Road Rage

I did a little digging and found out that the "crazy speeds" on the Autobahn are actually overexaggerated. But while we were there, the guy who drove us (a native German) did go pretty fast. And we saw one absolutely terrible crash on the first day, the kind of wreckage you know nobody walked away from. After that, we started noticing these white crosses all over the highway - turns out these are put up all over the highway where people died, kind of to remind drivers to be careful.



I like this photo because it's kind of fleeting - obviously taken from the car, with all the rich vivid colors of the German landscape, with a couple of ghostly flickers to reinforce the meaning. Of all the photos Jason took, this one puts me back in Germany the most.

More German Goodness

Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. Jason was up in Northern California working on some photos for a new photo essay which will be coming soon, dealing with horses and dogs and life on a family ranch. He also recently shot the cover for Mix Magazine, so as soon as I get the pictures from that, I'll post those here too.



But in the meantime, I've hardly even scratched the surface of my favorite photos of his from Germany. Here's another one. I love this photograph because I love how people unwittingly make such visual irony. The main guy in the photo is holding a pack of cigarettes, which in Germany are very VERY clearly marked "Rauchen kann tödlich sein" which means "smoking can be deadly." You can see it in the picture, because the warning is as big as the cigarette logo (what a concept! But I don't know if it's working so well - everyone in Germany smoked like crazy).

Anyway, he's also got a cigarette in his hand, clearly about to light up. That's pretty ironic - but even more ironic to me is that he's also holding a Diet Coke (pretty sure to kill you) and standing in front of a gas station (and we all know how the Blood for Oil situation is killing tons of people right now, I wonder if it's passed up cigarette deaths this year yet**). It's kind of like, how many fatal things can you find in this picture?

Then, the guy on the right kind of seems to me like he gets the joke. And how unfunny it is...And maybe adding death by misery to the list of ways to die in the picture.


**blogger's note: whoa, not even close! Don't click on that "cigarette deaths" link if you don't want to get completely depressed. The numbers are pretty staggering.**

New website

Hi everyone! Sorry for the long silence (again!) but I was helping with a new website for Jason. He has it up and it is great. Check it out:

Jason's new site