Postcards from America

March 19, 2025

Postcards from America

March 17, 2025

Calling Out In Transit

March 16, 2025

As of yesterday all staff at Voice of America have been put on administrative leave. Other entities like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia lost their funding.

What’s VOA? Not a dumb question if you’re in the US, as it has been radio and TV news for a global audience (hundreds of millions per week) and isn’t even available in the US except on the web. Read more on the background and yesterday’s announcement here. The Reuters story talks about ‘gutting’ VOA et al and how it is ‘unsalvageable’. Yet the article goes on to say VOA will be not destroyed outright but stripped to the bone, to the minimum required for basic functioning required by law. So I suppose they mean to put everyone on leave until they can decide what skeleton crew to bring back for a VOA fit for purpose, for the New Way. But that’s just speculation.

It’s a very sad day. VOA and Radio Free Europe are strictly not propaganda, no matter what anyone says. They were created to combat authoritarianism through independent, fact-based journalism. Bias is in fact not tolerated. For many in the world, they have long been respected, often the best source of quality, balanced news coverage in regions where that was in short supply.

Just a few days ago, before the hammer fell, I was in downtown Nairobi and had a chance to peek inside the famous Chester House, the old building where many of the big foreign news agencies were once headquartered for decades. All except one moved out years ago into new digs elsewhere, including VOA, but it was cool to see such a legendary place. It was also poignant, like a ghost of the past.

Voice of America in DC was just about ready to move from its aging headquarters near the Capitol into a sparkling new building that had been in the works for years. Last week it was deemed an example of waste.

REM’s “Radio Free Europe” has been my song of the day. Especially the bracing live version on their 1983 TV debut on Letterman. Energy crackling through them, especially guitarist Pete Buck who looks like he’s being electrocuted. Four dudes from Athens GA that shaped the musical landscape and the very image of America for decades.

Soft power. I’m with them.

Decide: defy the media too fast

Instead of pushing palaces to fall

Put that, put that, put that up your wall

That this isn't fortunate at all

Radio station: decide yourself

We're calling out in transit

Calling out in transit

Radio Free Europe

Postcards from America

March 14, 2025

New Project: Postcards from America

March 12, 2025

There is no single reality in the US. Americans all walk through life in bubbles of their own imagining and experience. Postcards from America - inspired in part by Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letters from an American - is mine.

Yet in some ways Postcards is the opposite of HCR’s approach. First of all, obviously they are photos not writing. They are not comprehensive or objective and my goal is not to celebrate or denigrate or even to specify. They are instinctual not rigorous, indirect not precise, fleeting but still hopefully contain something enduring or revealing. More questions than answers. These will be personal photo dispatches from my years as an observer trying to understand America better and bottle those imaginings.

I’ve always been somewhere between a US critic and idealist. It’s a shame, recently I was more comfortable than ever with my country.

Until… you know.

It will be just the photo, no text other than the place, no dates or explanation. You can form your own ideas and interpretations. I simply want to reflect back a small slice of what has resonated with me in the US, and maybe it will resonate with you. And, translated more broadly if you’re so inclined, a reminder of what America was, is, and can be.

In normal times this might be a harmless or even naive exercise. At the moment, asserting the quiet beauty and intrigue of little everyday American moments (at least as I see them) from the Before-Times feels punk rock. Defiant. Maybe even painful, as they become markers of what we stand to lose, and have already lost. There’s some mourning in that sense but I’m a stubborn optimist. I hope they also offer something to hold on to, to claw back to.

This newsletter had its origins as advocacy for climate action through the arts. Then noticing the steady creep of right-wing thugs on the march. Now here we are, wondering what will become of the American experiment. We are at the barricades. We are the barricades. Anything we can do now to stand up for good is worthwhile. This is one modest thing I’m doing. Hope you enjoy and share it.

A few logistical points:

I will add these photos three times a week for a while to the best of my ability. If HCR can handle writing each day, I think I can do this. You can see them several ways on my website, which I am trying to make as dynamic as possible with weekly updates. A place you may actually like to revisit on a regular basis.

They will appear on my Notebook blog, where you can use RSS to get your daily dose. (I love RSS, I just started using it again with the Feeder app. The RSS link is at top right.)
They will also rotate every other day or so as the nice big lead photo on my homepage (right below where you can check the weather in Greenland) if you prefer to just bookmark billcrandall.com and visit when you want.
Then they cycle into the Postcards from America section of my Projects page, so you can watch the body of work build in real time.
I will probably also add them to the Prints gallery in case you want one.

I won’t send each of them out by email, that would be way too much. I’m thinking I’ll include them as a weekly batch of 3-4, on their own or included in another post.

Photo Journal: Kibera Karma

March 12, 2025

Maybe the best two hours of my photographic life

So often when photographing out in the world, I pray to the photo gods.

It’s important because many things have to fall into place for a decent photo. Sometimes you just pray for something, anything, to work with. You pray for good light. You pray for moments and serendipity. You try to not screw up if those things do find you.

Sure, you can manufacture something. But there are ethics in photojournalism and documentary work, one of the primary directives is no fake/directed action. I never did that. Either it happened or it didn’t, and either you got it or you didn’t. If it’s fake, it’s nothing, a bit of theater. The power is that it’s real, authentic. Even as my work has moved to somewhere between art and documentary, I adhere to this. You become a kind of scavenger, a human divining-rod.

It’s getting harder in the modern world as life gets more conformist, regulated and suffocated, especially now that people live in front of screens. Years ago when I started as a photojournalist for newspapers, I would sometimes get sent out by an editor to find a ‘stand-alone’, meaning an everyday-life photo without an article. Just go find a good photo to fill space on the page.

Even before screens took over, I would drive and drive around the suburbs for hours (with my stack of map books, this was before GPS), frantically searching for anything that looked like a photo op. Something going on, something unusual, some sign of life. All I needed was one good shot.

You try making a picture in strip-mall suburbia.

Then there is Kibera.

I’ve written on Medium before about the vast Kibera slum, the largest in Nairobi and in all of Africa:

Why Africa’s Largest Slum is the Best Place in Nairobi

Ok, that’s a title meant to provoke. But in a city of contradictions Kibera is a Russian nesting doll of contradictions within contradictions. A complex place, defying easy stereotypes.

