ghosts got left behind

Posted on October 9, 2026 by greg

What do you do on a bright sunny October day when you don’t want to do the stuff you really ought to be doing? You decide to drive 30 miles into the countryside to photograph an abandoned (and reportedly haunted) 1860s Italianate house for Wikipedia.

Well, that’s what I decided to do anyway. But some days just don’t turn out the way you expect them to.

The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has a Wikipedia page. Officially it’s called the J.G. and Regina Long house, but historically it was known as the Maple Grove Hill farm. Why? Because the house was set on a hill and Joseph Grayson (J.G.) Long planted a grove of maple trees which, in the mid 19th century, weren’t common in Iowa.

Three things on the Wikipedia page caught my attention. First:

According to local tradition, it was a stop on the Underground Railroad and features an underground tunnel connecting the house to a barn.

How cool is that? Very cool, is how cool. Who wouldn’t want to see a house with an underground tunnel (okay, ‘underground tunnel’ seems kind of redundant) to help escaped slaves? And then there was this:

a radio station in Iowa, has reported the house to be haunted by evil spirits due to its history.

Really, a house with a secret tunnel would have been enough. A house with a tunnel that was part of the Underground Railroad would have been enough. Dayenu, right? But on top of that we’ve got some evil spirits. It’s almost too much. According to the documentation to have the house listed on the National Registry,

A female wraith, projecting an image of haunting, albeit benign, sorrow, has appeared over the years to individuals in different rooms. The present owner, who has experienced the phenomenon, believes the figure to be Regina Hiskey Long, second wife of J. G. Long, because of its resemblance to a photograph of her.

So okay, maybe the spirits aren’t all that evil. Maybe Wikipedia got that part wrong. But even benign spirits are cool, right? And the third thing that caught my attention? There was no photograph of the house. We’re talking about a house that was part of an informal secret network to help slaves escape their bondage, a house haunted by a wraith (who may or may not have been evil, who knows?), and there was no photograph of it on the Wikipedia page? How was that possible? A house like that? It deserves a photo. The situation needed to be rectified. And I decided I was just the guy to do the rectifying.

So there’s me yesterday, camera in hand, ready to do right by Wikipedia…and what did I find? No maple trees. No underground tunnel leading to a barn. No barn, in fact. And absolutely no ghosts. Not even the slightest tingling feeling of ghostitude. I can’t say I felt cheated, because the house was still exceedingly cool (for an abandoned farmhouse), but it wasn’t quite what I expected.

There was a very good reason for that. It turns out the house has been moved. Back in 2012 the property was sold and the new owner apparently decided he didn’t want to own a historic haunted house. So another person bought it and had it shifted a couple of miles to this new location. The tunnel, the barn, the maple trees, and the ghost were left behind.

But here’s the thing: houses aren’t just buildings; rooms aren’t just areas enclosed by a ceiling, floor and walls. Inhabited spaces can be metaphors for the people who inhabit them. A lived-in room can inform you; it can answer questions. Who lived here? Who worked here? What were their lives like? How did their lives shape this structure, these rooms?

The J.G. and Regina Long house, even though it’s been moved and inhabited by many other people, can start to answer a lot of questions about who J.G. and Regina were. And the first question is this: how did they come to build a farmhouse in an Italianate style with Gothic arched windows in rural Iowa in the 1860s?

The U.S. Civil War had ended; ‘civilization’ was moving westward, driven by railroad expansion. The arrival of the Chicago & Rock Island railroad in Monroe, Iowa made it feasible for goods to be shipped from the east coast. Italianate style private homes had become popular on the east coast in the 1840s, largely because the development of cast-iron and press-metal technology made the production of decorative elements more affordable. Without the railroad, it’s highly unlikely an Italianate home could have been built in Iowa in the late 1860s.

An 1875 illustration of the Maple Grove Hill farm in its original location.

