Blog Archives
Navigate the Absurdity
Drifts blends cinematic street photography, poetry, and candid reflections from cities around the world, finding beauty, humor, and meaning in the details most people overlook. What does the title Drifts represent about your approach to photography, writing, and observing the world?
It’s about allowing yourself to feel wonder in the wander. Letting my feet and my mind drift in the moment allows me to connect to myself on a deeper level.
What qualities in a place, object, or everyday moment tend to capture your attention?
I’m attracted to juxtaposition. Authenticity. The timeless. The absurd. Graffiti art in the historic Gothic Quarter of Barcelona. My GPS losing my location and leading me down random back alleys where I find the most delicious ramen.
What have your travels taught you about the similarities and differences in how people experience everyday life?
Everyone is seeking peace of mind. Yet only a few stop to find it. The daily struggle is real for everyone, but the happiest people I’ve encountered are the ones who choose to navigate the absurdity with a sense of humor and adventure. In Venice, there was a woman who seemed unhappy as she spoke of her city like a husband who, over the years, had forgotten how beautiful his wife was. Then, once in Mexico, I spoke with an Indigenous woman, with the most genuine smile, hard at work making corn tortillas by hand in the summer heat. Best tortillas I ever had.
How do you think photography and poetry can encourage people to become more observant and thoughtful about the world around them?
They can train the eye and the soul. A photograph can be a reminder to look up; a poem to look inward.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Aaron Andreu now invites us to linger in the spaces between moments-to see, to feel what drifts and what remains, and to discover the rhythm hidden in everyday life.
Drifts
Aaron Andreu’s Drifts is a compelling mix of street photography, poetry, personal reflections, and observations about the world. It’s a book that invites readers into the mind of an artist who finds meaning in fleeting experiences, overlooked details, and the strange contradictions of everyday life. Moving through cities such as Paris, Tokyo, Venice, Lisbon, Los Angeles, and Naples, Andreu captures scenes that might otherwise pass unnoticed. A quiet café, an empty staircase, a weathered sign, or a forgotten object becomes an opportunity to consider something larger. The photographs are interspersed with short passages that range from playful observations to pointed social commentary and deeply personal reflections. Together, they create an intimate portrait of someone who’s constantly watching, questioning, and finding inspiration in unexpected places.
Andreu has a particular eye for atmosphere, especially in places that carry a sense of history or have been touched by time. His photography moves between black and white and color, often favoring interesting textures, unusual compositions, and the small imperfections that give a place its character. There’s an appreciation for the worn, the eccentric, and the beautifully ordinary. The generous white space surrounding the images gives each photograph room to breathe, while the occasional pairing of multiple images creates interesting visual conversations. There’s also a cinematic quality to the collection, with certain photographs resembling stills from films whose stories are left for the viewer to imagine. The result feels like wandering through someone’s memories, stopping whenever something catches your attention.
Andreu’s writing brings another dimension to the experience. His voice is candid, sometimes irreverent, and often surprisingly vulnerable. He has strong opinions about art, individuality, popular culture, and the ways people present themselves to the world. Some passages are philosophical, touching on aging, creativity, love, and the passage of time. Others are deliberately provocative, filled with dry humor or a sharp observation that might make readers laugh, nod in agreement, or reconsider their own assumptions. There are also moments of genuine tenderness, particularly when he turns his attention inward. The writing has the spontaneous quality of thoughts recorded before they’ve had a chance to lose their original intensity. Some observations are more immediately affecting than others, but that variation gives the collection an unmistakably personal character. Andreu’s personality comes through on nearly every page, creating a sense of familiarity as the reader moves deeper into his world.
Drifts will appeal to readers who enjoy photography books, travel-inspired art, experimental poetry, and collections of personal musings. It’s also well suited to creative people who appreciate unconventional perspectives and have an interest in how artists interpret their surroundings. Those who enjoy discovering character in old neighborhoods, independent cafés, vintage objects, and unfamiliar streets will find plenty to connect with here. The book’s combination of humor, melancholy, curiosity, and occasional defiance makes it particularly engaging for readers who appreciate a distinct artistic personality. Its format also encourages returning to individual pages, allowing different photographs or passages to resonate depending on one’s mood or circumstances. At its heart, Drifts is a celebration of paying attention, following curiosity, and recognizing that even the smallest experiences can become meaningful when viewed through a creative lens. It’s a thoughtful, visually engaging collection that rewards readers who enjoy taking their time and seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.
