Welcome to this week’s Visual Story. This series, published on Tuesdays, focuses on a specific place or theme with a short narrative. Most of the “Visual Stories” are too long to be carried in most email browsers. If that’s the case, view it on a web browser or on the Substack app.

On the Fourth of July, in the midst of a weeklong heat wave that threatened, postponed and cancelled Independence Day celebrations across the U.S., Mother Nature decided to have a fireworks show of her own.

My wife and I escaped to the mountains of Central Virginia, an annual tradition that allows us to see family, avoid the crowds that descend on the Washington, D.C., area, and miss the scorching temperatures that infiltrate the nation’s capital and surrounding areas. While I initially thought about staying to photograph the 250th anniversary fireworks show, the partisan nature of the celebration made the decision to leave an easy one.

Typically, the mountains bring temperatures that are 10 to 15 degrees cooler than home, but last weekend’s extreme heat dome spared no one.

By the weekend, more than 40 million people in the U.S. were under heat alerts. On the Saturday, at least 18 cities recorded record high temperatures, including Washington, D.C., which broke a record set in 1919 when it reached 102 degrees at Reagan National Airport. The heat index was 10 to 15 degrees higher than that, making us even happier to be away from home.

In Wintergreen, a mountain resort about 40 miles from Charlottesville and three hours southwest of Alexandria, it only reached 88 degrees. But the humidity — a rarity there except during a heat wave — became almost unbearable. By midafternoon, flashes of lightning forced Fourth of July activities to shut down until the projected storms passed.

We returned to our condo to get ready for dinner with the rest of Jill’s family. About 5:10, the storms that would eventually pummel Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York City and points beyond started to roll in, and I brought out my camera.

In 2021, we bought the place in Wintergreen — a tiny, 700-square-foot one-bedroom condo — for two reasons. We wanted a place to get away, and we love the view of the valley below. I took this photo when I went down the previous week to get our place ready for the family event.

When the weather turns bad, you get to see that too, and I’ve managed to get fascinating — at least to me — landscapes of the changing skies. Given the historic nature of the weekend and the storms that were expected to pass overhead, I could not resist trying to see if I could replicate or exceed my earlier efforts.

I didn’t take much at first, but by 5:50 p.m., it was time for the main event — a series of black clouds with lightning strikes moving overhead and into the valley. Over the next 15 minutes, I shot these photos as the skies changed rapidly and storms headed toward Charlottesville and up into the D.C. area.

According to the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center, more than 500 damaging wind gusts were reported across the central and eastern United States. In Charlottesville and Albemarle County, winds reached near 75 mph, knocking down numerous trees. Heavy lightning also impacted the region, leaving more than 10,000 customers without power well into the evening.

By 7:30 p.m., the storm had passed through Wintergreen and the area was mostly dry. Activities resumed and fireworks went on as scheduled. By sunset, the valley looked like this.

In Washington, D.C., the severe weather resulted in an evacuation of the National Mall on Saturday evening. After the storms and speeches, the fireworks did not start until shortly before midnight.

By that point, we had been asleep for some time. The fireworks show in Wintergreen was a bit of a dud, and for the first time in memory, I took no photos. I much prefer the ones I got of Mother Nature’s handiwork instead.

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Welcome to this week’s Visual Story. This series, published on Tuesdays, focuses on a specific place or theme with a short narrative. Most of the “Visual Stories” are too long to be carried in most email browsers. If that’s the case, view it on a web browser or on the Substack app.

Even though we’ve lived only 120 miles or so from Philadelphia for the past 25 years, I can count on both hands the number of times I’ve spent extended time in the city.

That’s my mistake, and I admit my bias against the city’s large, loud, and proudly obnoxious sports fanbase has something to do with it. I know Philadelphia has a great arts and theater scene along with the cheesesteaks and link to the earliest days of our nation’s history.

You would think that last part would be enough to tip the scales, but thus far it hasn’t. Even though the Amtrak goes through Philadelphia’s 30th Street station on the way to New York, we turn onto the New Jersey Turnpike and skip the city when we drive by car. So, other than on a couple of business trips, a tour of the Liberty Bell when our kids were small, and overnight jaunts to see our son in two touring musicals ( “Newsies” premiered there), I haven’t shown the city much brotherly love.

But on a damp, cloudy April morning, I drove to Philadelphia’s historic Fairmount neighborhood to finally visit a bucket list site for me: The world’s first true penitentiary.

The gloomy weather suited the Eastern State Penitentiary, a prison opened in 1829 and closed more than 140 years later. Designed by British architect John Haviland, the prison has the look of a neo-Gothic wagon wheel, with seven corridors of 8- by 12-foot cells connected by a central hub.

It originally was designed to house 250 convicts in isolation, a practice that ended in 1913 due to overcrowding problems. At its peak in the mid 1920s, the prison had 1,700 inmates; mobster Al Capone and bank robber Willie Sutton were its most famous prisoners.

When it was completed, the penitentiary was the largest and most expensive public structure in the nation, bigger and more costly than the U.S. Capitol. Its design has been copied by more than 300 prisons around the world; each cell is lit only by skylights or windows.

Open year-round to the public for self-guided as well as guided tours, the city-owned property is described as a “preserved ruin,” with only stabilization and necessary repairs. It holds many special events throughout the year, including a popular haunted house each October.

I’ve long known this would be a fun photography outing and made a vow to go after seeing images taken by Gary Rubin, a local friend. The place is cinematic; among the movies filmed there were Terry Gilliam’s “Twelve Monkeys,” which turned the location into a mental hospital.

I also knew it would be creepy. The penitentiary has been used as a location for numerous reality shows focusing on the paranormal — no longer permitted, according to the Eastern State website.

Fortunately, I picked a good time to do the shoot. Going on a late spring weekday morning when school was still in session meant I didn’t have to deal with large tour groups. I also opted for the self-guided tour to have more flexibility, although it would be worthwhile to go back for the narrated version to get more details.

Digging into my pictures for this story, I noticed two things. First was the number of verticals I shot because of the narrow corridors; usually I’m 80-20 in favor of horizontal, but this time it was more like 50-50. And with only a handful of exceptions, all of the images work just as well — if not better — in black and white. I’ve tried to give you a nice mix here.

I hope you like them. And if you ever go to Philadelphia, be sure to check it out for yourself.

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Welcome to this week’s Visual Story. This series, published on Tuesdays, focuses on a specific place or theme with a short narrative. Most of the “Visual Stories” are too long to be carried in most email browsers. If that’s the case, view it on a web browser or on the Substack app.

This week, we are visiting a Gilded Age mansion located in the Blue Ridge Mountains with the largest Tiffany window found in a private home in North America. A window that is a portrait of the first owner’s beloved wife, no less.

The Swannanoa Mansion was built in 1912 on the top of Afton Mountain as a summer home for James Dooley and his wife, Sallie Mae. Dooley, then 70, was a Richmond native and lawyer who amassed his millions in the late 19th century due to investments in railroads, steel, insurance, and banking. He wanted Swannanoa to be a place where he and his wife of almost 50 years could escape Richmond’s heat and humidity during the summer months.

Although Swannanoa was only one-sixth the size of the infamous Biltmore Estate, the 23,000-square-foot mansion was not tiny — or lacking in eccentricity — by any means.

A Second Place

Five years ago, my wife and I bought a small one-bedroom condo at Wintergreen, Virginia, to have a place to get away from the craziness that comes from living in close proximity to the nation’s capital.

Our logic at the time was sound. In January 2021, we were 10 months into what seemed like a never-ending pandemic. The bottom had fallen out of the real estate market, making the purchase affordable, yet a sound investment. While my business was limited at best during this time, Jill was getting settled into a new leadership role and working nonstop. Both of us were going stir crazy for totally different reasons.