It has a notorious reputation — even Kenyans are a bit afraid of it — but it has achieved basic services like water and electricity in recent years. Because of its notoriety it tends to get more outside aid projects than other slums in the city, but certain episodes have also bred distrust of outside aid. There are byzantine layers to who controls what areas, but also a fierce sense of community often lacking in the rest of Nairobi.

There is an arts district.

I haven’t been to other slums — there are many in Nairobi — but I am told they are often more tense and get far less aid.

In some parts of Nairobi, you can see the dense medieval cluster of Kibera’s corrugated roofs as you whiz by on a nice roadway, as I did in my Uber ride from the airport when I first arrived here in 2023. I was immediately fascinated and knew I would need to somehow explore it. Which I eventually did, with the help of local friends. It was the privilege of a lifetime to gain access to such an intriguing place, where people are trying to live with stoicism and dignity despite the conditions.

Unlike suburbia, in Kibera everything is interesting, irregular, unregulated, improvised, alive. In its own way it has more vitality and intrigue than most of the world’s great cities. There are phones, but no one is sitting at home on Facebook. Life is outside.

Kibera is difficult to penetrate — you wouldn’t last long walking around, esp as a mzungu (white guy) with a camera, nooo sir — but with the right guide everything is possible. People barely look at you, they know you’re vouched for. My guide was a young painter that everyone seemed to know and like.

My first foray into the massive slum had been overwhelming, overstimulating, there was literally too much that seemed worthy of a photo. The next couple times I settled in somewhat, and had a few chances to get inside the life a bit more.

Then I had the kind of day photographers dream about.

My last visit, this past November 7th, wasn’t special at first.

It was raining hard in Kibera. Our guide had something come up and was a couple hours late, so my friend and I had lunch. It seemed like we might not even walk around at all.

Then we did, and hoo-boy. It may have been the most productive 1–2 hours of my photographic life. I have plenty of other work from Kibera, but all of the photos posted here are from the one walkabout that day. They are all basically street photography, quick-reaction observations. Sometimes I would pause a bit to let things come together, sometimes I barely had to break stride.

I’ve always thought good photography is more like channeling or receiving photos rather than either taking or making them. Usually that channeling happens rarely, when I’m in sync with the flow of things properly. This was like that, but over and over.

In the old days driving around on assignment, I’d be happy to get one good one that I didn’t mind putting my name on. If you got three or four worthy shots in an afternoon it was a rousing success. About the same for my personal work.

In one short outing in Kibera I got almost twenty images that I think hit the spot in some way.

Of course, I won’t end up using all of them. But twenty that I would consider for exhibition. Which I may be a part of soon, at a small gallery in Kibera I’m helping to launch for Kibera photographers I work with.

The photo gods were indeed smiling. Maybe it was their karmic gift for all that time I used to spend searching in frustration.

My father went to art school at Pratt in NYC in the 1950s. I remember he criticized the ‘trash can school’ of art, meaning going out and finding the most rundown person or place you can, taking a photo (or making a drawing or whatever), and calling it art. Exploiting people for their picturesque poverty.

This is especially a problem in Africa, which is maybe the most chronically stereotyped part of the world.

As a general practice, I never set out to make a place look bad or good. Certainly I try to never punch down from a position of privilege. I also try not to fall into sugar-coated clichés of the ‘happy poor’. Getting that balance is the crucial test when photographing places like Kibera. I can only photograph what I like. I look for what is interesting and feels both true and fair to people and places, and I understand that stories are complicated.

If you’re doing it right, photography challenges you to up your equanimity game. Not how to fake it but how to have it. As a well-known photographer once told me, people can see through you. They can see through you THROUGH WALLS.

I want to show that Kibera is interesting and worth caring about in a positive way. I love it and hope that comes through.

As I wrote previously after my first short visit: “what I really wanted to show was the unique landscape and the relationship of people to it”. Which is pretty much what I always try to do.

Kibera is not the bogeyman of dysfunction it is often portrayed as. It’s a fascinating urban organism — and a community. A community full of all kinds of complex problems and life is hard. Still, as I saw over and over, if people stick together with some toughness and care for each other, they can get through anything.

Which is dangerously close to a happy-poor stereotype. Sorry.

It’s the best I’ve got to strike a blow against all the unfolding disasters in the world. I refuse to add to the negativity. Something about a butterfly’s wings.

Remembering James Reeb

March 7, 2025

His murder was national news in the civil rights era. Here’s why his important American story is personal for me.

*The former Walker’s Cafe, where James Reeb had his last meal, in 2015. (Photo by Chris Walton, courtesy of* *Unitarian Universalist Association*)

Author’s note

For those who subscribed to me on Substack, I’m still there but now publishing newsletters from my own website.

James Reeb was a white Unitarian minister who, in March of 1965, heeded Martin Luther King’s call for clergy nationwide to join him in Selma, Alabama. The night after turning on the TV news to watch the Bloody Sunday violence against civil rights marchers at Edmund Pettus Bridge, Reeb told his children a bedtime story and got on a plane south from Boston.

He would never see his family again.

A day after arriving, Reeb was part of MLK’s second attempt at a nonviolent march across the bridge, the so-called Turnaround Tuesday. This time the marchers simply gathered, kneeled, prayed, and dispersed, avoiding violent confrontation.

That night after dinner, coming out of what was then Walker’s Cafe — a black-owned diner and one of the few restaurants that would serve blacks or their white supporters — Reeb and two fellow clergy were verbally accosted by several white men across the street.

The men followed and caught up to Reeb’s group a half-block up the street just before the Silver Moon Cafe on Washington Street. Here is the spot:

*Silver Moon Cafe, then and now. Washington Street, Selma, AL.*

Reeb was hit on the head with a pipe or club of some kind, and others in his group were pummeled. They somehow managed to stagger several blocks to an office serving as the marchers’ headquarters to call an ambulance.

Days later, Reeb died in the hospital at age 38.