Pages: 116 | ASIN : B0HGCZN7MX
Military History
The 20th PID Book combines original photographs, reports, maps, and memories with modern context to illuminate the vital work of WWII photo interpreters. What did the original 1945 volume mean to your father, Lt. William J. Snodden, and to your family?
I can’t remember my dad ever talking about his experiences during the war when I was growing up. It was only when he was in his late 80s, and I asked him specifically about those years, that he pulled out his military papers and this commemorative album. That day was the first time I heard about his work as a photo interpreter. Dad was never one to show his feelings, but as I watched him reverently page through the book, I could tell how meaningful that time was for him. My mom was a master declutterer, and as they moved from their family home to increasingly smaller senior apartments, she was ruthless. The fact that the album and his military records survived those repeated purges testifies to how important they were to him.
In 2019, a few months before he died, we donated the album to the Arizona Commemorative Air Force Museum in Mesa, Arizona. It was hard for him to give it up, but he was clearly glad to see it in a place where it would be preserved for future generations. I know he’d be pleased that I’m now making its contents available to people outside the museum.
What was the role of the 20th Photo Intelligence Detachment during World War II, and why do you think the work of photo interpreters remained relatively unfamiliar compared with other forms of wartime intelligence?
When I’d mention the book to friends as I was working on it, their first question was always, “Oh, was your dad a pilot?” The pilots who took the aerial photos have received a lot of well-deserved attention in history, but without the men developing and interpreting those photos, all of that information would have been for naught.
With each sortie, the reconnaissance pilots came back with hundreds of images. The PIs often worked throughout the night, first developing the photos and then, hunched over tables and peering through stereoscopes at minute images, identifying potential bombing targets, assessing whether attacks had successfully destroyed those targets, and annotating photographs before summarizing their findings in typed reports. As many as a hundred copies of a report could then be produced for distribution to commanders. During the height of the war, all of this was accomplished in less than twelve hours!
On the surface, the work of the PIs might appear dull and isn’t likely to attract the attention of a major motion picture studio. Their success wasn’t dramatic or especially visible—their product was intelligence. Pilots flew dangerous missions in recognizable aircraft; PIs worked behind tables with stereoscopes, pencils, photographs, and typewriters. One photographs beautifully. The other doesn’t. Yet both were part of the same intelligence chain. Accurate and timely tactical intelligence allowed commanders to make the best use of their resources, disrupt German activity, and ultimately save resources and lives.
The original book contains humor, cartoons, personal memories, and photographs alongside technical intelligence. Why was preserving their personalities and everyday experiences as important as documenting their military work?
This album was created just before the men were released from duty. It was created by the men of the unit, for the men of the unit. It shows us how they chose to remember that time in their lives and could also serve as a way to share their wartime experiences with family and friends. By adding humor and cartoons, they turned their work into stories.
The route map, in particular, contains more than 30 vignettes of locations and events throughout Europe. Some pertain to large-scale wartime events, like the liberation of Paris, while others show experiences specific to the 20th PID, like their crossing of the English Channel in a small boat stuffed to the gills with soldiers, a jeep precariously balanced on the bow, and a nearby periscope watching from the deep.
An ex-soldier could use that tiny drawing as a prompt: “Oh, let me tell you about THAT day!”
Eighty years after the original book was created, what do you hope publishing this restored edition preserves for the next eighty years?
Most, if not all, of the men in the 20th PID are now gone. This book is a uniquely creative artifact documenting firsthand their work and experiences during the war. I would like future generations to know of their contributions through the men of the unit themselves.
The book also has a place in military history. Although aerial photo interpretation had been used before WWII, during the war it became increasingly sophisticated and systematic and was integrated into fast-moving tactical operations.
What makes this book unusual is that we don’t have to reconstruct that process eighty years later. The men themselves left us the photographs they examined, the reports they produced, the maps they used, the cartoons they drew, and their own explanation of what they did.
My hope is that eighty years from now, another reader can open this book and still hear their voices.
Author Links: Website | Facebook
A Common Thread
An Atlas of Ordinary Wonders: Dispatches from the Edge is a beautifully curated collection of photographic essays celebrating the extraordinary stories hidden within ordinary places. What inspired you to gather these twenty photo essays into a single collection?
The idea for An Atlas of Ordinary Wonders: Dispatches from the Edge grew out of a desire to bring together photographs and stories that might otherwise remain scattered across different places and different moments in my travels. The twenty photo essays originally appeared in Edge of Humanity Magazine, and I wanted to give them a second life as a single volume.
