Documentary Photography

North Country travels, June 2026

(Click on each photo to see a larger image in a separate picture page.)

I recently completed a long overdue trip to the North Country, driving by car from the Twin Cities in Minnesota, to another pair of twin cities, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: Houghton and Hancock. I racked up 800 miles in three days and was able to get a glimpse into another place in time, when the region of northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan were centers for mining and resource extraction that helped to fuel the industrial revolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Houghton and Hancock were once hubs of mining-related commerce and waves of immigration from Europe that attracted many immigrant laborers, including my Finnish great grandparents. Today the area feels like a shell of its former boom days at the early part of the 20th century. The old Suomi College (renamed Finlandia University), founded by Finnish immigrants in Hancock, folded in 2023, leaving the former university empty after a century of education and learning. Michigan Tech University still thrives in Houghton.

My great grandparents, who mostly spoke Finnish for decades, raised their five kids in Hancock, and lived there until their respective deaths in the mid-1930s and late 1960s. I had long known that my great grandparents, on my birth mother’s maternal side, had emigrated to Hancock in the early 1900s, like thousands of other Finnish immigrants, who came to work the dozens of copper mines that are found in the Keweenaw Peninsula on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. My great grandfather, who died before he turned 58, labored in a coal dock, likely creating lasting health issues that led to an early death.

The author, Rudy Owens, explores downtown Houghton during his short visit to the communities where his Finnish relatives lived for decades.

The Keweenaw Peninsula is considered to have one of the richest copper reserves ever dug from North America, and those reserves and the decades of mining in the 19th and 20th centuries are what pulled in immigrants from all over Europe, including from then-Russian controlled Finland. My kin from Finland were among thousands who made that journey to start a hard, new life. Dozens of copper mines thrived, and then once the reserves were extracted, began to shut down by the start of World War II, including the historic Quincy Mine, that stands like a dark tower of Mordor above the struggling city of Hancock, in the valley below the hills.

The Upper Peninsula is completely off any travel path. It remains remote today. The remoteness of the area, and its distance the Pacific Northwest, where I have lived most of my adult life, meant I kept putting off a trip for decades. But, having connected with my Finnish kin in Finland in 2023, it felt like the right time to see the land the Finnish immigrants including my own family settled in the United States.

Finally I found a nice window and booked a four-day, three-night trip in early June 2026.

My journey began with a flight from Portland to Minneapolis. From there, I drove mostly state highways in Minnesota, Wisconsin. The trip took me through the northern small cities and communities of northern Wisconsin and the now visibly right-leaning communities one passes along the way in Wisconsin and Michigan: Mellen, Montreal, Hurley, Ironwood, Wakefield, Bergland, Mass City—before you arrive in Houghton and Hancock. I did as much as I could into a day and a half in the cities of my distant relatives in Michigan.

I felt very comfortable and connected here as a native Michigander, who was born of a half-Finnish-American mother who, with her parents, spent a lot of her life in Detroit. I have always considered myself both a native of Michigan and Detroit—in my DNA. I am a native son.

Once I arrived in my destination, in Hancock, I visited the once bustling mining city of Calumet, located about 10 minutes north of Hancock. It once had nearly 30,000 people and immigrants from all over Europe working in the copper mines at the turn of the 1900s, including at the large Calumet & Hecla Mine. I visited the famous memorial to the 74 victims of the terrible tragedy on Christmas Eve 1913 at Calumet’s Italian Hall, amid a violent and long copper miners strike that rocked the region and captivated the nation. I visited a family sauna on a family farm owned by a relative I met for the first time outside of Houghton. I visited the house where my great grandparents lived for decades, and was invited in by the owner. And I visited the graves of my great grandparents. I also walked the two cities and in nearby nature trails, soaking up the beauty and history.

On my drive back to the Twin Cities, I took a spectacular detour to the shores of Lake Superior. The water was clear and surprising warm. The temperature was in the mid-60s F. I was at peace. I drive up to the popular Lake of the Clouds Overlook in the lush, Scenic Porcupine Wilderness Mountains State Park and allowed the amazing landscape to cast its spell. By 6 p.m. on my last day, I was back in Minneapolis feeling alive and renewed. What  a trip indeed!

With love from Portland to Greenland and Denmark

In response to the ongoing threats being made by the leader of the United States to Greenland and Denmark, I want to say to my personal friends in both lands, and all the people that call those places home, we in the United States, the people of the United States, are your friends. We send love.

