Between Moments

Durham, North Carolina photographer Justin Cook. PORTFOLIO

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Work Free

What is the point of freelancing if you aren’t really free?

For many, that first year of self employment — “The Freshman Freelance” as I call it — feels like a mad dash towards burnout. Your work, that thing you are supposed to love, is an unescapable vortex of emails and texts and notifications; the bog of minutiae bleeds all the days together. You worry about where the next job will come from. It mutates your DNA. And that first year and those anxieties can linger, like background radiation, through your entrepreneurial life. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

In late 2010, I left my not-so-secure job as a newspaper staff photographer to go freelance. I wanted to be my own boss, to be invest in the relationships and stories that mattered most to me. I wanted to live and die by my own actions. I wanted to be free to fail and have no one but myself to blame. Four years into my freelance life, I was tired. I was working part-time at The INDY Week here in Durham, and I loved it, but knew it wouldn’t sustain me. I was fractured between that work, my documentary projects, my business, my marriage, my family and the trials of homeownership. So decided to leave. 

Before I left, I needed a place to land. For years, I had been working from home, which sounds like a good idea in theory, but work always lurked like a wildcat crouched for ambush, and the rest of my life felt out of reach. That’s when I found Mercury Studio. I remember the first time I walked in and met Katie. She was low-key and warm. Orange afternoon light bathed an open space that lacked polish or pretense; it was perfect without perfection as its goal. It felt like anything was possible here. I could start a garage band or a rebellion; make a masterpiece, or just make a mess. It felt like a creative womb, with just enough distraction — a place where my ADHD could thrive, and my torrent of ideas could flow. Here, I could just be.

When I was ready, I signed up for a desk membership, and worked here during my downtime from The INDY, and plugged into the community. It had all the charm of a newsroom without the office politics. Here, we work with each other, toward a bigger goal: working free. I was falling in love with it all.

And then my marriage fell apart. I divorced my wife suddenly. Friends who thought they knew the truth about what had happened betrayed me. Then my young cousin died of a heroin overdose. The blows kept coming. But my “co-workers” carried me through the most disorienting year of my life. This was the year I started all over again, like I’m used to doing. I learned more about myself than ever before, and confirmed what I had always known was true. I upgraded to an office and got an office mate and had a lot of fun. Mercury Studio became my refuge. It forced me to slow down, to take a breath and take care of myself — to be free in my freelance.

Mercury Studio saved my life.

Mercury Studio is no more. But in merging with The Makery, it has become something much more. The third effect is The Mothership, a co-working and event space, and a laboratory for ideas. Above all else, it’s a radically-accepting, collaborative community. And it’s run by women with a vision, who don’t need your permission.

It’s shots fired at an entrepreneurial culture that’s just empty. It’s a challenge to all of us to build the future we want right here, right now.

Thanks for everything Katie, Megan, and Krista Anne.

Work free or die.

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Tearsheets: Kim Brand in the 2016 National Audubon Society annual report, and Sarah Barton for Seattle Pacific University’s RESPONSE Magazine. Thanks Sabine and Leah for the calls! All images © 2017 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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2016

2016 was a year of working with great clients, and reconnecting with myself and the people I love, through chaos and with my camera. I took on assignments I felt like were made just for me. I felt more creative than ever, and photographed my own life with the same intensity with which I’ve photographed so many people who have trusted me in their most vulnerable moments through the years.

I’ve joked that 2016 is more of a verb: | [to͞o ˈTHouz(ə)nd sikˈstēn] To end abruptly, take too soon, maim, kill, destroy, set aflame, ruin, abandon, in an untimely, incomprehensible, insane, reckless, nonsensical, unreasonable, unjustifiable, shocking way; to repeatedly inflict tragedy upon someone or something, inducing compounding sorrows; having died in 2016: “Molly’s house got 2016ed by a tree during Hurricane Matthew.” ”My grandfather’s brain is getting 2016ed. Alzheimer’s.” “Look, that dumpster is on fire. Who 2016ed that dumpster? Wait that’s no dumpster – that *is* 2016.” “David Bowie, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Leonard Cohen, George Michael, and that lady who fell 30,000 feet during a plane crash and lived, all died this year – 2016ed.” From the last incomprehensible white-knuckle weeks of my marriage, to my cousin Tommy’s overdose death, to the rise of Donald Trump, and all the celebrities who passed, if 2016 proves anything, it’s that the tropes of “everything happens for a reason or “the phoenix rises from the ashes” are crap. The universe is fickle and indifferent – it births stars from ash, but doesn’t care if they shine on you.