Located 40 miles southwest of Charlottesville and 110 miles northwest of Richmond, Wintergreen is about three hours from our townhouse in Alexandria. It also is about three hours from Chapel Hill, where Jill’s brother and sister-in-law live, and had become a place for our families to meet for the holidays and at other times over the years.

Jill and her brother, Michael, grew up in the mountains of North Carolina and always spoke of feeling at home whenever we went to Wintergreen. Several months before we purchased our place, Michael and his wife Jennifer bought one nearby.

Over the next several months, I went to Wintergreen almost once a week, exploring parts of rural central Virginia with my camera. That May, when photographer friend Gary Rubin mentioned that Swannanoa would be open for a rare weekend tour about 20 miles from the condo, I jumped at the chance to join him.

About Swannanoa

Dooley, who served with his father and brother in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, was no stranger to building large homes that featured homages to his wife. In 1893, he built Maymont, a stone mansion on a 100-acre Victorian estate overlooking the James River, and named it after Sallie May.

For Swannanoa, Dooley purchased 763 acres on top of Afton Mountain from a local farmer and spared no expense building the mansion. The exterior is constructed from white Georgian marble from the United States, but all of its interiors are imported Italian marble. The 10-foot stained-glass window of Mrs. Dooley is at the top of the house’s grand staircase; the home also has an elevator.

Dooley died in 1922, leaving the majority of his estate to build a hospital, orphanage, and library in Richmond. Maymont also was left to the city; the house is now a museum. On the Maymont estate property now are an arboretum, an Italian and Japanese garden, a carriage collection, and a nature center with native wildlife exhibits and a petting zoo.

Dooley’s wife lived at Swannanoa until her death in 1925 and willed the mansion to her husband’s sisters, who sold it the following year. The mansion became a country club and golf course, but it went bankrupt during the Great Depression and was completely abandoned for a dozen years.

In 1944, Skyline Swannanoa Inc. purchased the estate and leased it four years later to the University of Science and Philosophy, a nonprofit “devoted to the Science of Spiritual Man and the Cosmos, with the aim of teaching the essentials of harmony found in the world’s religions/philosophies and in the fine arts and sciences.” The university rented the property for 50 years before moving into a building in nearby Waynesboro.

Since 1998, Swannanoa has been unoccupied. An exterior restoration was completed in 2006 at a cost of $3 million, but the effects of time and limited funds have not been kind to this house on the hill. The estate operates as a private venue through bookings, seasonal tours and ticketed events; it is reopening this summer after “an important period focused on deferred and necessary maintenance to better preserve and care for the property for years to come.”

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This is the last in a five-part series looking back at a short trip to Detroit in the summer of 2015. Like most of my “Visual Stories,” it is too long to be carried in most email browsers. If that’s the case, view it on a web browser or on the Substack app.

At the time of my visit, the city was struggling mightily to regain its footing, having lost almost 25 percent of its population in the previous decade, thanks largely to massive job losses in the automotive industry, ongoing racial tensions, and financial mismanagement. More than 70,000 buildings and 30,000 houses were left abandoned. Even though I had only two days, I wanted to shoot as many of these places as possible.

The sites visited in the first parts of the series included the former Packard Plant, an abandoned library, and two churches — St. Agnes, where I photographed a group of dancers, and the once beautiful St. Stainlaus R.C. Parish, which served Detroit’s Polish community for more than 75 years. You also can find links to those stories at the end of this post.

The final stop on a day-long photography tour was, in many respects, the creepiest place to visit. And without a doubt, it was the place with the most troubled history.

Southwest Detroit Hospital, located in the Corktown neighborhood, was the first in Detroit to hire and accredit Black doctors and nurses when it opened in 1973. The $21 million, 246-bed facility merged four smaller, Black-owned hospitals in the city.

Southwest operated for several years before it became embroiled in a series of controversies that would hobble it for the rest of its existence. More than 80 doctors would face criminal charges related to unethical medical decisions. A lawsuit filed by a patient in 1990 forced the hospital to file for bankruptcy and shut down the following year.

The facility was purchased by Ultimed and reopened as United Community Hospital in 1997. But in 2006, it too was shut down following a series of unethical financial decisions that included fraud by its directors and more than $2.5 million in unpaid medical claims.

When we toured the building in 2015, it was covered in bullet holes and graffiti that you could see from the interstate. Medical records and other debris were scattered throughout the building. It was frequently visited by urban exploration bloggers and YouTubers, several of whom were there at the same time as our tour group.

One place you couldn’t go: The basement. It was flooded.

Soon after the tour, the owner, Harley K. Brown, was ordered by the city to remove the debris and graffiti and pump out the basement. The building was gutted and boarded up in 2017, then demolished completely earlier this year, when it was announced that the site will be the future home of the Detroit City Football Club Stadium. The club fields a United Soccer League men’s professional team, a women’s outdoor team, and other squads.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this “Detroit 2015” series of Visual Stories. If you’ve missed one along the way, below are links.

This is the fourth in a five-part series looking back at tours of abandoned buildings in Detroit during a short trip in the summer of 2015. Like most of my “Visual Stories,” it is too long to be carried in most email browsers. If that’s the case, view it on a web browser or on the Substack app.

At the time of my visit, the city was struggling mightily to regain its footing, having lost almost 25 percent of its population in the previous decade, thanks largely to white flight and declines in the automotive industry. More than 70,000 buildings and 30,000 houses were left abandoned. Even though I had only two days, I wanted to shoot as many of these places as possible.

The sites visited in the first three parts of the series included the former Packard Plant and two churches — St. Agnes, where I photographed a group of dancers, and the once beautiful St. Stainlaus R.C. Parish, which served Detroit’s Polish community for more than 75 years. You can find links to those stories at the end of this post.

As a child and young adult, I haunted used bookstores far more than libraries. The reasons, looking back, are simple yet complex.

The first is I’ve always loved to collect books on subjects that I enjoy. Maybe that comes from having two parents who were teachers, or a grandmother who never threw away a scrap of paper, but books have always brought me peace.

Libraries, for some reason, brought me stress. What happened if I forgot to take the book back and could not afford the fine? (That happened often.) What if I damaged the book in some way and had to pay the full cost of it, which was something I couldn’t afford? (As uncoordinated as I was, damage was 50-50 proposition at best.)

At used book stores, I didn’t have to worry about due dates and damage waivers. Buying them also felt like being on a rescue mission; I was saving something from a path to oblivion.

That’s why walking into the former John S. Gray Library was the most difficult part of the tour of abandoned buildings in Detroit. Seeing books still on the shelves, left behind for a decade and a half to rot, literally turned my stomach.

Located in Detroit’s Island View neighborhood relatively close to the downtown business district, the library was named after the first president of the Ford Motor Company. Gray, who served on the city’s library board, was a prominent banker and early investor in the company.

Built in 1906, the year Gray died, the facility was part of a city-wide expansion of the library system. It was paid for in part by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who led the massive expansion of the U.S. steel industry and funded more than 2,500 libraries in the early 20th century.

In the mid 1970s, as property values declined in Detroit, the library system started closing branches. Abandoned the first time in 1975, the Gray building eventually became home to St. Christopher House, an outreach program for the homeless that was owned by the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan.

The homeless ministry operated a summer camp for children, a soup kitchen, and provided mental health services, but it was closed permanently in 1999 or 2000 due to severe financial problems. Once again, the building and its contents were abandoned and left behind.

Fortunately, this sad story is moving toward a happy — albeit belated — ending. As Detroit has slowly rebounded, especially in areas close to the downtown business district, historic buildings like the former John S. Gray Library have been drawing the attention of developers. In 2022, the library building was gutted after it was sold and is, according to Historic Detroit, being converted into 12 apartments.

Coming next week: The final stop on our tour — Southwest Detroit Hospital in the Corktown neighborhood.

Previous Installments:

If you’re interested, I highly recommend visiting the Historic Detroit website or subscribing to the organization’s Substack. It is a great resource.

