I was very surprised to hear from my editor, Ariana at the the New York Times' Arts photo desk, that one of my pictures of WWE Champion Jinder Mahal was selected among the Times' favorite arts photos of 2017. What an honor to be included among photos by so many talented photographers (and with quite a few friends in the mix!) and to see my photo in the mix of pictures of Bruce Springsteen, Nicole Kidman, Mark Hamill, Kumail Nanjiani, Angelina Jolie, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Katy Perry, and other stars of stage, screen, and the rest of the art world. As you can see in the screenshot, I even got to write a little blurb about the surreal experience of photographing professional wrestling.

Times editors describe the collection of images: "These images, some of the best we took in 2017, capture the power of the artists and performers we covered — and offer plenty of beauty on their own.... We want art to transport us, to take us beyond ourselves and the stubborn gravity of our lives. That’s one lesson from the selection of exceptional arts photography below, all commissioned or published by our photo editors this year. Memorable subjects like the actor Mark Hamill, the acrobat Elena Gatilova and the professional wrestler Jinder Mahal used their particular gifts to open portals to other worlds, resurrecting Luke Skywalker, making poetry out of aerial performance or conquering the WWE in the process."

The whole set is well worth a look: How We Looked at the Arts This Year: Our Favorite Photographs. Thanks to Ariana and the rest of the NYT photo department!

I'll be in Montana for a bit this November to visit family and get outside a bit. Cell phone signals will be hard to come by for parts of the trip, and email communication will be delayed. I'll be in Great Falls and rural areas in the north-central part of the state. Back in Boston on November 20.

I'm very proud to announce that I've begun writing for World Press Photo's Witness online magazine. The publication has been active for the past six months or so and, as the about page puts it, Witness is "a magazine for new thinking and new talent in visual journalism and storytelling. Witness presents the critical thinking, independent analyses, and new visual stories of our contributors." The publication is well worth following, and I'd say that even if I wasn't contributing.

Two of my articles have been published so far: How (some) photographers around the world make a living and A Look at Addis Foto Fest. I've got more articles planned and you can follow everything I write there on my medium.com page.

dvafoto, the blog that Matt Lutton and I ran for nearly a decade, has winded down over the last couple of years, and I'm excited to have a new avenue to write about the photo industry.

Thanks to WPP's Director of Communications and Engagement David Campbell for inviting me to get involved and for Witness Managing Editor Jennifer Noland for putting up with all of my edits and delays.

I photographed Harvard and MIT geneticist George Church a couple of months ago for the Norwegian news-weekly Morgenbladet. His work is fascinating--he's contributed to targeted gene editing such as CRISPR (and a newer method he thinks is better) and cloning the DNA of the woolly mammoth (soon to be a major motion picture)--and it was a joy to sit in on the interview and work alongside Morgenbladet writer Jon Kåre Time.

We were a bit unsure what sort of access we'd have for the piece, but thanks to the lab for being so open, I was able to get enough pictures for the cover (at left) and across 8 pages inside the magazine. I wish I could read the reporting, but if you happen to speak Norwegian and subscribe to Morgenbladet, you can read the online version here. There are a few images online that didn't appear in print.

I've got many more photos in my archive from my short time in the lab with George Church, his lab's staff philosopher and bioethicist Jeantine E. Lunshof, and the rest of the researchers.

A big thanks to Christina and Jon at Morgenbladet, Jonno for passing the job along to me, and Church's assistant and lab staff for being so accommodating to us.

I recently photographed a gerrymandering hackathon at Tufts University for Wired. The hackathon was put on by the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering GroupMetric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group, a Boston-based group of mathematicians, coders, and policy wonks, who develop tools and methods for analyzing US voting districting. This was a challenging shoot, no doubt about it. I've photographed other hackathons before and they often something physical for the participants to work on--circuitboards, VR systems, etc. This one was purely computational: There were 15 people in a small room, all staring at computers. Nevertheless, a challenge like that is always fun.

You can read the article, by Issie Lapowsky, at Wired.com: "What I Learned At Gerrymandering Summer Camp"

Thanks to Ruby at Wired for calling me for the shoot!

One of my images, seen at left of a tiger laying motionless in the zoo in Beijing, China, has been included in GoodPlanet Foundation's TERRA exhibition in Paris, France, currently on view. You can see my image as it's displayed in the picture of the exhibition installation above by Valeska Grafenstein.

Other photographers included in the exhibition include: Art Wolfe, Frans Lanting, Li Gang, Vincent Munier, Cyril Ruoso, Philippe Bourseiller, Daniel Sulivan, Solvin Zanki, Jurgen Freund, Francis Latreille, Suzi Esztheras, Octavio Aburto, Brent Stirton, Daniel Beltra, Doug Perrine.

If you read French, you can read a bit about the exhibition at GoodPlanet's website.

Thanks to the team at GoodPlanet including Camila and Eric who handled everything with my picture in the exhibition. Wish I could see it in person!