That’s the short version of a complex episode in US history. One that was the talk at kitchen tables nationwide at the time, but is slowly fading into obscurity.

Why am I talking about it now?

*The former Walker’s Cafe (center). Reeb and his colleagues left the diner and turned right. (Photos from Google Maps)*

*Directly across the street, where there used to be a row of commercial storefronts, a gang of white men shouted at Reeb’s group, using the n-word, and followed them.*

The former Walker’s Cafe is on the far right. The corner building at left and part of the empty lot in the center is where the Silver Moon Cafe used to stand. In front of the lot is a plaque marking where Reeb’s group was attacked as they walked.

*With Reeb seriously injured, they walked four long blocks to this building to call an ambulance.*

For one thing, as I wrote this from overseas it was March 7th, the anniversary of Bloody Sunday. As I first hit publish, it’s the anniversary of Reeb’s death five days later.

But I also have a personal connection to the story.

James Reeb married my parents.

The room where my parents met in the late 1950s.

In 1959, before moving to Boston, Reeb was the young assistant Unitarian pastor that officiated their wedding at Washington DC’s All Souls Church on 16th Street NW. The church where my parents met in the reception hall, the same room where we had my father’s memorial service in 2010.

But there’s more.

Reeb’s murder did not go unnoticed. Quite the opposite, the national outcry was such that it galvanized public support for the Voting Rights Act, which LBJ introduced days after Reeb’s death and signed into law months later on August 6, 1965.

The day I entered this world.

So, without getting into what has become of the Voting Rights Act more recently, you might understand how I have long felt a karmic connection with James Reeb. His quiet example of equanimity, conscience, and courage has often guided and inspired me. My parents told me Reeb’s story, and I tell my biracial daughter about him as a matter of family lore.

For 15 years I was a teacher and would tell my students his story to make the civil rights struggle more tangible through my personal connection. He’s represented in the 2014 movie Selma. We saw the film on a school field trip, sitting in the dark theater I choked up a bit seeing ‘him’ onscreen.

He died trying to help. Like a firefighter running toward, not away from, the flames. He would find out his white skin didn’t make him fireproof.

When discussing Reeb it’s fair to note that it was a white man’s death that was a game-changer at a time when so many blacks were being killed. But in a way that’s the point. To me, it’s an example of what more white people should do.

No, not get killed. But in a white-privilege society, whites need to stand up for what’s right in whatever way they can. You can’t just leave the oppressed to fight their own battles.

While I always had a fuzzy imagining of how his final moments played out, with a bit of research and an assist from Google Maps images, I came up with this virtual visit to the scene of a hate crime that rocked a country already reeling from the atrocities of Bloody Sunday.

The current desolation of the cityscape is striking. I was shocked the cafe still exists. Then Selma was a more bustling place, with evil just under the surface (except when it was on the surface). Now it appears to be just another dying small town, the block where the events happened is almost completely decimated by time. A town haunted, yet propped up somewhat by civil rights tourism. Hard to imagine where Selma goes from here.

Finally, as a footnote, there was never really criminal accountability in the case against Reeb’s attackers, who did stand trial but locals closed ranks around the accused. NPR has an excellent podcast and audio-visual interactive piece with a fuller exploration of Reeb’s death and the aftermath called White Lies, definitely worth checking out.

If you go to All Souls today, it is still a lively, progressive Unitarian congregation dedicated to social justice and voting rights. Photos of Reeb hang on the walls.

[First published March 12, 2024 on Medium. I’m making a tradition of posting this every year on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.]

Home Renovations

March 7, 2025

If you’ve seen my posts in various places over the last few months, you know my tech recommendations in terms of digital privacy: Signal, DuckDuckGo, Proton, VPN, no Google, etc. It’s been a fair amount of work making those switches but super satisfying, even a joy. For example, I actually look forward to using the Organic Maps app, the open source alternative I found for Google Maps.

(I won’t rehash all that AGAIN. You’re welcome.)

Another part of the tech equation is where and how to forge a digital home in the Age of Broligarchy.

I haven’t quite left the old house of Meta and Google. I’m still on FB for my friends, until it’s untenable. I deactivated IG/Threads but haven’t deleted yet, in part because once my new home(s) are fully built I hope to get some of those followers to come with me. I’m almost off Google entirely.

I’ve been on a building spree lately on new platforms (some, like Patreon, I’ve built and already abandoned).

Allow me to map out what I’ve been up to. If you’re looking to do some renovations yourself, this might also serve as a useful overview.

billcrandall.com (Squarespace)

After some concern that it was too stuffy and complex, I’m doubling-down on my long-time — and nearly comatose — Squarespace as my home base at billcrandall.com. I’m liking it a lot better since I finally got a grip on its features a bit more.

The landing page is a feed I will update often. I’m figuring out if RSS will work for it but hope you’ll consider old-fashioned bookmarking and check back sometimes. My goal is to work towards a website I refresh almost as often I would social media.

Ko-fi

I’ve linked other platforms to my Squarespace as well, including cozy but somewhat obscure ones like Ko-fi, a donations site for creatives. I’ve started using it as an experimental ‘photo cafe’ member space for photography questions, dialogue, feedback, even mentorship in exchange for pay-what-you-can. Or you can just make a donation anytime.

I’ve been working on translating my years of teaching to online material. I’m not there yet but eventually I plan to add a member page on Squarespace for photo dialogue and curriculum, which might one day replace the photo cafe on Ko-fi.

Darkroom

I’ve had people ask me about print sales, something I’ve wanted to set up for quite a while. So I’m now using Darkroom (via Squarespace) for fine-art prints on demand. They do their own shipping, including international.

There is a batch of Nairobi images in there for starters — part of processing the new work for myself — with new ones (and other projects) coming weekly for the foreseeable future.

Substack | Medium

This newsletter is currently here on Substack, which I like but increasingly I have my qualms. For one, you may have heard about Substack’s ‘Nazi problem’ — that their hands-off approach to content moderation allows actual Nazis to set up camp. Not many, but one is too many. Substack’s co-founder also had some sketchy pro-regime comments recently that for a lot of people raised doubts about whether Substack long-term is the safe sanctuary for creatives that it appears. You can read more here about the curmudgeon case against Substack.

