So…I’ve been messing around with smoke for a long time. Mostly I hate what I do with it, but I keep coming back to it. Every six months or so, I pillage the smoke folder, drag out some smoke raws, and sit in front of Photoshop (my favorite!) and try to discover what draws me.

I’ve taken to calling the more symmetrical output “smoke mandalas”. In conversation with Jamey Thomas, I mentioned the baffling relationship I have with this, and he said, “You know, a mandala is a thing. I mean, it’s a practice that people use to meditate.”

Recently, I’ve been working with the smoke in a way that keeps this in mind. I’m no monk, to be sure, and my efforts are ungainly, and less about spiritual attunement than about artistic discovery (if that’s in fact different), but it’s evocative and interesting so far.

My basic guidelines have been to work for 30 minutes, to start without an idea or intention beyond seeing what happens, to move (my fingers), and to observe, reserving judgement.

Sometimes the result is quite awful.

And other times, it coheres, and is beautiful. I’m still wondering what it signifies and what to do with it, but for now, I’m content to leave it as a process; not everything needs to result in a product.

Cotton + White Seamless + Oxygen + Gasoline + Heat + 30′ Ceiling + Fast Shutter + High Speed Sync =

The flames from the triple shirt setup touched the ceiling thirty feet up.

I can be real dogmatic, in my work, when I’m trying to get to the expression of some grand or clever idea. And that’s, you know, useful. At the same time, I always seem to have some line on something more abstract, more open-ended and maybe just pretty.

Which, pretty is important too.

In advertising, there’s pressure to make efficient photographs, with an instantaneous message, that will sell a product. And so, in an advertising photographer, there’s an inclination, maybe a habit, to avoid spending effort toward something that seems mushy, compared to the hard glitter of an ad photo.

Of course, there is great advertising that uses art without a point, or even art that doesn’t have anything to do with the product. It’s not axiomatic. Just a current that babbles along.

Thirty Inch Pearl Strand with Diamond-crusted Clasp

And with this, I think I’ve exhausted the Wells Fargo corporate archive. Until they ask me to shoot more of their stuff.

I imagine it would be rather difficult to create a walking mascot for First Interstate Bank. Or the seventh one, I guess.

Emily Polar. No pun intended.

Yours, truly.

One more from the Wells Fargo corporate archive.

Black Bart being much more famous than James Hume, of course, but this wallet of mugshots belonged to Hume.

It’s so precise and uniform.

And filled with rogues. It’s quite a contrast, Hume’s methodical stalking, versus the likely chaotic lives of his targets.

I’m pretty sure only Black Bart gets a full page, however. But oh, look at Grant Sutton, there – I don’t think that’s quite the right hat for him.

Black Bart was quite a dandy, apparently. This is his walking stick. It’s about 30″ long – not actually long enough to lean on, but good for pointing at things.

A little more about these two on the Wells Fargo Archive blog.

These are a pair of doors that once closed up a Wells Fargo Depot, to safeguard the gold and silver inside.

Except that now, they live inside the San Francisco museum.

Even if you did get past those doors, you’d still be confronted with something like this.

Here’s a selection of bank notes, part of the Wells Fargo Bank corporate archive that I photographed for the book, Time Well Kept.


Of course, it’s presidents on the bills now, but back then it was any old Treasury Secretary they could find.

Old Ben Franklin on this one (and his drinking buddy, I guess). I always pictured this scene being far less pastoral, you know, driving rain and lightning flashes and Ben’s pince-nez threatening to fly away in the wind. On the right, that lady is Electricity, and I’m not really sure what she’s doing with America there – is she rescuing or wrestling?


The main picture here is De Soto Discovering the Mississippi by William Henry Powell. I was pretty disturbed by the apparent baby crucifixion happening in the right corner, but in the color version, it’s clear that’s a decorative crucifix. Whew.

For you conspiracy buffs out there, the inscription is an abbreviation for the phrase Thesauri Americae Septentrionalis Sigillum, which translates to “The Seal of the Treasury of North America”. North America!

They went nuts with the typography on this one. I love the font for the words “United States”, and the fact that it actually says “Wells Fargo”. Finally, those are actual signatures, of the bank president and the bank cashier, on the note.

…in the late 1800′s, that is. This is a book of stock certificates, from the Wells Fargo Bank corporate archive.

As much as I love computers and the internet, and everything that digitization has brought us, will bits ever look like this?