To show this, I took these photos this morning (January 25, 2026) in Portland, Oregon, at Nordia House, a cultural center celebrating the ties between Nordic nations and peoples and the United States.

Everyone who I met shared warm words for all the people in Greenland and Denmark. We the people will never sever our friendship. We the people are not spoken for by the increasingly dangerous man who is leading my country to a dark place.

To that darkness, I shine light. That light is the love you see here from the people, some who have relatives in Denmark and others who will be visiting.

To see all of my portraits as individual photos, visit the my “Love Portraits” page dedicated to the people of Greenland and Denmark.

A summer trip to Finland, in black and white

I spent two weeks in Finland in late August and early September 2025. I published the majority of photos on my Flickr account, where I have now collected photos from four trips I have made since 2023.

For some of my photos, I choose to create final images in black and white. I like Finland in color and black and white. Finland remains very special to me. Two of my great grandparents emigrated from South Ostrobothnia, Finland to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the early 1900s. On my last trip, I stopped in one of my ancestral villages, Kortesjärvi. It was my second time there. I felt a special feeling in my skin there. It’s hard to describe. It felt like home.

No Kings Day in Portland, a history making moment in U.S. democracy

In the United States, we just witnessed the single largest collective and nonviolent and peaceful protests ever in the history of our country.

That’s right: October 18, 2025, “No Kings Day,” will go down in American history as a defining day for our troubled, imperiled democracy.

The protests were mobilized around one theme: that in the United States we have no kings. And they took place to challenge the authority of a sitting president and his administration that have falsely called peaceful American cities, like my hometown of Portland, Oregon, “war zones.”

Current estimates peg the number of protesters at 7 million, at least, in more than 2,600 locations, spread throughout every state.

VISIT MY POST ON MY WEBSITE TO SEE MORE PHOTOS AND READ MORE.

Memories of the North Rim, Grand Canyon

Today I learned, to my utter dismay, the historic Grand Canyon Lodge inside Grand Canyon National Park, on its North Rim, was destroyed by a wildfire.

There are few details outside of the initial announcement made the National Park Service the morning of July 13, 2025.

The lodge opened in 1937, and it has been run for years by the rapacious and problem-plagued Aramark concessionaire company, which for decades has poorly managed many national park public assets under government contract at parks like Grand Canyon.

A historic photo at the the the North Rim Lodge, taken in the late 1930s. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service, for Creative Commons use only.)

The lodge had one of the finest viewpoints I’ve ever had at any United States National Park, which serve as cultural and natural institutions that remain national treasures of all the American people. Long before white settlers stepped foot on the North American continent, all the lands in what is now Grand Canyon Park were the domain of indigenous tribes, who continue to call the area home.

As of midday July 13, 2025, two wildfires are burning on the North Rim, having burned more than 45,000 acres. The White Sage fire has burned 40,126 acres (16,200 hectares) near the North Rim, and the Dragon Bravo fire, burning to the south within Grand Canyon national park, has scorched 5,000 acres, according to the InciWeb website.

The moment I read the story about the blaze and destruction of the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, my mind raced back to the one night I spent there in September 2005.

I had flown down to Arizona from my then home in Anchorage, Alaska, to visit my old grad school roommate from our years together at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1991 and after. He and his family had settled in beautiful Flagstaff. The trip allowed us to catch up and do an adventure–running across the Grand Canyon, one of the most famous and world-class trail runs in North America.

My friend and host, Jeff, was very ambitious.

Jeff plotted a run from the South Rim, to the North Rim, and then back (called “Rim to Rim to Rim,” in trail parlance). I would meet him at the Grand Canyon Lodge for the night and do the simpler and shorter “Rim to Rim run” (about 24 miles) from the North Rim to the South Rim only. My run is the classic run. Jeff’s run is for the truly hardcore trail runner, which he was at the time.

We got incredibly lucky, scoring a room in a cabin by the lodge that had a vacancy open up before I arrived. We had been prepared to camp out in the elements on the North Rim, but I am not sure how that would have worked. Even in late summer, it can be freezing at night. But fate was good to us.

Everything worked out perfectly. Jeff ran across solo safely to get our cabin room. I took the shuttle bus to the Grand Canyon Lodge, arriving after a five hour drive, near sunset, after spending the first half the day on the South Rim doing a canyon rim hike. We both got about four to five hours of sleep, awaking around 4 a.m. I ate a terrible pizza at the lodge’s subpar cafeteria to load up on carbohydrates.