What connects these essays is not geography so much as a way of seeing. I have always been drawn to places that reveal something about the human experience—markets, streets, neighborhoods, forgotten landscapes, religious spaces, and communities that may not appear on a conventional tourist itinerary. A livestock market in Kashgar, a historic Chinese settlement in California, a night market in Taiwan, or the stark landscape of Namibia can seem very different on the surface. Still, each contains stories about identity, history, resilience, work, and everyday life.
The title An Atlas of Ordinary Wonders reflects that idea. Travel has taught me that wonder isn’t necessarily found in famous landmarks. Sometimes it is found in an old wall, a stranger’s expression, a crowded market, or a place that most people pass by. I wanted the book to encourage readers to slow down and look more closely at the seemingly ordinary world around them.
Your travels take readers from Kashgar and Haiti to Namibia and South Korea. How did you choose the destinations that appear in the book?
The destinations were chosen less by a checklist of countries than by the stories and visual possibilities I encountered there. Having traveled extensively, I have learned to remain open to places that surprise me. Sometimes I arrive somewhere because I have been fascinated by its history or culture; other times, a location presents itself as an unexpected photographic opportunity.
I am particularly attracted to places where layers of history, culture, and everyday life intersect. Markets are a good example. They are not simply places where people buy and sell things; they are living portraits of a community. Architecture can tell similar stories, as can street art, religious traditions, abandoned places, and ordinary moments of daily life.
I also look for a sense of place that cannot easily be separated from the people who inhabit it. The locations in this collection are geographically diverse, but I hope the photographs reveal a common thread: wherever we live, people create meaning through their surroundings. My goal is not simply to photograph where I have been, but to photograph what those places have to say.
The book includes discussions of lenses, lighting, and composition. Why was it important to share the technical side of the creative process?
Photography is both an art and a craft. I wanted the book to address both sides of that equation. I started including this information with my previous book, Around the World in Eighty Photos. There, it was focused on the thought process and settings for creating a single image, whereas here it is about creating a series of images.
A photograph may appear spontaneous, but there are usually dozens of decisions behind it—where to stand, which lens to use, how to frame the subject, what to include or exclude, how to respond to the available light, and sometimes, most importantly, when to wait. Sharing those considerations gives readers a glimpse into how I approach a scene rather than simply presenting the finished image.
I also wanted the technical discussions to be useful to photographers who are interested in travel photography themselves. You don’t need the most expensive equipment to create a meaningful photograph. Understanding light, composition, perspective, and timing is far more important than having a particular camera or lens.
Ultimately, though, technique is in service of storytelling. I don’t want readers to look at a photograph and think only about the equipment used to make it. I want them to feel something, become curious about the place, and perhaps imagine themselves standing there. The technical choices matter because they help translate an experience into an image.
How has your approach to travel photography changed over the past decade?
Perhaps the biggest change is that I have become more patient. Earlier in my travels, I was often focused on seeing and photographing as much as possible. Over time, I have become more interested in slowing down and allowing a place to reveal itself.
I have also become less interested in making photographs that simply announce, “I was here.” The iconic photograph of a destination has its place, but I’m increasingly drawn to the quieter, less obvious moments—the details, gestures, textures, faces, shadows, and encounters that communicate something deeper about a place.
My approach has also become more intentional. I think more about the story I am trying to tell and how individual photographs relate to one another. A single photograph can be powerful, but a series can create a much richer sense of place.
And, perhaps most importantly, travel photography has taught me to pay greater attention to people. The longer I travel, the more I realize that geography is only part of what makes a place distinctive. Places are ultimately shaped by the people who live in them. My camera has become a way of listening—quietly, visually, and with curiosity. I hope my photographs reflect that sense of connection and respect.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Blending documentary photography with reflective storytelling, An Atlas of Ordinary Wonders invites readers to slow down and look closer. Each chapter offers an intimate portrait of place, culture, labor, memory, or survival, celebrating the small rituals and human connections that shape life across continents. More than a travel book, it is a meditation on curiosity, empathy, and the quiet wonders waiting at the edge of the familiar.
Entertain and Enthrall
Secret Nebraska Sandhills takes readers beyond the highways and familiar attractions to discover the hidden stories of the region. You describe many of the stories as having been discovered accidentally. What was the first unexpected story that made you realize there might be an entire book hiding out there?
I was doing a book signing event for my previous book, 100 Things To Do In The Nebraska Sandhills Before You Die, when a man told me a story that blew my mind. That man was a former county sheriff. He shared with me the report he received about there being alien tunnels near Ringgold, Nebraska. I won’t share all of the details here, but when this man – I will call him Sheriff John – told me this tale and mentioned extraterrestrials and even the US president, well, when it came time to put this book together, that tale was one of the first ones that I investigated. I am thankful that we were able to exchange contact information and the man didn’t entirely give me the cold shoulder when I started calling and texting- touching base was difficult at first.
