Trees talk to each other at night.

All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.

Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.

Tiny bears live in drain pipes.

If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.

The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.

Everyone knows at least one secret language.

When nobody is looking, I can fly.

We are all held together by invisible threads.

Books get lonely too.

Sadness can be eaten.

I will always be there.

I like photographers who work in places with history.
I like photographers who use natural light.
I like photographers who get out there in the world.
I like photographers who shoot with a specific point of view.

Bert Teunissen has done and continues to do all these things traveling around the world shooting what he calls Domestic Landscapes. His photographs are a vivid protest against the prefab readymade corporate world that seems to encompass more and more of our lives and are vivid arguments for living life connected to a specific place. In interviews he estimates that 90% of the locations featured in Domestic Landscapes no longer exist.

I've blogged about Mr. Teunissen before, but he is doing an edition with us tomorrow at 20x200.com so I've posted again as a heads up. If you want to purchase a print, the best way to get notified is via the 20x200 mailing list which give you a bit of a jump on the edition.

Teunissen has blogged about Domestic Landscapes over at Aperture.org.

Liao Yiwu has a knack for capturing stories from everyday people in China that manage to be both poetic and funny. I first encountered Yiwu's work via the Paris Review in this story about a peasant who in 1985 declared himself emperor of Sichuan province.

Yiwu has recently released a book titled The Corpse Walker which is a collection of interviews of people in the bottom rungs of Chinese society-morticians, lepers, professional mourners, etc. This short excerpt of an interview with a mortician is a good example of his writing:

An excerpt:

"Beauty doesn't last. It's bound to be destroyed. So many kind, good-looking people die each day. I work on their bodies, hoping to temporarily preserve and enhance their beauty before they are gone forever. I don't want to lose anyone anymore. The scariest part of life is not death but the loss that comes with death. My former boss died at the beginning of this year. He was not even seventy. I did the makeup for him. This guy had one hobby when he was alive. He collected wedding invitations when he was young, and when he turned fifty, he began to collect obituaries. His whole room was filled with his collections. He used to say that all obituaries sounded the same and that we Chinese people lack imagination in the use of language. He wanted his own obituary to be unique, so he began to compose it when he was still alive. He printed hundreds of copies and stored them in a drawer with his bank statements and his will. After he died, his friends showed one to Old Wang, the new Party secretary at the funeral home. Old Wang, who was going to preside over the memorial service, read it aloud to several people during rehearsal. Nobody could understand what the obituary was about. It was so archaic, it sounded like haiku. I didn't know half of the characters. It was handwritten. He must have read it hundreds of times before he died, hoping those would be the last words he left for the world. But the new Party secretary didn't think the obituary reflected the revolutionary spirit of the new era. So he composed a new one filled with modern political jargon, in a style that our past director had despised. Oh well, what can you do? This is China. You don't have much control when you are alive. When you die, you won't have control over your obituary either. "

If you happened to be driving around the Texas hill country tonight you would have seen a huge waxing crescent of a moon hanging low in the sky. It was painted blood orange and loomed ever larger as it fell. I stopped on a particularly dark stretch of road, got out of the car, and communed in the darkness. With my hands in my pockets I spent fifteen minutes watching the moon slide below the horizon. I won't talk about how beautiful the scene was, because beauty is so difficult to telegraph but I can tell you how it made me feel.

Thirty minutes earlier I had been on a bus and I was full of that all over bone-tiredness unique to night time bus and car rides amplified by a slight chill and damp. I told my fellow bus riders that being a little cold, a little damp, very tired (and on a bus) made me remember the childhood versions of those feelings as well as the ones that inevitably followed—those of being lifted from the car, of being carried through the night and into the house, and being tucked into bed by my parents. Now that I am a parent who ferries his small children to bed after long trips I get some of that feeling back as I carry them. It's one of those strange parental feedback loops in which you simultaneously a) feel what your kid is feeling, b) are flooded with intense childhood memory, and c) feel what your parent must have felt when they were holding you. So I was looking at the moon thinking of all of that.

Simultaneous to those thoughts, I was remembering a time when I was 16 or 17 when I stopped on the same road to watch a new moon rise over the same hills. I remember thinking then that I hoped I would always be the type of person who would drive out to the middle of nowhere, stop his car, and look at the moon. At sixteen I imagined some future version of myself doing just that. The sixteen year old self was hoping I could share the view with a girl rather than imagining putting children to bed. But my adult self was recalling how my wife and I, after putting the children to bed, sit on the couch under a blanket and talk and how sometimes we fall asleep ourselves and how nice that is and how someday perhaps when the kids are older we'll miss doing that.

Back then I remember hoping for a shooting star. None ever came. None came tonight either. Maybe next time.

