DC Shirts - More Colors and Sizes

August 31, 2025

Back in occupied DC. Well, just over the line in Maryland, I haven’t really ventured into the city proper yet. On social media I did read about a few ICE sightings and police checkpoints nearby but it hasn’t hit me in the face yet. Seems the National Guard is mostly on mulch duty closer to downtown.

Last week I posted my new DC t-shirt design, an homage to ACDC borrowing their logo font and lightning bolt. I’ve just added two new darker colors - ‘vintage black’ (basically dark gray) and dark olive - and a 3XL size, check out the new lineup.

https://bill-crandall.squarespace.com/store/dcaf-unisex-t-shirt-new-colors

I picked up my sample shirt at the post office, did a quick change in a cafe restroom, and stepped out like Superman from a phone booth. In the first few minutes I got ‘hey, I like the shirt!’ a couple times.

I can vouch for the quality. It’s comfortable material, a nice slim/tailored fit. I’m six-two with my shoes on, 190 lbs, and a large fits but with not much extra room.

Got my first review!

“It looks really good. We were really happy with the color choices. Given the somber times, neutral and muted seems appropriate.

My hubby is the god of T-shirts, wears nothing but, he was super psyched to get this T-shirt as was I.

I like your logo in the shirt collar, nice touch.”

Via Signal, how apropos.

Free DC

August 24, 2025

I was at an expat lunch at someone’s house the other day here in Nairobi. As it turned out, several people there had various ties to the Washington DC area. I was saying that when I was back last time in April-May, I was expecting a dystopia but had actually enjoyed it despite everything.

“Well, you might get your dystopia now,” one woman said. Indeed.

I won’t do a deep dive into what’s going on. You know what’s going on. How I feel about it won’t shock anyone, nor vary much from how you feel. No need for me to go on and on.

Instead I decided to make my response in the form of a photo post. Fairy Tales from the Fault Lines is my long-term project from the 2010’s. It started as sort of naive photos taken with my first iPhones (4/5) when I was out and about in DC with my young daughter, mostly within walking distance of home or work. No story, purely random, driven only by instinct. Over time it became more of a personal documentary series on changing DC neighborhoods. The real city where people live. I wasn’t sure where those changes would eventually land, and how I felt about them, but I’ve always thought places are most interesting in times of transition. In DC’s case, especially in what I called the city’s ‘fault line’ neighborhoods like Petworth (where we lived for many years), Columbia Heights, U Street, and Shaw - where the different sides of a long-segregated city intersected and mixed in new ways.

DC is where I was born and where I grew up. Over what feels like many lives there I’ve fallen in and out of love with the city plenty of times. Most recently *out*, if I’m being honest. The city has certainly gotten more slick and expensive - I used to say many areas where you used to be afraid to walk you can’t afford to live in now. It’s gotten ‘better’ in some ways compared to the sleepy dereliction of my youth, but lately I’ve had a harder time finding my place in it. Maybe that’s just the way it goes.

When I took these pictures, however, it felt great and I was in full enchantment mode as a new father. I remember a dream I had at the time, finding myself walking around the DC of maybe the 1940s or 50s - my parents’ DC - and a feeling of deeply loving it all washing over me. The buildings, the alleys, the people, even as I tried to avoid detection as a time-traveler. While I never got my Fairy Tales book off the ground, I did get a lot of mileage out of it through various exhibitions and artist talks. Some of the work was published in the Washington Post Magazine in 2015 along with my short first-person text (check it out here, and a different version on the Nat Geo photo blog here).

I remember writing that mainly I was trying to find out if I could love the city as I had loved other cities. The Post editor actually pressured me a bit to end on an affirmative note in that regard. The best I could do was a kind of “we’ll see”.

That was ten years ago, hard to believe how things have in fact ‘landed’ after all. Of course where we’re still heading is unwritten, talk about uncharted territory. This is just a short selection I pulled together with current events in mind. It’s a sizable body of work overall, I might post a second round later. Interesting that while I used to see the images as bottling a particular time period, now they also represent the ‘before times’. And of course a layer of nostalgia for that phase of my own life.

(I also added them to my prints gallery for anyone interested. Since some of them were relatively small files from the phone camera, I’m only offering modest print sizes.)

The project is an homage to the city I’ve loved and will always defend, but which may never be the same after the current occupation. I’m working on a new song about it too. Stay strong my DC peeps, this is becoming quite a dark fairy tale, more Grimm by the day. Somehow we’ll get through it together. I was glad to see the impromptu go-go show at the corner of 14th and U the other day. More like that please.

I just added my DC resistance t-shirt, modeled after ACDC’s logo, to my store. Available in a few different colors, mainly kind of earth tones for now, I might add other colors in the future. I tried to make them something a grownup would want to wear. Notice it’s branded with the logo I use, which is a graphic symbol for a resistor (with an ‘o’, the electrical component). See what I did there. There’s a another little backstory on it but I’ll spare you for now.

The Tumblr Edition

August 10, 2025

Greetings from Nairobi.

If asked, I don’t really know how to describe what I generally post about. Sometimes it’s personal musings or updates, sometimes on photography in various ways, sometimes my music endeavors and various resistance-tech fixations. All are me trying to process life and ideas and share it out in ways that are hopefully interesting, relevant, and that respect your intelligence. To me, all have an undertow of mindful, art-based resistance, even if it’s not explicit.

Who knows if I’m doing it ‘right’? Maybe I should stay more focused. Or, maybe I need to mix it up more.

How would it look if I collected a couple weeks worth of stuff I’d normally post on social media and put it here? (That’s sort of what I was doing with my former Viaduct Arts newsletter, for those that subscribed to that. Viaduct was usually a compilation/digest of recent FB posts with a note from me at the top.)

What if you didn’t have to doomscroll on whatever platform to come across each individual post randomly, instead it all plopped as a bundle into your email on a Sunday morning?

It’s not a perfect experiment. Images seem to work best. I’m already discovering what wouldn’t work well in this space, like links, reels, anything not ‘evergreen’ enough to last more than a day. And of course it means you can’t comment or like the individual items.

There’s not as much to choose from since I like many others don’t post that much anymore, though FB is one of the few places I do. I barely look at Instagram, though it’s the only way to keep up with my Kenyan photographer friends. I dipped back into Threads the other day and it’s still way livelier discourse than Bluesky, which to my chagrin I’m beginning to give up on but I’ll leave that for another post.

In general I think the model of sharing broadly with strangers may be nearing a close. If there was a better way to share with friends and family that didn’t require wading through FB’s dreary AI slop or IG’s reels I’d sign up in a second. Otherwise I’m feeling a bit done. Anyone feel the same?

I’m more interested these days in what I’ve heard called the ‘cozy web’ - newsletters, groups, blogs. I’m liking good ol’ email, highly recommend Proton for the encryption. I’ve tried leaning into corresponding more substantively with a few friends via Signal, it’s been good. We’re so used to messaging being for quick hits, why not think of it like writing a more thoughtful letter or postcard?

Of course, I think many people are starting to remember that nothing beats in-person, real life interaction. And that might just be what saves us.

While on the subject of platforms, this is required reading about Substack. While it’s a place for valuable and interesting independent voices, it’s also a Nazi bar of sorts, comfortable enabling various creepy-crawlies:

Substack’s extremist ecosystem is flourishing

How about more Tumblr-style? Just throw things out there. I know times are dire but maybe we are feeding the beast by focusing on it to the exclusion of all else. There has to be more to life than Wordle results and end-times fascism (aka ‘political’) news. Which I guess eliminates much of what I (and probably you) post on FB. Let me see what else I got.

A better idea than the real thing, though there are certain people I wouldn’t mind being flung into actual space.

Remember magazines? The late Stockholm New was an amazing once-yearly (!) culture/art/fashion mag that I used to collect in the before-times. Didn’t know there was a ‘best of’ book. (Though I’ll admit that cover image sure lands more toxically these days…)

It had beautiful minimalist design that I used in my Publication Design class. I sent it recently as inspo to a Kenyan friend who I’m helping develop a Nairobi art magazine.

