Rudy Owens photographs

At long last, I reboot my photography website
Mother and daughter at High Point community garden.
Surfing at Seaside, Oregon
Lafayette Square, St. Louis
Birkenau Death Camp Toilets
Bali Sunrise

After many weekends of work, I have nearly completed the re-launch of my old and once-again-new photography website called rudyfoto.com. I have published this website for more than a decade. I rebooted it after a long siesta of several years.

Photographs that I previously published on my rudyowens.com website can now be found at rudyfoto.com. The re-launch also allowed me to post new images and themes, including an enitrely news series on surfing in Oregon and compilations of my essays compled over many years on the American city. That series includes St. Louis, Portland, Seattle, and Detroit, all of which I have called home at some point during my life. My other series include travel photo essays and documentary projects, incuding my series on Nazi Germany’s damning legacy of human rights abuses, which I completed between 1999 and 2001.

My main webpage, rudyowens.com, will remain my main web hub, and I will continue to publish periodic photo essays on this blog.

Please let me know what you think about my old and dear friend online friend: rudyfoto.com.

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Oh, those succulent, sensuous tulip petals

Tulips are, by all definitions, the baba-boom of flowers many gardeners plant here in the United States, and in Canada and Europe too. We have fields of them now exploding in the Skagit Valley. In my part of Seattle, I see dozens in full, glorious bloom. Their colors can almost drive a person wild. I love how the colors mix and accentuate each other in some petals. Me, I just do vegetables. I prefer to eat what I plant. I let others plant what I feast with my eyes.

How Seattle looks to my morning eyes
Taken from Highway 99, by the tunnel work site (2014).
Right now, the tunnel project is stuck and engineers are scrambling how to fix a massive and still-broken machine trapped beneath Seattle’s mucky dirt. This is the closest the public can come to seeing the work yard, as seen from Highway 99 (2014).
A long line of trucks usually is found on the service road next to the port and visible from Highway 99 (2014).
There is something comforting to me about this factory, which continues to churn out cement year after year (2014).

A massive tunnel-boring project in Seattle, that is pegged to cost more than $3 billion, is now on hold. Th several-stories-tall tunnel boring machine, dubbed Bertha, is now broken and stuck beneath the viaduct I drive over every day (Highway 99), and theoretically the future tunnel will replace the aging structure that takes me and tens of thousands of other drivers daily. North of the port, crews are digging up things by the Gates Foundation headquarters, making this a landscape of cranes, heavy moving equipment, and grand ambitions that tower like the Space Needle close by. Looking at the cranes in these pictures, I imagine I am seeing the giant snow walking machines seen in The Empire Strikes Back. My favorite landmark, however, remains the massive Ash Cement Factory. Time has not seemed to change this place. It just seems to get more grey.

Community gardening in Seattle
In 2002 I met this mother and daughter at the old community garden in High Point, before it was remodeled, as part of my Community Support Agriculture documentary project that I completed shortly after. This is one of my favorite portraits of a mother and daughter I have.
For my documentary project on Community Supported Agriculture in public housing projects in Seattle, I collaborated with Bunly, who did wonders working with many immigrant families building and sustaining community gardens. Dentists love this picture, by the way, and so do I.

In 2003 I worked on a documentary photography project on Community Supported Agriculture in Seattle. This work culminated in a show I exhibited in Portland, Ore., which highlighted gardens and gardening at two different mixed-income communities. These gardeners were all public housing residents, including immigrant families. I also showed these two photos in a show I did in Anchorage in 2006 at the Snow City Cafe called Being Themselves.