The addresses, prices, photographs, captions, and “pro tips” make the book genuinely useful for travelers, but it doesn’t read like a conventional guidebook. How did you decide how much practical information to include?
Many of the features in the book are not places that the public can get to easily. It is not a travel book. My intent was to entertain and enthrall. Only if the feature has a bona nfide attraction included in it did I include the tips.
Was there one photograph that became much more meaningful after you learned the history behind what you’d captured?
Due to my 11 years as editor of Nebraska Life magazine, Nebraskans know me for my writing AND photography. One critique I heard most after my travel book, 100 Things To Do In The Nebraska Sandhills Before You Die came out was that there were ot enough photographs. In Secret Nebraska Sandhills, there are more than 160 color photos. I felt that was important because photos can do so much to help tell a story. The circuitous photo of the North Loup River in the book’s final feature has become very meaningful. The reason is that, due to the river cutting into the roadbed, there is now a construction project underway to move the road to the south. The scene that I have long considered the most beautiful place in Nebraska will soon no longer be able to be seen by the public. The photo captures a special moment in Sandhills time.
Your book repeatedly demonstrates that extraordinary stories can hide inside places most people barely notice. What do you think we lose when we travel only to famous destinations and stop paying attention to everything between them?
To me, the best history and best stories come from the unknown places. The known attractions can be fun, but adventurers should never focus only on those. By being curious about how seemingly ordinary people live, and by wondering about their history and/or that of a particular place, we learn more about the culture of an area. And ultimately, I think we learn more about ourselves.
One last question: after all your research, do you believe in the Walgren Lake Monster?
I do not believe that there is a gigantic serpent-like reptile reminiscent of the Loch Ness Monster swimming in or near Walgren Lake. But I believe it does exist in the history and culture of the Sandhills. Folklore is oftentimes more entertaining than the truth, and I like to think that we haven’t solved all of Earth’s mysteries just yet.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
An Atlas of Ordinary Wonders: Dispatches from the Edge
An Atlas of Ordinary Wonders: Dispatches from the Edge is a generous, visually absorbing collection of twenty photo essays gathered from a decade of travel. Jeremiah A. Gilbert moves from Kashgar’s livestock market and California’s historic town of Locke to Haitian streets, Namibian ruins, South Korean mural villages, and the alleyways of George Town. Arranged chronologically, the book feels like a travel journal refined by hindsight, with each stop adding another point to a map shaped by curiosity.
Gilbert has a sharp eye for places where history remains visible in everyday life. He’s drawn to weathered storefronts, crowded markets, abandoned machinery, handmade memorials, public art, and the people who keep moving among them. The photographs capture both bustle and stillness, often finding their strongest details at the edges of a scene. A tea seller in Kashgar, a cigar worker at his bench, sand filling the rooms of Kolmanskop, and murals brightening an aging hillside neighborhood all receive the same patient attention. Together, these images reveal how communities preserve memory through work, ritual, architecture, and art.
The brief accompanying essays give each portfolio enough historical and cultural grounding to deepen the photographs without competing with them. Gilbert’s conversational notes about lenses, shutter speeds, changing light, and compositional choices add another appealing layer. They let readers see not only what caught his attention, but how he turned an encounter into an image. That makes the book especially rewarding for photographers, though the technical material stays approachable and never interrupts the journey. The progression also traces Gilbert’s evolving interests, particularly his growing fascination with street art as a public record of identity, resilience, and change.
What holds the collection together is Gilbert’s belief that meaningful travel begins with sustained attention. He treats a night market meal, a rusting car, a painted wall, and a deserted room as evidence of lives and histories worth noticing. The result is a book that invites readers to slow down, look closely, and reconsider how much beauty and human feeling can be contained in an overlooked place. An Atlas of Ordinary Wonders turns the overlooked corners of the world into vivid proof that wonder is everywhere we take the time to notice.
Pages: 217 | ASIN : B0H56R9ZHK
The Creative Way
The Creative Way is a compact, image-driven portrait of Steven B. Wills as a photographer and digital artist, tracing how his work grows out of nature, travel, memory, illness, recovery, grief, and curiosity. The book moves between biographical reflection and visual catalog, showing Wills’s fondness for landscapes, coastal scenes, wildlife, skyscapes, urban structures, abstract color experiments, and images. What emerges is less a conventional art book than a personal archive of creative momentum, where a phone camera, photo-editing apps, and a searching eye become tools for turning ordinary sights into bright, emotionally charged images.