I think mags like Kinfolk and Cereal were pretty heavily influenced by Stockholm New.

“I’m onboard with ‘clanker’ as a slur for robots and AI.”

Cool micro art shop in Haworth, England. All work by the artist-owner (no I didn’t take this pic, just came across it).

Samples from my World Landscapes print gallery.

“Wet Leg. Hell of a band (and band name). New album Moisturizer is the finest rock record I’ve heard in a while.”

“I had been reading good things about Superman. Ok, I saw it in French, which didn’t help. A lot I didn’t like but mainly methinks the director took the ‘let’s up the stakes by making him vulnerable’ thing too far. He spends the whole movie getting his ass kicked or crawling out from under the big thing that landed on him.”

"Personally I am very pessimistic. But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can't help but bless them for a good future. Because I can't tell that child, 'Oh, you shouldn't have come into this life.' And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making." - Hayao Miyazaki

This just in before I hit publish today, I’ll leave you with Robert Reich’s thoughts on Vaclav Havel and not letting the times suffocate us:

Havel had become politically active as poet, playwright, and dissident after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — which put him under the surveillance of the secret police. He was repeatedly jailed, the longest from 1979 to 1983. (In 1989, his Civic Forum party played a major part in the Velvet Revolution that ended Soviet dominance, and he was elected president shortly thereafter.)

While in jail, Havel wrote something that seems particularly relevant for us in these very dark times:

“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

Hope is a not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

*Paris Songwriters Club, photo by Jean-François Bellier*

On the Move Again

August 2, 2025

Sorry no newsletter the last two weeks. I found myself with nothing in particular to say and my bandwidth in Paris was taken up by a swirl of pending changes.

Time to go, for now, visa deadlines loom. By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be back in Nairobi for a bit. If you can believe it, VOA’s final fate is still not resolved but nonetheless we expect to be home in the US soon enough, and we’re happy about that.

There are many things that I liked about Paris, maybe more than I used to.

The city seems to be doing great, pulsing with life and variety. There’s a better mood than I’ve sometimes found in the past. I even noticed the French people are a bit friendlier than I remember. Amazing how it’s become a biking city.

Believe it or not I didn’t come across much anti-American sentiment, or outrage about what’s going on in the US. They do ask about Trvmp, and occasionally Mvsk, but they are not nearly as obsessed as Americans are.

The French people I’ve interacted with seemed pretty chill, open, and interested in talking to an American (granted I do try to be a good brand-ambassador). I still sensed a respect for American culture, and maybe a desire for the US brand to not collapse entirely.

The young guy working at a cafe in our suburb came over and chatted me up in earnest for a good while and was profusely shaking my hand by the end.
The immigrant running the local pizza place said he once studied in DC and was quick to tell me he prefers life in the US.
On my way home after playing an open mic in Belleville, a young French-Arab-African (his description) guy across from me on the Metro started asking about my guitar and where I was from, we had a great three-station chat about music and life.
Waiting around before playing at the Paris Songwriters Club in Montmartre (see top photo), I overheard a French singer-songwriter say (non-sarcastically, I think) ‘oh shit, there are Americans here, I hope my songs are good enough’.
At our local cineplex, Superman was packed but I also went to well-attended one-off screenings of the original Blade Runner and Jaws.

At least some of the US soft power legacy seems to be holding for the moment.

No, in the end I didn’t take many photos. Never found my hook, and our daily life was much more in the burbs, not central Paris. For me personally the gift of time was a chance to work on music, almost like a self-residency. I think I got somewhere new, especially with my live performance fitness and confidence. I’m grateful for the chance to grow and for a lot of positive response. People seemed to care, many told me what I was doing resonated with them. Can’t ask for much more. The open mics - often several a week - were also a way of discovering cool parts of the city I didn’t really know before.

Just the other day I came across some great new pics of the one I played on a canal barge in Stalingrad in early July. Here are a few by their own photographer (as marked) plus a couple of mine to set the scene. Just a wonderful space and vibe.

It’s remarkable how art and culture are woven into the fabric of Paris life. A bit scary to think France is one of the only countries with global influence and power - even nukes - that still sees itself as a bastion of culture, design, ideas, and human values. There are dark rumblings and thugs on the march across Europe too, and the world’s biggest countries are all sort of a lost cause at the moment. It has occurred to me we may need France to carry the torch of idealism if the US falls further under the boot.

At my performances in Paris, I often started off by introducing myself as being from the US, along with some variation of:

“Rough times in America.” Then only half-jokingly, “We’re counting on you, France!”

Paris Open Mic Report

July 13, 2025

As I wrote in my newsletter two Sundays ago, I’ve been playing outdoors here in France. I omitted one purely practical reason for doing so: we’re living in a suburban town out at the end of a RER train line (not Metro) and the last train from central Paris is around 9:30pm. So much for going out at night, including all the great open mic nights I had searched up around the city. If I wanted to play anywhere other than our apartment, outdoors it was, and during the day.

When we were first here there was RER maintenance going on for a couple weeks, so sometimes there wouldn’t be *any* train service on weekends and evenings, or there would be bus service adding at least an extra hour on the way home. Pretty brutal.

When you add the fact that the door-to-door journey itself is already an hour and a half each way, frankly we weren’t even going into Paris too often.

Then just over a week ago, everything changed.

On the way home from Paris one night I was pretty late for the last train and had already resigned myself to a pricey Uber. I decided to check the trains just in case and…

BOOM - late trains running! I’m still confused. New schedule since the repairs? Were they always there and I had it wrong?

In any case, since then I’ve been hitting the Paris open mic scene with a vengeance. This past week I did three nights in a row and might try for four next week.

You could play a different one every night and most nights there are multiple options. The level of musicians can be pretty high, but you get the whole gamut like open mics anywhere. Although I’ve seen a few people who clearly didn’t even know their songs, that was sort of strange. Maybe they were imploding with nerves, I saw that a couple times. One girl kept getting flustered, stopping, and fussing, ‘YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, I’M TRYING REALLY HARD!’. A young guy completely botched his cover of Blackbird but came back super strong for his second song, he had good chops.

He told me after, “I don’t know why I do that… I need to learn to get comfortable right away”. Right there with ya.

For starters, I had an offer to play an open mic on a canal barge in the Stalingrad area, at an occasional series called Sawmill Sessions at Peniche Anako. Great space, great sound, great audience, just quality all around. The limited open mic roster meant business, really top-notch (followed by a group jam, which is a common thing here). The featured performer who invited me was Cory Seznec - who is not only an incredible musician, singer, and performer with a strong following here, but by chance is moving to Takoma Park with his family shortly, so keep your eyes peeled for any shows.

Cory’s set was jam-packed (granted it was his sendoff show for his peeps). It got even more crowded after I took the shot below on the right, standing room only in the back. Amazingly it didn’t thin out too much for the open mic segment afterward.

I was up last (I think it was 8th). For the gearheads out there, I really enjoyed the Ear Trumpet stage mic, one of those you stand a bit back from, old-timey style. It was startling in its warmth and clarity. Cory got my second of two songs, a soft, restrained version of Love Again from my Mars album (the intro got clipped).

You know I hate these videos, I find them diminishing, but I’m trying to get over it.

Next up was the Paris Songwriters Club, hosted by an Irish expat downstairs at the Cave Cafe in Montmartre. I didn’t get any photos, sorry, but again it was a packed lineup and a full and diverse room. I’m hard on myself but I was happy to play pretty well, solid energy, and get a good response to the songs. I’ll be going back.

I talked my daughter into coming with me the next night to the Highlander, a Scottish (duh) pub right off Pont Neuf. Another medieval basement space.

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been practicing an alternative set, reviving long-dormant originals by me and my mod-entourage from the old DC scene and reworking the songs for solo acoustic. The Highlander open mic would be the first time I would roll out a couple of them in front of people.

While they’re from such a different era and we were practically kids when we wrote them on our Rickenbacker guitars, I can’t help but think their blend of youthful hope and a certain grandiosity might make them the right kind of anthems for our current moment. What’s the expression, if something is out of fashion long enough it comes back?