Any of these platforms could screw you eventually, simply as a result of their own success. I’ll probably ultimately move the newsletter to Squarespace. Already I’m cross-posting these posts to my Squarespace blog and longer pieces to Medium.

My plan is to operate as centrally as possible from the real estate I ‘own’ and control. That’s Squarespace. Need a good foundation for a homestead.

Bluesky

Bluesky is going ok. Not the liveliest place, takes a while to get traction, but it’s a good, non-toxic replacement for Twitter. At least it’s not Meta like Threads. I have to say the quality of chatty convo is better on Threads if that’s your jam. Following news and commentators is better on Bluesky and you can organize a feed of just your friends.

The question of digital homebuilding is also different for artists. How to not just showcase your work on a static portfolio site but create a more dynamic space?

How to connect, engage, and even create community?

How to present your work as having relevance and value beyond a click or a like?

As I’m now a former teacher and back to being a photographer (albeit someone who can’t work here in Kenya, and will be unemployed when I get back), these are questions I’m wrestling with.

For starters, to me relevance means combining my images with writing in new ways — both my new Nairobi series and older work that I’m taking a fresh look at — to expand the context, process, and stories around them. Also using archive images to illustrate posts like this one.

Value means offering ways to buy the work and/or support me directly in other ways. Otherwise a website is only the dreaded word for freelancers: exposure (what everyone wants to give you, in the hopes that someone else will pay you).

I hope you’ll find me in my non-oligarch homes. None are fully furnished yet but all are quite presentable, so I’m giving you all the house tours first.

Notice none of them benefit our worst bro overlords. And none of it involves doomscrolling. So more of the time I spend online is actually creative and productive instead of mindless and passive (though the struggle is still real).

If you’re already a subscriber thanks for sticking with me. As a digital semi-nomad (ironically writing about home-building), I hope my newsletter can at least be my small contribution in defense of art and culture and stubborn optimism.

As someone (cough) just put in my new bio on Squarespace, I do have a track record as “a warrior for truth-telling, empathy, community, education, and change through the arts”. Yeah, that’s quite the immodest mantle to claim but it’s true and I have receipts. That’s what I’m trying to build on, especially in this moment.

If you want to support me further, please consider:

- Upgrading to a paid subscription

- Sharing the photo cafe with someone who could benefit from my help with their photography (or signing up yourself so I can help you!)

- Buying a print

For those who actually read this far, bless you. It’s a lot, I know! Here’s the roundup with links:

billcrandall.com — My main Squarespace website, personal blog, print sales, etc
Ko-fi — A photographer support space (also integrated into Squarespace)
Darkroom — Print sales (also integrated into Squarespace and Substack)
Substack — My newsletter on photography, ‘future-music’, and how art can save us
Medium — Longer-form writing
Bluesky — Find me if you’re there

Hope you’ll visit and be in touch. Keep the faith, power on.

Outtakes: DC in Bloom

February 27, 2025

14th Street revitalization. The Tweed Ride in Adams Morgan. Thievery Corporation selling out the 930 Club. The Funk Parade on U Street. Halloween block parties in front of our first house in Petworth. The former skate park in Shaw. Bikes everywhere, including the new Capital Bikeshare system.

I was born and raised in and around Washington DC. Looking back, the middle of Obama’s first term, around 2010 or so, has to be considered a candidate for ‘peak DC’ vibe of the last few decades. Of course that’s a loaded concept, as self-proclaimed Chocolate City was and is a long-time bastion of proud black culture, even when the crack-era streets were at their most dangerous. But by 2010 many formerly derelict areas were blooming — as I liked to say, all the places where you used to be afraid to walk you now couldn’t afford to live in — and a buttoned-down government town was entering a phase of new personality and dynamism.

Washington DC, the city where people live away from the monuments and power corridors, is mainly liberal but it’s often the first city that feels the cultural shifts that come with the politics of a new administration. A previous low point in the ‘vibes’ was Bush’s second inaugural. DC was dismal, sullen, on edge as the rhinestone cowboys paraded through town.

By contrast, during the first Obama term the spirit on the street was unmatched. Not just the wildly exultant election-night celebrations at 14th and U Street, which had burned during the 1968 riots after MLK was shot. There was just a sustained mix of joy and relief, a relaxed air, a feeling of moving in a positive direction. Even some of DC’s jarring divisions by race and class began to soften. Gentrification swept the city, creating its own set of problems, but it felt like the city was coming into its own diversity.

Going through my photo archives recently, I came across a number of photos I took around that time. Many of these were outtakes I never used for anything before, or they were made for a magazine assignment and put away. A few of the black and whites are from my personal Fairy Tales from the Fault Lines project that documented the central neighborhoods that were changing fast.

Looking at these images now as period pieces, DC seems a whole other world of pre-COVID, pre-Trvmp spirit and energy. A lost era of optimism.

I’m writing this from Nairobi, Kenya, where I’ve been living for the last year and a half. So I don’t know what DC is like at the moment, though I can imagine. To be honest, even before we left in 2023 I had soured somewhat on the city, my own optimism was waning. Even as it began to come out of the COVID doldrums that suffocated many cities, it already seemed like it had become a more soulless casualty of its own growth. I couldn’t feel the city I loved anymore.

While they feel like only yesterday, I realize now that these photos represent a slice of time, a transition moment of culture that is passed. Which I guess is what moments do.

But rather than just being somewhat bittersweet reminders of what was, I hope they can be an inspiration for what can be.

We will have to defend urban culture in these perilous days. DC may even lose home rule.

More broadly, I would argue culture is where we make our stand, while other battles are being waged. They are coming for culture. How we carry ourselves and move through space together can define the very landscape. Are you willing to walk around your own town feeling like the ether around you has been hijacked? That you have to watch what you say and do — or how you dress, wouldn’t want to look too different now — in deference to MAGA sensibilities, even in a blue area?

Culture only thrums and thrives in the US because of its diversity, a diversity that will be increasingly under attack. Defend one, you defend the other. ‘Culture wars’ are about to take on new meaning. Let’s be creative and tough in how we meet the moment.