We awoke in near freezing weather and darkness under the stars. We grabbed a photo in the dark at the North Rim Trailhead, just where the 6,000 foot descent to the Colorado begins.

I had a nasty spill that day, cutting open my hand on some sharp rocks, but otherwise the day was pure magic. We made excellent time, stopping at Phantom Ranch, by the Colorado River, to refill our Camelback water pouches and buy some food, and we got to the top of the South Rim by mid-afternoon.

I continued to do trail runs for many years after this epic outing, but this adventure, with a good friend, Jeff, remains my most memorable trail run.

I’ll always have that memory of standing on the edge of the canyon, at sunset, gazing at 2-billion-year-old metamorphic rocks turning purple and dark orange hues as the sun slowly slipped over the horizon.

Nothing ever truly lasts, but this news still fills me with sorrow. The country lost something special today that we will never have back.

(I published most of these photos 11 years earlier, and wanted to share them again with this memory of what is now gone forever: Grand Canyon Lodge.)

‘Democracy is a verb’
Signs at protest Sellwood Bridge
Sign at protest Sellwood Bridge
People protesting Sellwood Bridge
Sign at protest Sellwood Bridge

Every Friday since early April I have been joining a group of mostly older (like me) Portland residents at peaceful protests on Portland’s Sellwood Bridge during the Friday night, after-work rush hour.

The local organizers live in southeast Portland, like me, not far from Sellwood Bridge. The bridge is found on the south side of Portland, straddling the Willamette River. It’s a busy corridor for traffic heading from mostly Democratic and left-of-center leaning Multnomah County to a more evenly split jurisdiction politically, Clackamas County, which lies the south.

The organizers call their weekly civic event “Friday protests on the Sellwood Bridge.” It is an apt name. Their mission is simple too: “Our goal is to encourage our community to stay engaged and to use our voices and First Amendment rights to protest any erosion of our Constitutional freedoms or functioning government.” 

The last event took place on Friday, May 30, 2025. My photos, all intentionally hiding most of the faces of the participants, were taken at the protest under sunny, warm skies.

That night, from about 5:30-7 p.m., over 75 folks assembled on the Sellwood Bridge to defend our country, exercise protected speech, and engage hundreds and hundreds of rush-hour commuters. We come with our own signs—painted, drawn, or marked out with Sharpies. Participants can also use the many more professional signs and repurposed but evergreen cardboard signs brought by the organizers.

On the last Friday of May 2025, the horn energy was righteous under the early summer sun.

Supporters in the passing rush hour cars, and also cyclists, outnumbered the few angry white male bird flippers by about a ratio of 25-1. That was encouraging.

Like previous weeks, I saw the outrage and solidarity in people’s faces. They showed with their expressions they were all in on the resistance themes. I observed how they leaned into their horns, giving protesters  a thumbs ups, pumping their fists, and even yelling in support.

For the commuters, they see people engaged. They see protest happening. They see the signs focusing on: cuts to Medicaid, violations of due process, cuts to our federal health system, illegal firings of tens of thousands of federal workers, threats to the environment and education, the gutting of our federal bureaucracy, the illegal disappearance of lawful residents to gulags out of the United States, and more.

The drivers recognize that their frustration and outrage at the ongoing coup to the U.S. Constitution is not a personal assault, but one shared by their neighbors and our country. And man, were they laying in on the horns on May 30, 2025.

Graphic for Sellwood Bridge Protest
The Sellwood Bridge Protest logo

The importance of showing up, week after week

The protests each Friday on the Sellwood Bridge are all organic, with almost no coordination, outside of weekly email reminders.

A few people started the civil actions in February 2025, and they have grown. The entire purpose is to keep showing up, to keep calling out the violations of law by the current president, and to demand a restoration of law and the end of corruption and lawbreaking by the current administration of President Donald Trump, a convicted felon.

What’s important about the events each week is the consistency of civil disobedience and the act of protest.

Renown historian of 20th century tyranny, Professor Timothy Snyder of the University of Toronto, in an interview on May 31, 2025, with MSNBC’s host Ali Velshi, said, “Democracy is a verb.” It’s not a static thing. It’s action. When there is action, others engage, and the acts themselves become part of a system that is vital to human goodness.

I think Snyder described the value of action so perfectly: “But we also have to recognize that it’s not on any one of us to solve the whole thing. Right. So each of us does a little bit, and together that changes the whole landscape.”

