Hello.

Hi there. I’m Eric. I’m a photographer. If you don’t know much about me, I suppose here is as good a place as any to get to know me.

I live in Seattle, but almost never photograph anything here. My preference is the eastern part of the state, and I’m out there in the spring and autumn as much as I can be - mostly weekends. I also have messed up my life enough to get a month off every year for more extended travel, a four-week photography trip that is equal parts exhausting and productive. It is not a vacation in the sense that there is nothing relaxing about it. More on this later.

My work is generally black & white and shot on film. I prefer medium and large formats. None of my cameras are lightweight, and this has somehow not stopped me from hiking with them. This practice is inadvisable and not sustainable. Each year I tell myself I’ll figure out a better way and never do.

Often, I take winters off from photographing. This allows me to enjoy a kind of hibernation and to sort out what I’m doing in the coming shooting season, which generally starts in March-ish.

Each winter, I lay out my coming trips and my plans for the next few months. And I think I’ll share a bit of that here. I don’t know if it’s interesting, but we’ll see.

Last Summer Was Bad

I’ve had an amazing string of luck on my summer trips. No accidents, no injuries, nothing stolen, I wasn’t shot at, everything was basically fine.

Last summer this streak ended. Though not dramatically. Sort of.

I left Seattle with the idea of getting to my parents’ house in Pennsylvania in three days. I’ve done 1000+ mile days before and figured that doing three in a row would be a great idea.

This was a mistake. The first day was indeed fine. The second was okay. I was tired, but knew I’d be “home” tomorrow. On the morning of the third day, somewhere in Indiana, I became intensely nauseated.

I was on the Indiana Turnpike and pulled over at a rest area to sort it out. By “intense,” I mean that I was green and felt like I was going to barf. I couldn’t move without waves of nausea spinning me around. I tried to walk it off, I tried to sleep, I tried to ignore it. I knew that the longer I spent there, the longer it would take to get off the road.

I am a stubborn person. Getting a hotel room is almost out of the question. I figured that if I was going to be nauseated, I might as well be nauseated while driving.

After a few hours at the rest area and feeling slightly better, I started to drive. Most turnpikes have emergency pull-outs every mile or so. I used almost every one of these until the next rest area, where I again stopped. It just wasn’t going away.

I crossed into Ohio, and eventually, the nausea calmed some. My stomach was empty, but I was still too nauseated to eat. By Pennsylvania, I was exhausted. Every ounce of strength and effort had been spent on the road. When I rolled into my old hometown, I had nothing at all left in me.

The next morning, the nausea was gone, but it had taken my will with it. The day after that, I got a bit better. I spent two weeks at my parents’ house in varying degrees of nausea, stress, and exhaustion.

My first thought was that I somehow made myself carsick. This was all but confirmed by riding along with my father on a few short drives. It wasn’t consistent, but it seemed like I was getting carsick.

The time with my parents was good. I was able to get out and photograph some cemeteries as well as the town of Shamokin, which became the subject of my latest book Anthracite.

Last Summer Got Worse

I left my parents’ house and gave myself two and a half weeks to return to Seattle. Along the way, I wanted to explore a bit of Virginia and North Carolina, as well as stop in Missouri, Kansas, and a few other places.

Normally, I have a route and see places along that route, almost never staying more than a night in any single location. This time, however, I decided to find a couple of towns and explore the surrounding area in loops that would bring me back to the same campsite each night.

I don’t think I mentioned this - I camp. It’s rare that I stay in a hotel room. Out of the thirty days on the road, usually around 28 nights of them are spent inside a tent. I love it and it’s cheap or free. If I didn’t travel this way, I couldn’t afford to travel at all.

Because I stayed too long at my parents’ house, I had to cut down some of these loops. But that would come soon enough. First, I wanted to explore some railroad towns in Virginia and North Carolina.

I will have much more to say about these towns and this experience in the future (possibly a zine will come of it).

Three things happened almost simultaneously. First, the nausea came back. Second, the temperatures went from the low to mid-80s to triple digits. Third, my air conditioning went out.

The nausea seemed to be related to the road, especially the interstate. When I travel, I almost never use the interstates. I’m all for backroads and a lot of stopping. But this trip required them, and every time I was on one, I got gripped with intense nausea. And when I knew I would have to be on one, I’d spiral into anxiety and would receive the nausea in that way. It got to the point where I didn’t know which came first and which was the symptom.

If I could have just gotten on Interstate 80 and sped back to Seattle in a handful of days, I would have. But I had learned my lesson on the trip east. So going slow was necessary. And that was the plan all along anyway.

I did my best to keep to my schedule. Now, in most years, the schedule needs to be flexible. It needs to change with everything that happens around me. This year the schedule had to be forgotten. This was convenient, since I wrote out my schedule on a notepad and forgot it at home.

My maps still showed the roads and routes I wanted to take, but not where I hoped to be each night. And not the number of days I anticipated the trip home to take.

I won’t take you day-by-day through my trip. I honestly don’t remember much of it anyway. The heat was oppressive and the nausea was various shades of debilitating.

Two nights were spent in the Land Between the Lakes, an 170,000 acre chunk of public land on the Kentucky/Tennessee border. I fell in love with the place, exploring dirt roads and old cemeteries, old homesteads and churches. I can’t recommend it enough.

The plans were to stay in Coffeeyville, Kansas for the next three nights, exploring the loops I mapped out the previous winter. But I also needed to get my air conditioning fixed. I had it flushed and checked for leaks a couple of times so far on the trip, but nobody could sort it out.

