My brother, Ryan, during a search for old wooden oil derricks in Orangefield, TX. Unfortunately, we discovered on this trip that either Hurricane Rita or Ike had destroyed all of these amazing structures.

We left Chicago for Texas a mere hour before the snow began to fall, at 2pm. The drive took 16 hours, and we arrived at Stacy’s parents’ house South of Dallas just after sunrise. Although the weather wasn’t great (freezing rain, copious amounts of fog) I can’t say it was an altogether awful drive; just uninteresting.

A few days in Dallas, a few in Houston, a few more in Orange. Then we decided to add another week to the trip and head to Austin. I’m so glad we did. The weather in Texas was fantastic pretty much the whole time we were there. We’re talking dry and in the 70s on most days. Awesome. And now I feel like I could live in Austin again and really appreciate it. I know that’s not likely to happen, but who knows.

We got back from Texas just in time for it to snow, and now it’s snowing again tonight. I thought I’d hate getting back to that, but it really hasn’t been that bad. Maybe it’s growing on me.

I shot around 8 or 9 rolls of 120 film on the trip, both color and B&W. I’ll be posting images from those soon.

I was never really happy with the most recent incarnation of my portfolio site, WalkerPickering.com, as the design was really just centered around the way I designed my business card . So over the past couple of days I’ve worked (and re-worked) a design into something I’m pretty sure I like… for now. I seem to redesign about once a year, so I’m sure it won’t be long until the design bug gets me again.

This can all be traced back to two things: my love of web design in the mid-90s and my short stint as a graphic design major in undergrad. Even though I don’t really enjoy designing for most things, I still like having creative control over how something like my own portfolio is laid out. I know that’s a good thing, but it means I spend too much time changing it to actually establish any kind of real long-term brand identity.

So please feel free to leave some feedback on the design. I’m happy to field any questions and resolve complaints—if I happen to think you’re right, of course.

Also, I’ve updated a few of the different portfolios on that site. If you liked the Joe K. work, there are a few new (never-before-seen) images there, as well as fresh stuff my New Work portfolio (along with a new title, etc.). (I love parentheses.)

Stacy and I are driving to Texas for a 2700+ mile roundtrip Christmas visit. Both dogs are leaving with us, only one will return. Crazy Homer the Basset Hound will spend the winter months with the in-laws, and I will get some sanity and sleep back. We’ll be gone for 11 days to such exotic locales as DALLAS, TEXAS, HOUSTON, TEXAS and ORANGE, TEXAS. We may even drive over Lake Charles, LA if we’re lucky! Ha.

The day after my 28th birthday, I apparently ran a red light in Elk Grove Village, IL on the way to Ikea. Yay. Incontrovertible proof above.

My friend Katie Waugh, who’s a new MFA candidate in fibers at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, recently worked on a project where she needed photographic documentation of the performance. She also created a video, and I contributed this along with about 23 other frames that day.

It’s a repost, I know, but enjoy this now-dead bird:

Well I’m almost finished with my first semester of officially teaching, and I’ll say it’s been fun for the most part. I definitely had some preconceptions that were shattered throughout the course, but I expected that. I’ve come to realize that, as one of my students aptly noted, I’m a “hard grader”, which I think makes me a tough professor… ? I’m ok with that label. One of my most difficult professors as an undergrad seemed to have a lot in common with how I run my class now, and in looking back I realized that I actually did learn quite a bit in his class. I hated him at the time, but any animous I have for him now is simply residual. It probably took becoming a professor myself to realize he wasn’t just being difficult for the heck of it.

It looks like I won’t be returning to MCC in the Spring, however, because they won’t be offering my section. I was given the possibility of another course, but scheduling/transportation became enough of an issue that I wasn’t able to make it work. It’s unfortunate that I live so incredibly far from the school, because I really enjoyed it out there. They’ve mentioned having me back in the Summer and Fall, and I think I’d like that.

There is an upside, though. There’s a decent chance that I’ll be teaching an art history course at one of the City Colleges of Chicago in the Spring. It could be a great opportunity to get into that system (which, let’s face it, is one of the reasons we moved to a city like Chicago), and teaching something so different would be a nice challenge. I’m also hoping at least one major school (if not more) that I’ve had my eye on will pick me up for at least a single class. That would rock my world.

