Feb 23, 2025
Scenic Overlook Saturday – Dallas Divide Overlook, Colorado
📸 by Lars Leber Photography
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Scenic Overlook Saturday – Dallas Divide Overlook, Colorado
📸 by Lars Leber Photography
Veterans gone fishing at Black Canyon National Park
In March, three federal agencies joined forces to host a fly fishing event for veterans. The BLM, National Park Service, and Bureau of Reclamation invited Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, a non-profit organization, to fish in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and Curecanti National Recreation Area in Colorado. Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing is dedicated to the physical and emotional rehabilitation of disabled active military and disabled veterans through fly fishing.
Michael Marinkovich, volunteer and visitor coordinator for the BLM's Uncompahgre Field Office, helped bring the three agencies together to support the event. Marinkovich was an interpretive park ranger at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park when he first starting working with the Montrose chapter of Project Healing Waters. After joining the BLM, Marinkovich wanted to stay involved with the organization and orchestrated this event for the benefit of local veterans.
Last month, Marinkovich escorted ten veterans to fish an area with special permission from the Bureau of Reclamation and the National Park Service. "The opportunity to collaborate as agencies to serve a great group of veterans with Project Healing Waters is always an awesome experience," said Marinkovich.
Charles Watkins, a veteran that participated in the event, said, "The Healing Waters Fly Fishing group is a phenomenal resource to local veterans. I got to go out with a group of like-minded veterans to experience a part of Colorado I would have never been able to experience without this group. I would not have been able to do this without the wonderful people in the Healing Waters Fly Fishing group, and their partnerships with the BLM, NPS and BOR to make this experience possible."
I am finally spending some time posting original content and updating my website. My photographs tend to range in topic like most people with multiple interests and a camera in hand. You’ll be seeing studio portraits, still life, and some casual travel/tourism photography.
The above image captured in the Western USA. A small population of a once larger trading post and ranching town, Leadville, CO is now a stop-through town for many that are on their way further into the Rockies.
Me + Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Colorado
That drop is a half mile deep.
Well, I did my best to clean this one up and I’m still not sure if I like it.
One of the first projects we did for my old graphic designing class at college was to create a travel poster for a place (real or fictitious.) I decided to create another poster based on my love for the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
Please do not repost without giving credit.
To each their own Americana.
Out there in the lower elevations of the Rocky Mountains there are places that look as if you could be in the more rural but lush plains. The mountains ranges are not just rocks. A vast green land blankets the spaces between thin air.
Uncanny
Gallery Gossip Girl here,
There is something so discomforting and delicious about a little uncanny valley...on purpose. In a world of A.I Slop, outlandish edits and plastic surgery norms, messing with an image in an obvious and purposeful way, feels like a reclamation.
Cue in art by Aaron Graves at Shutter & Strum.
Aaron has been known in this town for years for his meticulously painted and posed, hyper realistic mannequins. They have been used in photo shoots and videos, installations and fashion shows. When you think of mannequins, you think of Aaron Graves.
His exhibition, "Uncanny" features 16 mannequin portraits. They line the grey walls with school-photo precision, each dressed the same and posed in similar fashions from the bust up.
At first, the show feels like a spooky, and somewhat unimpressive, photography exhibition of perfect looking models. Perfect makeup, perfect, crisp, white dress shirts in perfect grey frames lined up in perfectly measured distance from one another.
It feels cold in the room, eyes peering AT YOU, not the other way around.
As you begin to investigate the works closer, you find plastic divisions on wrists, hard hairlines, and brushstrokes of eyebrows. These are not perfect models, these are plastic mannequins.
They stare intensely at you from their non-human eyes. It is intense, upon realization, but also comforting? Something about acknowledging their fakeness feels like an answer. We are so bombarded with edited imagery that I don't even know if what I am looking at is real online anymore. I don't even know if I care. Here, we are presented with absoluteness- these may look real, but I promise you, they are not.
These mannequins were each handcrafted in an old sculpture tradition of working with live models to create incredibly realistic forms. Some, tracing back to the 60's, feel so real with such undeniable attention to detail. Partially, that detail is in thanks to the painter Graves hires. His mannequin painter has been with him since he first gained interest in collecting vintage mannequins. This is a brilliantly talented oil painter who specializes in hyper-realistic makeup. The work is stunning. The paint job drives the uncanny realism home with perfectly placed beauty marks, the gloss of makeup, and the shadows of eyelashes. Jaw-Dropping talent.
It is a unique interest, mannequins.
Maybe it is the draw to control? Maybe it is the admiration of this lost artform? Maybe it is a passion for perfection?
After visiting this show, I find myself thinking about that uncanny image. Half of the photos I scroll past on Instagram give me this same uneasy feeling I was noticing in Grave's exhibition. The images are almost human, almost artificially produced, almost edited to realism. A stomach ache for my eyeballs. Anymore so, I can not tell if the content I am engaging with was even created by humans. What an uncomfortable place to be in.
Aaron Graves has harnessed that very same discomfort, photographed it and presented it to us, in 16 uncanny photographs.
Visit Shutter & Strum this month Friday, Saturday and Sunday
2217 E Platte Ave, Colorado Springs, CO 80909
XOXOX
Gallery Gossip Girl