My Own Interests (by The Generation)

In a distant land,

Where the borders reach into the sky,

I can take a stand,

With no fear, no need to question why.

I can make a plan,

A new design that needs no reason.

You can understand

Why the harvest comes in every season.

My own interests lie

In a place where no one bothers me

My own interests lie

In a place that only I can see

No light ahead

Just empty space where birds are riding

Full speed ahead

Only I can tell where the truth is hiding

Don't take my hand

If you know what's good

From what someone told you

No one understands

That a paradise is waiting for you

I got my daughter to record video and she did a great job. I flubbed a few lyrics, like swapping ‘stand’ and ‘plan’ in the intro verse. Yeah, still learning them, and the stage sound was pretty challenging so tbh this time I was in survival mode. But that’s part of why I do these, learning to survive anything.

Afterward I was down about it at first, it had sounded so terrible to me and felt like such a struggle. How it sounds out in the room is often very different though, so the video was actually reassuring. Part of the deal is how you cover any problems, so in that sense it was a win.

I usually make little notes for myself. “Overall not bad. Next time looser, more energy.”

Lastly, Thursday night was Tennessee Jazz, not far from Highlander. I was 12th on the list, out of around 20.

I don’t have pics or video of myself but here’s the scene:

When you talk about culture in Paris, this is one of the lesser-appreciated manifestations. People turn out for even the humblest - but surprisingly rewarding - of music events: the open mic.

Nairobi E-Photobook

July 6, 2025

I’ve been exploring how to use the photos I make in new ways. I really have no interest in spending weeks or months on a project only to post on social media for likes. Unfortunately that’s where a lot of photographers’ work goes to die these days. In the future I could try to do a Nairobi book or exhibit but that’s down the road.

One thing I came up with for my Nairobi series is an e-book, to put the pictures in immediate, direct service of the young photographers and students I was helping in the Kibera slum (the largest not just in Nairobi but in all of Africa). I worked with a great weekly photo class for teens, Kibra Film and Creative Hub, run by a dedicated guy named Hassan Ahmed.

As you may have seen me post about before, I brought Hassan photo books from home as the start of a modest photo library, so students would have at least some reference resources for inspiration and ideas.

Yet while showing the students images of Chicago or Paris or Istanbul is exotic and instructive, for these young people it’s perhaps not as useful as images closer to home. What I knew from giving a couple of presentations to the class is that they really responded to seeing what they can do with the visual and storytelling possibilities in their everyday landscape. Like most of us, they are fairly numb visually to that landscape, but to me Kibera and Nairobi - while quite challenging - are among the most visually rich communities I’ve ever encountered. I could see they were most electrified to realize the potential that surrounds them.

As a resource, I decided to make them an e-book using a selection of my Kibera/Nairobi images and a kind of general summary/outline of my guidance. It’s both about and formatted for the phone, which is what most of them are using to shoot for the class. In fact some of them have to share phones, there are often not enough to go around (there are a few DSLR cameras too).

This way the file is endlessly shareable and each can have their own copy that they can access anytime.

I think this ebook is helpful for anyone looking to improve their creative expression using their phone camera, and includes thoughts on things like composition, editing, and many of my general principles and quick strategies from fifteen years of teaching.

Here are a few screenshots:

I’m making this resource, born in Kenya, free for my subscribers.

Here’s the Dropbox link, I invite you to download it to your phone and/or computer.

Alternately, here it is on Proton Drive.

If you like, you can donate to the Kibera photo program through me. Anything you can afford will go a long way to help Hassan buy more cameras and subsidize the fees (about 15 bucks) for those who are interested but can’t afford it. Intake for the next session is going on now! Send me a message and we’ll coordinate, I still have the Kenyan mobile payment app so I can forward money to the right account directly.

If you want to support my efforts, buy a print, make a donation on my site anytime, and/or please consider giving me a shout-out to anyone you know who might want to subscribe to my newsletter.

In Music News

June 29, 2025

If you see me on FB, you might wonder why I’ve been posting about playing outdoors in random places here in France. There are some practical reasons and more spiritual ones.

No I’m not busking. For one thing, I simply need to practice to keep and build my musical fitness. It goes away, fam, especially as you get older. I know that’s stating the obvious but I’ve never been a diligent practicer. Yes, I’ve played music for literally decades. But that was for bands, where you can hide, and I had lost my chops entirely for several years at one point when I basically gave up music. Solo is a totally different beast, it’s like I started over about nine years ago now.

Playing outside is daunting but I like it. Since for a while now I haven’t been in one place long enough to line up actual gigs, it’s sort of like the open mics I was doing around DC recently to stay in shape. It’s a big step up from practicing in your bedroom, because with any eyes and ears on you it adds that little bit of pressure that is helpful. You’ve got to bear down more. It’s like practice for your nerves as well, which I still have a slight problem with. I’m a growth-mindset type, it’s an ongoing process to get to where I want to be.

There’s something profound about placing your music out in the world, instead of in a closed-off venue. And doing it in a place like Paris becomes part of my explorations, sort of like with photography. I’m sniffing around for the right spot, the right time of day, the right situation, where I feel a certain comfort and connection with the surroundings. It’s a vibe thing, for me the camera is like a divining rod and so is this. Sometimes I pick for acoustics, underpasses are always good.

It’s led to memorable moments in the last couple days.

On Friday I played in a little park right behind Sacre-Coeur. People nearby here and there, of all ages, reading books (yep, there’s hope for the world) or quietly sitting around. Very peaceful on a perfect day weather-wise. I played for maybe an hour on one of the covered concrete benches, trying to add to rather than detract from the mood.

At least no one fled. One young guy was sitting on a bench across from me with his eyes closed for a good while, almost like he was meditating. He came up to me after, I said I hoped I wasn’t disturbing him.

“No, just the opposite” he said. “Are those your songs??”

Turns out he was a musician and had been digging it. He had kind, thoughtful, and insightful things to say about the melodies, chords, passion, etc but also just about creativity and life. Just an awesome guy, we talked for a good half hour. Made the whole day of lugging my guitar up and down the hills of Montmartre in the heat worth it. Classic case of ‘if you reach even one person’.

Then it happened again the next day.

Not at first. I went back to Montmartre but this time that same park didn’t work at all. It was just too hectic, even annoying.

When it started getting late I settled on a shaded little pocket park down the street. Kind of noisy, near a main road. It was partly a playground on one end, there were little kids charging around. I got sprayed by a water gun and one kid in diapers kept trying to smack my guitar.

Not ideal but I hung in there, shifting to my new alter-ego set - a revived compilation of originals written by me and/or certain friends spanning various bands we were in back in the long-ago DC scene (a slice of which I wrote about here). Plus a couple of covers. That material worked better - louder and more upbeat than my usual solo stuff which is fairly mellow.

Toward the end a couple of young French rock-and-roll types had stopped to watch as I bashed out a version of Smithers-Jones, a song my old band Modest Proposal used to cover. They seemed to like it.

“Super cool. Pink Floyd?” one asked.

“The Jam,” I answered. Blank stares. Oh well.

I had noticed a young art-nerdy girl sitting on the other side of the park was sketching me for a while. I went over to see if she would show me. She was super nice, she actually gave it to me, said “you play really well!”, and vanished.

Oh man, I’ll cherish this. All my tiredness and doubts fell away for the second straight day, once again all it took was that one person, one sweet interaction, to make it feel special. And this time suddenly the roles were flipped, I was the part of the visual landscape someone else chose to focus on. Pretty cool.

While I’m not taking photos much at the moment, this process and the little rewards that come from it feel similar.

[By now you might be thinking: um, video please? Maybe I will eventually in some form, but frankly I hate crappy little phone videos - of myself and others - and I don’t really have any gear whatsoever here to make it sound decent. Then the whole enterprise becomes something else, that will never do justice to the experience and the moment.]

Speaking of taking music out into the world, this is super cool, take a look. No, he’s not my beard-game inspo but I do love Loney Dear’s work. He’s like Sweden’s modern-day Brian Wilson.