These are challenging times indeed but sometimes at the barricades is where you find out what you’re made of. We might even rediscover ourselves. Not so we can go back but so we can go forward.

Takoma Dreaming

February 20, 2025

Maybe it’s homesickness or expat daydreaming, I made a wish list of attributes of my dream place to live.

- cloudy/cool at least half the year

- English language

- small-scale architecture (preferably not newly built)

- small, cozy homes

- tolerant social norms

- diverse population

- arts/culture centered

- access to nature

- not dominated by rich people

- openness to outsiders

- modest/practical dress norms

- active, cared-for public space

- clean, trash-free

- walkable (car not needed)

- safe

- local/indie shops

- good and affordable health care

- simplicity

- bohemian atmosphere can be found

Then I realized many of these qualities exist to some degree where I’m from, Takoma Park MD.

The Matatus of Nairobi

February 11, 2025

Matatus are ubiquitous in Nairobi. The makeshift buses (the bigger ones, there are also smaller ones more like minivans) are often pimped out in elaborate designs, colored lighting, and sometimes loud music pumping. Like a rolling club, but full of weary commuters trying to get home.

They are also notorious rogues of the road. They are known for aggressive driving, to put it mildly. Sometimes on the wrong side of the road if it will gain them a few seconds (though this unfortunately can be true of Nairobi drivers in general). Their manic honking as they stop to solicit passengers carries far over the landscape. Like hearing a faraway train whistle but far less romantic.

I did ride on one once with a Kenyan friend, it was fine, uneventful.

Maybe the most notable thing about them is the mish-mash of pop-culture motifs in the paint jobs, to attract customers (the buses are privately owned and operated). The rear end in particular usually has some sort of face. Maybe Bob Marley or a sports star or celebrity. Sometimes a generic or hipster reference that an oldie like me wouldn’t get.

Sometimes the face staring back at you in traffic is white.

Sometimes it’s James Bond.

I won’t try to unpack the jarring (to me) colonial context of that. A Kenyan friend here told me I’m overthinking it, that the average Kenyan doesn’t see a ghost of the past, they just see a movie star.

Photographer Notes

My shooting tactics are different here. These photos were generally taken very quickly, sometimes without looking through the viewfinder at all. Or from the car when it's the only way. Good luck trying to pull over, get out, and run over to shoot something properly. The lead photo was taken with my phone while driving.

The streets of central Nairobi can be a bit rough and chaotic but are alive with photos. Yet street photography is historically not really a thing, until fairly recently it was illegal unless you had a permit.

That's all changing, there is a new generation of young Kenyan photographers out there doing it, telling the stories of the city from the inside. I know because some of them took my photo workshop a while ago and I still mentor and collaborate with them. It's hard out there for them too, they also worry about getting their cameras snatched.

As a mzungu (white guy) it's harder in some ways. Not necessarily more risky, there's just no stealth-mode option. People see you. They will say 'hi mzungu!'. It's a trade-off, on one hand you do get a bit of polite deference. On the other, you're a potential mark. In a year and a half I have literally never shot on the streets here alone, as I normally would. But with a Kenyan companion all is possible.

We were having dinner with expat friends once, one of them was talking about how Nairobi has become so much safer than it used to be, certainly compared to some other places where she had worked in Africa, like Lagos. While it was once dubbed 'Nai-robbery', she said no one she knew these days in Nairobi had a crime story. At one point I mentioned the idea of walking around with a camera. She paused, looked at me, and said:

"Um, yeah, don't do that."

Select images are available as fine-art prints:

https://billcrandall.darkroom.com/

Seekers

February 7, 2025

My photo students finding their vision. Kibera slum, Nairobi, 2024.

Micro-Memoirs

February 5, 2025

Vaclav Havel smoking a cigarette on an empty Prague street.

The exact moment my father gave up trying.

The inside of a Yugoslav military interrogation room.

Purple Rain-era Prince browsing alone in the record store where I worked.

Crying like a baby when Ali lit the Olympic torch, his arm shaking.

Arriving to my best friend lying in the street, t-boned on his scooter by a pickup truck.

Walking alone on an endless mountain road toward Montenegro, snow falling, late afternoon, no ride.

First morning in Prague, spilling my jar of breakfast goulash on my only jeans.

First morning in Africa, the sun, the seller-calls from the street.

The strange man following 14-year-old me home from the bus, peering at me from behind a tree.

My roommate leaving my dirty dishes piled by the front door since I must not have seen them in the sink.

A terrifying late-night childhood encounter with a ‘witch’, who turned out to be our schoolmate’s mentally ill mother.

That time I accidentally walked out into a Kosovo minefield.*

As an exercise, I wanted to see if I could distill a few of my most enduring memories into a single sentence each. Not so much the big ones, the less obvious fragments that have nestled into my memory bank over a lifetime. These were among the first that came to mind in one sitting.

Number one rule, they had to be moments that don’t have pictures. Photo-less word-photos. Captions for photos that don’t exist. We often take a picture to remember, but so many of our lives’ most resonant moments - large and small - are the ones not photographed.

My mother has dementia. So memory and forgetting are on my mind, so to speak. What do we do if our most important memories don’t have photos to back them up? What if the day comes that we can’t summon them any more?

Write them down. Try it as a meditation as well as a writing exercise. No, not in the usual long-winded way. Each one its own ‘micro-memoir’.

Resist the urge to exaggerate or make them more colorful. No frills or breathless embellishment. No before or after. Just the actual moment itself, pared to the bone, like the text equivalent of a snapshot. Edit them down to as much a blunt statement of fact as possible. My parameter was one sentence and it had to be something I actually saw. I left out ones that were too personal to ever share, we all have those too.

All that was my way, do it your way. Don’t do it to impress anyone, just for yourself.

Keep them safe, one day you might need them.

What would your short list of micro-memoirs look like? What images do you conjure?

I’m reminded of one of the greatest short monologues in cinema history, a mere 42 words.

*(That one has a photo, see above)

• • •

US Civil Defense Guide

February 5, 2025

Some countries in Europe have been distributing pamphlets to all households on how to prepare for and deal with crisis or war.

