By JAMES K. BOYCE
With photos by TIANNE STROMBECK
Sitting on a boulder one morning on a little island in northwestern Ontario, I watched a loon fishing about fifty yards offshore. The air and water were dead calm, the lake surface mirroring the clouds above and the trees along the shoreline.
By NINA FULLER
Nina Fuller is a Maine-based photographer, writer, counselor, and sheep farmer whose career spans more than five decades. Known for her evocative images of animals, landscapes, and rural life, Nina creates much of her work from her farm and carriage-house studio in Hollis, Maine. Her fine art photography often captures moments of stillness and natural light within the daily rhythm of farm life, bringing visual poetry to the textured reality of wool, wood, and pasture. Her work reflects a deep reverence for nature and animals. As Nina explains, “There is peace within the chaos—the sheep, the light in the barn, the feeling that this could be two hundred years ago.” Whether photographing a running lamb, a quiet flower, or a collapsing fence, Nina captures more than just image—she reveals emotion, texture, and timeless presence.
Courtesy of the Portland Art Gallery
By MAJD HIJJAWI, MOMEN MALKAWI, and HUSAM MANASRAH
Photography by Majd Hijjawi
An abandoned villa in Um Uthaina. This house is a remnant of a once affluent residential neighborhood in Amman, with an eighties architectural style popular at the time. This home no longer exists, as commercial projects have been taking over the neighborhood.
By ZOE VALERY
This woman in the airport is neither catching a plane nor meeting one. (…)
Why is this woman in this airport? Why is she going nowhere, where has she been?
—Joan Didion, “Why I Write” (1976)
In the margins of the Strip, planes shimmer in and out of Las Vegas. I photographed this periphery, populated by plane watchers. Why they watch and why I write seem to be connected by a tenuous link that became clearer as the afternoon transpired.
*
Sundown marks the time and the place for a discreet show among Las Vegas locals. At the golden hour, vehicles on Sunset Road veer toward McCarran International Airport and park in front of the runway. While the casino-jammed stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard known as the Strip blinks itself awake in the background, the airstrip stages a steady stream of landings and take-offs. Every day, new and seasoned plane watchers come here to view the aircrafts rolling between the sky and the Vegas skyline.
Years ago, I wrote that seekers of all stripes—journalists, philosophers, scientists, mystics—are chasing the same elusive thing: something like truth, understanding, a fully integrated perspective, awakeness, untangling. We just ask questions in different contexts, modalities, and microcosms.
“The bunker was the reality of totalitarianism, its hideous remnant and reminder. The beheaded, violated, mutilated ghosts of Nicaragua bore witness, every day, to what used to happen here, and must never happen again.”
—Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile
In the early hours of July 17, 1979, Anastasio Somoza snapped shut the last of his suitcases, preparing to leave. He took one last look at his newspaper; little things like pens, paper clips, and dust lay scattered around the desk, his daily mess. He’d expected this departure for days, yet he was still rushed; he was irritated and scared. In the bunker office, the stiff leather furniture and the leather-covered walls gleamed as the dim ceiling light flickered. Behind him, caught in the somber solitude of that late night of surrender, hung a large relief map of Nicaragua, the country he had “inherited” and ruled, and was now abandoning. The country whose people he had abused, tortured, waged war against. The country that was now aflame at his doorstep.
By TEJU COLE
She wrote: color is the sound an object makes in response to light. Objects don’t speak unless spoken to. An object does not have a color—it makes a color (the way a bell makes a sound).
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