Desert Tango

The thing I love about being a photojournalist, and I’m sure the same is for most everyone else out there, is that you never know what the day will bring. There is a certain magic in that living in the moment flow you develop when you don’t know whats around the next corner. My case in point is related to a story I’m working on about a homeless guy named Bernhard Schultze. Bernhard is great guy, he’s a spunky little guy with tons of character, a zest for life, and he’s a German living on the streets here in the heart of Indian Country. I really didn’t intend to do a photo story proper on the guy, maybe a character profile or something, but tha’ts what it has evolved into. It’s really interesting to see how someone who has so little can give so much back to the people’s lives he touches.

One of the things I find interesting about Berhard is that he, due to his circumstances, is completely living his life in the moment. He’s not worried where his next meal or pack of cigarettes will come from, he knows they will come, as they have for the past several years. He says he never makes plans, he just simply lives and life happens; he’s along for the ride. Yesterday he went so far as to tell me that he likes being homeless because of this. Cool.

I’m not ready to show any images from the story yet, so I apologize for that. I want to present it as a cohesive package, but I love some of the situations I find myself in when I with Bernhard. From taking belts of whiskey and smoking marijuana in an alleyway to going to listening to the preacher at church, you never know what to expect from him. So here are a few outtakes what will most likely not end with the final story:

To live in New Mexico without the occasional UFO sighting wouldn’t be living life to the fullest, or at least to have a UFO convention come to town, which we did. In trying to illustrate the idea in a preview story for the Gallup Independent, I had to come up with something, so I went with the hoaky idea of tossing a couple of pie pans glued together in front of an old historic building in town, which also happens to be the place where the convention was held. Yea it’s little campy, but that’s the effect I was going for:

Over the past 5 months I’ve made two trips to Oregon. It’s a truly beautiful place, and some of it stands in contrast to the southwest desert in which I live. Here’s a few of my favorites from my trip:

This being my first post, I think an introduction is in order. My name is Brian Leddy and I am photographer based in western New Mexico. I work for the Gallup Independent, a 16,000 circulation daily newspaper based in Gallup. While photojournalism is my primary area of focus, I do a lot of outdoor, portrait and other editorial stuff on a freelance and personal work basis. I love the outdoors, and thus I’ve been branching out into that area of shooting. As mountain biker myself, I’ve been putting a lot of effort into shooting anything to do with the sport. I’m fortunate enough to live in a region where we’ve got a fantastic network of trails and great people to ride with. A few somewhat recent magazine articles have called us the next Moab. Maybe so, maybe no, but for a serious mountain biker, this place is a dream. With that I’ll leave you with a few images from a race I shot a few weeks ago of the Squash Blossom Class Screamer on our High Desert Trail System.