HistoricDetroit.org

The official Substack of HistoricDetroit.org, chronicling the stories behind the bricks of the Motor City's historic skyline.

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This is the third in a five-part series looking back at tours of abandoned buildings in Detroit during a short trip in the summer of 2015. Like most of my “Visual Stories,” it is too long to be carried in most email browsers. If that’s the case, view it on a web browser or on the Substack app.

At the time of my visit, the city was struggling mightily to regain its footing, having lost almost 25 percent of its population in the previous decade, thanks largely to massive job losses in the automotive industry, ongoing racial tensions, and financial mismanagement. More than 70,000 buildings and 30,000 houses were left abandoned. Even though I had only two days, I wanted to shoot as many of these places as possible.

The first two parts of this series focused on photographing dancers in the abandoned St. Agnes Church and the start of a day-long photography tour at the Packard Plant. You can also find links to those stories at the end of this post.

Of the four places I photographed on a day-long tour of abandoned or empty buildings in Detroit in August 2015, the former St. Stanislaus R.C. Parish was in by far the best shape.

But the Catholic parish, which was built between 1907 and 1911 to accommodate Detroit’s then-rapidly growing Polish community, had some advantages that others did not. Even though it was closed by the Archdiocese of Detroit in 1989, the building was occupied for most of the next 25 years and remained under the watch of a full-time caretaker who lived inside the church.

That said, across the street was a burned-out house that had been abandoned. One of the church’s connected buildings also was a shell of itself after it caught fire.

According to Historic Detroit, the parish was the fifth to serve the city’s Polish community, which became one of the largest in the nation after immigrants came to America following the Civil War. Located just south of Interstate 94 on the southeast corner of Dubois and Medbury streets, the Neo-Baroque church can be seen from the freeway.

The main church building was enormous, in part because St. Stanislaus saw its 700 families double in size between 1905 and 1910. Eventually an entire complex was built, with a school and a second sanctuary in addition to the rectory. The buildings are considered “an excellent example of a Catholic parish complex” constructed between 1900 and 1915, the Historic Detroit article says.

Well into the 1970s, the church remained a vibrant part of the community. Parishoners raised funds to repair the façade and front steps prior to St. Stanislaus’ 75th anniversary. After the church was closed as part of the archdiocese’s consolidation of parishes, members occasionally would hold services outside.

Starting in 1995, Promise Land Missionary Baptist Church owned the property and held services there, but lost the church to foreclosure in 2012 and vacated it. It was sold two more times in three years; when I toured it, it was being used for storage by a private developer. Internet searches show no major developments since that time.

In my photos, I tried to capture the enormity of the main building, which had only a handful of pews. The once lavish Beaux-Arts interior, while aged, remained mostly intact.

Coming next week: A tour of the former John C. Gray Library, which was closed and later became an outreach ministry for the homeless in Detroit.

Previous Installments:

If you’re interested, I highly recommend visiting the Historic Detroit website or subscribing to the organization’s Substack. It is a great resource.

HistoricDetroit.org

The official Substack of HistoricDetroit.org, chronicling the stories behind the bricks of the Motor City's historic skyline.

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This is the second in a series looking back at a short trip to Detroit in the summer of 2015. Like most of my “Visual Stories,” it is too long to be carried in most email browsers. If that’s the case, view it on a web browser or on the Substack app.

At the time of my visit, the city was struggling mightily to regain its footing, having lost almost 25 percent of its population in the previous decade, thanks largely to massive job losses in the automotive industry, ongoing racial tensions, and financial mismanagement. More than 70,000 buildings and 30,000 houses were left abandoned. Even though I had only two days, I wanted to shoot as many of these places as possible.

With my wife scheduled to be at an all-day conference, I had a chance to do something I’d long wanted: Tour abandoned buildings with a group of other photographers.

There are two reasons: First is safety in numbers, and at the time Detroit was one of the most violent cities in the U.S. Second, to make the most of my time, I needed a guide who knew where to go.

Jesse Welter, then with Motor City Photography Workshops, was more than happy to oblige. He served as our guide to four locations: The former Packard Plant, the St. Stanislaus R.C. Parish, the John C. Gray library/St. Christopher’s House, and the Southwest Detroit Hospital. All were symbols of Detroit’s decline and decay.

I had hoped to go inside the Michigan Central Station, but Welter explained that it had security and numerous no trespassing signs. Tours were not discouraged; they simply weren’t allowed without police arriving to take you to jail, he said.

The Packard Plant

Our first stop on the tour, which started at 7 a.m., was the former Packard Plant, described by Historic Detroit as “one of the most tired images” of the city’s decline.

The sprawling 3.5 million square foot complex, which at one point had about 80 buildings on 80 acres of land, produced more than 1.6 million automobiles over a 50-year period. It’s downfall came when Packard purchased the Studebaker Corp., a lemon that never made a profit.

Packard closed the plant in 1956 and parts of the complex became the Motor City Industrial Park. When the park, which continued to produce cars for Chrysler and other automakers, was closed by the city in 1999, vandals took over.

Failed efforts to rebuild the park have occurred over the years, and the city finally started demolishing parts of the former plant in 2022. More demolition started in 2024; at a press conference, Mayor Mike Duggan called the plant “a source of national embarrassment,” according to Historic Detroit.

Only two Packard structures are still standing today. The city hopes they can be used for a “high-quality industrial or manufacturing project.” This March, plans for a Packard Park manufacturing facility and mixed use outdoor public space were scrapped when city officials terminated negotiations with the developers.

The site’s future remains uncertain.

Coming next week: A tour of the St. Stainslaus R.C. Parish, a 100-year-old church that served Detroit’s Polish community, one of the largest in the nation.

If you missed Part 1, you can find it here:

Also, if you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend visiting the Historic Detroit website or subscribing to the organization’s Substack. It is a great resource.

HistoricDetroit.org

The official Substack of HistoricDetroit.org, chronicling the stories behind the bricks of the Motor City's historic skyline.

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Fifteen years ago today, one of the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history tore a six-mile long and three-quarter mile wide path through the middle of Joplin, Mo., ultimately claiming 158 lives and destroying more than 900 homes and buildings.

At the time, I was the editor-in-chief of American School Board Journal, a magazine published by the National School Boards Association. Six weeks before, at NSBA’s annual conference, I had met Joplin Superintendent C.J. Huff and board President Randy Steele when they picked up an award from the magazine for the district’s Bright Futures program, which connected existing community resources with students and families in need.

No one knew the entire community would be in need within a few weeks.

The tornado, which spent 38 minutes on the ground between 5:34 and 6:12 pm., fell on Joplin’s graduation day. Ceremonies for the 445 seniors had just ended at Missouri Southern State University when the first warnings were issued.

Fortunately, the district had moved its ceremony away from campus due to enrollment growth. The high school was in the EF5 tornado’s direct path; it along with four schools, the district’s technology center, and the central office, were destroyed, as was St. John’s Regional Medical Center. They were among 8,000 buildings and more than 4,000 homes that were obliterated by the force of Mother Nature.

For more than a week, we tried to get in touch with Huff, Steele, and Kim Vann, who ran the Bright Futures program, to offer our support. Steele and I stayed in touch via Facebook and at one point he asked when I was coming to Joplin.

Six months after the tornado, I found myself driving down Interstate 44 from St. Louis, with plans to stay two days. On both the north and south sides of town, things looked like nothing had happened. In between, things were much different. I’ve grown up in areas that have been devastated by hurricanes, and this was unlike anything I’ve seen before or since.

The high school was a pile of twisted rubble, as was the hospital. Both would be torn down within months and rebuilt over the next year and a half. School officials, concerned about asbestos and the structural safety of the buildings, allowed administrators to enter the building once for essential files, leaving the rest to deal with the elements until demolition could begin.

