Sinner buddy Tony writes about his new book:
I work in a downtown Seattle neighborhood (South Lake Union, if you want to get technical) whose industrial/urban expansion pushes and crowds intrusively upon the last few scraps of the organic. The latter continues to hold on just enough to reveal its beauty, if you know to look.
Last summer, a goblin opened my eyes to all of it. He stared at me with melancholy doe eyes and a mouthful of fangs. And I knew he'd be unceremoniously executed by a wrecking ball soon. So--armed with my beat-up Pentax Optio and my two unjaded eyes--I captured him for posterity. His unceremonious passing lifted a curtain in my head, revealing to me all of the neighborhood's pockets of rough-hewn beauty.
Many of the things that modern developers look down upon--plants, weeds, shrubbery, older buildings that've commited the unpardonable sin of showing their age and their exquisite faults--possess special beauties of their own, unique enchantments that usually fall beneath the ever-turning wheels of gentrification and homogenized urban growth. All of that nature, and all of those discarded/older structures, struggle futilely against the Monolithic New, and that struggle lives vividly under all of our noses. It's a potent metaphor for a lot of life. And it photographs really well.