When 1000 Words Beats a Photograph

June 21, 2025

Re-publishing this after last week’s post on Kosovo and Serbia. This story was from one of my followup visits to Serbia. Yes I’ve posted it before, when I first got on Substack, but almost no one saw it. And it’s one of my most memorable experiences, a better story than the photograph that caused it.

Word to the wise: old women spinning wool in random fields are no basis for stopping the car for photos! They could be sirens luring you to peril!

It’s not even a very good photo, in the end maybe not worth what it cost me.

As our five-day Serbia photo road trip neared its end, my Serb friends and I decided to pull over one more time when we saw her. This was one of my last frames before we noticed a small group of soldiers approaching us from the line of trees.

“What are you photographing?”

“What does it look like we’re photographing?”, my friend replied.

“There’s an army base over there.”

“What army base, I just see trees.”

“It’s beyond the trees.”

“Well, I don’t see it.”

“You’ll have to explain that to our commander, come with us.”

A couple hours later the interrogation wasn’t going anywhere. The officers had a light-bulb moment that all of my answers were being translated by my friend, who could be telling them anything. So we waited about an hour in silence, another guy showed up, pretty beefy, and they started over with the same questions. Soon he couldn’t help showing off a little.

(Caricature of a deep Slavic accent) “Mr. Crandall, I want you to know I speak English very well, and I am listening very carefully to what you say.”

“Ok.”

Things still didn’t really go anywhere. I was a freelancer for the Washington Post, NY Times, etc at the time, was in the Balkans for my job as Photo Director of the Balkan Times news site, but was shooting for myself. They didn’t know what to make of any of that. But you could tell none of them really had the authority to call the whole thing off.

“(Sigh) Show us where you were photographing.” So we went back out to the field and recreated our angles.

“Are you sure you couldn’t see any barracks?”

Playing it safe, I hedged. “I don’t think so, how can I be sure?” I said. My friend was livid, hissing under his breath “damn it, say YES I’M SURE!”.

My slight waffling was costly. “Ok, we will take you to the police station in the nearest town, where we have a photo lab. We will develop your film and we will see what you were photographing.” So we followed them to Uzice in our car, already exhausted. My friend’s girlfriend, who they separated from us, said later she overheard they wanted to take us to military court if they could see '“one window of the barracks” on our film.

The police chief came out to meet us. We sat in the car as he spoke to the military guys for a couple minutes max, and made a few gestures that I interpreted as “are you guys total idiots, wasting my time with this?”. I guess he had the authority to call it off.

That was that, we thought.

But the translator guy, who we called Bruno because he looked like a Bruno, perked up. “Great news! Now I can show you my town!” and set off across the street still holding both of our confiscated cameras in one giant hand. What he really meant was now we could sit for another two hours with him in an empty 80s-decor cafe while he practiced his English with a literally captive audience.

He seemed particularly determined to zing me, his American ‘guest’.

“Americans know little about history. Mr. Crandall, you say you are interested in Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall… Tell me, what was the REAL beginning of the end of communism in Eastern Europe?” My friends peered at me expectantly.

“Um, I’d say the 1980 Solidarity movement in Poland, Gdansk shipyards, Lech Walesa…” They burst out cheering and high-fiving like I had scored a goal. Bruno was not amused.

A bit later he tried again.

“Americans know nothing about geography. For example, can you tell me what is the capital of Latvia?” Where I’d been a few years earlier, so that didn’t work either.

My head was splitting, we hadn’t eaten since morning. I excused myself to the bathroom just to get away. He came along and peed next to me and kept talking, something about Bosnian Muslims not washing their hands.

When we finally somehow made it back to our car it was dark with a five-hour drive back to Belgrade. The next day we were on the TV news by name, photographers detained on suspicion of spying. The embassy called me. My older Serb colleague said everyone was asking him about me - “You know Crandall? What’s he really doing here??”- apparently there had just been an actual recent spy scandal in Belgrade involving an American passing sensitive documents.

Bruno later called my Serb photographer friend, saying that he was glad to meet us, that he lived unhappily with his mother, and he hoped we’d visit him again sometime.

New in the Prints section this week - In 2005 I was on a magazine assignment to photograph the Czech band Plastic People of the Universe at the Black Cat club in DC. They were well-known dissidents in the 1970s, and their old dissident buddy Vaclav Havel, who happened to be in town, showed up to see them backstage with Madeleine Albright.

*Dumpster fire with competing graffiti, postwar Kosovo, 1999*

On Kosovo and Serbia

June 13, 2025

A note about the lead photo. It was one of the first photos I took after arriving in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, when I went there on my own to photograph the postwar situation. I still had my backpack on from the flight, and was killing time while hoping my sole contact there would pick me up later as promised. (This was 1999, no smartphones. I had a cheap basic phone but no local SIM card yet.)

I didn’t think much of it at the time but a local friend told me what was interesting to him was the competing graffiti. The faded one in the background says ‘Nikola Mostar’ in Cyrillic. Meaning some Serb guy named Nikola is bragging he helped destroy Mostar, Bosnia, during that conflict a few years earlier.

The more recent one is the rebuttal, presumably by an ethnic Albanian, though interestingly in English. Over a smoldering literal dumpster fire. Sort of the Balkans in a nutshell.

My contact - Rod, an Australian I met on the UN aid flight from Rome - did pick me up btw, right on time in front of the Grand Hotel (locals joked it wasn’t grand and barely a hotel) in the cold rain as evening fell. By then I had discovered that who I thought was my only contact, an NPR reporter, wasn’t even listed at the hotel. So my new Aussie friend was all I had.

Turned out Rod was the local head of World Vision’s media relations. Meaning part of his job was to help visiting journalists. He put me up in a guest house for the week I was there, drove me around to sites outside the city, and let me use their office.

When the UN aid plane we had shared crashed in foggy mountains a few days later, killing everyone aboard, there was no way to leave. It was literally the only plane going in and out of Kosovo at the time. So Rod told one of his staff to drive to Thessaloniki, Greece for some World Vision business. And, oh, on the way drop off Bill in Skopje, Macedonia for his new flight.

I couldn’t have done much without him. I always seem to find a guardian angel.

As I go through my archive, the question that often looms is not just what is good but what still endures. Which is tricky when you have something that was once timely and topical like Kosovo. Why should anyone be expected to care after so many years? We have enough on our plate.

When I say tricky, first off even referring to Kosovo and Serbia as separate places would be offensive to Serbs (pre-war Kosovo was a province of Serbia, with a majority ethnic Albanian population). Kosovo finally declared independence in 2008, which Serbia still does not recognize. Even the spelling of the capital - Serbs use ‘Pristina’, Albanians ‘Prishtina’ - is loaded.

A Serb photographer friend, no right-winger himself, anguished to me back then “I still can’t believe we lost Kosovo.”

The reality of course is that the specifics of that conflict have long faded. It doesn’t take twenty-odd years for that to happen. Who is still talking about the Sudan conflict of the last couple years, which isn’t even over?

Of course for those in Kosovo, life has moved on but considering it’s the Balkans, grievances can still be ‘fresh’ after centuries,

But we can’t even keep up with our current grievances, threats, and conflicts. How can you ask someone to care about photos of what is now not just old but ancient news?

I think you do it by taking a step back and trying to universalize it. Revisit the work not for the ‘best’ photos but for what can still pull us into the story.

I’m no war photographer, Kosovo is the closest I’ve come. If you put me in an active war zone I would be useless. I’d run away from the bullets, I’m funny that way.

At the time I was more interested in the humanistic side: How would the Kosovar Albanians - just back en masse from muddy refugee camps over the border in Macedonia - try to reclaim their lives with winter coming on?

Those I met were often astonished to be alive. School started, markets reopened, but cold was the new threat with many homes without doors or windows. In the heavy, rainy gray of Kosovo in the November I was there, they tried to pick up the pieces.

But I also came to be very interested in ordinary Serbs, who were just coming out from under Milosevic. Internationally demonized for ethnic cleansing of a province Serbia claims as their religious cradle, Serbs argue they were simply defeating a separatist push until NATO got involved against them.