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and we don’t have a whole lot planned. Stacy’s friend Hope has flown in for a few days, so we’ll be showing her our admittedly shallow tour of the city. It’s gotten pretty bitterly cold, but I’m told it gets much worse by January, so I guess we’ll be counting our blessings for the “warmth” we’ll experience walking down Michigan Avenue.

What’s not apparent is how incredibly cold it was. We were using my coat as the dropcloth. Thanks to my student, Maggie, for the photo.

We shot out in the cold yesterday… here’s one of students right before we did individual portraits with sheet film for making cyanotypes later this week. It was overexposed, and bleached out quite a bit before I scanned it on an awful scanner in a PC lab at the school.

Ike was pretty brutal to our family’s beach house on the Bolivar Peninsula. So brutal, in fact, that it’s gone. Before (from Google Maps street view):

And after (via Mom and my brother Ryan yesterday):

Ryan erected the flag pole and flew a flag that they found.

The opening of an installation at the University of Chicago Renaissance Society.

Y’know, the more art I see, the more I realize how little of it interests me. There are only three types of work that tend to catch my attention these days (with rare exception): photography (naturally), video and installation art. Video has the ability to draw you in, often creating a package that makes you think what’s happening on screen is (or could be) real. But an installation can actually do it. Transforming a space, even into something normal but different, can often have such a jarring effect as to make the viewer question what’s real about the space and what isn’t.

I know this isn’t always the primary role of installation art, but many times it’s what I find most intriguing. Sometimes sculptures will embrace this transportational quality. I saw a show a few weeks back when my friend Eric Hancock was in town. The artist had created some type of treehouse in the clouds (although the whole thing looked eerily like a mushroom cloud), and even though I couldn’t climb in it, the scale made me feel like I could have. I instantly forgot that I was standing in a gallery, just looking at a piece of art. This doesn’t happen to me so much with paintings (or photography for that matter).

That’s probably not the best way to judge art, but it’s at least caused me to consider different ways of art-making.

At the world’s first Sears.

I finally got my scanner hooked up at home. Oh how I miss the simplicity and power of the Flextight software with the Imacon. If I could only find a spare $18k.

Even to this day, this remains one of my favorite videos of all time. (Quicktime required)

I’m here in Milwaukee at the 2nd Annual Coalition for Photographic Arts Juried Exhibition. I didn’t even know about the show until today when Daniel Shea (a photographer I literally met for the first time this morning) told me about it, and offered me a ride. It’s been a great show, and I’ll be posting a video on photoawesome from it soon.

On my ride home from work. Just the way I like it: empty.

Just a little somethin’ I made. Isn’t it, like, super deep?

Now that I have wordpress on my phone, I think I’ll use it to post here more regularly. More semi-low-res photos to come.

We attended our first openings of the fall gallery season tonight, which was a lot of fun. It wouldn’t have been so, had our friends Katie and Eric not been there. They both left Atlanta/SCAD the same time we did, only Katie is now attending SAIC for her MFA, and Eric is racking up residencies and stuff left and right. I’m jealous of both. But we’re all here in a pretty great city, and it was a lively art scene tonight. Tons of people everywhere.

I’ve been teaching for three weeks now, and the possibility of another class at another school is possibly on the horizon. Steve (Aishman) always said they’d contact you at the last minute, and that advice (along with much other) has held true. So far the teaching has been incredibly rewarding. It’s weird, at times, to be completely in charge of the direction of a course. Not just the planning and syllabus and all that, but the simple direction day to day. I’ve been writing extensive notes about every single class meeting on the train home that evening, and I think that’s really helped keep me on track.

As a matter of fact, a student from another class was in the lab the other day, and when I asked her, she said that they were doing the exact same thing in her class that we were. It felt good to know we were on track.

The weather in this part of the country right now is phenomenal. It’s actually been a bit chilly lately (68°F high), but prior to that, it was around 90°F rarely, and generally in the mid to low 80s. I look forward to the snow for now, but I think I’ll live to regret those words.

My first day of teaching is today. Only thing in my way is a 15 minute bike ride to the train station, an hour on the train, and about 25 more minutes on the bike on the way to the school. Oh, and here’s hoping there are bike racks out there.