Matt Giraud : Photographs : Recent

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What do you get when you cross a Stay Home Order, cabin fever, and someone who drapes so elegantly in an ivory crepe empire waist dress? If you guessed “recreate Fuseli’s ‘The Nightmare’ with a stuffed animal and an ancient chihuahua,” boy, how’d you do that? That’s correct!

Note the heirloom-quality gold brooch, which my friend proudly fashioned from cardboard and a few dabs of acrylic paint. She wears it for Buddy (her chihuahua), who while a fussy eater and a little drooly, is more of a love demon than a nightmare, even Photoshopped to three times his size.
Siri, a high school senior, on the road from where she’s been to the adventure, promise – and traffic – of what comes next.
A prisoner’s view at the Château de Duras in southwest France. Marguerite Donnadieu wrote her first novel here, adopting Duras as her nom de plume in homage. And maybe even literally here, in this crumbling cage, when the words didn’t come and this was exactly where she was anyway, in a prison of language that despite its bars, offered a vision of escape where those same words could lead.
France’s soaring cathedrals inspire both insignificance and awe before the awesome, fractal majesty of the divine. The Galeries Lafayette is one of them; its denomination just happens to be commerce.
Eloise wants to know what the hell you’re going to do about it.

Well?

I'm sorry, are you still here?
Thanks, Dad.

Part of a series I shot for Safe Routes Partnership, a national non-profit working to improve the health, safety and well-being of kids.
Joy.

How do we get back here more often?

Part of a series for Safe Routes Partnership, a national non-profit focused on getting kids of all ages more active and healthy.
Sometimes it’s less about moving forward than resisting the pull to retreat. A shell fragment thwarts the gravity of the receding tide and streaks like a comet up the beach.
An X-ray view into not only a building, but its past: stonemasons rough in the cornerstone of Eliot Hall before the actual ceremony in May, 1912. And is that Buster Keaton supervising?
After cleaning the mighty press countless times during harvest at Kelley Fox Wines, Stephanie Sprinkle had made it her fawning puppy.
On a break from harvest, under a canopy of ancient cedars, winemaker Kelley Fox tastes visitors through her ethereal Pinot Noir and Pinot Blanc.
To a winemaker like me, a vineyard is a cathedral, a place you go to touch the divine – and if you know what you’re doing, put it in a bottle. So when I walked the aisles of this lovely vineyard outside Yamhill, Oregon, I was looking at the details of how it was farmed, for sure. But also... something else: signs it might be the kind of special place that makes a transcendent Pinot Noir. You know, something about this place gives me that feeling...
Do you remember being as head over heels about anything as much as this?

Yeah, that was transcendent, wasn’t it?
The action isn’t always where the crowd is looking. My godson races past them in the middle leg of the 3x800.
In the bleak light of one late winter morning, winemaker Kelley Fox sits before a glass door overlooking the vineyard and begins to stir. It's a biodynamic compost tea, and she'll "dynamize" it for at least an hour before she loads it into an old brass backpack sprayer and walks her rows of Maresh Vineyard, applying a little to every vine. Eight months later, the vines will return the favor with vibrant, utterly distinctive fruit that could only have come from that much care.
Andrea Nakayama is a functional nutritionist, entrepreneur, and passionate advocate for the healing potential of nutrition at both a personal and clinical level. Warm, gracious, and professional, she was a pleasure to photograph – I can only imagine how great a teacher she must be.
In addition to creating the foundational message strategy for Portland City Councilor Nick Fish’s bid for re-election, I shot the initial round of images for the campaign, including this portrait. Nick’s life-long commitment to public service is pretty inspiring, and I think the calm resolve that drives him comes through powerfully in this shot.

So how'd he do? Despite a strong challenger, Nick earned a resounding 61.8% of the vote in the primary, well past the 50% threshold that would have forced a runoff in November. I’m really proud to have been part of the team that helped get him there.
Birds of a feather: Violet and the peacock.