In the early 1860s, Joseph Grayson (J.G.) Long and his brother Jesse moved from to Iowa from Pennsylvania following the death of J.G.’s first wife. They’d been prosperous in Pennsylvania and farmland was cheap in Iowa. They both bought land, built similar Italianate houses, and became successful breeders of thorough-bred cattle. J.G. remarried (Regina Hiskey, a schoolteacher from Ohio) and had a family. Jesse became the president of a local bank. The future looked bright and promising for the Long brothers.

And yet, something was clearly wrong. In 1875, J.G.’s brother Jesse committed suicide by hanging. A few years later, J.G.’s son died from a self-inflicted gunshot. And according to the local newspaper, in 1899 J.G. himself “became insane, was adjudged a fit inmate for the asylum at Mt. Pleasant by the commissioners and has been taken thence.” He was institutionalized for a year; shortly after his release, he died in house he’d built. Jesse’s house was destroyed in a tornado.

Regina continued to live in the house her husband built; she died there in 1925. If ghosts actually exist, then I can see her as an “image of haunting, albeit benign, sorrow.”

The house and property passed through various hands until 2012, when it was relocated. It’s now completely abandoned. Sadly, but not very surprising, the house has been vandalized. Inevitably, at some point in the future, the house will be gone—either intentionally demolished or a victim of severe weather. It’s a shame for many reasons. There’s something poignant and tragic about any abandoned house, but especially one that held such promise when it was built.

As the documentation for its inclusion on the National Register of Historical Places says:

The Long house dramatically expresses the optimism and economic vitality, which [the region] experienced during its early years when its location on a major overland route from the southeast to Des Moines seemed to insure its future growth.

Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defined the future as a “period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.” Obviously, that sort of future is often an illusion. J.G. Long surely didn’t anticipate his future. And hey, my day yesterday didn’t turn out as I’d expected. But spending time in the J.G. Long house, learning about his life and the odd history of the house he built, has been worthwhile. I do find myself thinking about Regina, alone in that large house out in the countryside.

Any actual ghosts may not have moved with the house, but house itself is in the gradual process of becoming a ghost. I’m glad I was able to witness and explore a part of that process.

rained out

Posted on June 11, 2026 by greg

I was supposed to meet a friend yesterday and do a sort of photo-walk. He’s got something planned that requires a specific sort of urban photography–street scenes without people. We agreed to meet at the top of a parking garage at 0930. That would give us the last of the morning light, and at that time of day most city workers would be at their desks instead of loitering around the street. The delivery drivers would have unloaded most of their goods by then, and the unemployed folks would probably still be in bed or having coffee.

We hadn’t counted on the storm, which arrived almost precisely at 0925. My friend had the good sense to turn around and go back home. Me? I’d arrived early (an old PI habit; you always get there early and check out exits). I was atop the parking garage watching the storm come. It was impressive. Lightning, thunder, wind, the complete package.

I do love a good storm. My camera, however, does not. My little Ricoh GR isn’t waterproof. It’s not even weather-resistant. I’ve had it out in a light sprinkle, but that’s it. This wasn’t the sort of storm that begins with a few tentative drops; this arrived as a goddamn deluge. I took shelter in a rooftop elevator lobby…at the opposite end of where my car was parked.

I was dry, but effectively trapped. That gold Prius in the photo below? That’s my car. Without a camera, I might have made a run for it. But nope.

I didn’t mind being trapped, really. I was dry, my camera was dry, and I figured the rain would let up eventually. I just had to be patient (which reminds me: a million years ago when I was in high school and got in trouble (again), the Boys Advisor told me that patience was my only redeeming quality). Besides, there were windows in the stairway beside the elevator, so I had stuff to look at. And, as I said earlier, I enjoy a good storm.

After about ten minutes, I remembered something obvious. The city of Des Moines has a skywalk system. And (I believe) it connects every public parking garage in the city center. So I wasn’t trapped at all. I just had to find the skywalk entrance and I was free to wander around.

