Costume Portraits – Dragon*Con 2009

Here is my new collection of 188 fan-costume portraits taken this year at Dragon Con 2009. Dragon*Con is the world’s largest fantasy & science fiction convention and is held annually in downtown Atlanta, GA. Also be sure to check out the Gender Bending Fan Costumes group on flickr where I have added a number of my photos. All the images in this set are available to share and use freely under this Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Creative Commons license.

Photographs on Bill Moyers Journal

Update: The episode aired on PBS Friday May 1st.
Watch it on the Moyers site or as a stand alone M4V file.

I just got news that a few of my photos will be featured on the PBS show Bill Moyers Journal. The images will accompany a story about the Boston organization City Life/Urbana Vida focusing on the eviction blockades they have been using to keep people in their homes after foreclose often due to predatory loan practices by large banks. For those of you in the US the episode will air on your local PBS station at 9pm (check local listings). Also see this months Progressive magazine for more on people fighting evictions in the Boston area.

Photos in The Progressive Magazine

Last year I did a series of photo essays documenting homeowners, activists and organizations like City Life/Vida Urbana in their struggle to stop sub-prime foreclosures in Boston. These evictions are still putting families on the street in record numbers across Massachusetts and across the country.  A few of my images are now appearing the March 2009 issue of The Progressive magazine. They accompany a featured article called Fighting Foreclosures by Colin Asher which talks about those efforts to stop forced evictions resulting from predatory lending by brokers and banks.

Street Art for the Capitol Climate Action

One of the things I love about digital image sharing sites is you never know where your photos are going to show up. In the spring of 2007 a few friends and I planned a Boston protest against big banks which were funding new dirty coal power plants. As part of that demonstration I made a few caution signs that said “Dirty Power Kills Communities” and we had participants dress in hazmat suits complete with masks and goggles. I took a set of photos at that action and put them on flickr and smugmug (at the time one even ended up on the Washington Post blog). This week, two years later, another of those images has shown painted on a wall in DC. as part of a street art campaign for another protest against coal power plants.

It a mass civil disobedience planned for March 2nd called the Capitol Climate Action. On that day thousands of people will descend on the Capitol Power Plant (which powers Congress with dirty energy) to demand a new clean energy economy based on solar and wind power. I have no idea who did this street art but I’m glad one of my photos is playing a small part in this action – plus its cool to see it painted larger than life on the side of a building.