Sometimes I think it’s just sort of out of reach for me. This whole image making thing. I point the camera but it feels heavy, unwieldily, awkward silly, whatever and there’s nothing else.

My eyes are inevitably magnetized to the back of the screen (chimping) and I don’t like what I see and I can’t figure out how to make it better and it just makes the whole thing slide further down that slippery slope of… ugh.

I was going through images I shot over the last few days, an experience that for me is kind of like opening up presents on holidays, and there was nothing there. All blah. All ick. So. I stopped. I just couldn’t do it anymore. Instead I did what I do best most of the time. I aimed my eyeballs at the Internet and let them glaze over until something happened.

And I was sort of lucky because in a roundabout semi-circular fashion through a series of absent minded clicks I stumbled upon the blog of former Livebooks Resolve blog editor Miki Johnson.

It’s so true and pure and silly and different in a lot of ways than the blogs I usually read. It made me feel like it’s okay to be embarrassed and not so good at things sometimes and just kind of try anyway.

And she also reminded me how much I like this book and the way Tim O’Brien writes:

“Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.” –Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried.

I’m here now. And will be for a few weeks. Look out for stories on vagrant communities and a dwindling peacock population in an unexpected place…

From the streets of Buenos Aires to to the bottom of Brooklyn to a little lake in upstate New York the little $1 wonder is on the move again.

Shots from the little Olympus OM-4 that I brought with me to South America. Sadly, it died halfway through the trip and I still haven’t figured out how to revive it.

And sometimes I remember to open the lens cover. And sometimes I point it at something pretty. And sometimes the light agrees. And sometimes the roll stays in there so long that 36 exposures span three continents. And sometimes I’ll even let you take a look…

Rumor has it that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid fought their last gunbattle about 40 kilometers north of this tiny tumbleweed of a Bolivian town. I think it’s one of the coolest places we visited. It just had this kind of mellow, ground down, rough around the edges sort of vibe going on.

A lot of the walls in town were painted with these old advertisements that had started to deteriorate from all the sand and the sun.

We happened to be there on the town’s birthday so there was a big celebration. People were firing these really primitive looking fireworks. They were hand held and made a really loud bang when they made loud bang. This little girl didn’t like the noise. I can’t say I did either.

This bike just looked kind of classic to me.

We rode some horses through the badlands. I think you kind of have to when you’re in such a wild west kind of place. It was fun but more bumpy than I thought it would be. Not a good activity if you have a camera bag and a camera around your neck.

Boliva is a lot more rugged than its neighbors. The roads are mostly packed dirt paths through the desert, the towns look like sets from a wild west movie and the women walk around in bowler hats and brightly colored ponchos.

We got an impromptu tour of some of the smaller towns when we made our way to lower altitudes after our desert adventure went a bit awry.

This women is walking in front of a church in a tiny middle of nowhere town that was built entirely by a mining company that came into to take advantage of the resources in the surrounding countryside. The church was originally on a hill but they moved it brick by brick and reassembled it after the town sprouted up.

This is a dusty car on the street in Uyuni. According to our guidebook the town exists almost solely on revenue from tourists. It was a strange ghostly kind of desert nowhere town that looked like something out of another place in time.

This is a cup of tea made from the same leaves that they make cocaine from. The tea doesn’t get you high or anything but it does give you a little energy and take the edge off if you’re hungry.

This is a pile of plastic bottles I saw behind a little shack restaurant on the edge of the salt flats that we ate in. I always wonder what countries without potable water do with all the plastic trash they generate.

This is the bus that I spent half of my birthday on. The front says Mercedes but I just don’t think I can believe it. Desert dust seeped in through the cracks in the windows and the little TV blared Bolivian pop ballads so loud that they were distorting. It rattled my bones all the way from Uyuni to Tupiza but I guess I really can’t complain for $8.

This is a little creature that we dubbed Dread Dogg. It’s a sad little long haired stray that after too much time in the desert has started to go a bit rasta.

And lastly, my Spanish sucks so I have no idea what this says. Do you?

A little over a week ago Patrick and I managed to make it through a three day jeep tour of the Bolivian desert. We braved brain crushing altitude, ice cold nights and long long bumpy “roads.”

During the excursion we spent a day on the sun bleached plains of the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat.

It was bright white, blinding, and as one might imagine… very very salty.

We also saw a train graveyard, some lagunas and a geyser field.

We weathered the 27 hour busride here in champion style. The only downside was a team of defecating babies that were seated in the two rows behind us.

None the less we´re here and it´s dry and sunny and my face is pink and my skin is dusty.

Here are some pictures that I took yesterday