The Art of Loneliness

Me at Badlands National Park, South Dakota, June 2019. Photo by Scott Pretorius. The more I pursue my artistic interests—whether photography, music, filmmaking, or any of the others—the more I embrace the self-prescribed loneliness that goes with that pursuit. Loneliness as an artist isn’t a universal truth, of course. But I find in my experience...

Do You Want To Build A Snowman?

A long, lonely highway somewhere in the prairies of South Dakota, 2019. Photo by Rob Salem. Copyright © 2019-2021 Rob Salem/The Stormworks. Inertia. (noun): The resistance of a physical object to a change in its state of motion, unless acted upon by some external force. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Objects in...

No Perfect Mondays

Aerial photo by Rob Salem. Copyright © 2021 Rob Salem/The Stormworks I’m one of those guys that likes to plan. And when planning I have a need to make the start of a thing line up with the calendar in such a way that it will start on the “first” of a block of calendar...

The Weight of Things to Come

I'm currently working on a music video. It's... heavy. Musically, yes--it's for a metal song after all. But that's not what I mean. The content--some of it shot by me, some provided to me for use in this video--has an emotional gravity to it that is making it tough to work on. I can see...

Making More of Less: The Spaces Between

  There’s a thought in music that says that the spaces between notes are more important than the notes themselves. Essentially, this is the notion that notes played are made more valuable by the silence around them. As a guitar player I agree with this notion. But I think it’s an idea the goes beyond...

Good? Bad? Good Enough?

I'm currently working on a project that involves going through the several thousand photos I've taken the last few years and figuring out which ones I like enough for commercial use while keeping in mind the purpose of the end product and the probable consumer demographic. It's a project that's been on the back burner...

A New Year & A New Start

  I’ve had this blog for a few years, but haven’t really done much with it the past year or so. The past couple, really. I’ve made occasional posts here and there, but with no consistency nor any mind towards developing the identity of this particular corner of the internet beyond what it’s been for...

El Salvador: Imagen y Palabra

Let’s start with a cliché: El Salvador is a country of stark contrasts. Cliché, but true. I suppose that could be said about most places in the world but given its status as one of the most dangerous countries in the world that isn’t an active warzone, I’d say it’s particularly true of El Salvador....

Ars Gratia Artis

Something that's been bothering me lately is the tendency of others to always make art about money. Before I go any further, I want to clearly state that I'm absolutely in favor of artists of all mediums being compensated fairly for their work, and that the above statement is relevant to a specific phenomenon I've...

Ricky

Meet Ricky. Looks like a happy guy, yeah? He was happy to talk and happy to let me take a couple photos of him, especially after my partner in Nova Vox handed him one of the sleeping bags we had to pass out to homeless people that night. This is the photo of all the...