I used to spend a lot of time in the skywalk system. It’s been somewhat diminished over time; a major urban fire cut off a large central chunk, as did some urban renewal. It’s not quite as extensive as it once was, but it still covers about four miles and connects over fifty buildings and parking ramps. The skywalk is climate-controlled–heated in the winter, air-conditioned in the summer. There are coffee shops, barbers, law offices, restaurants, small markets along parts of the skywalk. It used to be one of my favorite places for photography.

The thing about the skywalk is that it zigzags all through the downtown area. It not only connects building (hotels, banks, businesses, apartment buildings), it sometimes passes between them or behind them or through them. It crosses streets, rambles above alleyways, sidles up against structures, and reveals parts of the city you might otherwise never see. And reveals them from perspectives you wouldn’t otherwise get.

I roamed the skywalk for maybe half an hour, then the storm passed, the rain stopped, and the sun came out. I found the nearest exit to the street level, stepped outside and shot this photograph. The post-storm light was delicious…for about ten minutes, at which point the city became unbearably humid. I should have stayed in the skywalk. Instead, I hiked the streets back to the parking garage, got in my car, and went home.

I didn’t get to meet my friend (we’ll reschedule for next week) or shoot the sort of photographs he needs/wants. But I had a good time and stayed mostly dry. After a month of shooting mostly monochrome, it was difficult to think in terms of color again. I did shoot a lot of high contrast monochrome photos during my walk, but I decided to stick to color for this blog. It was refreshing to think about color again. Refreshing…I guess that’s what rain is for.

It worked.

bikes make you 12

Posted on March 26, 2026 by greg

Here’s the thing about bicycles: they turn you into a 12-year-old. It’s hard for some folks to admit, but there it is. Solid fact. You get on a bike, and every single cell in your body remembers what it was like to be twelve years old. It doesn’t matter what sort of bike you ride, or why you ride, or when you ride, or the manner in which you ride, you become twelve again. It’s just a fact.

You cycle for fitness? That means riding hard and fast…which is what you did when you were twelve. Not all the time, of course, but every 12-year-old on a bike has ridden like the demons of Hell were chasing behind them. It’s fun to ride fast and hard. Sure, sure, sure, you may be genuinely serious about fitness. You may be wearing lycra and Shimano RC9 cycling shoes because adults believe in optimization. You may be measuring stuff (pulse, cadence, average speed, elevation gain, etc.) because adults feel the need to measure stuff and compare results. But down the bone and gristle, you’re riding like you’re twelve–because it’s fun. There’s a weird joy in cycling really really fast.

Who likes riding really really fast? 12-year-olds, that’s who.

You cycle for transportation? You’re twelve. Your bike is how you got around when you were twelve. You rode your bike to visit your friends, you rode to school, you rode to the park, you rode to the local market to buy candy or a soda or shoplift cigarettes. Now you’re riding to the office or to a coffee shop to meet friends or to the market for fresh vegetables (and if you smoke, please shoplift your cigarettes; don’t give those fuckers your money). Yes, yes, cycling is an efficient, healthy, cost-effective, environmentally friendly means of transportation, and that’s all very adult…but there’s a part of you that knows you’re riding your bike because it’s fun. You’re twelve.

You KNOW your parents would forbid you from riding your bike here.

You ride gravel? You do cyclocross or single tracks? You mountain bike or ride BMX? You’re twelve. You’re riding across the neighbor’s lawn, you’re riding your bike through a construction zone, you’re riding through the neighborhood park, you’re deliberately riding through a puddle, you’re taking your bike where your parents explicitly told you NOT to ride. You’re doing it partly because it’s fun and challenging and partly because your parents told you NOT to ride there. Ask yourself, at what age do kids start being rebellious? Twelve. This is NOT a coincidence.

This is 12-year-old behavior. This is childish. This is fun.