I saw the Serbs as victims as well as perpetrators. Victims both of the war itself and of Milosevic’s ultra-nationalist reign. Around 250,000 ethnic Serbs in Kosovo were displaced, forced from their homes in fear of revenge attacks after the war. Many would never return, though they were unwanted in Serbia proper either. Those who tried to go back at the time often ended up in tent camps under constant armed guard by KFOR troops, sometimes within view of their houses.

I wanted to understand them too. Looking back now, hardcore Milosevic supporters remind me exactly of MAGA. The same faces. And the violence and divisions of that period in the Balkans offer plenty of echoes of where we’re headed today. So many stories of friends and neighbors who got along fine, until they didn’t.

Until they started killing each other.

I normally try to be very careful about pairing photos, the contrasts can make statements that you may or may not intend. In much of the former Yugoslavia, it’s easy to get it wrong, at least depending on who you’re talking to. So, yeah, tricky stuff, but I thought I’d try anyway to juxtapose pics of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians and Serbs. Maybe it’s actually strange I’ve never tried this before.

I’m looking for certain visual and thematic combos. I want to see if it can make some elements of the situation understandable and maybe even still relevant after all this time, even without a lot of explanation. But open-ended enough to ‘read’ them and form your own ideas. I considered not even telling you which side was which, that might have been interesting but maybe not as illuminating.

Let me know what you think of these examples. This is a valuable exercise for me, especially for a project that never quite achieved final form. I have no illusion of offering answers but hope it at least provides intriguing questions or insights.

Destroyed Albanian home near Pristina | Camp for returned Kosovo Serbs, northern Kosovo

British KFOR soldier with ethnic Albanian kids, Pristina | Milosevic supporters, Belgrade, Serbia

Serbs, Mitrovica, Kosovo | Albanians, Pristina

Albanian kids in apartment lobby, Pristina | Serb nationalist, somewhere in Serbia

Pristina, Kosovo | Camp for returned Kosovo Serbs, northern Kosovo

Camp for returned Serbs, northern Kosovo | Pristina

Vandalized Albanian mailboxes, Pristina | Camp for displaced Kosovo Serbs, Belgrade

Camp for displaced Kosovo Serbs, Belgrade | Pristina

Camp for displaced Kosovo Serbs, Belgrade | Market, Pristina

Theater festival, Belgrade | Minefield, Klina region, Kosovo

Looking Back, Looking Forward

June 8, 2025

Apologies for no Sunday newsletter last week, I was traveling for a few days.

First off, I know in the last several months I was spreading across various platforms but I’ve also been working hard on my website. Lately I’ve been aggressively consolidating under that one roof and trying to keep it dynamic: frequent updates, the blog/newsletter, RSS feed, print sales, and a dedicated Workspace page for interacting virtually with students and collaborators. At the same time I’ve pulled back from doing some of those things on places like Substack and Ko-Fi. To me it just feels so much better - and avoids both algorithmic and oligarchic ick-factors (how’s that for alliteration?) - to build on your own real estate.

Notice I’ve more clearly made my homepage at billcrandall.com a place to see anything new at a glance. Why not bookmark it? Besides the blog (where this newsletter comes from), there are additions every week, like a feed. New projects, new additions to projects, new print offerings, etc. My goal is to update as often as social media.

Today you’ll find a new batch of international landscapes from my archive, which were just added to the World section of the Prints gallery. Well, as much as I love nature, I almost never do straight-up landscapes. Usually they are what I think of as human landscapes:

The Blue Lagoon in Iceland. From our first visit there many years ago, before they jacked up the prices and you didn’t have to book in advance like now.
Kiev’s Independence Square (aka Maidan) during the Orange Revolution, remember that? Felt like such a hopeful turning point at the time. Little did anyone know what was still to come.
A orphanage for baby elephants we visited in Nairobi several months ago.
Boats launching from Soumbédioune fishing village in Dakar.
A hopeful moment in postwar Kosovo.
An Arabber’s horse-drawn produce cart in West Baltimore.
A cityscape of Tallinn, from a brief visit after my 2013 residency across the water in Finland.
A farmer and his wife doing their morning chores in Poland (can’t recall the village name).
A overexcited guard dog greeting me and a friend in southern Serbia on a long-ago road trip (that ended in our detention by the ex-Yugoslav military, but that’s another story, maybe I’ll repost it soon).

Again, check them out on the homepage or the Prints gallery page.

As step back and look at them together, I have the distinct feeling like maybe I want to say ‘see, the world is pretty cool and interesting - and worth fighting for’.

Lots more to come, hope you’ll consider becoming a collector. From a friend and recent satisfied customer:

“I’ve been meaning to write and say two beautiful photographs arrived last week. They were perfectly packaged and printed on serious, heavy paper. We can’t wait to frame and hang them!”

I made my first images in Paris one day last week, sharing a few little impressions below. Besides the fact that I’m living out in the ‘burbs and don’t get into the city much, as I mentioned last time I haven’t been sure what to shoot here. I know that sounds crazy, I mean it’s Paris, right? But the last thing I want to do is what other people do, or feed everyone’s preconceived notions of this city. Tbh I admit I came here not sure that Paris is for me, but also not sure that Paris is even the Paris of our collective imagination.

But I also don’t want to do a critique of the city. That would just be sort of a bummer, and we don’t need that.

Instead of rejecting the idea of old romantic Paris, I decided to see if I could find if it actually exists and what that means to me. I know, sounds super easy to fall into cheesy clichés, that would be a huge challenge.

My first instinct was to see if I could find a particular old atmosphere. I was thinking of how Haussman’s early 20th century renewal bulldozed most of what was left of medieval Paris. I’ve had the nagging feeling Paris is again on the cusp of another new phase, or is already there. Like most cities, partly becoming a commercialized Potemkin version of itself. So if musty remnants do in fact exist I’d better hurry.

I searched up some of the old Left Bank literary/artist cafes to see if there were any ghosts there. Les Deux Magots, Cafe de Flore, and Le Procope are all pretty close together. Most looked nice enough and had lines of tourists waiting for lunch, not surprising. The last one, La Palette, formerly known as an artists’ cafe, spoke to me a bit more over my croque monsieur.

On the way there I stopped in a used book store. The woman working there saw my camera and started rummaging for photo books to show me. One of the first ones she produced was by Josef Koudelka, my favorite photographer, and it was the exact small edition I carried as a photo student until it literally fell apart.

Ok, karma was starting to speak and I tried to listen.

She couldn’t get her card reader to work, so I couldn’t buy it, so I set it down and took a photo of it, catching the light on a little pedestal of books. Like the holy grail.

At a vintage store later, an oddly random piece of ductwork somehow struck me in a similar spirit. I don’t know why. The owner got mad at me for not asking first, oh well. I usually prefer forgiveness over permission.

At least I was starting to get a feel for what I wanted. I think. As I used to tell my students, it’s hard to find what you’re looking for if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

Postcards from America

May 26, 2025

Ramble On

May 25, 2025

Ok, yeah, Led Zep reference. On a side note I’ve been revisiting them recently, what a weird and interesting band beyond their hard-rock debauchery. Robert Plant is such an unusual singer. A precarious relationship with pitch and his voice goes rough in odd places, but there really is no singer quite like him. Jimmy Page and John Bonham are so heralded (rightly so) but John Paul Jones might be the real glue. They have a reputation as gods of thunder, but so many songs are acoustic and even on bangers like Immigrant Song the guitar is actually barely distorted. For a band whose better-known songs like Kashmir and Stairway to Heaven are over eight minutes long, Immigrant Song is surprisingly short, clocking in at a mere 2:26. Their dabblings in Druid and Norse mythology should be ridiculous but somehow manage to be evocative.

For such a famous band they are sturdy but pretty unpolished and off-grid by today’s standards. Pretty damn refreshing if you ask me.