So, inspired by the Swedish one, I went through my archives and made one too, an artist’s (semi) mock survival booklet.

Obviously events are moving fast so make your own personal adjustments as needed as the situation warrants.

Please share for maximum preparedness.

Take care out there.

Print-ready PDF available for purchase in my Squarespace shop.

Rovaniemi, Finland was largely destroyed by retreating Nazis at the end of WWII.

Bring on the Moomins Revolution

February 5, 2025

It’s said that some photographers photograph the world as it is, and some as they wish it could be. I tend to fall somewhat more into the latter category. I believe in being a truth-teller but I do follow my enchantments.

During a month-long artist residency in northern Finland some years ago, I was charmed not just by the magical, nonstop midsummer light of late June. My enchantment was also due to finding myself in the land of certain storybook heroes.

As I wrote back then about the photos I made along the way:

I am always most interested in the undercurrents of a place. In Finland I encountered subtle contrasts of dream and reality, past and present, modern and rustic, warm and cold, and shadow and light. The light has a primal effect on both the psyche and physiology, with a dizzying vitality and presence of its own. Yet it seems to never fully banish the blue palette of the Great North. The pervasive blue is like the menacing Groke in Tove Jansson’s lyrical tales, a reminder that winter’s cold will soon return.

Who? If you didn’t grow up in northern Europe, Russia, or Japan, there’s a good chance you haven’t heard of Tove Jansson - or the Moomins.

Tove Jansson was a Swedish-Finnish artist and children’s book author in the early-mid 20th century. For me, discovering her universe of Moomins characters was like opening a previously unseen door to a unknown way of being.

The famous storybooks and picture books were ostensibly for kids, but I’d say barely. I found them when my daughter was young and, while she loved the characters and we still bond over Moomins now that she’s in her teens, I was utterly hooked by the slightly thorny Nordic melancholy in the stories and artwork. Maybe my favorite character was Snufkin, a bohemian wanderer and Moomin’s best friend.

Both of these guys reminded me a bit of Snufkin:

Jansson was first and foremost an artist, and besides being a painter she illustrated covers for anti-fascist magazines during the rise of Hitler. She was also somewhat of a sexual libertine, in same-sex relationships when that was illegal in Finland.

The Moomins’ world she created was in part her artistic response as war darkened life in Finland — an idealistic, even utopian antidote to despair and thugs on the march. Sound familiar?

It was a quirky, idiosyncratic vision but a humanistic one. Strange and even unsettling things happen, but in the mostly reassuring world of Moominvalley, friends are friends, adventures are to be had, true predators are few (sometimes there are slight jerks), songs matter, respect and kindness (but not necessarily over-sentimentality, this is Finland after all) are valued, and you can always find another bed in your house for an unexpected guest, even an odd one.

The stories are often infused with nature’s raw power that can turn surprisingly dark: a comet headed for Moominvalley, storms, and floods. And encroaching winter, personified by the menacing (but ultimately just lonely) character Groke, who freezes the ground she walks on.

I’ve long been fascinated by Tove Jansson and think about her example - making complex but joyful art as a rebuttal to dark times - often in our own times.

Looking back now on my pictures from Finland, ten years later, I can see more clearly the semi-conscious references I was making, maybe channeling my inner Moominvalley. At the time I wasn’t really sure what I was doing, I was just shooting and responding intuitively in a new place. I pulled a few selections for this post, though I can’t explain exactly why they feel Moomin-ish to me. They just do.

They are definitely a different style compared to my usual. First of all the color (I usually work in black and white) but also they are very quiet and unassuming. Not trying too hard, content to be little mood-fragments. Which is also very Finnish, that notion of equanimity — “don’t go thinking you’re better than others”.

And that light!

If you bundled the personal qualities of Tove Jansson herself and the world she created for the Moomins — tolerance, solidarity, egalitarianism, respect for nature and all creatures, anti-materialism, imagination, creativity — this free spirit from another time would make a perfect art-warrior in the face of our contemporary problems.

It would even be a quite fine new religion: Moominism!

But since religion and various -isms often seem to cause as many problems as they solve, let’s at least call Moominism more of a secular thing, like humanism.

Either way, count me in. If we could all be a little more like her, and them, the world would be just fine.

Let the Moomins Revolution begin — inspired by a mid-century painter-turned-children’s-author and carried forward by artists, writers, poets, dreamers, nonconformists, and humanists everywhere.

• • •

[Originally published November 28, 2023 on Medium]

Thievery Corporation video shoot, ESL, 1999

On Czech Photography, DC Cool, and Icelandic Indie Music

February 5, 2025

It’s fascinating how different cultures produce specific art in certain times/places. Think the blues, the British Invasion, or Bollywood. Art has the soft-power potential to shape and steer the world around it, at least for a period of time, by electrifying and shaping the perceptions of each of us. And shaping the art that follows - the British Invasion wouldn’t have happened without the blues.

Even on a grand scale, art can shift history by inspiring countless individuals. Ask yourself how someone behind the Iron Curtain must have felt when they heard jazz, Bob Dylan, or the Beatles. Like life was worth living, even amid the gray stasis of Soviet-bloc communism, because amazing things were happening out there in the West. Somewhere beyond the visible, beyond the mundane, life vibrated not just with freedom but with mysterious and exciting frequencies (hope they’re not too disappointed now, but that’s another story). The fall of the Berlin Wall must have felt in part like pounding down the door to get to it.

As a child of the Cold War I went the other way, West-to-East. In post-1989 Prague I discovered a love for Czech documentary photography, which may sound pretty niche until you begin to appreciate the Czechs’ photo tradition: a unique brew of surrealism/magic realism, non-sentimentality, anti-kitsch, dark humor, and respect for humble people in the face of oppressive situations. Pretty useful traits in these times. It put a stamp on me as a person and a photographer, that continues to this day in both my photography and teaching. I still quote a Czech photo mentor to my students.