Pulling into nearby Independence, Kansas, I stopped at a shop recommended by another shop, and they took the whole thing apart, found the leak and tried to fix it. For three days in a row. Most of those days, I sat outside the shop waiting. I’d explore some in the evenings and even in the mornings before they opened. I camped at a nearby lake.

On the fourth day, they said they probably fixed it unless pieces of the pump found their way into the evaporator. If that was the case, there’s nothing anyone could do apart from replacing the entire air conditioning system, which they couldn’t do without the parts which would take a week to get there.

A lot of money later, I left the next morning and it promptly stopped working again. The nausea also returned, requiring me to stop every few miles to … actually, I’m not sure what. Rest? At that point, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I figured it was motion sickness and that stopping would help. Which it did, in a way.

The nausea would come in waves and then leave. Sometimes it would come back. Sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes it seemed to react to food or lack of food. Sometimes it seemed fully independent of anything I was doing.

I eventually wound up in Grand Junction, Colorado. Camping again, I ate a little that evening and was utterly plagued by nausea and heat. The next morning, with temperatures somehow still in the 90s, with my AC out, and with my inability to eat anything, I had quite the nervous breakdown while driving through town.

Realizing that I might not actually be able to drive myself home, I talked myself into eating. I understood that even though I was nauseated, I was also very undernourished. I had been eating almost nothing since North Carolina. I forced myself to down a plate of tofu and broccoli at a Chinese restaurant, knowing it would likely bring on the nausea. I also had to hit the interstate again, which would apparently also do the same.

I-70 into Utah was a mess. The afternoon sun was melting me; my phone, which I used for navigation, wouldn’t charge because it was too hot in the car. My nausea required frequent stops, and everything I wanted to photograph was left unshot.

I can’t convey how much I did not shoot compared the the previous years. I had such big plans! I had actually convinced myself to travel in a slightly different way (the loops thing), and I think it might have worked if not for the various maladies befalling the entire trip. It had slowly become a war of attrition which I was quickly losing.

The broccoli and tofu did enough of the trick to get me into Utah and Idaho. I don’t remember much of the run at this point. I had plans for Idaho, but I always have plans for Idaho. These plans are almost always pushed aside to get home.

Through clouds of nausea, I finished the trip, leaving the interstate even through Oregon to spare myself any further problems. It didn’t work as well as I hoped, but I got home.

Autumn, Okay?

For the rest of the summer, I sat myself at home except for one trip to eastern Washington. It was supposed to be a two-night ramble, but turned into a short daytrip. Nausea and lack of food again.

Photographically, I spent the autumn developing film. I had taken a hundred or so 4x5 photos in various small cemeteries across the country. There were literally hundreds of cemeteries I had hoped to visit that I could not, but I didn’t walk away from this venture empty-handed.

I also had fifty or so rolls of film. I still haven’t developed the color shots from the railroad towns in Virginia and North Carolina. There’s a long reason why, but it’s actually several reasons, none of which are all that pertinent to the story right now.

As for the nausea, I’ve been to the doctor a few times and was given suggestions ranging from “we won’t know without testing” to “maybe a few different things.” Due to the whole insurance thing, I have to see a new doctor, but that hasn’t happened yet and won’t until March.

The nausea comes and goes and has become essentially chronic at this point. I have bad days and less bad days. There is rarely a day that I’m not affected by it. But I have figured out its schedule and what doesn’t cause it (it’s not motion sickness or anxiety or interstates or even certain foods). I’d rather not have medical advice unless you’re a gastrologist, which you probably aren’t.

I hope to get it all sorted out before the real photography season starts for me this spring. And maybe I even will. If I don’t, then I’ll have to find ways to deal with it while on the road (a much more impossible task).

What’s Next?

It’s odd planning a year’s worth of photography not knowing if any of it will happen. That’s always there, of course. Life is life and sometimes it just isn’t what you want it to be. But this seems a little more ominous. Of course, I could always photograph stuff in Seattle. I’ve done it before and have enjoyed it. I just don’t want to do that.

As I said above, this past year I released a book and I think there’s another one - a small one - yet to be developed. That might come in the spring.

I also have hundreds of 4x5 photos taken on x-ray film of pioneer graves and small cemeteries. My original plan had been to make one huge book out of it and be done with the project entirely. But then I noticed two things.

First, my most recent book did not sell well at all. It was the largest book I’ve made to date and thus the most expensive and therefore the fewest sales and I’d like to not repeat that mistake.

Second, I really enjoy photographing cemeteries. Like a lot. They are places where I can relax with my photography, where I can set up various shots, try new things, and never have to worry about a landowner or nosey local shoo-shooing me away. Nobody bothers you in a cemetery. And the cemeteries I visit are usually so out of the way that nobody even knows I’m there.

If I were more savvy at marketing schemes, I’d release books for each state filled with photos and stories from their local cemeteries. But I’d be afraid that I’d have to change what I do quite a bit. My photos of these graves are often pretty impressionistic. I love that, but it’s not what most people are looking for in their books on cemeteries.

My plan, then, is to release a book or so of cemetery photography every year or so. No pressure on me, and I can keep prices low. The mathematics and finances work out much better that way as well.

I have more than enough photos to release a small book right now, and maybe that’s the next thing I’ll work on.

This Place (Substack)

My journey through all this will be on display for those who want to read it. I miss doing the podcast (All Through a Lens) and this fills the gap a bit.

I won’t moan on about my mystery ailments, I assure you. Instead, I plan/hope to regale you with stories of my travels, of historical this and photographical that. I’m aiming for this to be weekly-ish and would love for you to tag along.