*Syrian refugee from car window, Paris, 2016*

Anyway, this was supposed to be about rambling. It’s been a strange ride lately. In March I was still ensconced in Nairobi in our house with two doggos. In April I was back solo briefly in the Republic of Takoma Park, seeing my mom, reconnecting with friends and fam, moving soil in the garden, and trying to help save the US republic-if-you-can-keep-it.

Today was my first morning waking up in my in-laws’ apartment in a suburb of Paris, where circumstances have brought me for an undetermined period of time. Not complaining (or bragging), it has been that old dilemma of stability/security vs freedom/change. Certainly lacking the former at the moment but I feel privileged to be gaining plenty of the latter, especially as a man of a certain age.

Not sure how much I’ll photograph here, we’ll see. Paris is a challenge since it’s one of the most photographed cities in the world. If I do find a theme, I hope it will at least surprise. As I often say, I don’t try to make places look good or bad, I’m looking for something truthful. So many people, photographers included, fall into the trap of idealizing and romanticizing Paris, as if it was still the 1950s Paris of their mind’s-eye. Not me. While I do like it, I find the reality of the City of Light a somewhat grittier and complex everyday experience.

With that said, for now first things first. I set out in the cool rain early this morning, jet-lagged but determined to get my fix of proper croissants and baguettes. That’s something I do cherish here. On the ten-minute walk there, I reminded myself (as I would remind my former students) to at least look around, to open my bleary eyes to new surroundings.

It’s a bit like in 2013 when I had two days (really only one full day) to photograph in Tallinn, Estonia. I needed a hook, so I decided to not even shoot the famous Old Town at all, I only worked in the surrounding Soviet-era areas - with a bike and one small camera - to see what ordinary life was really like. My idea was when can a post-Soviet country move on, start being post-post-Soviet? The set actually won an award and were part of an exhibit at Nat Geo, here’s a different edit including a few I haven’t shown before:

Rambling on. More soon from Your Man Near Paris.

À Bientôt

May 18, 2025

A quick note today to let you know I’m on the move again this Friday. I’ll be in France, staying with family outside Paris for at least part of the summer. Hard to say how long, a lot is uncertain. Could be a few weeks or a couple months.

Hold down the fort please (a bit more literally than normal). All my usual channels remain open.

A few photos of Paris from some years ago:

Postcards from America

May 14, 2025

Seeing Belarus

May 11, 2025

I met one of my heroes this week at a talk in downtown DC.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is the Belarusian opposition leader in exile. You could call her the president in exile, as she is widely seen as having won the election against Belarus’ longtime authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, in 2020 after she stepped in as a last-minute replacement candidate for her jailed husband (whose picture she carries everywhere). She was a complete political novice but won convincingly according to neutral observers.

It was a stunning victory but only the beginning of a long, ongoing saga for herself and the country.

Lukashenko refused to admit defeat, even as hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets for months in the COVID summer of 2020. They were so beautiful, both graceful and tough, and stoic as Belarusians tend to be. This was their moment, their ‘color revolution’ (white and red, the national colors) that I thought wouldn’t happen in my lifetime. The regime teetered. Surely they couldn’t beat or arrest everyone into submission.

But that is exactly what happened.

One of the most stirring recent examples of people power was brutally and systematically crushed. Tikhanovskaya, the mother of a young child, was forced into exile in Vilnius. Ever since, she has led a kind of opposition cohort from abroad, meeting regularly with heads of state to keep Belarus on the international radar.

She says she is hopeful that the Trump administration will use its influence to help free what are now thousands of political prisoners in Belarus.

Meanwhile, she hasn’t seen her husband in five years, and she said he has been held incommunicado for the last two. She doesn’t know where he is.

I was able to speak with Tikhanovskaya after the event briefly, introduced by one of her close aides I know personally. He was at the launch of my photobook The Waiting Room in 2012 at the former Montserrat House in DC. The guy in the tie in the crowd shot:

The last time Tikhanovskaya was here a few years ago, I made sure someone delivered a book copy to her, and it’s since been spotted in the ‘waiting room’ of her office in Vilnius. She and I agreed I would try to visit the office when I’m in Europe over the summer.

I’ve been told my photobook is the first to focus on Belarusian culture and identity, which to me is at the heart of their post-Soviet geopolitical predicament, somewhat stuck (literally and metaphorically) between Russia and the West. Not Russian, not European.

So much of what’s going on - in Belarus, the US, and elsewhere - boils down to a battle for culture.

I’m actually wary of didactic ‘activist art’ and even the old warhorse ‘creating awareness’. We are usually all too aware already, the question is what to do. For me, there are ways to make a difference as an artist: how you portray human values, do you elevate and energize people or demoralize them, do you plant the right seeds in the right places, can you take an interest - even a passionate one - in something outside yourself. In a way, through art we help create the world we want to live in.

I’ve always tried to uphold all that in my own work, and nowhere more than in Belarus. People ask me why, do I have ancestry there or something? (No) As I told Tikhanovskaya, I went there because I was curious, I kept going because I started to care, and I made my book because I wanted other people to care.

And for Belarusians to feel seen and to see themselves. It was like discovering a place that hadn’t been shown a mirror before, and the blinds were drawn on the windows.

Besides photographing there on several trips from 2000-2009, my Belarus-related collabs include:

2001 - Exhibition in Minsk with Czech photographer Karel Cudlin as part of our ‘Seeing-Eye’ project, and a workshop that focused on developing Belarusian documentary photography which barely existed then (it does now). The importance of the critical observer in repressive societies.

2003 - Second exhibition in Minsk on an ArtsLink grant, showing my work from Belarus and the US. Interestingly, I got some state media coverage, which generally seemed to see my work as warmer toward Belarus than toward the US.

2006 - Curated and co-organized the Chernobyl20 exhibition, featuring the some of the best photography about the human aftermath of the 1986 nuclear disaster. We had Paul Fusco, Lucian Perkins, Robert Knoth, Gabriela Bulisova, and more. The show opened at the UN on the day of the 20th anniversary, after a special UN assembly on Chernobyl. Then a second opening at the Rayburn building on Capitol Hill.

2008 - Helped bring Belarusian artist Zoya Lucevich to the US for a residency, where she made a body of work that showed at the UN, a first for an artist from Belarus. Zoya has a close ancestral link to Belarus most famous national poet, Yanka Kupala, whose real name was Ivan Dominikovich Lutsevich. (If I recall correctly, her great-grandfather was Kupala’s brother.)

2009 - Invited to lead one of the inaugural summer workshops at a new independent photo school in Minsk.

2012 - Published The Waiting Room book, which won second place at FotoweekDC’s International Photobook Awards.

2013 - Talks at FotoweekDC festival, the National Press Club, and the International Center for Journalists about Belarus and my work there.

It’s a lot but so much of it I could never do now. Belarus has gotten much worse, it was repressive then but you could function. Today I don’t think I’d set foot there, I assume there’s a KGB file on me (yes, they have their own KGB). In her talk, Tikhanovskaya referred to the country as like a prison at the moment.

Talking with her aide (my friend) after the event, he said what Belarusians need is inspiration. We tossed around a few ideas and chatted more about the general importance of art and culture in the battle against oppression.

Especially now that we here in the US are moving in a similar direction, we may need each other.

On the power of inspiration, I’ll leave this on a note from Belarusian author Victor Martinovich, from his intro to my book:

A girl on a trolleybus is standing with her back towards us. We only see a wide boulevard disappearing in the distance, manicured trees on both sides. The girl has a light summer dress and is turned sideways to the observer. We can tell that she is beautiful but also that she is not a model. The scene is not professionally staged; such scenes take place in our lives ten times a day, in a store, on the metro, during a walk home.

But it seems that you can love life again and forgive it everything just for this one scene.

Calling Collect(ors)

May 4, 2025

There are now three main galleries in my Prints section, more to come.

Prints are made and shipped directly from darkroom.com. Potential collectors can go to Prints here on my site or browse my darkroom.com pages (linked below).

