they’ve started keeping a written list, storing their dreams away in a log, ready for the picking when the time is right.
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