Remarkably, schools opened — on time — 87 days after the tornado. Elementary school students were in facilities that had been vacated. Middle schoolers were in a warehouse in an industrial park. The high school students were split between a building that previously served early childhood and special education and a vacant department store that had been converted into a makeshift campus.

The streets were reasonably clean by the time of my visit, which in and of itself was remarkable. The tornado had generated 3 million cubic yards of debris, enough to cover a football field 120 stories high.

Over the two days I was in Joplin, I was continually impressed by how the schools had responded. I knew — and the school officials acknowledged — what a lift it had been to just remain open. I left wondering how much longer they would remain.

A new high school opened in 2013; the hospital was rebuilt and reopened the following year. Huff left the district in 2015 and now speaks around the country about his experience. Steele also resigned from the school board in 2015. Bright Futures, now a national organization, has affiliate communities in eight states.

My story and a number of the photos you here appeared in the May 2012 issue of the magazine. Go to this link to read the story.

Here are more photos of the high school:

And here are photos taken around the community:

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This is the start of a multi-part series focusing on a visit to abandoned sites in Detroit, Michigan. Like most of my “Visual Stories,” it is too long to be carried in most email browsers. If that’s the case, view it on a web browser or on the Substack app.

When my wife had a business trip to Detroit in the summer of 2015, I was happy to join, even if it would only be for a day or two.

Some might wonder why I was eager to visit Detroit, especially at that time. The Motor City, once the fourth largest in the U.S., had gone through decades of decline and decay. Poverty and crime were at record highs, and Detroit had been named the most dangerous city in the U.S. for several years running.

In all of my travels, I had never visited the city except for its airport. With limited time, the list of places to see (Motown Museum, Fox Theatre, Comerica Park, Ford Field, the Ford Piquette Plant, Detroit Institute of the Arts, to name a few) was almost overwhelming.

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Between 2000 and 2010, Detroit had lost almost 25 percent of its population, down to 680,000 from an all-time high of 1.58 million in the 1940s. More than 70,000 buildings and 30,000 houses had been abandoned as business owners and residents left without paying taxes. The city had just emerged from bankruptcy and remained on the financial brink.

Dedicated efforts to revitalize the Midtown Area and the Central Business District were finally under way and gaining, in fits and starts, some traction. The city was working to demolish the dilapidated buildings that were the face of its decay.

In the end, I opted for none of the touristy attractions, focusing instead on places that had been left behind. On one day, I went on a “Detroit Ruins” photo tour; on the other, I spent most of the day in an abandoned church on Rosa Parks Boulevard with four teenage dancers from the Detroit suburbs.

Context for the trip and the dance shoot is necessary. At the time, our son Ben was on the national tour of “Newsies,” which was running for eight weeks in Toronto, Canada. Toronto is only four hours from Detroit by car, so Jill and I decided to turn it into a vacation that included a trip there and home via Niagara Falls.

Annelise Ritacca, a friend of Ben’s who had been one of the Ballet Girls on the “Billy Elliot” tour, was back at home in the Detroit suburbs and taking classes at Juliana’s Academy of Dance, a studio in Madison Heights. I was working on a multiyear “Art & Dance” project at the time, and Annelise’s mother Chris wanted me to do a shoot with Annelise and three of her friends — Hadley Koger and sisters Brittany and Jocelyn Podolski.

My photo project placed dancers in different/unusual settings — mostly urban — that were outside the regular performance environments of a studio or theater. For the Detroit shoot, I wanted to find a place that had been abandoned but was still considered safe. Chris, a Michigan native who knew the area well, suggested the ruins of St. Agnes Catholic Church.

Built over two years in an era when Detroit was booming, the gothic style church opened in 1924 and thrived for almost a half century. The 1967 riots along nearby 12th Street, which left 43 dead and hundreds injured in five days of fires that destroyed nearly 400 buildings, severely damaged the community. White families, many of them Catholic, fled the city and the neighborhood.

The Catholic Archdiocese, which saw congregations dwindling across the city, started to close and consolidate parishes. St. Agnes saw its numbers drop from more than 1,600 families pre-riot to fewer than 200 a decade and a half later. In 1989, 30 churches were closed by the Archdiocese of Detroit; in 2000, the St. Agnes school was shut down.

St. Agnes was closed as a church in 2006 and put up for sale, but it took three years before a deal was consummated. Meanwhile, the building was ravaged by vandals.

In 2015, we were able to enter the main sanctuary without issues. Other parts of the St. Agnes complex, including the school and rectory, had no trespassing signs, but the main building did not. That would change in August 2019, according to the Historic Detroit website.

In 2022, the City Planning Commission approved plans to redevelop the St. Agnes site to create 85 multi-family units with retail spaces. In June 2025, the rectory was destroyed by fire, the work of a presumed arsonist. Officials at St. Agnes Lofts, the current owner, said they still plan to redevelop the site.

Coming next Tuesday: A photo tour of the abandoned Packard Plant.

If you’re interested, I highly recommend visiting the Historic Detroit website or subscribing to the organization’s Substack. It is a great resource.

HistoricDetroit.org

The official Substack of HistoricDetroit.org, chronicling the stories behind the bricks of the Motor City's historic skyline.

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Among all the displays of excess and eccentric whims of the extremely wealthy that you find in the Biltmore Estate, none is more bizarre or unusual than the Halloween Room.

Located deep in the basement of the 135,280 square foot mansion — the largest privately owned house in the U.S. — outside Asheville, N.C., is a huge room with a series of bright murals featuring witches, bats and black cats along with folklore characters, soldiers, and other equally interesting sketches painted on the walls.

The room seems mysterious and out of context from the rest of the Gilded Age mansion, which has 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, 65 fireplaces, three kitchens, a 19th century elevator, an indoor swimming pool, a pipe organ, and a library with more than 23,000 books.

Apparently, Biltmore’s Museum Services staff felt the same way for many years. For decades, the room was thought to have been the scene of a lavish Halloween house party hosted by Cornelia and John Cecil, the daughter and son-in-law of original owners George and Edith Vanderbilt.

However, in 2019, the staff discovered the paintings were created for a New Year’s Eve celebration in December 1925. The scenes on the walls were linked to La Chauve-Souris, an avant-garde Russian cabaret and theatrical troupe that toured the U.S. in the 1920s and appeared on Broadway in 1922 and 1925.

Russian artists Sergi Sudelkin and Nicholai Remisoff designed the abstract sets used by the troupe, whose name translates to The Bat. Over three weeks, the Cecils drew the murals based on the illustrations that appeared in the theatrical program.

“We know that John and Cornelia Cecil were interested in many aspects of Russian culture, and Biltmore House wasn’t the only place Cornelia painted using these sorts of images,” curator Meghan Forest said in an article that appeared on Biltmore.com in 2024. “Combine that with their flair for entertaining, and you get what must have been the social event of the Asheville season.”

One hundred guests attended the New Year’s Eve celebration, and one — local resident James G.K. McClure — wrote his observations of the evening and room to a friend. Calling it “the best party I’ve ever attended,” McClure described the room as “full of cauldrons and post and glowing fire.”

Curator Leslie Klinger says McClure’s autobiography helped her team solve the mystery of the strange, seemingly out of place room. “This connection was really exciting to us because we didn’t expect it at all,” she told Biltmore.com.

Enjoy the rest of these photos of this strange room, and for more on the Biltmore Estate, visit last week’s Visual Story — “Being There.”

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On a rainy evening in early January 1980, my neighbor Paul drove me to Houston’s Meyerland Plaza Cinema I & II to see a Peter Sellers movie that stood no chance of making it to the two-screen theater in my hometown.

Thanks to my dad, who knew “Dr. Strangelove” and the Pink Panther movies by heart, I had watched Sellers’ films throughout childhood. In 1980, I was in ninth grade and had become obsessed with movies, haunting Texas City’s Tradewinds Theatre every weekend and bemoaning all the things I could not see in my hometown.

