There is something magical about creating an edit out of something that you have no ownership over. No guidelines to adhere to, no existing notions of what the final product should be. This edit is more an exhibition of my reaction to the images as I mulled over them carefully. How well they play together and how I picture them working within a larger body of work that never has nor ever will exist. With these pictures I got to create a photographer and in essence, recreate their life as I saw it.

I don’t yet understand what these photos are about and, unusually for me, I’m not sure I really even care to find out. I started photographing dogs right after I graduated from art school and, in retrospect, I dimly understand the work as a sort of reaction to the art and ideology fed to me in that institution (almost out of some sort of creative vomit-reflex). In the beginning I took these photos without any consciously understood motive, and without any motivation to later find a motive, and without any motive to deliberately not have a motive, but simply and truly for its sake, for the honest joy of photography. If there is any concept here it is implicit, in what the photos are not, and if there is any significance here it is in the decision to not care, or even feel the need to care, about the works significance. Can art be like this? Let’s just say that I’m certain that this work would receive a failing grade in school. Now, after having done this for almost a year, I still don’t understand much about the work, but I do understand what the work isn’t about: dogs. I realize that dogs are just a token subject matter, a particularly pliable photographic foil, convenient rather than necessary. They are something for me to play with, project onto, learn from, express myself through. My single hope with this work is that a viewer can appreciate the photos as I took them, which is to say with the same un-self-consciousness, the same unconcern for fine talk and obtuse ideology, out of the same simple animal joy for photography.

Adam Krawesky’s professional art practice involves documenting life on the streets, and how people interact in open, public environments—often unknowing fixtures in an urban landscape. His street scenes evoke the relationship between the omnipresence of the built city and the ways humans navigate and make sense of the spaces around them. In his photography, the monotony of everydayness is countered by the emotive qualities of space in a manner that recalls Henri Lefebvre's formulation of modern space as at once conceived, perceived, and lived. Krawesky's solitary figures carry the ambiguous burden of the city, embodying a response to the anonymity and enclosure that characterize urban space. Characteristic of Krawesky's work is the sense that there is intrigue lying around the corner, in the shadows, just outside of the frame's reach. His photographs express the opposition of presence and absence, of affect and tedium that one experiences in the city. Adam Krawesky is represented by Patrick Mikhail Gallery.

The Race Across America is no ordinary point to point stage race. There is no finish line and cushy hotel with warm dinner and massage at the end of each day - there is only open road ahead and the implicit challenge of this contest: how much more can you endure without rest? It is a non-stop test of physical and mental stamina. It is a relentless carnival of pain. The access my writer friend and co-conspirator on this project david houghton and I enjoyed made it clear that this race is as much about being able to handle the effects of massive sleep deprivation as it is about being able to ride a bike for 20 or more hours a day. I was surprised at first by how keen riders were to talk as we drew up alongside them - of course we were a break in the monotony of their day (or night), but the human contact also allowed them to verbalize whatever was on their mind at that point: how far to the next checkpoint, what we knew of other riders, even how our project was progressing. We were focussing primarily on the American rider Dave Haase, one of the main contenders in the race, and so as the days wore on and the field became more spread out, we had to drop the slower riders and keep the company of the guys up front: the downside of this was simply that we missed the drama of talking with the people that weren't there to win, but to finish... surely just as fascinating a story. As a cyclist I was in awe of the physical prowess and dedication of each rider and the support teams they had cajoled or coerced to join them on this odyssey. As an impartial observer I was astounded by the human ability to push beyond the limits - physical and psychological - we set for ourselves daily. I may still feel a glow of accomplishment after a 100k road ride, but I now find myself thinking: no biggie.