As my photo series, Around the Hat has grown substantially this year, I'm getting to the point where I'm less concerned about new content and more interested in doing something with the giant image library I've built. The Thinking Hat exhibition last month was a great introduction to what that next step could look like, but in my mind the project has always been seemed ideal for an original Medicine Hat photo book.
It was this idea that finally inspired me to create a dedicated facebook page for the Around the Hat series. With this new page I hope to drum up even more local support, start sharing the massive back catalog of posts that I've created, and begin a more targeted campaign for marketing the series as a complete project. This will be no small task, but I see this being a big focus of mine in 2014.
In the meantime, I want to encourage all of you to check out my new page. Like, share, and comment on my posts, and please share your opinions on the series. A photo book like this won't be possible without support from the community. The website aside, this book has the potential to become an amazing historical record of Medicine Hat - especially considering the level of detail so many of these locations have been photographed in. Please help me make it happen.
Start by liking my Around the Hat page on Facebook.
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I did a photo shoot with my parents last weekend in Police Point Park. I made a promise last Christmas that I'd shoot some nice portraits of them this year, and we managed to finally find the time just before the last of the leaves started to disappear. In the end I think the shots turned out really well. The autumn scenery was epic and my parents were pretty cute.
Mike and I continued our drive up the Pacific coastline having just left Seaview Beach earlier that afternoon. The sun had set as we finally reached Aberdeen, Washington and upon arrival the search began for Kurt Cobain's memorial.
Aberdeen is Kurt Cobain's hometown and there's a small memorial located next to the Wishkah River. I had looked up the location prior to our trip, but now in the dark we had to do some aimless driving to try and figure out where to go. After about 20 minutes we spotted a little guitar several blocks up, and sure enough that was it.
More than the memorial, it was actually the bridge that I was most interested in seeing. Hundreds of fans have scrawled messages under Cobain's bridge in Aberdeen. It was here that Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic used to hangout, which created a bit of a legend around the location and inspired the song Something in the Way on their Nevermind album. It seemed especially profound uncovering the individual messages with a dim cell phone light, realizing that so many people had traveled to this spot.
We spent most of our time checking out the graffiti under the bridge. Mike lit the wall so I could focus my camera and I snapped a number of pictures with my flash to get a full image of what was actually there. It was a fascinating, slightly eerie experience. Truthfully, I didn't know just how significant the location was until I got home and read the book I'd picked up at a used bookstore in Portland. With the images on my computer though, I was finally able to read more than I'd noticed the first time around.
