Nathan Oldham | Photographer & Writer

I used to fear hands that creased and gnarled inward and were hammered by orbits but these also may have traced clouds as lovers talked heavenward from their repose in a field or sunk fence posts around a home or steeped in blood while delivering child or calf or all of these until they clutched at life and death would not pry them loose

Hold, like wild grass with its dew so when midday ravishes diamond drops we remember no rain, only the sudden touch and there is a chance of tomorrow coming with the same, rainless falling of us

@mountaingazette was a gift this year and I’ve been pacing, eagerly awaiting the day I could tear into 160 pages of writing, photography, and art all around outdoor pursuits and culture. #printaintdead and there’s a sublime quality to large format print publications. If you’re not a subscriber, you may want to reconsider your priorities and become one. It’s also become a recent life goal of mine to either have my photography or writing published in MG.

I do need that blue to sing and you to compose so the light is color and not far off like this sky

But first! Coffee. Then. Eric of @dirt_floor_record_production radiates a fireside warmth and this portrait session for the MAKERS project all took place in and around his recording studio in a cabin on top of a little mountain in Haddam, Ct. With each portrait for this series, I’m humbled by the generosity of people who quickly become more than just “someone” who sat to make an image. Any collaboration has potential to yield more than art, or better said, collaborative art is relational by nature. The Makers project is photographed on @nikonusa Z series cameras and lenses.

On the topic of fear and all its permutations: if I’m honest it’s tiring facing off against the same old ghosts. Don’t you grow weary of the dance? We’ve traced these steps of our conflicted choreography and the floor is worn through the varnish. I’m tired of death knocking as if the door isn’t already open, as if we aren’t conditioned on despair with our bleeding news and alliance with mortality, so when it comes walking in all bones and rot we pull out a chair. Waking to destruction is a habit we must be rid of. Fear is a liar in that it says true things, but truth can be (is) a weapon and I will not have it used for anything but emancipation and story. So yes, I’m tired of the turbulent renderings of verity. Enough so that dawn is for slamming doors on the intruder of my quiet home.

I keep settling back to the silt and brine sun gazing that distant pin of light and miles of water suggest it’s just a matter of time (until til I break the surface) if I were inclined and did you know we can free-fall beneath the surface (around thirteen meters) how is that possible that we can still fall even when the air is gone

A bit about Makers. I am compelled to create anti-content, that is, photography for the purpose of story, intimacy, and intentionality. I’ve referred to my current project, Makers, as slow portraiture (or portrait-journalism), in direct response to virtual consumerism. We digest media at an alarming rate and the pressure to produce content to fit the appetite and metabolism and gluttony of an algorithm is at odds with the soul of the photography I wish to champion. Makers is a curation of talented creatives, personalities I gravitate towards, and the images will live in print. It’s not for everyone, but that’s the point after all. If I have any hope for this project, it’s that I can add my voice to the virtues of intentionality, and that someone may decide to pull their own craft from the bottomless ocean of content and tangibly resurrect it into the real world.

If we are on the topic of wishing, and a wish can be anything, and it doesn’t mean it’s the end of more wishing tomorrow, then I will heap my dreams into this river like some giant wishing well. That’s what they call it? Any body of water which drinks our spare change and the full bodied hopes of children who teach us all the meaning of believing and of course the world is possible, it’s ours isn’t it? All of ours? And conflicted people stare casually at grace and let it slip to the bottom.

The virtue and terminus of analog photography is the tangible print, which occupies physical space. It is defiant to the cold storage and virtual nonexistence of digital imagery, which trivializes the entire process. We can adopt the principles of the analog camera to the digital by imposing a restriction on the otherwise limitless capacity of our technology. Before every press of the shutter release we need to ask whether this is an image which should be printed into existence. Film demanded some intention by design. What was considered a flaw of film during the advent of digital was its limit of 24 or 36 frames per roll. Every single shutter release would bring the photographer one exposure closer to winding the negatives back into their housing to later be processed in a darkroom. There was (is) an economic calculation in photography, particularly as film became more expensive. Digital promised to eliminate that pressure. And it did. But art which thrived on the scarcity of a product was replaced with an abundance of digital files, which may or may not possess any element of inspiration or intention. Hence, a self-imposed restriction: is this picture worth printing? My CF Express card can fit over 1,500 RAW images at 48 megapixels. And like a bigger house, or a bigger backpack, more space often excuses more junk. So rather than sell off your digital kit, it may be worth adopting, even temporarily, this habit of slowness, and intent, to preserve the virtue of picture taking: to make images that matter; if not to the world then at least to yourself.