BH Neely's Photography

Emergency Exit, Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan

This is the emergency exit from the airport in Mazar-e-Sharif. It's not the smallest international airport I've ever been to (that honor goes to Uralsk International, in Kazakhstan), but it is pretty small.

Many of my friends have heard me babbling all weekend about The Plan. It's a simple plan, really...put together 60-80 photos for a sale. I'll be printing books to use as catalogues. Photos will be available in sizes from 11x14" to 20x24", including some square photos at 12x12" and 16x16". I'll also have three sets of greeting cards. Just getting the images ready has been something of a massive undertaking, using up all of my Friday and Saturday, but now the hard part's done and all I have to do is design three books and 12 cards, ship everything off for printing and hope like hell that when I have the sale people will buy them.

Garbage, Almaty, Kazakhstan

When we lived in Almaty, I had a job that started at 7 am, so I'd walk through the parks of the city before anyone else was awake. And this being not Greece, most parties were finished and the people home by 5 or 6 am, so I had the place all to myself. It was beautiful and peaceful...

Until I started to realize that every morning Almaty looked abandoned. It was as though every resident of the city had been taken up and dropped whatever they were doing. So I set out to be the crying Indian, in the hopes that if people saw what they were doing, they'd stop.

I began work on an exhibition called Almaty: The Abandoned City. I went out every Saturday and Sunday for a month, shooting from about 5:30 until 7:30 am, taking pictures like this one. It got pretty depressing, because it was so easy to find junk and garbage, and I distinctly remember the moment when I had shot enough when I got excited over finding a huge pile of garbage.

Unfortunately, we were leaving in November, and I wanted to wait until I was sure I could put together an exhibit, so I didn't start looking for a venue until August. And I missed the fall exhibition season. So I may have been crying, but nobody knew about it.

Lest my Kazakhstani friends be offended, know that I remember American cities looking like this, and that what got us to start using garbage cans was a long series of advertising campaigns and exhibitions showing just how much garbage we were throwing out the windows of our cars and dropping in our parks.

Graffiti, Athens, Greece

There are a pair of schools near the apartment where we lived in Athens. (Makes me sad to say that in the past tense.) They were covered in graffiti. The way the sun and the shadow from the building across the street played across this wall of one of the schools helped make the graffiti look more interesting. I also like the roughness of the paint job from previous efforts to cover up older graffiti. It's a common practice in Greece, but they almost always use a paint-covering primer, and then fail to go back with a matching color to the rest of the wall, so you get these huge gray patches that don't look any better than the tagging.

Old Shutters!, Athens, Greece

It's like an illness with me or something. I find it very difficult to walk past broken shutters, cracked terra cotta tiles or other bits of decaying works of man. In fact, I'm going to have to go back to this one, because I didn't have my tripod along, so the shot's a little blurry. Not too bad for a blog, but not good enough for cards or prints. And you know the world doesn't have enough urban decay cards and prints.

Gate, Pnyx Hill, Athens, Greece

There's something about roads that fade to an end in a stand of trees or a gate with no fence that makes me stop and wonder. Who did that? What were they protecting? Where were they going? Why did they stop protecting it? Why did they stop going that way?

Bushes in the retaining wall

There's something beautiful and melancholy about the number of plants growing from sidewalks, retaining walls and other locations in Athens. It serves to make the city seem alive, unlike in other places, where it seems to make cities look like they're falling apart.

Getting tired of Athens? Paris is coming...maybe even tomorrow.

New logo?

I was taking my walking photo seminar around Monastiraki, and I had just pointed out the scene of the birds (no car for them to fly out of this time), when I saw my new BPS Photography logo. I swear, I didn't paint this or pay someone to do it.

Still in Glyfada

Here it is set against one of its shiny neighbors, who didn't run out of money for construction

More of the apartment building in Glyfada

Looks all nice and pleasant. An apartment in a meadow.

Speaking of nice and pleasant, how do you like the new look here at blog.bpsphoto.com?