You need more evidence that cycling makes you twelve? Ask your non-cycling friends (you probably have some) how they feel about cycling in general. Odds are they think it’s…childish. It’s not how adults get around. Adults drive. Adults don’t have time for frivolous stuff like riding bikes. Why can’t you just grow up and act your age? (HINT: because you’re twelve years old.)

Still more evidence? Okay, simple test. Get on your bike. Get it in motion. Now take your feet of the pedals, stick them out straight, and gently swerve left and right and left and right, rhythmically back and forth as you coast. How does that feel? It feels great, doesn’t it. You’re twelve.

You’ve done this. If you haven’t done it, you’ve wanted to do it. Go ahead, do it; it’s fun.

You can put on lycra, you can strap a briefcase to your rack. put a bag of groceries in your pannier, you can buy a cargo bike and take your kids to school…doesn’t matter. You know what else doesn’t matter? Your age. If you ride your bike, you become twelve years old again. It just happens. Accept it.

No, don’t just accept it. Celebrate it. You see all those people in cars and pickups and SUVs? They’re locked into adulthood. You? You get to be twelve years old your entire life.

celebrate good times

Posted on November 5, 2025 by greg

This morning, for the first time in a year, I actually wanted to read the news. For the first time since the darkness dropped again and Comrade Donald Trump slouched back into the White House, I actually looked forward to reading the news.

Because the news was good. Not just because Democrats won, and not just because they won by larder-than-expected margins, and not just because they won from coast to coast. The news is good because of the way they won. The ways they won, I should say, Because the way they won in New York City was different than the way they won in New Jersey and in Virginia. That confuses the pundit class.

Today there will be a LOT of pundits claiming Zohran Mamdani is the new face of the Democratic Party. Nope. He’s the face of the Democratic Party in New York City. Mikie Sherrill is the face of the Democratic Party in New Jersey, and Abigail Spanberger is the face of the Democratic Party in Virginia. We don’t have–we don’t need or want–a single face to represent the Democratic Party. We want a variety of faces and a medley of different voices all dedicated to civil rights and the needs of working people. This morning, we have more of that.

But we need still more. We want and need Democrats who will not just speak out against MAGA fascism in the US, but who will actively resist it. MAGA should be worried about last night’s electoral results, but the people who should be actually scared are the impotent Old Guard of the Democratic Party. They’ve convinced themselves that they’re helpless and weak against MAGA; they’ve allowed themselves to be cowed by Trump, they’ve been too timid to fight back. These election results are also a warning for them–either stand up and fight for democracy or get the fuck out of the way.

Yes, the news this morning is good. We should celebrate it. We should take as much joy as we possibly can from it. And then tomorrow (or what the hell, next week) we have to get back to work. The results of this one election isn’t going to turn the nation around. The US is still massively fucked up. It will remain massively fucked up for the near future. But this morning we see evidence that, with hard work, we can begin to unfuck the nation. That’s what I call good news.

So, in the words of the philosophers Kool & the Gang, “Let’s all celebrate and have a good time.”

agri-culture

Posted on September 4, 2025 by greg

The only thing I know about keeping livestock is…okay, I don’t know anything about keeping livestock. I mean, I know it’s hard work. I don’t know that from experience, since I’ve never kept livestock, but even sharing space with a pet (cats and dogs, certainly, and probably birds and lizards, what do I know?) means cleaning up after them. Even the tidiest of cats uses a litterbox and somebody has to deal with that.

Why am I talking about this? Because looking over the photographs I took at the recent Iowa State Fair, I noticed I have a lot of photos of farm people cleaning stuff. Cleaning their animals, cleaning the gear needed to take care of their animals, cleaning the things their animals pull, cleaning up massive amounts of animal shit. Everywhere I went, men and women and kids were busy cleaning.

And when I say ‘cleaning their animals,’ I don’t mean they were just washing them (although there’s an astonishing amount of animal-washing going on all the time). I mean they’re shampooing them, blow-drying them, combing them, trimming them, vacuuming them.

