A selection from my new book, Gure Bazterrak, published by Deadbeat Club Press. This book represents the culmination of 34 years of photographing life and culture in Iparralde, the northernmost provinces of the Basque Country located in in SW France.
Les Grues. Cranes.
Photographs from Appalachia from the monograph, You Will Look to the Mountains, published by Deadbeat Club Press, LA.
“I was born in 1960 in Boise, Idaho in the American West. Some six decades earlier, in 1896, my great, great grandmother Maggie May Jones travelled from Lenepah, Oklahoma to Idaho with her husband Robert and their two small children in a covered wagon with all of their belongings and a whole lot of dreams. The best memories of my childhood were those summer days spent with Maggie Jones’ grandson, my grandfather, (a doppelgänger for Robert Mitchum) fishing salmon and rainbow trout in his small boat at Arrowrock Dam in the Foothills outside of Boise. Hot dry days and cool desert nights, rodeos, drive-in movies, root beer floats at the A+W with carhops on roller skates, drunken family fights, floating the cold Boise River, state fairs, cowboys and Indians, picnics in the park and loaded guns. Although I have not lived in Idaho for more than forty years, it is the place I still call home.”
In the two decades since the end of the apartheid, South Africans have held onto hope that housing, jobs, and education will become available to all. Yet, townships often remain places where survival, not quality of life, define daily life.
In this gritty, post-Soviet mining town nestled in the Tian Shan mountains I have found the beauty and warmth of a proud people determined to hold on to their roots and way of life in a place that more often than not feels like the end of the world.
With slow time and the particular rhythms of rural life, I am reminded of my earliest self and the limitlessness of childhood.
The story of amateur boxing is framed in images of bodies, tiredness, contact, desire, damage, relationship, violence, and heart.