You may have been following weekly installments for Postcards from America, a compilation of my personal views of the US from the ‘before-times’. I’m up to fifteen images (rolling out three per week for five weeks) and growing. Many years ago, one of my dearest mentors, a little-known but phenomenal and poetic Czech photographer, looked at my Eastern Europe work and said something like ‘very nice, but I’d like to see what you can do with your own home’. So this is for him.
New York City is Beautiful just dropped. It’s an experimental series from several years ago when I was looking for a new visual approach to one of the most photographed cities in the world. The title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, for a city that has moved from the outward physical dysfunction of my youth to more recent existential dread (COVID, climate, authoritarianism) under the carnival surface. You want color, you got it. And no, I’d rather not give away the secret, very lo-fi, technique used (an idea I actually got from one of my photo students at the time). See if you can guess! DM me, I’ll tell you if you’re right.
Early on I decided Nairobi was a city of contradictions and I haven’t really changed my mind. This set represents a select sampling from my body of work there, trying to understand and come to terms with the place that was home for a year and a half. Frankly I haven’t decided yet what I’ll do with it. Need to let the images sit for a bit first.

There’s also a World section with a grand total of one image so far, an older favorite from Stockholm.

My standard sizes will fit standard frames. Prices are meant to be affordable but what the biz calls ‘respectable’.

Yes, that time has come. The time any artist dreads.

I’m asking you to buy something.

Of course you don’t have to. Or you could do it later, whenever. I would at least love if you check it out.

I could use the support as things remain unpredictable on my work front for the foreseeable future. Huge thanks to my OG paid supporters from Substack, for you a special offer: if you let me know a photo you want I’ll send you the original file free, so you can print at cost at your leisure and as often as you want for personal use.

Since moving off Substack, this newsletter will be forever free.

Thanks and enjoy your Sunday! Please let me know any questions or problems.

A Love Letter in Times of Chaos

April 27, 2025

I was considering this image for my Postcards from America, and it got me thinking. What DO you love?

Your loved ones, family, friends, your home of course. Your dreams and imaginings. Your work if you’re lucky. Your neighbors if you’re really lucky (as I am). For me, photography is about love. I can’t photograph what I hate, my shutter finger won’t activate.

I love a lot of things in other countries. Many places have quite lovely architecture and sensible social support systems. I’ve often felt I could live happily in this or that country. Kenya is tempting. Finland is a great place, must be nice if you’re Finnish. But as a visitor something is deeply lacking that is becoming more clear to me as I get older: it’s not home and never could be. Especially when you reach a certain age and home is so deeply embedded with life already lived.

Granted I’ve been living abroad, I’ve only been back a few weeks so I might be a bit misty. But in our budding spring I am reminded of a notion of love that is closer at hand.

I’m going to make an outrageous statement: I love this country, more than ever.

Even with everything going on. Because of everything going on. Yes it’s under siege from within. That makes me disgusted with those doing the siege-ing, not the place.

Yes these are deeply disturbing times. Yes I am still deeply critical of a long list of things, as I always have been. As a true American should be. Name a ‘great American’ who wasn’t on some level a contrarian.

In this country it's easy to forget the love part when there is much that repulses. But as we grow angry we also become indifferent or callous to our true bounty and potential.

How can you love a place where the soul-crushing never seems to end? This country can kill you, or let you die, without remorse. The people it rewards are so often the wrong ones, even the grotesque ones. The worst impulses are too often allowed to run amok. Freedom? In so many ways, this is not freedom. Quality of life? The US will never be, I dunno... Denmark. A country that has its basic act together for its people without huge pendulum swings.

But I love it anyway. I didn’t used to say that. Maybe now because it’s under such unique threat. Maybe it’s defiance talking, because it’s mine and I’m not letting these people destroy it. I’m not going to let the bastards take both the country AND my feelings about it. I’m not giving up on what it can be. That day might come but it’s not here yet.

I’m not talking about baseball or national parks or Hollywood. The things that have moved me after returning have been more everyday, local, and connected to my memories.

Sometimes just by going outside and moving around.

The cacophony of birds. My god. But not just the birds, generally - that one mockingbird (hey, he’s back as I write this) that reminds me of the baby mockingbirds we once found and built a little fort for in our yard. The mother would swoop down and feed them, until they disappeared after a few days.

The astonishing tree canopy. Not everywhere is so blessed. But not just trees generally - the ones we planted in our yard several years ago. We prepared the soil for a year before planting. Moving dirt around will bring you closer to your own patch of Earth. Ok, yeah, at the moment it’s a mess (hey, I’ve been away).

The woods nearby. Especially the area of the woods where we buried our dear departed guinea pig Seydi.

My childhood house that I passed recently with my mother. On its own it contains countless life moments.

The cool ‘hippo rocks’ I had to cross everyday on the way to school, that now feel like a shrine.

It helps that I like where I live now.

One night last week I was out for a walk. Passing a local music school after dark, the lights were on, it was open mic night and a good turnout at that. Great vibe.

(Speaking of open mics, I was part of a local Open Mic for Democracy event last week.)

Circling around a shabby house across the street that is a celebrated DIY art venue, I peeked in as an art-rock band in what was once a living room is nailing it for about a dozen people in what was once a dining room.

Down a darkened street in the historic district, lights emanated from the old, deeply American houses.

Over at the bookstore another night, an author talk about Ukraine. Where, oddly, I met a lovely family of Latvians living here. Talking about my time in Riga in the 90s, they actually knew one of the friends I made there. Wild.

Next door is the music store on one side and the funky local radio station on the other, next to a great recording studio. Music store > bookstore > radio station > recording studio. Damn. What a lineup for any town. If revolution breaks out, put the barricades there.

America is both an actual place and an imagined one we carry around in our heads.

Things in this country I usually carry in my own America-bubble: proper bagels, public libraries, Martin guitars, East Coast autumn, endlessly varied nature, everyday friendliness of people, indie coffeeshops.

When I dream forward I sometimes think of the Hudson Valley.

Of course there’s music and culture. Beyond the stars and obvious pop culture names, plenty are out there that still make America cool: Andre 3000, Beach House, Kishi Bashi, Patti Smith, Thievery Corporation. A radiant Tracy Chapman’s surprise 2024 Grammy appearance with Luke Combs still stirs.

Younger up and coming artists like Jesse Welles (that United Health song guy) and the DMV’s own Yasmin Williams (a new kind of guitar hero for this generation).

Author and commentator Rebecca Solnit has done much to buoy us in these times, and I’ve been discovering new independent voices like Marisa Kabas and Joan Westenberg. Our cinematic canon can still claim the Coen brothers, Spike Lee, and Jim Jarmusch.

This is just a small sampling. Your list will of course vary. I humbly suggest that you take a meditative moment to recall what you do love.

In these perilous times, you already know what you’re against. You will only truly fight for what you love. (Ask Ukraine.)

To be clear, I don’t forgive those who brought us to this dangerous point. My love is not about that.

It’s a weapon to defeat them.

*Our next generation of everyday apps needs to better prioritize privacy and ethical ownership. If it collects your data, you don’t want it.*

Resistance Tech

April 19, 2025

[This is an updated followup to my Substack post a while back, If It's a Digital Coup, It Needs to Be a Digital Rebellion]

“The defaults are becoming dangerous,” I said.

My friend, a pastor, looked at me for a long moment. “That’ll preach,” said the guy who writes a sermon every week.

We had just come from lunch, where I had given him my usual spiel about ‘resistance tech’, about how we urgently need a movement to reassess the apps we use: Google, Meta, X, Amazon. Apps and platforms that have been our popular, comfortable, and convenient defaults, the obvious mainstream choices, even as we ignored their data privacy perils for years.

Apps that have helped create - and continue to fund - the tech billionaires that now seem onboard with authoritarianism. We need to get out of their clutches.

Dangerous?? Strong word.

But consider: does this one help someone surveil you? Does that one track everything you do online, or in real life? Did that one help create a billionaire that is now controlling you as much as serving you, and whose wealth is radically distorting our society and politics?

My pastor friend and I had been tossing around ways to hone the slogan version, the elevator pitch. ‘Non-cooperation with our own oppression’ was another good one of his.