Seriously, people were vacuuming off…something, I don’t know what. Loose hair? Dandruff? Barn grit? No idea, but everywhere you go in the animal barns at the fair, there are men and women and kids vacuuming their livestock.

Women grooming sheep while men sit and chat.

These animals weren’t just being cleaned; they were being groomed. Meticulously groomed. (Okay, sorry, a slight tangent here. The term groom has a slightly hazy etymology. It’s probably(?) related to the Old English growan, meaning ‘to grow.’ At any rate, by the 14th century groom referred to a male servant who attended to officers (and their gear and horses) in a noble household. By the 19th century, the noun had been verbed, and groom referred to the process of tidying up or preparing for a purpose. So groom referred to both a person and what the person did. I don’t know why I thought you needed to know that, but there it is.)

A young girl vacuuming (or blow-drying) a cow.

As I was saying, these livestock animals (and I’m talking about cows, horses, pigs, goats, sheep, llamas, alpacas (is that the plural of ‘alpaca’?), rabbits, and chickens (do rabbits and chickens count as livestock? No idea.) are meticulously groomed. It’s clear that some of the grooming is done in the hope of winning a prize, but it was also clear that much of it was done out of pride and affection. That was especially true of the younger people.

Here’s a thing you probably need to understand. All this cleaning and grooming? It’s taking place in and around massive cooperative barns housing hundreds of animals. Animals are noisy, so these barns are a constant barrage of animal noises. Also? Animals shit and piss a lot. I mean, a LOT. And they’re not particular about where or when they do it. So even though there’s a constant stream (so to speak) of people shoveling, sweeping up, and carting of waste products (the logistics of livestock waste management must be staggering), the fact remains that these massive barns…well, they smell like you’d think they’d smell, but not as bad as you’d expect.

What I’m trying to say here is that there’s an astonishing amount of hard work done by the farm families who bring their livestock to the fair, and all that work makes the environment as pleasant as possible. One of my reasons for visiting the animal barns during the State Fair is to look at animals, of course, but it’s also to see this remarkable group of people cobble together a shared sense of community. There’s something very tribal about it. And as a sociologist by training, it’s fascinating.

But here’s the problem with being a sociologist: I know that the farming community I see at the State Fair is, largely, a myth. Around 40% of farms in Iowa are owned by corporations. Modern farming, even among non-corporate farms, is a business more than a self-sufficient way of life. The farming life we witness at the State Fair is something of a sentimental homage to an idea of rural living from the past. An homage grounded in nostalgia and an agrarian myth.

But so what? I’d argue there’s value in that. The fact is, it’s not corporations who are grooming their livestock at the State Fair. It’s not corporations who are hauling manure and polishing wagon wheels. It’s families doing that.

My visits to the State Fair animal barns always leave me impressed (and yes, a wee bit stunned by the smell and noise). I leave those barns profoundly grateful there are people–families–still willing to do the hard work of making sure the world gets fed. As myths go, this is a pretty damned good one, and I’m glad folks are keeping it alive.

not the weirdest thing i’ve done

Posted on August 24, 2025 by greg

A couple of days ago I wrote about a photograph I’d taken of some cracks and oil stains in a random patch of blacktop. It may seem a wee bit weird to photograph a patch of blacktop, but…well, just wait. In that post, I briefly referred to the fact that there’s a difference between blacktop and asphalt. That sparked a reply to the post, and that reply reminded me of an earlier crushed stone and bitumen-related photograph I’d taken fifteen years ago.

Now that was weird.

Back in November of 2010 I was noodling around a location where a local supermarket had been demolished. All that remained of the store was its foundational slab and what had once been a parking lot. That’s where I came across something odd.

Yep, that’s a chunk of asphalt curbing around which somebody had tied a strand of red PVC-coated wire. Why would somebody do that? I don’t know, but I assumed it was to make it easier to carry. Why would somebody want to carry a chunk of asphalt curbing? No idea. I located the spot from which the curbing had been removed about 20 yards away. There were several similar chunks of broken asphalt curbing. But somebody had selected that particular chunk, tied red PVC wire around it, and moved it.