What do you think she sees?
The actor Amelia Hillery, unfurled on a bed of brittle leaves as the sun sets on an autumn afternoon.
Sunrise kisses the top of Mt. Adams near Goldendale on our last grape run of the winemaking season. Man, I love this time of year, and I love that road trips into this beautiful country are part of it.
The 2017 solar eclipse dons a diamond ring on its way out the door. Never having shot an eclipse (and may never again!), I could only guess at the settings and gear I'd need – where we were, the totality only lasted about a minute, so I didn't have a lot of time to fool around with settings, and of course, I also wanted to experience this once-in-a-lifetime event, too! Luckily, my guesses were damn close.
Waiting for the the 2017 solar eclipse from a farm on Grand Island, Oregon. Keen observers may recognize Don Yerian, the draft horse whisperer in other images I've shot, on whom Devo Kraftwerk eclipse glasses look decidedly out of place.
I've never been in a parade, but I can't imagine how tough it must be to give everyone along the way a good performance block after block, hour after hour. Not this fine gentleman: the amount of energy and passion he put into, well, his pride was incredible – and inspiring.
Radio and podcast producer Susan Davis is listening. Always listening.
Susan Davis, podcasting coach, producer... and icon! As you can probably tell from this image, yeah, this was a really fun shoot. The passion and intensity @cutmymic brings to her work was crystal clear throughout the session, but buoying it was a healthy goofiness and willingness to experiment that must make collaborating with her on a podcast (if not a photo shoot) incredibly rewarding. I mean, who would you rather make something with?
The audio and the ecstasy: one last shot from my portrait session with Susan Davis, podcast guru, public radio producer, and champion of the human story. I asked her to close her eyes, try to forget I was there, and imagine she was listening to something beautiful and let it take her somewhere else. Maybe it was a piece of music, but more likely, I'll bet it was a simple, quintessentially human moment, a heartbeat or signal in all the noise of our lives. And maybe it was *only* a moment, maybe just the telling pause in someone's voice that clears your attention of any other audio as you now are listening, truly listening, to nothing else, the tightening timbre as they edge toward something deeply felt, a memory of an experience that changed things for them forever, the noble struggle for control before emotion crests the dam and their voice catches. That moment of... connection, with another human being. The kind of audio that is her life's work, in other words. This is where it took her
Jessica Boudreaux, lead guitar and vocals, Summer Cannibals, Portland Oregon
Strike: a poster I designed for International Women's Day, featuring the actor and director Amelia
A portrait of Amelia Hillery, a talented young actor preparing for the role of Juliet in an unconventional staging of Romeo and Juliet.
The sign says "Launch here," but to where? Back to earth? It sure looks awful far away from here, on the frigid shores of an icy lake on a distant planet.
I strapped on snowshoes and set out into the storm. Snow fell harder, then harder still, and every step away from the cabin seemed to take me farther from dimension and color. I reached a clearing, and looking up into the trees gathered around me in the silent rumble of snowfall, I was in an old photograph, water-stained and fading back into nothingness.
Suprematism comes to Odell Lake as sheets of ice fracture into geometrical forms.
$Sheets of ice fractured on Odell Lake, Oregon | © Matt Giraud Photography$
At the water’s edge, the edge is frayed, a blast of frosted glass frozen in time, shattering out into the dark. The wind sings: walk with me, don’t be afraid, out upon the stones I’ve laid – I’ll show you where the real lake lies. But those are lies a moment tells, the lie I tell with frozen time until the lake sighs, and ripples liquify the edge.
We had a "light dusting" here in Portland, so I went out around midnight, set up my tripod, and opened the shutter. It was like walking into the hall of the mountain king.
Interior designer Kara Brennan lounges in the Sinatra suite, Orbit In!, Palm Springs, California
For the BTA Alice Awards, an image of Alice leaping into the future and a new organizational mission: advocating not just for bikes, but for walking and transit as well. It was a dramatic and risky move considering its core membership of avid bicycle advocates (understandably skeptical about diluting the organization's focus), so I positioned the BTA's new bike-walk-transit focus as an amplification, taking the BTA 'to the power of three.' Along with a core event brand identity, I created posters, a program and a slideshow anchored by dynamic images symbolizing an organization in motion.
Warehouses, shoulder to shoulder like a line up, fade into oblivion beyond the last faltering streetlight’s gaze. The steel padlock seizes, numb as your fingers working the reluctant key. Inside, the door’s weary creak describes a vast space you cannot see. The dead air is scented with stillness – of power cable long cooled, of bearing grease muffled with dust – distant echoes of a human hand long quiet.

Your eyes fumble in the darkness, searching for scale and substance, and after a moment, pallid walls begin to lift out of the gloom, leaving behind a grim council of breakers brooding their latent might.

And something else: wefted through the shadows, a single thread of purpose, and just before you understand that it is perfume, it has wrapped itself around your will and the lights come on.
This old guy has been hanging on the wall since Annabeth’s now-husband gave it to her in lieu of earrings in the early days of their courtship (worked like a charm, obviously!). It seemed to both of us the perfect final shot of the session: the end of one thing that really means the beginning of another.
The incredible flying artist George Wehn.
When I got out to the dock on Odell Lake just after dawn, I was the first person to break the snow – but not the first. This image was featured in Canon's official Instagram feed.
One light dusting of snow and winter’s steely monochrome numbs the Black Pine Mountains to iron.
Next stop, Snowville. Definitely.
Nothing like 20 degrees and a icy wind whistling down the Ohio River to get the playful, space age Big Four Pedestrian Bridge to yourself.
Her first time drawing a bow, she traces back and forth the imaginary line between the end of her arrow and the center of her target, and wills with all her might to connect the two. And then, away.
In Key West, the phrase ‘batten down the hatches’ is more than a figure of speech: from August through September, the specter of hurricane season looms over this tiny, exposed shoal 100 miles out into the Straits, casting a shadow that throws everything out of balance.
Before and after, then and now.
Pier post, Sunset Key, Florida
Nancy Forrester, artist, environmental activist, wedding officiant, savior of parrots and the vanishing face of a more bohemian Key West – here with an affectionate blue macaw.