Writing Wednesday: Acknowledgements

Writing acknowledgements is always gratifying if a bit bitter-sweet. For me, at least, it marks the end of a project and I get more joy from the doing than the having. Yesterday morning, I wrote the acknowledgements for my book on oil, photography, and archaeology in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota and submitted the revised draft to the press.

I was happy to acknowledge to all the people who contributed in various, often subtle ways to this project. 

Acknowledgements

I wrote most of this book as my dad became ill. He got me interested in photography when I was a younger. He took me to buy my first camera, my first digital camera, and mentored me as much as I was willing to listen. At some moment in my life and with the help of my colleagues, I became an adequate technical photographer and the photographs in this volume are a testimony to that adequacy.

As my dad’s health failed I started to take more photographs on my daily walks in a local park and around the house. While the photos in this book are deliberate in a technical sense, they lacked any self-conscious awareness of photography as craft. My recent photographs, in contrast, have sought to capture something more than technical details. Photographer John Holmgren introduced me to the phrase “make photographs” in the Bakken. I now try to “make photographs” even if the photos in this book are merely taken. As I finished this book, I came to realize that my shift to more deliberate photography represents a kind of embodied memorial to my dad. My attention to light, the fussing with camera settings, the framing of objects and scenes, and my posture all served to commemorate my dad through how I move, look at the world, and ”make photographs.”

This book would not have been possible without the collegiality, friendship, and support of the members of the North Dakota Man Camp Project: Bret Weber, Richard Rothaus, and Kostis Kourelis. Photographers Kyle Cassidy, John Holmgren, Richard Rothaus, and Ryan Stander all showed me how they made photographs. Richard Rothaus, in particular, shared his love of cameras with me and helped me think about photography more than he realizes in our walks around the village of Ancient Corinth, with our cameras at the hottest time of the day. Kostis Kourelis brought the technical vocabulary of an architectural historian and the careful eye of an archaeologist to my work and always encouraged me to stick with the evidence while also framing the project more broadly and thoughtfully. Bret Weber talked to people. He conducted the interviews in Appendix I and made sure that our enthusiasm for material culture did not overshadow the human element our work. Aaron Barth, Carenlee Barkdull, Sebastian Braun, Kyle Conway, and Ryan Low shared insights at various points in this project and Ryan allowed me to present my work in his class. My friends and colleagues on the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory (CHAT) standing committee and who presented at CHAT conferences inspired me to write this book. Jacqueline Senior and Dan Etches Jones at BAR encouraged and supported my work and expressed appropriate and productive skepticism. My colleagues in the department of History and American Indian Studies at the University of North Dakota and in our faculty writing group created a conducive and supportive space for writing during some very difficult semesters.

My wife, Susan Caraher, has stood by and watched me work on this strange project with her usual patience and support. I wish I had shared more about it with her as I wrote and I’m sure it would have been better for it. Our dogs, Argie and Milo, have listened to me talk at them and Argie has learned to stop when I am fussing with my camera.

It goes without saying that the problems with this book and its limitations are my own. The book has many of them, but I do hope that it is still useful to some people who are interested in bringing an archaeologist’s eye to the contemporary world.

This book is about photography and as I finished the book, my dad passed away. My dad taught me to be curious and tried to convince me to slow down and look carefully at things. I’m not sure my dad would have enjoyed this book or the photographs. That said, the work of writing this book, thinking about photography, and taking photos while I wrote, however, helped me to connect with my memories of him even as he was slipping away. In that way, this book brought me closer to him and to honor that I dedicate this book to his memory.