first gallery of pictures from Iceland 2002-2009

But what's the genesis of this psychological architecture, our wish to experience ourselves in terms only we can know and describe? Where did the impulse to explore or desire come from? Which idea did we catch as a virus at a young age that kept us so sure about the singularity of identity, the uniqueness of our existence, the inner profit that comes from living within the bounds of your own imagination? I paid my dues by reading, but for some reason the lives of strangers became reduced to those that were distinct and those that were mundane; the thinkers made up the first, and athletes and actresses and stars fell into the second. To follow the thinkers, I had to think. I could have thought about the thinkers, but I prefer to think about myself. But the question has always been not how do I feel, but what do I think about how I feel. People always respond to this because we feel deeply but don't often bother to examine why, even as we write down or share the landscapes of our feeling. We all claim limitless capacity to feel, and I have no argument for that, but what do people think, for instance, about the impulse to murder blossoming from the fertilizer of love?

-- from a letter to Jonelle written in the dark, under the influence of light deprivation, which at certain moments fills me with the impulse to flee to Casablanca or Tunis or Algiers. Credit cards glow in the dark: escape from my curdled thoughts, suffusion with light and shadow, but I was just in Oaxaca for ten days, and the patterns of compulsive self-examination under cover of darkness were as strong there as it is here. I step on the ice and barely notice the intricacies of its structure, except as a pretty texture to photograph. But how much am I willing to really examine the substance. Why is it that ice formed in the ocean becomes fresh water? The leach of saline must be similar in some way to how I distill memory, somehow beautifying sour events or sensations of deep loss into dulcet tone and tint, sugars on my tongue, spilling scenes of self to entertain and explain. A shattered love affair becomes a symphony of feeling; the death of a friend or relative, the parachutes I use to fall back to Earth; the mining of the planet for profit becomes a scar to celebrate and offer as proof to judge corporations and executives (and the rest of us) who operate according to a bottom line rather than within the confines of bottled time. Look, as I write, the daylight surges up, and the city reflects its newly fallen snow. The storm is over, time to hit the road, except that I am pulled back to bed, exhausted by being!