I plan to keep going to these events as long as my democracy is under siege, and it looks like it will be a long and painful four years, at least.

Portland, Oregon rally against the Trump administration, April 19, 2025

Protesters against the administration of President Donald Trump numbered at least 3,000 and shared a diverse range of creative protest signs, defending American democracy.

On the weekend marking the 250th anniversary of the first shots fired in the American Revolution against a tyrannical monarch and the British Empire, at least 3,000 people gathered in downtown Portland, Oregon to protest the administration of President Donald Trump.

The April 19, 2025 events kicked off at Pioneer Square, a gathering place for many public events in the city, and then the march took over the streets for over an hour. Protesters represented all ages and carried a wide array of colorful, creative, and biting signs criticizing Trump, Elon Musk, and the administration for its many actions. I saw about a dozen Portland police officers following on bikes, but mostly there was no visible law enforcement presence based on my observations.

There was no need for any police given the entirely peaceful nature of the civil action by thousands of people exercising their protected speech, as allowed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The day was a fitting one too.

Nationally some have dubbed collective national protests on April 19, 2025, as “No Kings Day, Part II.” The reasons for unrest today have a striking similarity to what happened two and a half centuries ago, as British forces gathered in Massachusetts to confront increasingly rebellious colonial residents.

The issues that led to the first conflict of the American Revolution—the right to self-determination, liberty, democracy, the rule of law, a life free from the power of kings—helped to forge a nation 13 years later, in 1788.

That year, the newly christened United States of America was created through the adoption of a founding charter, the Constitution. While revolutionary, it was also terribly marred and flawed by enshrining slavery, our country’s greatest sin. It would still take over two centuries to guarantee the document’s original promise for all persons.

This framework for a nation, set forth in the Constitution, called for a system of checks and balances by three branches of government: the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. On April 19, 2025, in Portland, people gathered with deep and profound concern that this sacred charter had been irrevocably broken by a man who has proclaimed himself to be a king.

At these protests in Portland, the residents who gathered to assemble recalled our original bold vision for a country with their calls for accountability, the rule of law, and the safeguarding of our democratic freedoms. Their demands reminded us all of our daring experiment to forge a more perfect union, stretching from 1775 to 1788, and grounded in our Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Lastly, I observed few persons from a group being targeted for enforcement and deportation action by this administration: Latinos. There was a lot of chatter online by some of the organizers (I can’t confirm who the organizers are based on published posts), who said it would be safe for all people. However, many Latinos are fearful in Oregon, given the cancellations this month of upcoming Latino cultural events statewide. I believe they do not want to be seen, photographed, or filmed at these events. There were very few African Americans too. The lack of diversity at this event is telling and needs to be discussed.

Celebrating Finnish Independence Day: Itsenäisyyspäivä

Finland’s Independence Day, itsenäisyyspäivä, is celebrated each year on December 6. It commemorates the day the Finnish Parliament declared independence from Russia in 1917, as Europe was being torn apart by World War I and as Russia was convulsing in its own violent revolution. Finland would soon have its own bloody civil war soon after, in 1918, with the German-backed “whites” defeating the USSR-supported Finnish communist forces, the “reds,” with a decisive and destructive battle in Tampere led by Finnish war hero Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim.

For the Finnish people, it marked the first time ever that the country was finally free of foreign domination after more than 700 years of colonization, Christianization, and conquest and rule by Sweden, from the mid-12th century to 1809. It then endured 108 years of Russian domination and rule. It finally became a nation amid the chaos of World War I.

After the Tsar’s rule was toppled, the Parliament of Finland made its Declaration of Finnish Independence on December 6, 1917. The new Nordic nation sent requests to be recognized as a sovereign country to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The Bosheviks in what became the USSR formally acknowledged Finnish independence on December  31, 1917.

Many Finnish citizens in most communities commemorate their independence with formal and solemn events, often involving war memorials than can be found in every city and every community, no matter how small, throughout the Nordic country, like this event planned for December 6, 2024 in Kuopio, at a memorial, or at churches, like this event the same day in Helsinki.

My Finnish relatives, who I only met for the first time in September 2023, told me the day for most Finns has special significance as a remembrance of the war dead, who died in Finland’s three conflicts during World War II: The Winter War, against the USSR (1939-40); the Continuation War (1941-44), against the USSR; the Lapland War against Nazi Germany (former ally, 1944-45). Some of the pictures I’m seeing posted as day awakens in Finland on December 6, 2024, are of people reading the great Finnish war novel, Väinö Linna’s The Unknown Soldier/Tuntematon Sotilas.