Why? No fucking clue. But it was odd, and I do love things that are odd.

So I returned to that spot about six weeks later. The chunk of curbing was still there. It had snowed, but the snow had melted off the chunk. A heron had apparently been curious enough to check it out. Not sure if that meant the heron was as curious as I was, or if I was as stupid as a heron.

Anyway, I stood there in the snow for a while, trying to cobble together some semi-logical reason for somebody to tie some PVC wire around a chunk of curbing and carry it twenty yards before dropping it. I was sure there was a logical reason; not necessarily logical to me, but logical to the person who did it. But I’m damned if I could figure it out.

I found myself occasionally wondering about that chunk of curbing and the red PVC wire. Did the person just happen to have some red PVC wire in their pocket? Had they deliberately brought the wire with them, intending to move the chunk of curbing? And why why why would they want to move it in the first place? It made no sense, but I was intrigued by it.

So I went back again on a cold, wet, foggy day in February. And yep, it was still there.

It wasn’t just strange; it was also visually interesting. I was taken with that red PVC wire. I considered taking hold of the wire and lifting the chunk, just to see how heavy it was. But I was reluctant to disturb it. It wasn’t just an object of curiosity anymore. That’s when I began to think of the chunk of curbing as a possible photo project. Which meant it didn’t seem right to intentionally change anything about the subject matter.

I returned to visit the chunk of curbing about a month later and was shocked to see it had been moved. Somebody had apparently picked it up, carried it about twenty-five feet, at which point the red PVC wire had snapped.

I can’t imagine many people would find a reason to noodle around the detritus of a former supermarket. But IF somebody did, and IF that somebody happened upon the chunk of curbing, then surely they’d be tempted to pick it up. I mean, I’d been tempted to pick it up myself. The way the PVC wire was wrapped around the chunk of curbing–it was clearly intended for it to be picked up. Who could resist it?

Somebody didn’t resist it. Somebody had seen it, had picked it up, and toted the chunk of curbing twenty-five feet. Hell, that was the most understandable thing about the whole situation.

I didn’t get back to visit my pet chunk of asphalt curbing until late in the summer. As I approached, I saw two chunks. I thought maybe whomever had moved the curbing back in the spring must have returned and broken it.

But no. It was a second chunk of asphalt curbing. Somebody–maybe the same person who’d moved it earlier–had apparently gone to the spot where other chunks of curbing were scattered, picked up another chunk, carried it to the vicinity of my pet chunk, and dropped it.

This compounded the WTFedness of the situation. It reinforced the original weirdness. It made no sense at all. It was insane. It was…kind of wonderful. I was oddly pleased by the development.

I returned a month later. Not much had changed. Some orangish lichen had grown in a nearby crack and I spent some time trying to find a way to photograph the red PVC wire and the orange lichen, but nothing seemed to work. In the end, I just documented my chunk of asphalt curbing along with its companion.

I figured I’d just about come to the end of the chunk’s story. I was still curious about the whole thing, but the original aura weirdness was beginning to fade.

Still, I’d developed something of a perverse relationship with that chunk of curbing. I felt a need to check on it. So of course I went back.

The red PVC wire had moved. It had broken six months earlier, but a length of it had been trapped beneath the chunk of curbing. How did it get loose? Maybe a bird or animal had tugged on the wire and freed it? In any event, I took it as a sign (No, not that sort of sign; just an ordinary sign) that the project was at an end. Surely, the wire would soon get blown away. Without the red PVC wire, the chunk of curbing was just a chunk of curbing. As soon as it was gone, the photo project would be over.

I gave it a couple of months. I went back in December. Nothing had changed. As near as I could tell, the red PVC wire hadn’t even moved. That was…weird. You’d think that over the course of two months something would have moved the wire. But that was just minor league weird compared to the overall weirdness.