My life and my career tell me that most suffering is meaningless. But it’s the best teacher. It teaches you what you are really made of. Priorities come into stark relief; molehills don’t feel like mountains anymore. You learn to create your own catharsis and closure. Suffering is a glue stronger than gravity that bonds people. Everywhere I looked, I saw people being resilient, despite personal and cosmic suffering. They picked themselves, pushed on, they created, and commiserated and celebrated despite it. 

What a struggle it’s been.  If I had to struggle in 2016, I’m glad I struggled along with you. Forward together – relentlessly.

Much love, and thanks for everything.

All images © 2016 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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My Favorite Books of 2016

There are a few of the books that helped me navigate the tempest that was 2016, and chart new courses in myself. Pardon all the astrophysics. “H” Is for Hawk - Helen Macdonald

A memoir about grief and wildness. Macdonald conjures pictures and moods with a feral yet precise wordcraft that more resembles sorcery. It felt like she was writing to me. Hands down my favorite thing I’ve read all year. From the New York Times: “The premise of her memoir is simple: Macdonald loses her bearings after her beloved father’s sudden death. She retreats from the human world. She’s a poet, historian and longtime falconer, and for complicated reasons, she seizes upon a strange yet sublime prescription for what ails her: She will raise and train a young goshawk, a cur of a bird to some, notoriously difficult to tame. Bigger, “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier,” she says, than other hawks they are sometimes confused with.” Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan

I devoured books about astronomy and astrophysics, including this ultimate cosmic perspective, written by the wizard of NASA’s Voyager Spacecraft program. Humanity is so small and irrelevant in a vast, indifferent universe. I can’t believe I waited until now to read this classic. It will put the cowards and fools in your life, the chaos of the world in perspective. Read it along with Cosmos.  So relevant in 2016: “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” -- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond

A masterwork of journalism about landlords, evictions and poverty in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So haunting, so meticulously and relentlessly reported. An incendiary marriage of facts and narrative. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking

Imagine an early universe so hot that atoms can’t exist because all particles are being cooked. In an instant, the force holding it all together balloons and shatters into the known laws of physics. The energy soup that is the infant universe cools, matter forms, and with it, mass and gravity. But the physics of the very small and very large are disconnected. This classic book chronicles the quest to unify them again, in one complete theory. Yeah. My head hurts trying to imagine it all, too. Wait until you read about black holes. Essential stuff for exploding your brain. Read it along with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Origins. The ADHD Advantage: What You Thought Was a Diagnosis May Be Your Greatest Strength - Dale Archer, M.D.

Some of the most creative, entrepreneurial, driven people in the history of the world had/have ADHD -- the explorer gene. Richard Branson, Emily Dickenson, Kurt Cobain, and so many more. How do you build a life around your greatest strength, when everything around you seems set up to fail you? How do you stay a hunter in farmer’s world? I’ve known about my ADHD since I was 6. It has been my greatest shame and my jet fuel. This book felt like a pat on the back, and a push to master myself despite the odds.  Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People - Jackson MacKenzie

How do you recover a sense of self in the wake of a toxic relationship? Start with this book.  The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity - Julie Cameron

I had no shortage of creativity this year, but I felt burned out from photography. How to recapture the wonder I had as a child, that ultimately led me to live a creative life? Write every morning. And follow the weekly exercises in this book. Reconnect with the artist child in you, and learn to be kinder to yourself. Pilgrimage - Annie Leibovitz 

Burned out from her high-profile, high-stress commercial photography career, Leibovitz reconnected with herself by photographing the spaces and ephemera of her greatest artistic heroes and sheroes: From Thoreau’s bed to Ansel Adams Yosimite, to Georgia O’Keefe’s homemade pastels, and Emily Dickinson’s clothes.  How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie 

Hard to believe this book is 75 years old. For anyone in leadership, striking out on their own, or trying to navigate today’s animus dialogues. “Three techniques for handling people. Six ways to make people like you. Twelve ways to win people to you way of thinking. Nine ways to change people without arousing resentment. Time tested, anecdotal examples from the titans of leadership.”