When Paul, then a SMU student home from college, offered to take me to “Being There” as a belated Christmas present, I was not about to refuse.

More than 40 years after it was made, this gentle but potent satire may be even more relevant today. Directed by Hal Ashby, Sellers plays Chance, a middle-aged, simple-minded gardener who has never left the Washington, D.C. townhouse where he worked for a wealthy man, Mr. Rand.

When Mr. Rand dies, Chance is evicted and soon hit by a limousine carrying Shirley MacLaine, playing the much younger wife of Melvyn Douglas’ character, a wealthy and dying business mogul with ties to the White House. Chance, who is functionally illiterate and gets all of his knowledge from television, is brought back to their lavish mansion, where his blank stare and simple style make everyone believe that he’s actually a brilliant political pundit.

Even though the movie is set in the D.C. area, principal photography was done at the Biltmore Estate outside Asheville, North Carolina. The Biltmore, which has 135,280 square feet of living space, is the largest privately owned house in the United States.

I lived in North Carolina for almost eight years and went to Asheville numerous times, but it wasn’t until long after we left that I went on a tour. My wife and I have had several memorable stays at the Grove Park Inn, mostly for meetings, but we were never in town long enough to go to the Biltmore, which draws more than 1.3 million visitors annually.

Several years ago, after Jill attended a family reunion in Boone, we went to Asheville and decided it was time to see it. Built between 1889 and 1895 for George Washington Vanderbilt II, the Biltmore has remained in the family and has been a museum since the late 1950s.

One of the most prominent Gilded Age mansions, the Biltmore House was designed by Vanderbilt family architect Richard Morris Hunt. Using the French Renaissance chateaux as a model, the house is an orgy of opulence and wealth, with four acres of floor space in the house, 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, 65 fireplaces, three kitchens, and a 19^th-century elevator.

The estate overall is an amazing place, with numerous restaurants, a luxury hotel, dairy farm, and winery on 8,000 acres. After Hurricane Helene hit the area in September 2024, it was closed for two months, but the house and most of the surrounding area were not seriously damaged. Because of the region’s reliance on tourism — approximately 15 percent of the workforce in the four counties surrounding Asheville is tied to it — reopening the Biltmore was huge for communities that had been devastated.

It should not come as a surprise that many movies, including “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Forrest Gump,” have been filmed on the estate and its grounds. But for my money, “Being There” is and always will be the best.

I hope you’ll seek it out.

Here are more photos from our tour. In next week’s “Visual Story,” we’ll take a look at one of the oddest features of the Biltmore Estate — the Halloween Room.

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Italy is the country we’ve visited the most outside the United States, with a four-day trip to Venice, Murano, and Burano in March 2017 and a seven-day journey to the Amalfi Coast, Naples, and Rome in May 2024.

Today, it’s time for a look at Venice, described as one of the most beautiful and romantic cities in the world.

Several months after we became empty nesters, my wife Jill and I went on a short bucket list trip to Venice. Built on a group of 126 tiny islands separated by canals and open water and linked by more than 470 bridges, this northeastern Italian capital lives up to its reputation.

Our four-day excursion, which included Jill’s birthday in late March, came at a great time. We stayed at a cute little hotel away from the tourist section, ate great food, made an impromptu midafternoon pub stop due to heavy rains, and went on several tours. We also watched Jill’s beloved UNC Tar Heels play in a Final Four game on an iPad at 3 a.m.

Of course, I took lots of pictures.

The photos in this Visual Story focus on the sections of Venice where we walked and stayed. Earlier posts looked at side jaunts to the islands of Burano and Murano, and a future “Visual Story” will focus on the Doges Palace and Cathedral.

As with the other posts in this series, I looked for photos that captured each place in a somewhat unique way. Or, if not unique, at least a twist on the familiar.

I hope you enjoy them. At the bottom of this post, I have links to the other stories from our Italy adventures.

Other Visual Stories from Italy

This is the latest in a series of Visual Stories focused on our travels to Italy. Click on the links to see the others, which include:

• Tours around Rome and Naples.

• Photo walks through Burano, the Collosseum, and Pompeii.

• Galleria Borbonica, an underground tunnel in Naples, and a glass factory in Murano.

I hope you’ll join me for future posts, which will look at Vatican City, Amalfi and Positano, and the aforementioned Doges Palace.

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“Last Days,” the hand scrawled sign announcing the closing of a small store near the intersection of 54th Street and Broadway in New York City, felt ominous to me when I first saw it.

Of course, I had to take a picture.

At the time, the fall of 2009, we had just moved our sixth grader to Midtown Manhattan, where he was in rehearsals for the first Broadway revival of “Ragtime.” It was a crazy and hectic time in our lives, with our girls staying behind in Northern Virginia and my oldest son living in North Carolina with his mom.

Our jobs at the time were begrudgingly allowing us to work remotely for parts of each week so we could give our 11-year-old son this once in a lifetime opportunity. That meant Jill and I were trading off every three to four days, with friends and relatives coming to stay to give us an occasional break.

Prior to the move, I could count on both hands the number of times I had been to New York in my lifetime. Living in Midtown around the corner from the Ed Sullivan Theater several days a week was a welcome culture shock.

What I didn’t realize at the time was the tallest hotel in North America was being built on the opposite corner.

The apartment we lived in was a small, 700 square foot one bedroom in The Adlon Building, a co-op that one of Jill’s friends helped us find and rent. Located on the southwest corner of 54th Street and Seventh Avenue, the building opened in 1912 and is known for its Secessionist-style brick and terracotta façade.

Even though most of Midtown is on a grid, streets and avenues are not created equal. The distance between most of the east to west avenues is roughly 750 feet, meaning you’ll cross seven avenues to go 1 mile. By contrast, you cover about 20 streets to cover the same 1-mile distance.

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In the late 19th and early 20th century, West 54th Street became known for its elaborate townhouses and brownstones, most of which were located between Fifth and Sixth Avenue. Studio 54, the famous nightclub that is now a theater, is on 54th between Broadway and Eighth Avenue.

Where we lived, West 54th Street is less than a quarter mile from the heart of Times Square (aka “the theme park”). Because Broadway cuts between two avenues (Seventh and Eighth), the soon to be construction site was less than a football field’s length from our apartment.

As I’ve written previously, it was during this time that my interest in photography grew exponentially, eventually leading to what became a second career. Schlepping Ben back and forth to rehearsals, school, and then shows, I was walking in Midtown at all times of the day and night, and I started documenting my surroundings.

In those days, my skills and equipment (a Canon Rebel with kit lenses) were rudimentary at best, but I developed a great love for the art form. Combined with my first blog — the name “Our Reality Show” has carried over from that time — I found a way to chronicle and make sense of this wild and stressful period of our lives.

One example of that chronicle was the ongoing demolition and construction.

Anyone who has been around a large construction site knows what a pain and disruption it can be. Imagine such a site on one entire block of one of the busiest cities in the world.

Due to age and the necessary asbestos/rodent abatement, tearing down the buildings between Broadway and Eighth Avenue took more than a year. One owner on West 54th refused to sell, which led to delays and eventually meant that construction had to take place around his property.

In November 2010, I saw a ghost sign for O.S. Bailey’s boarding stables. Based on historical records, Bailey built the stables in the late 19th century to hold carriages and horses for the owners who lived in the tony townhouses down the street.

With the call of the wrecking ball however, any trace of the stables was soon to be gone for good.

We had the West 54th Street apartment for almost three years, until February 2012. Four months earlier, our son Ben started work on the “Billy Elliot” tour. Ginno, our “adopted” son and Ben’s de facto guardian for his last several months in New York, lived in the apartment and was soon to follow him on the road.

I had gone up sporadically, each time chronicling the progress of the construction. These photos were taken on the day before our son left for the tour in October 2011.