Still, I’d made the decision that I’d keep coming back until the red wire was gone. So I returned in the spring. The entire area was fenced off and construction equipment was tearing up the old parking lot.

There’s an apartment complex there now.

I no longer live in that area, but maybe once or twice a year there’ll be a reason for me to pass nearby. And when I do, I think about that chunk of asphalt curbing, and the bright red PVC-insulated wire, and the person who’d tied the wire into a parcel-carrier. And I wonder what in the hell they’d been doing, and why. And it pleases me that I’ll never know the answer.

i’ve got one hand in my pocket; a year with the ricoh gr3x

Posted on June 20, 2025 by greg

Okay, it’s been one whole year (plus a day or two) since I unboxed my Ricoh GR3X. One year, and I’m still infatuated with it. Here’s what I wrote about the camera a month or so after I bought it:

[T]his camera seems to have been designed almost specifically for the way I shoot photographs. I’m not a street photographer, although I enjoy shooting street. I’m not a landscape photographer, or a fine arts photographer, or a portrait photographer; I don’t really belong to any of the more common photographic traditions. I belong to what I like to call the flâneur school of photography.

Then I wrote some pretentious shit about the term flâneur. Basically my style of photography is to sort of noodle around places, noticing things, chatting with strangers, sticking my nose where it probably doesn’t belong, and shooting photos. That sounds pretty casual. It probably looks pretty casual to other folks—and it kinda is. But I’m not really a casual photographer. I almost never photograph anything without pre-visualizing it. Happily, I’ve been shooting long enough that the pre-visualization process (composition and exposure decisions) usually only takes a moment.

The Ricoh GR3 makes the process between pre-visualization and shooting easy. It’s designed to let you change the exposure settings with one hand. In fact, the video reviews I watched before digging into my pocket to buy the Ricoh often showed people shooting photographs with one hand. My first response to that was ‘What kind of fucking amateur is shooting photos with one hand?’ I mean, one of the first and most valuable lessons I learned in photography was how to hold a camera to eliminate camera-shake, to give yourself a stable platform. I sure as hell was NOT going to be shooting any photos with one hand.

You guys, guess what. I now routinely shoot photographs with one hand. Every photo in this post was shot with one hand. I have to say, at first that felt…irresponsible. But the camera weighs almost nothing (really, it’s about nine ounces) and the image stabilization system is incredibly forgiving. The photo above? I shot that in a low-light situation. We’re talking a half second exposure at F11. With one hand. Ginger is blurry because she’s walking, but everything else is clear and in focus. That ought to be impossible with one hand. But here we are.

Now, shooting with one hand seems sorta kinda…natural? For example, I’m at the local farmers market, I’m toting a bag with pastries and fresh veggies, and I see a woman with a pug in a baby carriage. I pull the camera out of my pocket (did I mention it fits in my pants pocket? Not like a cargo pants pocket, but a regular blue jeans pocket…astonishing), ask the woman if I can photograph her dog, and a moment after she says ‘sure,’ I’ve got the photo. One hand.

And that’s another thing. For most of my long and randomly wicked life, I’ve been reluctant to shoot photos in portrait aspect. Even with my cell phone, I turn it sideways and shoot in landscape. But with the Ricoh, I seem to be shooting a LOT more vertically. I don’t know if it’s the camera (it’s probably the camera) or a change in the way I see the world, but there it is.

Over this last year I’ve shot 3335 photographs on the Ricoh. For some photographers, that’s probably just a busy couple of weeks, but it’s a lot of photos for me. I’m a rather parsimonious photographer (which I’m sure is a result of having learned to shoot pre-digital, when film and processing cost money I didn’t have).

So am I shooting differently with the Ricoh? Yes and no. I’m still shooting the same sorts of photos, but I’m doing it more quickly, more fluidly, and more vertically. And I’m doing it with one hand in my pocket.

hands off, the fringes

Posted on April 6, 2025 by greg

Like a million other concerned people, I attended the local Hands Off! protest yesterday. I wasn’t sure how many people would show up, considering it was a cold, blustery day (about 42F with steady 14mph winds and gusts about twice that). I thought we might still get a thousand people. Maybe.