Art can transform the landscape at the local level. In the late 90s, DC’s famed music group Thievery Corporation almost single-handedly created a cultural vibe that didn’t exist, in the nation’s capital or anywhere, of lounges and trippy electronica music with an international worldview. TC is still going, and the scene around them - a kind of empire encompassing newsletters, graphic artists, photographers, singers who worked in local cafes, DJ happenings, and backroom recording studios - lasted maybe 10–15 years. Faded now but a good run. It made life itself feel different in DC. In those days I know people who said they felt more comfortable moving to the normally buttoned-down, “boring” capital because of the cool factor that Thievery birthed. Photographing in post-war Kosovo, I met people whose first question was: “You’re from DC, you know those guys?”

Years before that, DC had a legendary DIY/activist punk scene that still reverberates in a plethora of recent documentaries. For people who were there and part of it, it’s not an exaggeration to say it has defined the arc of their lives.

What even constitutes an arts/culture movement at the moment? I can’t think of much… K-Pop?

For me, most recently was the wave of innovative music from Reykjavik, primarily 2000s-2010s bands like Sigur Ros and Of Monsters and Men, but stretching further backward and forward with other lesser-known Icelandic artists. Entirely new musical vocabularies and creative approaches, evoking inner and outer landscapes, from a tiny cultural ecosystem with a mind-boggling ratio of artists per capita. The Icelandic capital’s population could mostly fit into a large college football stadium or two, yet they have both mega-stars like Bjork and Sigur Ros and a thriving and super-creative indie scene. As a whole, this movement infused my brain with new synapses and life with new wonder. And I wasn’t alone.

I feel like we’re due for something to hit. Where might it come from? The Russian underground, a new samizdat? An unlikely Israeli-Palestinian collab for peace? A post-hurricane Asheville, NC underground that leads an art revolt in the southern US (Athens, GA did it)? Hungarian artists spark popular sentiment against Orban, that topples wannabe fascists there and beyond, a new Eastern European revolution? Dare to dream. Fervently rooting for an artist mobilization around climate and, since the US election, antifascism.

Or maybe it’s something else, here already, waiting to be discovered? Or waiting on you to create something. Large or small, we sure could use it.

• • •

[Updated - originally posted Nov 17, 2023 on Medium]

Julius

September 9, 2023

First portrait.

Nairobi has lots of perfect, high-end malls as well as tons of makeshift roadside markets. As we still haven’t gotten our shipment from home, I’m typing this on a small wooden desk custom-made for me at a market near our (mostly empty) house.

Julius is an artist who sets up shop along a busy road not far from the city center. I saw his carved elephant from the car and circled back after dropping off my wife at work. We settled on around half his original asking price.

I sometimes feel conflicted. I’m told that haggling is expected, and that as a white person my starting price is usually double or triple. On the other hand, people like Julius have to make their money somehow. Once I bought a beautiful handmade end table on the side of the road. The guy started at 6000 Kenyan shillings, about 42 bucks. That’s a particleboard end table price at IKEA. I was in the middle of reflexively trying to get him closer to 4000 when I just decided to give him 5000, around $35. It was a really nice table, solid wood and well done. Bargaining down 1000 shillings was respectable enough. I know I’m still paying well more than someone else, there’s no way around that. It’s not like I have a lot of money, but that $10 or whatever difference will carry a lot farther for him.

With Julius, he started at over $100 (he really went for it!), I wasn’t going to pay that. But I really liked the elephant, which is now guarding our front door. We were both happy in the end.

Cool guy, very down to earth and direct. We talked a while as he cleaned it up. Practically every Kenyan I’ve met, rich or poor, has been friendly and open if you are. There’s often a moment when things shift from transactional and proper to warm and authentic if you’re not setting off their colonizer meter.

I don’t usually work this way, posing people when I’m shooting for myself, but the light was tricky and I couldn’t sort out the composition. Still getting back in the swing of things.

I guess it’s like how my first round of landscapes helped me start to process this new place, engaging more with ordinary Kenyans is helping me understand and feel connected to the people. I just try to show I want to know about them, and usually they are pretty curious about me as well.

Nairobi Calling

August 29, 2023

My family and I just moved from Washington DC to Nairobi, Kenya. Everyone brings up wildlife, but that kind of photography is not really my thing (though I did do the safari drive in the huge National Park on the edge of Nairobi, it was great). Daily life is fascinating enough, I want to figure out what makes this place tick.

I like Nairobi. It’s challenging to photograph here as a white person, and the gap in income can be vast and difficult to bridge. Unlike my wanderings in Eastern Europe over the years, there will be no ‘blending in’, so different approaches will be needed. So far I’m not even close to peeling back the layers, or even knowing quite how I will. But each day I get a little more comfortable, engage a little more, understand a little better.

I’m even haggling at roadside markets and driving on the left in the madness that is Nairobi traffic. Progress! I’ll let you know when I’ve gotten on a boda boda (small motorcycle taxi).

Here are a few first impressions. I’d call them Nairobi in Passing, as many are fleeting shots from the car. It’s ingrained in me to resist the impulse to make what a Czech photographer friend calls ‘describing pictures’, meaning images that don’t rise above being merely descriptive. Though I’m still in that phase somewhat, I’m only human, and many friends have said they’re curious what it’s like here. So even though it’s just skimming the surface I’m happy to show a little slice.

I try to be mindful not to use people for their picturesque poverty. Because oh man there’s poverty in Nairobi and wow is it picturesque but no you can’t get out of the car and shoot it and anyway you shouldn’t. What is the point of such pictures? To reinforce everyone’s negative stereotypes?

Senegal was my first view of Africa some years ago. Anywhere I go I’m not trying to make it look bad, or good. I’m not looking for the news or cliches. I’m looking for what’s true, interesting, human, unexpected, universal, mysterious or hopefully even poetic.

At least in Kenya I have the language. I’ve only been here for a month, so I’m in no position to offer profound insights, photographically or otherwise. I’m aware that anything I say (or shoot) now might make me cringe in another month. But observationally, there are areas here that could be Northern Virginia. Highways, new apartment and office towers, big houses, lush tree canopy, nice restaurants. Much of it behind walls, barbed wire, and private security. That’s another story.