What I appreciated most was the sincerity running through the book. There’s something quietly moving about the way Wills frames creativity as a way of surviving and noticing. The section on Bodie structures stayed with me because the ghost town’s “arrested decay” feels like a natural extension of the book’s deeper ideas about resilience and remembrance. The image made for a friend who passed away in May adds a tender human ache to the collection, while the self-portrait near the end gives the whole project a disarming intimacy. I liked that the book doesn’t try to hide the artist behind polish. It lets us see the maker, the process, the experiments, and the emotional weather behind the images.
The writing is plainspoken, sometimes repetitive, and occasionally reads more like notes for a curated portfolio than a finished narrative. That looseness has its own charm. The language keeps circling back to nature, digital tools, healing, and transformation, and those repetitions begin to feel like the book’s heartbeat. The ideas are strongest when they’re paired with the art itself: the red-and-black image generated from two colors, the vivid lighthouse with its stained-glass intensity, the bear in the canoe beside the deer, the moody coastal and moonlit scenes. I found the mix of photography, filters, and AI both intriguing and a little uneven, but that unevenness also makes the book feel alive. It’s an artist’s workshop with the door left open.
I came away from The Creative Way feeling that I had spent time with someone who genuinely needs to create, not for spectacle, but for steadiness, wonder, and connection. The book is imperfect in structure, but generous in spirit, and its best moments carry a warm sense of gratitude for beauty wherever it appears. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy personal art collections, digital photography, outsider art, nature-inspired imagery, and creative journeys shaped by resilience and emotional honesty.
Pages: 32 | ASIN : B0GR1ZQL68
Echoes of Memory: War, Testimony, and Survival on Sanzao Island
Echoes of Memory is a deeply personal work of public history by Robert Cupchoy and Lani Cupchoy, rooted in survivor testimony, family archive, poetry, and scholarly reflection. It traces the Japanese occupation of Sanzao Island during World War II, beginning with the shattering recollections of Fook Im Chen as planes descend over rice fields, moving through starvation, forced labor, cultural suppression, and the devastating history of the comfort women system, then widening into questions of inheritance, healing, and remembrance. What makes the book distinctive is its refusal to separate history from kinship. The authors present Sanzao not as an obscure footnote to larger wartime narratives, but as a wounded, living place whose people carried memory in stories, rituals, photographs, silence, and even in the later transformation of the family home into the Cupchoy Café.
Fook Im’s memories of bombs falling, villagers hiding food, and families clinging to one another have an aching immediacy that formal history often struggles to hold. The chapter on the comfort women is especially harrowing, not because it reaches for shock, but because it understands the intimacy of violation. Jin Yuan Lin’s presence in the comfort house, his memory of the women staring out windows, and his fear that forgetting them would mean losing them again, left me with a quiet grief that lingered after the page ended. The writing is sometimes at its strongest in these moments of restraint, when the authors trust a remembered image to carry the weight. The prose can become academically dense, with theoretical frameworks crowding the emotional field, but even then, I sensed the urgency behind it. The book wants to protect these stories from being dismissed as anecdote, and that protective instinct gives the scholarship its moral heat.
What I admired most is the book’s central idea that memory itself can be a form of evidence. That argument feels both intellectually persuasive and emotionally earned. The poems that open chapters don’t always have the precision of the testimonies, but I appreciated their function: they create a ritual threshold before the reader enters material that is painful, fractured, and sacred. I was also moved by the book’s attention to cultural survival, especially its insistence that festivals, language, family meals, and oral storytelling matter as much as destroyed homes and ruined fields. The Cupchoy Café section could easily have felt sentimental, yet it becomes one of the book’s most affecting gestures, a cup of Hawaiian coffee in Sanzao carrying the long route from violence to diaspora to renewal. That image feels humble and profound, proof that remembrance doesn’t only live in monuments. Sometimes it lives in a room where people gather again.
Echoes of Memory is a work of witness rather than a conventional history, and that is its strength. Its emotional truth is unmistakable. I closed it with a fuller sense of how war survives inside families, landscapes, and inherited silences, and with real respect for the labor required to turn private grief into communal memory. This is a thoughtful, affecting book for readers interested in World War II history, Asian and Pacific studies, oral history, trauma studies, family archives, and anyone drawn to histories told from within the circle of those who still carry them. Its lasting gift is its conviction that to remember the dead with care is also to restore dignity to the living.
Pages: 232 | ISBN : 9798279679836
