Austin-based photographer Blake Gordon wants people to turn off their televisions and get outside. He transports us to natural landscapes throughout the American West, with an old school television.

A graduate student of Design at the University of Texas at Austin, he is represented by Aurora Select.

Matt and I arrived in Norfolk recent graduates of two different photojournalism programs, Ohio University and the University of Missouri, but we both felt the same nostalgia for the community of photographers we had gone to school with. The wide world outside of school is exciting and daunting; without a peer group to reinforce your work and spur your progress, you can feel unmoored. We are right to feel this way; entering this job market, we navigate an uncertain landscape, propelled by little more than an irresistible commitment to photojournalism. Matt is a freelancer and founding member of LUCEO, which is a robust collective of talented emerging photographers, and I am at my first newspaper staff job at The Virginian-Pilot after internships at The Herald in Jasper, Ind. and The Dallas Morning News. Though our career paths are different, we share a dedication to the communities we photograph and try to become better photographers and better storytellers, everyday. We learn to be better from the people around us, our peers and our subjects, not by sitting at our computers considering our own work (though, to be fair, I think we all do plenty of that.)

By some accident of geography and timing, Norfolk and the surrounding area is populated with some remarkable photographers. Sick of looking at one another’s work all the time, Matt and I wanted to invite them all over and see what they were working on. I had an empty garage and access to a projector. Matt and Melissa had a living room and dining room and, of course, that wide and welcoming porch. Looking to recreate some of that community we missed, we decided to open our doors and invite all the photographers in the Tidewater area to come over for some beer and some photos, asking them to hop the fence after the show for a party at Matt and Melissa’s house. We called it Hop The Fence Photo Night.

I swept the garage, I set up an ancient projector screen from a forgotten storage closet at the Pilot, and lit a fire in the backyard. That first night, Tim Gruber and Jenn Ackerman came up from their retreat on the Outer Banks to talk about their transition from school to freelancing, Ross Taylor, a new staff photographer at the Pilot, showed work from a recent trip to Bangledesh, local photographer Jesse Hutcheson showed work, and two students from ODU, Shane and Caroline, shared photos. We drank, we sat around the fire, we looked at pictures and listened. On subsequent nights we’ve seen work from Nicole Fruge, Maisie Crow, Ryan Henriksen, Brendan Hoffman, Pilot former editor Norm Shafer and the always surprising high-school photographer Richard Perkins, among others. We’ve had hot chocolate in the winter and lemonade in the spring, and this upcoming Hop The Fence Photo Night with be our biggest, as it falls on Matt’s birthday. If you’re in Norfolk, Va. on July the 11th, feel free to drop by and bring work to share.

We see work from students just beginning their forays into photography to accomplished photojournalists, and the discussion, though sometimes long, is always fruitful. As we all know through following APAD, there are communities all over the country, waiting to be coalesced, and there is a relaxed camaraderie to seeing pictures in a garage in your own neighborhood. All it took was a projector, some beer and an email list. So far, it’s been a great year.

The book is sold through Soth’s publishing arm Little Brown Mushroom. They are certainly doing some interesting things up there in Minnesota.

The website is a series of ongoing vignettes produced, directed & captured by Filmmaker Drea Cooper & Photographer Zackary Canepari.

oneyearofbooks gives you inspiration for the latter. Don’t blame me or Laurence Vecten when it comes to paying rent next month. And if you are responsible, perhaps you can connect with Laurence and see about trading books.

Photographer Tim Hussin is taking some time with his brother Noah to travel throughout the country and tell stories about people in everyday communities that are making a difference.

With Noah’s background as a 2008 Fullbright Scholar, and Tim’s experience interning at both National Geographic and MediaStorm.org after being named the 2009 College Phtotographer of the Year, this brotherly duo is out to shake things up a bit.

Instead of relying solely on the decisions of editors and publishers to tell the stories they discover while cycling across the country, they are seeking funding from the general public.

And if you donate to their publicly-funded cause, you will receive a gift ranging from a postcard to a huge poster-sized print as a special thanks.

America reCycled