I have a soft spot for photography made in the world's more visceral places. Davin Ellicson is working on a long term project documenting rural life in Romania where according to his bio he lived and farmed with a peasant family for a year in the Maramures region. He knows the people he's covering and it shows.

1. How George Lucas' billions can't buy him a beard to hide the fact that he is chinless.

2. How a higher percentage of bowlers have beards than the general male populace and how bowling really SHOULD be an Olympic sport. How it is an ancient game of history and tradition and how people who bowl are good people, true of heart.

3. How girls really dig night time van drivers more than you would think and how night time van drivers have to be pure of mind to resist temptation.

4. How night time van drivers sometimes get together in the summer to shoot bottle rockets into the lake.

5. How it is very dangerous to shoot bottle rockets from inside the van because it is possible to blow a finger off.

6. How Jimmy keeps his blown off finger in a jar of formaldehyde.

7. How Jimmy despite being a late night van driver has women problems.

8. How Jimmy has no chin.

9. How Jimmy has a beard.

10. How this is all for the best, because although he is a friend ("since the middle of 8th grade") Jimmy is a bad guy with a black heart.

I'm in Austin at SXSW until Tuesday. If you're here, say hello. Best way to find me is via twitter.

While I don't necessarily understand some of the editing choices he has made, the portfolios of California based photographer Victor Cobo contain some compelling images full of narrative delight and mystery.

John Chiara by using archaic techniques and hand built cameras has become of photography's most innovative landscape photographers. Working with giant truck-sized cameras that he actually crawls inside of while creating an image he produces one of a kind prints that manage to evoke not only the grand tradition of making landscape pictures but also of the essence of photography itself.
If you happen to be in New York, there are only a few days left to visit his exhibition at The Von Lintel Gallery. Go See the works in person as they demand to be seen.

This short video (real player format) of Chiara shows something of his technique.

John Davies is on the short list of four finalists for this year's Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008. His large scale prints are best seen in person as they contain an incredible amount of detail. They're currently in a show of prize finalists in London. Of course any British readers of this blog have probably already seen the exhibition.

The Photographers’ Gallery
5 & 8 Great Newport Street
London WC2H 7HY

The artist David Horvitz maintains a web page titled "THINGS FOR SALE THAT I WILL MAIL YOU". On it he offers exchange of money for his time.

For example,

If you give me $400 I will take a train to a desolate area with a packed lunch and sit down and read Anna Karenina. I will do this for 6-10 hours. I will repeat the same thing the following days until I have finally read the entire book. Finally! I am only going to do this once, so this is an edition of one only. I will send you documentation of this from the closest mailbox to where I do this. I'll also write the location of the mailbox on the envelope if you ever wish to go to where I will have sent it to you from.

and

This one is really serious. I'm scared to do this. But I think I have to. If you give me $10 I will think really hard of someone who I need to apologize to. I will write them a letter of apology. I will make two copies of the letter. I will send one to you and one to the person who I am apologizing to.

(via jen bekman who spends most days sitting at a desk a few feet away from me in the 20x200 office and still manages to send several IMs and many emails a day)

Leonie Purchas' In The Family project is full of the type of photography that gets me out of bed in the morning- intimate, revealing, and true with the occassional punch in the solar plexus to leave you totally gobsmacked.

In my next life I will be a Japanese game show host.
I will hand out cream pies to ladies in bikinis.
I will supervise games of human tetris.
I will watch grown men in diapers yodel the Beatles.
My hair will be streaked purple
My suits will be boxy
My manner: always enthusiastic.

I will smoke
and drink santori whiskey
and be the lovable liar
A fixture at dinner parties
and late night karaoke booths
My bed will never be cold.
Everyone wants to know a famous tv personality.

When the camera's red light is on
I am on
My hangovers hidden
My hollowness masked with an enthusiastic “Genki des!”
but in my quiet moments
Amidst the human cannonballs and noodle eating contests
I will dream of another life
Maybe one with two boys
A wife who loves me despite my flaws,
And the knowledge that
The best parts of life while hidden,
are sometimes glimpsed
In the glimmer of what might have been

Related: TV in Japan

One of the games I play with my 3 year old is to present him with images of family members when they were younger to see if he recognizes them. He recognizes his mother back into her childhood, his grandfather he sees only with a beard, and me he has no problem identifying after about the age of 16. Today I presented him with this image, a picture I found of myself circa 1992, taken while out backpacking.

I had a pretty full beard, was very skinny and to my eyes look barely unrecognizable, but my son was almost annoyed when I asked who was in the picture. "It's you daddy. You have a big beard, blue shirt, and a hat with a P. You are outside."

"Are you sure it's me" I asked.

"Yeah. Daddy it's you." Then he studied the picture a bit more, "But where am I?" he asked.