The local news estimated the attendance to be around 7,500, and they tend to be conservative in their estimates. It was an eclectic crowd with a variety of concerns. Climate change, veteran’s benefits, social security, health care, education, trans rights, social justice, the court system, immigrant’s rights, Ukraine, and more. But there was absolutely universal condemnation of Comrade Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE.

The protest began, as all protests do, with speeches. I confess, I paid little attention to the actual speeches, though I was pleased to hear the crowd cheering and applauding. During the speeches, I left the main crowd and moved around the fringes. Why? Because there are folks who want to protest and make their voices heard BUT for any of a thousand reasons may be uncomfortable with crowds.

The folks on the fringe of the protest were pretty much the same people who made up the rest of the crowd. They were mostly white (this IS Iowa, after all) but beyond that they seemed to be a fairly representative sample of the protesters. There were young kids (some in strollers), and working class folks, and church-goers, and goths, and office workers, and trans folk, and wine moms, and college students, and old folks (some using walkers), and union members, and passers-by who just wanted to know what the hell was going on.

One of the things I found most interesting about the event was that everybody was 1) happy and 2) pissed off. They were pissed off enough to give up their Saturday to carry signs and listen to speeches and shout for Elon Musk to be deported and for Donald Trump to be impeached and to take over one of the main city streets and march a mile or so in cold, blustery weather to the state capitol building, where they listened to still more speeches. But they were also happy and laughing and clearly delighted to be with others who agreed with them. There was a tremendous sense of relief, and a sense of urgency, and a sense of something approaching hope and optimism. That all seems contradictory, but it didn’t feel like it.

Nobody there thought this march–or any of the hundreds of other marches–was going to change anything. Nobody there was that innocent. But it felt like there was a shared commitment to changing the way we govern ourselves. There was a very clear feeling of joy at the chance to express themselves, to carry signs and chant slogans and shout out their frustration and rage and hope.

It was also clear that this was the first time a lot of these people had attended a protest. At the beginning, there was a tentativeness to the crowd. A lot of looking around to see if anybody was watching, if anybody was upset or offended by what they were doing. This was especially clear when the organizers asked them to take to the street and march up to the capitol, where we’d join up with a second protest. We are a car-brained culture, and these people were unsure about the propriety of taking over a street without permission.

But they did it. And when cars approached the head of the march, they had to stop and make a U-turn. At the back of the march, a lone police officer in a squad car followed to insure no drivers disrupted the march from behind. Within a few hundred yards, this crowd of normal Iowans were chanting, “Whose street? OUR STREET!” There was a palpable sense of released anger and resentment and liberation. It really was OUR street.

When the crowd took to the street, these two women with their “We the People” sign led the way. It seemed appropriate. Because it’s true. We, the people, are massively pissed off. And yesterday, we let those malignant fuckwits of the Trump administration know it.

I took a lot more photos of (and in) the crowd itself. But here I wanted to show the people who, at least at the beginning of the day, hovered around the fringe of the protest. The people who usually get overlooked. The people who don’t make the highlight reels or the news reports. As so many protest signs said, you know things are grim when even the introverts show up.

You’ll notice that most of these photographs are of women. You’ll notice they’re not drawing attention to themselves. They’re drawing attention to the signs they’re carrying. Signs they mostly made themselves. There’s a song from the 1950s resistance movement in South Africa that goes, “Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo.” This translates as:

When you strike the women, you strike stone.

We’ve been striking stone for decades. Centuries. Eventually, it’s going to spark a fire that will incinerate the patriarchy. It may still be a long time coming, but it’ll happen. And when it does, women like the ones in these photos–the ones quietly occupying space at the fringe–they’ll have helped light that spark.

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