On a walk later I thought of ‘boycott oligarch tech’. I’ve usually used ‘resistance tech’ or ‘rebel tech’ as shorthand.

It’s been surprisingly hard to get the pitch lingo right. I've got my first Resistance Tech community workshop scheduled for next month, so I need to be able to be clear, persuasive - and short. Like ten minutes total (it’s a slot at an unrelated neighborhood event), and I want them to leave with some new apps actually downloaded.

The idea itself is straightforward enough: easy replacements for the everyday apps we've become so used to, but are now becoming outright harmful or even, yes, dangerous.

My goal is a basic roadmap to a better everyday 'tech stack' for average people who don't want to think too much about this stuff.

People who don't particularly like change, but understand there's a problem.

A set of apps with all the functionality you need, a non-surveillance business model, and ethical ownership. Including apps not based in the US and therefore not potentially as vulnerable to American government interference or overreach.

We do have those choices.

Our money is a potent weapon and we don't want it going to the bad guys. Like how we might choose to shop local and not patronize companies that don't reflect their values.

And it works. It's certainly working against Tesla.

Now it's time to apply that to the tech giants that dominate our lives. Imagine if enough people did it.

Time to free ourselves, to disentangle from dependency on toxic tech.

The good news is that it's easy to switch. Quality options are waiting for us. For a starter kit of daily apps, you could break it down into a few main categories, with solutions that you'll feel good about using.

Google, one of the worst culprits in collecting and monetizing our online activity, is of course many things: Chrome, search, gmail, maps are particularly egregious data harvesters. YouTube too, which is a Google product. And Google tracks you even when you’re not using Google. Countermeasures are needed. So Google is spread over multiple categories below.

The apps below are not the only good choices out there, just my suggestions. Your needs may vary of course.

Messaging

Text/WhatsApp > Signal

Signal is the gold standard for encrypted messaging and voice calls. They don't collect any personal data when you use it (other than your phone number to sign up, which some people do complain about, but they don’t do anything with your number). As we now know, our government is using Signal, so they clearly think it’s secure.

User error notwithstanding, like accidentally adding the wrong person to your group chat.

Texting is inherently insecure (ask Mark Meadows or others after Jan 6th whose text messages were trotted out in court). Even US law enforcement recommends encrypted messaging, for the moment at least, after a major recent Chinese hacking incident.

WhatsApp is also well-encrypted but it’s a Meta product. While they can't read your messages, WhatsApp does collect other data like who you messaged, how often, what time, etc. WhatsApp has been problematic in the past with their handling of that data, and now Meta is currying favor with the regime. You do the math.

That said, WhatsApp’s encryption is the same as Signal and it is very popular worldwide. In Kenya, where I just lived for a year and a half, everyone uses WhatsApp. Less so in the US and more and more people are bypassing it and going to Signal for privacy and security.

Browser

Chrome > DuckDuckGo, (also Vivaldi, Ecosia, Brave)

The Chrome browser, like all Google products, harvests your activity to build data profiles of you. Google has more on us than we care to imagine, which can have serious implications. See the link below for a great explainer.

A better option is a non-tracking, privacy-oriented browser with good-guy ownership like US-based DuckDuckGo - my recommendation - or others. Vivaldi (Norway) and Ecosia (Germany) are also very good and European-based if you're looking for that extra insulation from US policies.

Not only does DuckDuckGo not track you, it helps block Google trackers that follow you around the web even when you're not using Google apps themselves.

https://spreadprivacy.com/how-does-google-track-me-even-when-im-not-using-it/

Vivaldi (what I’m currently using) has some cool customization features and built-in free Proton VPN.

Email | Drive | Calendar | VPN

Google > Proton

Proton Mail is based in Switzerland, which is therefore governed by strong Swiss protocols on digital privacy rights. You can send emails normally or with encryption.

Proton has long been the go-to for journalists, activists, and others with privacy concerns, recently it's becoming more mainstream.

The paid tier (about $10/month) has Drive and Calendar apps that work very much like Google, along with a password manager and a strong VPN.

The free Proton tier offers their email and basic VPN (more on VPNs below), which is hard to beat.

Maps

Google > Organic Maps (also Maps.Me, HERE)

Do you want Google knowing everywhere you go? Because they do, Google Maps is tracking and compiling your movements and activities. It doesn’t have to be that way.

I can personally recommend Organic Maps, an open source, non-tracking phone app that doesn't collect your data. I've used Organic in Kenya and the US and I'm satisfied with it. The user interface is different than Google Maps, might take you a few minutes to learn, but it's simple and works great once you get the initial hang of it. I was especially impressed with its amazing level of detail for walking/hiking directions, even in the middle of a large park where it marked things like benches and shelter.

Organic Maps uses downloaded/offline maps by default, meaning you pre-download the map files for the country or region you're in. That way you don't need a data signal or wifi to use it, which could save your ass. Google Maps can do that too but it's harder to figure out how. With Organic it's easy.

Social Media

X / Threads > Bluesky

Instagram > Pixelfed

Facebook > ?

Tricky. You don't want to lose valuable communities, groups, and connections, that's the tradeoff if you're trying to get off Meta.

There really isn't a good Facebook replacement out there. I tried Tribel but... yeah, no. I’m still on FB.

Threads is quite active, more two-way engagement than Bluesky, though your toxicity experience may vary. I find Threads substantive and civil, but kind of random. And unfortunately it's Meta. Your call.

Pixelfed is a new-ish, decentralized, European Instagram alternative. For photo buffs there's also the Foto phone app, also quite new. They both seem fine though truth be told, personally I’m a bit over sharing single images in that format. Seems a little pointless.

There's really no excuse for still being on X, Bluesky is a solid choice with non-oligarch ownership. While it can take time to get traction, it's a good place to follow your favorite commentators, news sources, and such.

Search

Google > Ecosia, DuckDuckGo

Again, Google tracks and compiles everything relentlessly. That's how they make money.

DuckDuckGo and Ecosia are two search engines (as well as browsers) that don't. Both use Microsoft’s Bing. Ecosia plants trees with their profits. Both are lovely options.

VPN

What's a VPN? A Virtual Private Network hides your activity from your internet provider. It also hides where you are, even what country you're in. Some people use this to watch international programming (like, say, sports in another viewing market). You just toggle it on, and choose a country to pretend you're in. That's it.

Some people might not feel the need for a VPN, but a non-tracking browser and a VPN is a rock-solid privacy combo.

Shopping

Amazon > Shop local or direct from merchants

Yes, we are all addicted to the convenience of home delivery. Addicted enough to allow Bezos to be in the overlord suite? At least consider canceling Prime, and minimizing or eliminating Amazon shopping. You can always use it to find stuff, then go straight to the merchant.

For books there is bookshop.org if you don’t have a local bookstore.

What about Apple?

Broadly speaking they are not the worst privacy offenders. They make their money from selling devices and hardware. They don't need to make money from your data, unlike Google or Microsoft.

If you have Apple products and apps at least use those. Compared to other mainstream options, the Safari browser or your Apple email are not terrible choices.

A side note on encryption: since bad guys can hide with encryption too, there is a deep split playing out in Europe right now, between countries (like Spain and Sweden) who want to undermine encryption for the sake of fighting trafficking, drugs, child porn, etc, and others like Germany who defend the right to encryption for personal privacy.

There’s also a push within Europe to develop their own alternatives to US big tech. I came across this just yesterday on France 24:

Europe seeks tech independence amid strained ties with Trump's America

I don’t have all the answers. My Resistance Tech list doesn't address all the ins and outs of our tech dependencies but does offer a start towards digital liberation. A fresh start.

Feel free to write me with questions - or suggestions for my pitch!

Want a simple list with links to these apps? Download my cheatsheet here.

News - Kilmar Garcia case

April 15, 2025

Jennifer Vasquez - wife of Kilmar Garcia, who was deported to an El Salvador prison in error - arrives at the courthouse in Greenbelt MD for a hearing Tuesday, April 15 about her husband’s case.

Normally I consider myself a lapsed photojournalist but felt the urge to be there.