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Cubs fan Bruce Ladd for ESPN. Thanks for the call, Rachel! All images © 2016 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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St. Louis, Missouri. All images © 2016 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

[shawnrocco]

A little levity for the day. #nodumping #durham #dogsofinsta #dogstagram

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YESSSS

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First time voter, Shere Williams, in Durham, N.C. An outtake from a recent New York Times assignment. Thanks for the call, Tanner! All images © 2016 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

[iancbates]

National Geographic sent me to Sun Valley, Idaho to photograph the area’s diverse activities. It was my first travel story and I had a good time trying to work in a different capacity. Thanks for the opportunity Jess!

Link here: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/destinations/united-states/idaho/day-night-sun-valley-idaho/

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Lovely work by @iancbates

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Disadvantaged Students Outnumbered at Top Public Boarding Schools for Education Week Some outtakes from this fun story about minority and lower-income students at boarding schools. We focused on The North Carolina School for Science and Mathematics, blocks from my house here in Durham. Thanks for the call, Charlie! All images © 2016 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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Orange County Republican Party headquarters in Hillsborough, N.C. firebombed for The New York Times.  Lot’s of outtakes from this assignment yesterday.  1). Campaign volunteers continued phone operations outside their headquarters. 2). The hole where the molotov cocktail allegedly entered the building. 3). The interior damage from smoke and flame. Authorities believe the fire extinguished itself after running out of oxygen. 4). Evelyn Poole-Kober, the vice chairwoman of the Orange County Republican Party, poses for a portrait by the window. 5). Smoke-damaged George W. Bush bobble-head. 6). Smoke-damaged books by conservative personalities. 7). The swastika and graffiti that read “Nazi Republicans leave town or else” had been covered up by police. 8.) A melted, soot-covered eagle on a singed American flag. 9). Volunteer Blake Halsey mans the phones outside. 10). Ken Grantham of Carolina Game and Fish, and his customers found it hard to believe that anybody from Hillsborough could be involved in the firebombing.

---- Thanks for the call Marisa. All images © 2016 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh, N.C. for Walter Magazine Loved working with Tony and Anita on this story. Tony is a renaissance man. All images © 2016 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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Michigan sunsets: Presque Isle and Flint. 

All images © 2016 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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Outtakes from a recent assignment for VICE about domestic-violence-related mass shootings in America. 

“The term "mass shooting" often inspires visions of chaos, of armed men raining bullets indiscriminately on schools or nightclubs or blighted urban streets. The public imagination paints them as capricious storms of violence that appear as quickly as they churn through the news cycle. Above all, we perceive them as public, the victims at best acquaintances of the killer, and at worst random targets of a deep, faceless hate.But the majority of mass shootings are private acts, neither random nor unpredictable. In fact, close to 60 percent of those that kill four or more people unfold just as this one did in Ravenel on May 17—not gangland feuds or terrorist attacks but intimate executions carried out in quiet homes by ordinary men who murder the women and children closest to them over slights as insignificant as a new phone number or a custody hearing.” Top: South Carolina Senator Marlon Kimpson (District 42 - Charleston and Dorchester Counties) in Charleston, SC has introduced common-sense gun-control bills in the South Carolina Legislature.

Bottom: The graves of Armani Mungin, 8; Betty Mungin, 55; Alexis Mungin, 29 and her unborn twins. Kenneth Lamar Ancrum, 23, faces 5 murder charges in their shooting deaths.

All images © 2016 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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Summer storm, July 2016.

All images © 2016 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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Scientist’s drive for a cancer cure inspired by the father he doesn’t remember An honor to photograph this brilliant man for STAT News: “MIT Technology Review recognized [Zhen] Gu as one of the world’s top 35 innovators under 35, putting him in the company of previous winners Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page. “I would not hesitate to say that Zhen is one of the most creative people with whom I have ever worked,” said renowned MIT inventor Bob Langer, who nominated his protégé for the honor. “Zhen never seems to run out of ideas.”[...] Gu has also wrapped drugs in cocoons made of DNA and encased them in orbs of liquid metal. He has even drawn inspiration from our own bodies by cloaking cancer drugs in the membranes of platelets, the cells that keep us from bleeding to death from a cut or scrape.” All images © 2016 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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Mt. Airy, NC. An outtake from a March Education Week “Federal Grants Boost N.C.’s ‘Early College’ High School Push”

All images © 2016 Justin Cook Documentary Photography. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.