And here. We. Go.
There was no debate or difficult decision to be made on this year’s best photo. It was from the first football game I ever shot (Iowa v Illinois at Iowa’s Homecoming) and it remains one of the best peak action sports photos I’ve ever taken (in general but certainly in football). I suppose you could knock it since it’s a photo of the opposing running back in a game that Iowa dominated but as a single peak-action sports frame, I didn’t top for the rest of the year.
Top Ten of the Teens: 2016
2016 was probably the hardest year to pick a “best of” given how much I was able to shoot that year. That year saw me getting out of the Army, driving across the country (a couple of times), multiple foreign trips, and extensive work on covering forgotten corners of Chicago. But since I had to pick one, it had to be the portrait I shot of a coffee farmer in Thailand.
The story of how I found myself in the Inthanon mountains is an interesting story itself, but not really relevant to the photo. The short version is that I was able to spend the afternoon with Mr. Somsak Sriphumthong where he showed me his farm and how he roasts and bags his beans. After the tour, he offered me a cup of his coffee and we hung out in this shack adjacent to his roasting operation where I managed to snap this photo of him. I’m not sure that I’ve ever taken a better portrait.
(and if you’d like to know more about Mr. Sriphumthong, there have been stories written about him: https://www.bangkokpost.com/life/social-and-lifestyle/433561/the-brewing-of-change)
Top Ten of the Teens: 2015
“The thing you have to understand about Guinea, is that they were the county that said ‘no’.”
This was one of the first things we told visitors from DC when they asked what they needed to know about Guinea and it was important point—Guinea really was the only former colony that rejected membership in La Francophonie at independence from France and, as such, its relations with France have always been strained (we used to joke “1958 never ended out here”).
And so, with that in mind, I always found the Air France ads at a certain traffic intersection that I passed through frequently in downtown Conakry to be absolutely fascinating. “What message is this sending? How could this possibly resonate here?” It always just seemed wildly inappropriate and perfect demonstration of the complicated relationship between France and its former colony.
Unfortunately, there usually a number of police in uniform at this intersection (controlling traffic/shaking drivers down, etc.) and even though I usually passed through it in uniform and in a diplomatic vehicle, taking a photo in front of them would be more hassle than it’s worth. But it came to pass that one Saturday morning that i was coming back from grocery shopping downtown and the intersection was almost empty. I asked my friend who was driving to slow down for a moment and as she did, this gentlemen walked into the frame.
Top Ten of the Teens: 2014
“Your mission is to proceed up the Highway N1 in an embassy SUV. Pick up Ebola’s path at Gueckedou, follow it and learn what you can along the way. When you find the Ebola, infiltrate it’s team by whatever means available and terminate the it’s command.”
Okay, those weren’t the orders we’d been given, but they weren’t that far off. It was the fall of 2014, Ebola was raging all over Guinea and our Ambassador had sent me and one of our Diplomatic Security Agents to the Forest Region of Guinea—the area of the country where Ebola was most rampant and where communications were poor—in order to determine the security situation on the ground.
I was no stranger to overland travel in Africa at this point—I’d visited 17 or 18 countries, I’d done long road trips in Senegal, Tanzania, and South Africa, and I’d traveled all over Cameroon. But this would be the longest road trip I ever did in Africa—over 1,200 miles total. But all of that doesn’t make this the photo of the year for 2014 for me.
Rather it’s what this image conveys—if anyone ever asked what driving long distances in Africa was like, I think this image tells the story better than I could do if I tried to describe it myself.
Top Ten of the Teens: 2013
If 2012 was a hard year to pick a best of photo because there were so many to chose from, 2013 was hard because there were so few. Overall, it was a tough year for photography since my job had me moving from Senegal to Washington and then back to Guinea within the span of about six months. And Guinea was not a particularly hospitable environment for photos which further limited opportunities. So that leaves us with this shot of London from November of the year.