Last night we went to a beautiful brew pub for dinner expecting all expats but it was mostly well-to-do Kenyans. We ended up making friends with a wonderful Kenyan couple sitting near us. He was just back from working in finance in NY for years, she was a local designer who, as it turns out, had revamped the interior of our local Quickmart to look more like Whole Foods.

There are also vast slums throughout the city that are no joke. Google Maps took me through the edges of Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, by mistake when I was driving around looking for something else (no I didn’t take pictures). Kibera is the most well-known but there are others. The wealth disparities are jarring, and often not too far apart.

Between the two extremes is a contemporary city, developing fast (and not). Very rough around the edges with plenty of problems and idiosyncrasies. Not exactly a pretty or pleasant city yet (weather’s great btw), and not for the faint of heart. If there’s a visual manifestation of Kenya’s clear but uneven progress to emerge as a ‘middle income’ country, it’s the contradictions of Nairobi. For now, Kenyans nimbly navigate those rough edges pretty well, with a particular combo of confidence, nonchalance, and stoicism.

Except when they don’t - one night early on, heading home on the expressway, I did see a dead body in the middle of the lanes. Likely someone trying to cross in the dark where they shouldn’t have. Our Uber driver was unfazed.

Stay tuned to this space, I’ll try to send more dispatches when I can.

• • •

Mod Memoirs - Origin Story

June 18, 2021

“We are the mods, we are the mods, we are, we are, we are the mods” [from Brighton riot scene in Quadrophenia]

Well, I wasn’t always, obviously. Following my middle school Rolling Stones fixation, I was more of a Neil Young disciple by 9th grade or so (left). I believe for that particular photo shoot by my dad in our side yard, I was practicing The Needle and the Damage Done. On the Martin 000-18 that I sure wish I never sold.

When I first met David Thornell (at right in the group photo), it was at a band practice with Trial and Error, a mostly cover band I was in with Andy Goldberg (now Andy Chase, who went on to form the band Ivy with the late Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne). David showed up at Andy’s Chevy Chase garage studio in an all-black Beatles suit, including John Lennon cap. I was like, ‘who is this guy???’. So later I called him up and asked what that was all about. We had a long conversation about what mod was, the whole ‘clean living under difficult circumstances’ thing, the music, the scooters, of course the clothes, the parkas, Quadrophenia, the attitude. Suited teenage me just right, so suited I became. Practically overnight, from 70s open-neck terrycloth shirts to three-button jackets with side vents just so.

When 1000 Words Beats a Photograph

June 6, 2019

It’s not even a very good photo, in the end maybe not worth what it cost me.

As our five-day Serbia photo road trip neared its end, my Serb friends and I had decided to pull over one more time when we saw her. This was one of my last frames before we noticed a small group of soldiers approaching us from the line of trees.

“What are you photographing?”

“What does it look like we’re photographing?”, my friend replied.

“There’s an army base over there.”

“What army base, I just see trees.”

“It’s beyond the trees.”

“Well, I don’t see it.”

“You’ll have to explain that to our commander, come with us.”

A couple hours later the interrogation wasn’t going anywhere. The officers had a light-bulb moment that all of my answers were being translated by my friend, who could be telling them anything. So we waited about an hour in silence, another guy showed up, pretty beefy, and they started over with the same questions. Soon he couldn’t help showing off a little.

(Imagine a caricature of a deep Slavic accent) “Mr. Crandall, I want you to know I speak English very well, and I am listening very carefully to what you say.”

“Ok.”

Things still didn’t really go anywhere. I was a freelancer for the Washington Post, NY Times, etc at the time, was in the Balkans for my job as Photo Director of the Balkan Times news site, but was shooting for myself. They didn’t know what to make of any of that. But you could tell none of them really had the authority to call the whole thing off.

“(Sigh) Show us where you were photographing.” So we went back out to the field and recreated our angles.

“Are you sure you couldn’t see any barracks?”

Playing it safe, I hedged. “I don’t think so, how can I be sure?” I said. My friend was livid, hissing under his breath “damn it, say YES I’M SURE!”.

My slight waffling was costly. “Ok, we will take you to the police station in the nearest town, where we have a photo lab. We will develop your film and we will see what you were photographing.” So we followed them to Uzice in our car, already exhausted. My friend’s girlfriend, who they separated from us, said later she overheard they wanted to take us to military court if they could see '“one window of the barracks” on our film.

The police chief came out to meet us, spoke to the military guys for a couple minutes max, and made a few gestures that I interpreted as “are you guys total idiots, wasting my time with this?”. I guess he had the authority to call it off.

That was that, we thought.

But the translator guy, who we called Bruno because he looked like a Bruno, perked up. “Great news! Now I can show you my town!” and set off across the street still holding both of our confiscated cameras in one giant hand. What he meant was now we could sit for another two hours with him in an empty 80s-decor cafe while he practiced his English with a literally captive audience. He seemed particularly determined to zing me, his American ‘guest’.

“Americans know little about history. Mr. Crandall, you say you are interested in Eastern Europe, you talk about the fall of the Berlin Wall… Tell me, what was the REAL beginning of the end of communism in Eastern Europe?” My friends looked at me expectantly.

“Um, I’d say the 1980 Solidarity movement in Poland, Gdansk shipyards, Lech Walesa…” They burst out cheering and high-fiving like I had scored a goal. Bruno was not amused. A bit later he tried again.

“Americans know nothing about geography. For example, can you tell me what is the capital of Latvia?” Where I’d been a few years earlier, so that didn’t work either.

My head was splitting, we hadn’t eaten since morning. I excused myself to the bathroom just to get away. He came along and peed next to me and kept talking, something about Bosnian Muslims not washing their hands.

When we finally somehow made it back to our car it was dark with a five-hour drive back to Belgrade. The next day we were on the TV news by name, photographers detained on suspicion of spying. The embassy called me. My older Serb colleague said everyone was asking him about me - “You know him? What’s he really doing here??”- apparently there had just been an actual recent spy scandal in Belgrade involving an American passing sensitive documents.

Bruno later called my Serb photographer friend, saying that he was glad to meet us, that he lived unhappily with his mother, and he hoped we’d visit him again sometime.