It made no sense once the lease ended to keep the apartment. Rent was continuing to go up, and we knew the chance of Ben returning to New York were slim once he finished the tour. Our rule was he could stay in the city as long as he had a job, and he was entering the teenage “dead zone” for child actors. He stayed home in Northern Virginia for a year, then booked the national tour of “Newsies” at age 16.

I went to New York after Ben’s tour ended in May 2013 and stopped by our old stomping grounds. After four years, including 27 months to construct the 68-foot, 750-foot-tall glass hotel, the project on our former street corner was nearing completion. (On the corner of West 54th and Eighth Avenue is another stunning new building — the SAG-AFTRA Foundation named after Robin Williams.)

Over the past 10 years, we’ve stayed a couple of times in the combined Courtyard/Residence Inn at 1717 Broadway. The view is amazing, but the digital billboard in the bar area sometimes can creep you out.

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My first trip to Washington, D.C. was in the spring of 1982. I was 17, a junior in high school, and traveling with classmates as part of the Close Up Foundation program. To my teenage history loving brain, visiting our nation’s capital was a bucket list experience.

The trip was my first commercial flight from the Texas Gulf Coast community where I grew up. Given my father’s illness, our family had not traveled much out of state, and then only by car. I had been on a plane once, a tiny two-seater that a friend of my grandfather flew me around in several years before.

The presidents and U.S. history had been a subject of fascination since I was in third grade, so seeing D.C. close up (literally and figuratively) was exciting. I distinctly remember visiting the Monet exhibit at the National Gallery of Art — my dad, a visual artist and history teacher, was jealous — and my first walk down into the Vietnam Memorial while listening to Billy Joel’s new song “Goodnight Saigon” on my yellow Sony Walkman.

Close Up, which was founded in 1971, is designed to give students a deeper understanding of history, the federal government, and the role of citizens in a democracy. What it gave me, in a series of day and night tours, was a deeper appreciation of the city itself. It also opened my eyes, at least a little, to the complicated history of our democracy.

Ironically, I did not return to D.C. until I was in my mid-30s, when I flew into National Airport to interview for a job. Twenty-five years ago last month, I started that job, which moved our family from North Carolina to the Northern Virginia suburbs. For 17 years, we lived in Lorton, almost 20 miles from downtown D.C.; in 2018, after our kids were grown and had left, we downsized and moved closer in, to Old Town Alexandria.

Neither Jill nor I work in Washington, D.C., although we often go in for meetings and events. Over the years, I have taken thousands of photos in the city, feeling so fortunate to have access to a place I worshipped from afar as a child.

D.C. is a more complicated place these days, as the pillars of our democracy are targeted by the anger and tantrum-prone whims of a person who was divisive and destructive in his first term and has only gotten worse in his second. Congress and the Supreme Court, the other parts of the Executive Branch that are supposed to serve as a form of checks and balances, have done us no favors.

Saturday’s “Another 52 Weeks” post, which in a departure featured photos taken last week solely in Old Town, discussed the creative burnout I had felt after shooting so much in Alexandria during the first year of the pandemic. I realized while writing the post that the same could be said about D.C., where I covered and participated with my family in a series of protests in 2020.

Over the years, I’ve worked hard to develop what could be described as a healthy self-preservation instinct. I still follow the news regularly, but I work hard to get it from legitimate sources instead of social media, which I’ve tried to wean myself from as much as possible. I also found myself stepping back from the protests, disappointed by the failure of our nation’s leaders and skeptical that they will ever respond to their constituents’ concerns in a positive, bipartisan manner.

Mental health — individual as it is for each of us — matters, folks. And for me, that meant stepping back from taking photos in D.C. as well. I didn’t want every visit to the city to represent politics, protest, and spin.

But, as I discovered in Alexandria last week, I’m also willing to look at old places with new eyes.

Nicholas, my oldest son, ran the Cherry Blossom 10 miler on Sunday morning and I went along so we could get some one-on-one time. I also brought my camera, knowing how peaceful and quiet D.C. can be in the early weekend hours despite the presence of 20,000 runners and their closest friends.

We parted at sunrise and I took the opposite path from the race, walking the National Mall between the Washington Monument and the Capitol. I tried not to focus on the iconic images everyone sees, but the random things that caught and interested my eye.

It was a relaxing and peaceful morning, and a reminder of how beautiful this representation of our fragile democracy remains despite the perpetual black cloud that seems to be hanging overhead. I hope you enjoy some of what I managed to get in the two hours I was there. I’m pretty sure I’ll go back some time.

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After posting this, I went back and looked at the last time I did a photo walk in D.C. It was March 2024, when I photographed the cherry blossoms at peak. Here is that “Visual Story,” which also mentions the Close Up trip.

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When I travel, I’m always looking for places off the beaten path to stop and shoot. Unless it’s a longer trip with a precise schedule, I rarely plan these stops, preferring instead to see what I randomly find.

Several years ago, driving through Connecticut on a trip from New York to Boston, I stopped in the town of Waterbury. Like many municipalities these days, Waterbury advertises its “Historic Downtown” from the highway in an attempt to attract visitors like me.

In this case, it was not false advertising. Waterbury, with all of its ups and downs, has a fascinating, colorful history, not to mention a fair share of political scandals and tragedy. Located 75 miles northeast of Manhattan, it is the birthplace of photographer Annie Leibowitz, a number of actors (Bob Crane of “Hogan’s Heroes,” Dylan McDermott, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Rosalind Russell), former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, and Robert Gallo, the researcher who identified HIV as the infectious agent that causes AIDS.

Known as “Brass City,” Waterbury was a manufacturing hub from the mid 19^th century through the first half of the 20^th century. (James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is set in Waterbury in the 1930s.) Still one of the largest cities in Connecticut, the town went through a severe economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s as factories shut down.

One of those factories was the former Waterbury Clock Company.

The complex, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, was a series of multi-story red brick mill buildings constructed in the 1850s and expanded as the company grew. Driving up to the long-abandoned buildings, which were surrounded by a fence to keep trespassers at bay, I was fascinated by the Neo-Classical Revival elements that dominated the era.

According to a local historian’s blog about the facility, the Waterbury Clock Company employed 3,000 workers and manufactured 20,000 clocks and watches per day at the end of the 19th century. The company produced the famous $1 pocket watch invented by Robert H. Ingersoll, selling 5 million worldwide; in 1933, the Mickey Mouse watch produced by the Ingersoll brand was so popular that it sold more than 2 million over 18 months and saved the company from bankruptcy during the depression.

Tragedy and Departure

In the 1920s, numerous young women hired to paint luminous watch dials were poisoned by radium, which was used to meet a growing demand for glow-in-the-dark timepieces. At least 15 dial painters died from the poison; the company had to pay more than $90,000 between 1926 and 1936 to settle lawsuits and medical claims.

In 1944, the company was reorganized and renamed the United States Time Corporation — now the Timex Corporation — and the headquarters were moved to Middlebury five miles to the south. In subsequent years, the complex was subdivided and taken over by other businesses, but the area still is tested regularly for radium contamination.

Soon after my visit, the former corporate headquarters at the Waterbury complex was torn down because had been ruled unsafe.

But Timex has held onto its history; several years ago, it unveiled a limited edition of the $1 pocket watches. And just last month, it released the Waterbury Heritage Chronograph, a new watch named after the town and the company where its operations began.

Here are more photos from my impromptu tour:

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Today, it’s time for a glass blowing demonstration in Murano, one of the many islands in the Venetian Lagoon near Torcello, that ended with a request and slight photography twist.

Having walked the streets of Venice for two days and nights and toured the Doges Palace and Cathedral, we decided to take a lagoon ride to the islands of Murano and Burano on the final day of our first trip to Italy.

Looking for things to do and see prior to the trip, we knew we wanted to go to a glass blowing demonstration in Murano. A friend recommended a morning tour of New Murano Glass, and knowing little to nothing in advance, that’s where we decided to go.