It gets the nod mostly from a technical standpoint—I had consciously been trying to really nail my exposures in an attempt to stop relying on HDR and this photo was a testament to that. I’d also wanted to experiment more with reflections in my photography and the Regents Canal was able to provide me with ample opportunities to practice.
Regents Canal, London. Nov. 28, 2013.
Top Ten of the Teens: 2012
2012 was a tough year to pick a “best” photo from. For starters, I shot a lot of “good” photos this year and, in addition, I did my first real photojournalism since Iraq when I covered Hillary Clinton’s visit to Senegal—and some of those photos are still in my portfolio on this very website. So why this landscape photo?
Well, for starters, it remains one of the best landscape photos I’ve ever done, in this year or any other. It was taken in Paris during the Nuit Blanche festival when a number of government or private buildings are open to the public. In this case, I shot this from the Paris City Planning Offices which have a great terrace on the 13th floor. The only problem was, I got here so late, the lights on the Eiffel Tower had already gone dark for the night. But still, in terms of portraying “The City of Light” this photo works better at telling its story than any other I took that year.
4eme arrondissement, Paris. Oct. 6, 2012.
Top Ten of the Teens: 2011
I’m often asked “when I got into photography” and there’s no good answer to that question. Of course, to a large degree, I’d been into it at a young age—at least high school, if not earlier—but that’s not a satisfying answer since I certainly wasn’t shooting back then. So if not then, when? Was it when I started buying my first non-kit lenses in Korea and went into Seoul to practice street photography? Was it in Iraq when I treated my battalion’s deployment as the opportunity to self-embed even though I hardly picked up a camera for years afterwards? What about 2006 when I first started shooting regularly, especially since it was at this point that I started my long-running Chicago documentary project?
To me, none of those are really the right answers—to the extent there is a right answer, it is May, 2011.
The photo below is the second frame I ever made in Paris—on my first trip to France. The story of that trip is a tale in its own right, but as for this frame, it was rare moment—at that point in my photographic development—where I saw the moment (the “decisive moment” if I can quote Cartier-Bresson, which, since we’re talking about Paris, I think I can)—did not hesitate, and got the shot. As it happened, I got a LOT of shots on this trip—some of the best photos I’d taken until that point and still some of the best photos I’ve ever taken of Paris. And out of that trip, something snapped. I realized that I hadn’t been taking photography seriously, that I wasn’t really doing it intentionally and I wasn’t really trying to grow at it. After May 2011, that started to change. It was definitely two steps forward, one back, that sort of thing (HDR would remain a thing for a few more years). But from this point forward, things began to change.
And this still remains one of the best street candids I’ve shot in my life.
The Boulevard Saint-Germain, 6eme arrondissement, Paris. May 26, 2011.
Top Ten of the Teens: 2010
Something I haven’t ever really done is go through my archives in a systemic way and really take in what I’ve shot. With this being the end of the year, I was considering going back and looking for my top shots of the year but since it’s also the end of the decade, I thought it might be worthwhile to go back and look at my top shots from the last ten years. But rather than just look at the top ten overall—which would skew heavily to the last two years or so—I’m going with the top photo from each year.
Picking the best one from each year is obviously hard, especially given that I had a couple of pretty lean years in this span. Also, I had to resist the temptation to pick an “important” (but merely “very good”) photo over what was my best frame of that year. And so, with that, let’s begin.
2010 was virtually the stone age when it comes to me and photography. I’d long since been to Iraq and I’d been shooting regularly for about three years at this point but I still wasn’t really practicing photography intentionally. Largely my photography at this point was urban landscape focused (though at least my Chicago stuff was somewhat focused on endangered buildings and areas) and I was still developing a style and really learning how to see. I was also still heavily into HDR and the less said about that the better.
With all of the above, my best frame of the year was something of a lucky shot. But it does show use of negative space and rigid composition that I think my later stuff would demonstrate. And if nothing else, at least it’s not HDR.
Dupont Circle, Washington D.C. Aug. 2, 2010.