It was a brutal time, when Finland, a much smaller nation, faced an adversary with vastly superior resources and weaponry and withstood an unprovoked attack at great cost. Finland ultimately lost more than 10 percent of its land, but was never brutally occupied by the USSR like Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, or like other Nordic countries, Denmark and Norway, by Nazi Germany. However, the Nazis fought a scorched earth campaign in late 1944 and early 1945 against Finland when Finland turned on them to reclaim their nation and make peace with the USSR. The Germans left a trail of ruin as they were driven from Lapland, where they once were stationed as allies. The harsh peace signed with the USSR ultimately saw Finland retain its territorial integrity and maintain its independence against heavy odds.

During my three trips to Finland since August 2023, I have been documenting the way the country and its people remember the trauma of these wars, taking photographs of its war memorials and markers for the dead. Nothing has shaped modern Finnish identity more than these conflicts that took 95,000 lives of its soldiers between 1939 and 1945. Finland’s remembrance of these traumatic experiences are found in nearly every Finnish community, no matter the size or location.

Every city and village I visited had memorials. All of them. So I would stop my rental car, get out, and document what I found. Flowers were always fresh. Always. Every memorial I saw everywhere had fresh flowers. Everyone I went to had visitors. The past was always remembered. If you look for Finnish news of itsenäisyyspäivä, inevitably there will a photo at a memorial.

You can see my full photo gallery of the memorials and markers at cemeteries and public spaces on my Flickr photo page dedicated to these places.

Cruising the Baltic Sea with old farts

I’m getting to be an old fart. As such, I actually want to do another Baltic Sea crossing between Sweden and Finland on these cruise ships. They are fun. On my trip from Turku to Stockholm on the Viking line, I met a fabulous German couple who even guided me nicely to downloading the right local transport app and picking the right bus and subways to the central station from the ferry terminal in beautiful Stockholm. How about that! Also, you get to behold old farts like me disco dancing in the discos, the mad rush to buy duty-free booze by huge crowds of Nordic travelers stocking up for months, and the wonderful upper deck views of this lovely part of the world.

Summer perfection with live Latin music at Sellwood Park

(Click on each photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)

Portland does get its summer concerts in the parks right, even if so many other things are not going well.

We have a lot of issues now in our city, from a wave of gun violence to massive open air drug use of deadly fentanyl, and the failure of our community to meet these and other challenges. These problems have also led to an exodus of nearly 3 percent of Multnomah County’s population since 2020.

In fact, this week, the local weekly newspaper, Willamette Week, published a litany of woes that national and international journalists have shared about the falling star that Portland has become from its quirky, almost rock star status less than a decade ago.

“Portland is on a short list of destination cities for national media,” wrote the Willamette Week.
“Rather than a model, however, we have become a cautionary tale. It wasn’t long ago that the nation’s leading newspapers and magazines regularly wrote the same glowing profile of the Rose City—a lovably weird outpost wedged between the Cascades and the Pacific where colorful (but mostly white) residents pedaled tall bikes while playing the bagpipes, eating Voodoo doughnuts, and slurping elderflower-flavored kombucha.” 

The Voodoo doughnuts and bagpipes were always absurdities and click-bait style gimmicks disconnected from lived reality of nearly everyone who lives here, but that’s what feeds the media and social media appetites.

Portland, and its countless brand messengers, ran with it, until the city hit the brick wall of harsh reality. This collision of fantasy and reality has made us a model of what can go wrong with civic life and the brute truth of complex issues like gun violence, deadly opioid-fueled drug use, mental health disorders, gentrification, racial disparities, political experiments gone amok, and more. 

Despite our many issues, the city can still put on some good public events that bring together diverse residents. That was on display on July 15, 2023, at the great public park near my home, Sellwood Park.

The Portland-based Latin Music group Conjunto Alegre dished up the standards of salsa, merengue, cumbia, bachata, cha-cha, and more. This is a wonderful and eclectic ensemble from the diaspora of musicians from Latin countries who call Portland home.

Even dance-challenged–and yes, mostly white–Portlanders were on their feet dancing. The band had fun. The crowd had fun. Kids had fun. The breeze cooled all of us down at the end of a hot day. And for a couple of hours, the magic of Portland had returned. I loved it!