Glass blowing in Venice dates back to the 8th century — some say even earlier — and has been concentrated in Murano since 1291, when factories were moved to the tiny island to avoid large scale fires.

In the 15th and 16th century, Murano became the largest center of luxury glassmaking in Europe. This is largely thanks to glassmaker Angelo Barovier’s invention of Cristallo, a totally clear, almost transparent glass that was used in the first mirrors. The first chandeliers also were invented in Murano, and eyeglasses have long been manufactured there.

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Murano’s dominance started to decline in the early 18th Century and almost disappeared completely when Napoleon Bonaparte captured Venice in 1814. However, artists such as Antonio Salviati and the Toso Brothers helped revive the industry in the 1920s.

Over the past 35 years, the number of glassblowers in Murano has declined dramatically, from 6,000 in 1990 to fewer than 1,000 today. The market also has dropped as consumer tastes have changed and fakes have proliferated in Asia and Eastern Europe.

But it remains a fascinating craft, and one we were privileged to see.

The tour began with a ride on a small boat to New Murano Glass, where we took part in a 30-minute glassmaking demonstration. I tried to follow it step by step with my camera as a master of ceremonies described what was taking place.

For this story, I decided to make the photos in this sequence black and white except for the last one. The reason: Given the long-standing history, I thought it gave the process a more authentic feel.

The process is quick as the glass goes into the kiln. Colors are added and then it is formed again before it is flattened and reshaped.

The glassmaker then starts cutting and shaving pieces of the still hot glass before returning it to the oven again and shaping it some more. Fire is added to make the glass more malleable.

At this point, all that is left to be done is to cut and shape the horse, a process that takes less time than you might think (under 5 minutes).

And then it’s done.

At this point, we went into the gallery’s showroom. It had beautiful works all around, the majority of which were at the limit of our price range. Unlike the demonstration, pictures were not allowed, in part because of the fear of forgeries and fakes.

That’s when I had an idea: Would the gallery let me point my camera into the bowls and vases and shoot from extremely close range? The idea was to focus on the colors and patterns, not the works themselves.

Our boat was about to leave for Burano, a sister island and the next stop on our tour, so I didn’t have much time. Still it was worth a try, so I asked one of the salespeople, who then went to the manager.

“You will have to show me,” the manager said. “If it doesn’t work, you will have to delete it. If it does, you will have to send me a copy.”

After the first shot, I got a quick thumbs up, although the manager continued to follow me around and asked to see each photo. In less than 10 minutes, I took and got the OK on 11 images, which serve as another beautiful way to showcase the work of this nearly 1,000-year-old craft.

Other Visual Stories from Italy

This is the latest in a series of Visual Stories focused on our travels to Italy. Others include Galleria Borbonica, an underground tunnel in Naples; tours around Rome and Naples; and photo walks through Burano, the Collosseum, and Pompeii. (Click on the links in this paragraph to see any of those stories.)

Future Italy posts will look at Vatican City, Venice, and the Doges Palace and Cathedral.

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As a photographer, few things bring me more joy than the opportunity to capture other artists telling a story, whether it is through music or in a dance, cabaret or theater setting.

The reasons for me are simple, yet complex. Performance photos present opportunities to capture something that is inherently dramatic and often filled with emotion. And each instance, no matter how many times the artist does it, is unique. No second chance to make a first impression, as they say.

Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by performers, and found myself in settings where I’m surrounded by them, even though I have none of those talents myself. I can’t sing or dance, and my ability to act is confined to playing the fool in social settings.

What I can do, I think, is anticipate and capture moments in time.

March 12: Patterson Hood and John Moreland

Earlier this month, I was privileged to capture three shows in three different settings over a four-day period. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, January and February are usually terribly slow on the freelance front, so the opportunity to shoot and edit so much within such a short period of time was a creative salve and a (albeit small) financial relief.

The first two shows — an acoustic concert featuring Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers and singer-songwriter John Moreland, followed by a fast-paced dance performance featuring 21 separate numbers — were in familiar settings that presented familiar challenges as a photographer.

The Hood-Moreland show was at The Birchmere, a listening room that seats about 500 near our home in Alexandria, Va. I’ve shot more than 50 acts at The Birchmere over the past seven to eight years, so I know the place well. With the exception of an occasional technical curveball, the light settings don’t change much from show to show, so I also know what works and what doesn’t.

The issue, if there is one, is that there is no pit or area designated for photographers. You also are told by staff not to restrict the audience’s sight lines during the 15 or so minutes (usually three songs) that you can have your camera out. Depending on the size of the group performing and the crowd, this can prove tricky. It also can get boring fast if you’re using the same four or five angles for every show.

During the three songs, I usually find a way to shoot while kneeling on one knee, sitting in an empty chair, or standing in a nook that doesn’t block someone’s view. I use the chandeliers just off stage to fill the frame and add another element to my photos, but that effect can be overkill fast.

Here are several photos I got on Thursday. I think they work.

March 14: The Company Project

On Saturday, I shot the dress rehearsal for Metropolitan School of the Arts’ annual spring show, “The Company Project.” I’ve worked with MSA since my kids danced there more than a decade ago, and I greatly admire the work the students and teachers put into their shows.

What makes MSA somewhat unique in this hypercompetitive landscape is its emphasis on performance rather than trophies. The studio has more than 650 students and three pre-professional companies (ballet, jazz/musical theater, and tap). It also offers private voice and music lessons to individuals.

The Company Project, always held at the beginning of March, is the kickoff to the spring season. It is a fast-paced 90-minute show, with more than 20 numbers.

For these types of performances, I usually shoot the dress rehearsal, which gives me the opportunity to move around and get different points of view without impeding the audience. But that opportunity brings challenges as well.

The show is held at a local community college auditorium, which has limited side lighting and can present some issues if the students don’t hit their spot. Given that dress rehearsal is time to work the kinks out, shooting then is not full proof. Also, the different dances change from light to dark in an instant, which forces me to often tweak ISO (3200 to 6400) and shutter speeds (never less than 1/250^th of a second) to stop movement.

By the end of the performance, having shot 1,500 to 2,000 images, I often feel like my head has been in a blender, but at the same time, I’m anxious to see what I managed to get. This year, I edited more than 400 photos, a nice ratio.

Here is a slideshow of highlights, soundtracked to music by Audionautix.com (via Creative Commons):

March 15: “Unexpected Songs,” a cabaret

On Sunday, I photographed Susan Derry’s one-woman cabaret — “Unexpected Songs” — at the Creative Cauldron Stage in Falls Church. Susan and I met in 2009 when she was in the cast of “Ragtime” at The Kennedy Center (the name I will always use), and have followed each other on social media since.

Derry, who has performed in another cabaret at 54 Below in New York and frequently acts in the D.C. area, writes the excellent Substack “Raising the Key” about the highs and lows of spending a life on stage. An adjunct professor in voice at American University, she has a cabaret residency during the Creative Cauldron’s 2025-26 season and is developing this new show that focuses on the “beautifully imperfect middle of our lives.” It will be performed again at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, March 29.

The challenge shooting this show was not knowing the small venue or the lighting system in advance. Given that the show also was new, some lighting cues were chosen on the fly. But I was pleased with how a number of my photos turned out, especially the ones that were in black and white.

Here are some examples:

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s “Visual Story” as much as I liked shooting these three very different shows. And I’ll say it again: I greatly admire the courage performers must have to put themselves on stage.

Talents and gifts aside, the combination of resilience, vulnerability, and let’s face it, balls/guts/hubris required to do show after show and performance after performance is an admirable trait.

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New York City always has been a balm for my creative soul.

As longtime readers are aware, the city is where I started my journey as a photographer almost 17 years ago. (It also is where I was prompted to begin the blog that later became this Substack.) Stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with sights and images, from gnarly to beautiful, New York never disappoints or fails to stir me in a creative way.

Earlier this month, I went to the city for overnight trips twice within a seven-day period. The first trip was super quick — less than 24 hours on March 1-2, with time spent in Harlem and Brooklyn — as my wife and I checked out the venue where our daughter and her wife will formally celebrate their marriage.

The second trip, on March 7-8, was a little more than 24 hours. Going solo this time, I managed to again see Emma, Colby, our son, Ben, and our “adopted” son, Ginno. I also caught Jonathan Groff in the Bobby Darin musical “Just in Time” and walked around Manhattan before the show.

In both instances, of course, I brought a camera with me. But the cameras — and my approach in how I used them — was very different.

Trip #1: iPhone Pro 16

On the first trip, I knew I wouldn’t have much time to randomly shoot, which is my favorite thing to do in New York. So, instead of carrying my camera, I used my iPhone 16 Pro instead. And I did so on purpose.

The phone, for obvious reasons, is not my favorite camera. As much as the devices have improved over the years, phones still are only slightly better than a point and shoot or the low-end DSLR I used at the start of this photography quest in late 2009.

Phones have limits that are real, yet they seem to give people an excuse to break the rules, which ranges from annoying to exasperating. (Yes, I’m talking to the “Just in Time” fan who was aghast when the usher told her to stop filming, even though everyone had been told to turn off their phones before the show started. Sadly, this is not a random occurrence these days.)

That said, I’m not a snob about phone photography. I’ve always felt as long as you understand the phone’s limits, you can get some beautiful images. And sometimes, when I’m looking for a creative jolt or reboot, I pull out my phone because those limits force me to focus on composition and framing. They also remind me of the value of taking vertical photos.

Here are some more examples of what I managed to get on the first trip:

Trip #2: Canon R6D2

For the second trip, I brought a Canon R6D2 — a backup camera — and a 24-70 lens. My goal this time was to test the camera’s low-light limits while walking around Midtown at night. I want to push myself into more night photography, and there’s no better place to start than in Manhattan.

Normally I use my R5, which has more pixels and a wonderful dynamic range, in my day-to-day work. The reason I picked up the less expensive R6, besides the cost, was because I’ve read about its low-light capabilities and seen how rich its color palette is despite fewer megapixels.

In an hour of walking around, I had more misses than hits. But I was greatly encouraged by the hits.

What do you think of these images? To my fellow photographers, do you use phones in your work, either as a backup or as a tool to help you refocus or re-energize your creative juices? I’d love to hear from you.

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“Well, since you’re here, we have to go to the Notch. That’ll be fun.”

I wasn’t sure what my friend Eric was talking about — a restaurant? a bar? — during an early October trip to Vermont several years ago. I had gone up there to help him and his wife, Mary, clean out her late father’s garage and check off another state on my never-ending map of places to visit.

Eric and I describe ourselves as brothers from other mothers. (And other fathers too, for those who need clarification.) We’ve been friends for more than two decades, since bonding over a mutual love for the Houston Astros while our sons played coach pitch baseball.

For years, Eric had been trying to get me to see his beloved Vermont, where he spent the majority of his youth — his Astros fandom came from a brief childhood stint in Texas — and later met the love of his life. After college, Eric and Mary moved to Northern Virginia and he had become a career employee in the federal government when we met.

When the Vermont garage cleanout coincided with a lighter-than-usual fall schedule, it was time for me to make the trip. Unfortunately, peak leaf season had just passed, and the weather was starting to turn colder, but Eric was right. Vermont is beautiful and so is Smugglers Notch, a single lane mountain pass with a fascinating history.

A Slow, Steep Ride

Smugglers Notch is on state highway 108 (VT-108) that separates Mount Mansfield from Spruce Peak and the Sterling Range in Lamoille County. Driving up on either side, the warning signs let you know quickly that this will be a slow ride, complete with steep and narrow hairpin turns.

“We’re fortunate we’re here now, because it won’t be long before the weather turns cold enough that they shut the road down until the spring,” Eric said.

You easily can see why the tough to traverse route, located at the highest peak of the Green Mountains in the north central part of the state, is a chosen path of people doing things that aren’t necessarily lawful. In fact, the Notch’s name stems from a trade war that started more than 200 years ago.

Trying to prevent the U.S. from becoming involved in the Napoleonic Wars, Thomas Jefferson pushed through Embargo Act of 1807. The act, which forbade trade with Great Britain and Canada, presented problems for farmers in Vermont who relied on trade with Montreal, located less than 100 miles to the north.

The farmers continued to trade with Canada, using the Notch as a bypass to carry goods and herd livestock. Later, in the middle of the 19th Century, the route also was used by fugitive slaves looking to leave the U.S. After it was improved to accommodate automobile traffic in the early 1920s, Smugglers Notch became a chosen path for bootleggers to bring in liquor from Canada during Prohibition.

Eric explained all of this to me on a misty, foggy afternoon as we made the climb up the mountain. Passing the warning signs telling 18-wheelers and drivers of other large vehicles to turn around, he noted that many fail to listen and become jackknifed in a particularly tight curve, especially when the weather starts to get cooler.

“We better hope that doesn’t happen today, or we’ll be sitting for a while,” he said, noting that locals call the annual seasonal occurrence “stuckage.”

Despite the mist and the fog, we were lucky that day, and I managed to get the images you see here as we parked near the curve and walked around for a few minutes. It really is a picturesque place.

What do you think?

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Coming Thursday:

The final installment in my “Social Distancing Diary” series that looks back at the first year of COVID-19.

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Italy is the country we’ve visited the most outside the United States, with a four-day trip to Venice, Murano, and Burano in March 2017 and a seven-day journey to the Amalfi Coast, Naples, and Rome in May 2024. Experiencing these places for the first time, I looked for photos that captured each in a somewhat unique way. Or, if not unique, at least a twist on the familiar.

Today, it’s time for a walk on the streets of Burano, an island in the Venetian Lagoon near Torcello.

Our first trip to Italy in March 2017 holds great sentimental value for me, in part because it was a true (albeit short) vacation.

In our first 20 years of marriage, my wife Jill and I traveled quite a bit for work and child-related things but, due to finances and familial obligations, rarely went somewhere far from home just as a couple. Italy was the first European destination on Jill’s bucket list, so after our last child left for college, we started looking for ways to make it happen.

I found inexpensive flights to Venice, and we agreed to jointly celebrate our 52^nd year on the planet there. My birthday is in January, a tremendously busy work period for her, so we decided to go for a long weekend for her birthday in March.

Regularly on lists of the most beautiful cities in the world, Venice is built on a group of 126 islands, one of which is Burano. Located four miles from St. Mark’s Square in downtown Venice and accessible only by a 45-minute ride on a water bus, the tiny island is known for its colorful, brightly painted homes.

In my photography journey, it’s also known as the home of the pissed-off cat.

The Cat Story

We went to Burano in the afternoon on the last full day of our trip, having spent the morning at a glass blowing demonstration on the sister island of Murano. Unfortunately, it was gray and rained off and on throughout our visit.

Walking around the island in the drizzle, I hoped Canon’s promise that my camera — then a 5d Mark III — was water resistant was true. I snuck in shots here and there and wondered how the colors would have popped if we had more sun. Ultimately, I think the cloud cover and damp skies helped.

The cat would beg to differ.

We saw him/her/they scurrying around while we stood on a bridge over one of the canals. When the cat crossed over another small bridge nearby, it sat down in the middle and gave me a look before continuing its search for a dry space. I managed to squeeze off three quick shots before it ran away.

Here are the best of the rest of my photos from that afternoon.

Other Visual Stories from Italy

This is the latest in a series of Visual Stories focused on our travels to Italy. Others include Galleria Borbonica, an underground tunnel in Naples; tours around Rome and Naples; and photo walks through the Collosseum and Pompeii. (Click on the links to see any of those stories.)

Future related posts will look at Vatican City, Venice, the Doges Palace and Cathedral, and the glass blowing factory in Murano.

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