Though progress is slow and steady, I've been exceeding goals left and right on my way to creating a basement studio. My reorganization isn't limited to the basement, though. Getting organized involves the whole house. This weekend I finally unpacked my big cardboard box of old journals (the earliest dating back to 1994) and put them on a bookshelf for easy reference. Next to these fabulous pieces of personal history sits a book of a different kind: my Reclamation artist book.

As often happens when I am cleaning/reorganizing, I simply had to sit down and leaf through my handmade book to experience it anew. It totally blew me away. For the past year I've been experiencing my photography on a computer screen or in a paper mailing envelope from the color lab, and I found it inspiring to see my photos beautifully presented and complemented by deckled edges and compelling text. In fact, just now I stopped typing to sketch out a new idea for presenting my new digital work alongside journal texts.

I won't go on (too much) about this book tonight. Know that I could because it's just that awesome. Over the course of two days I poured my heart and soul into it, expending way more money and labor than I ever could have imagined. That weekend I carried it on a trip to Boston, hugging it close on the T so it didn't get damaged. At my wedding, our best man recalled in his toast that trip we made to visit him in Boston, how I sat on the floor of his apartment trimming my prints just so (leaving just enough white so the viewer would know they hadn't been cropped) and carefully installing them in the pages of my book.

In this age of digital convenience, we'd all do well to remember where we started: pulling film off the reel, making contact sheets, and accumulating boxes of 5 x 7 prints. Something is lost when our work isn't tangible. It's too easy these days to process, evaluate, and display photos electronically. They still take on a whole new meaning as prints, and a whole new meaning again as lovingly presented, tangible works of art.

What is the biggest realization you've had about your work lately?  The most inspiring presentation?

As the initial momentum settles from my current work around home and the domestic, I have a little breathing room to flip through the pages of my journal and analyze the kernels of ideas written there. Now is a good time to take inventory and gather ideas on how I actually intended to present these images.

From the beginning, I wanted to make these pictures as much about words as pretty photos. So far, the following ideas look good to me:

• Combining journal writings with images in a diptych fashion, using high-quality scans of handwritten work.

• Somehow creating a zine to accompany the photos, an interesting revival of an art form from my teenage years. I am yet undecided whether this would be available as a take-home, by mail, or some other way, but the zine would follow viewers home and become part of their domestic landscape.

• Creating postcards from the images and asking people to mail them to me with on-topic musings. I'd like to see the postcards strung up or otherwise inviting interaction from readers/viewers. This is maybe the toughest idea to connect to the base “meaning” of the work.

Regardless of viewer interaction, these images demand a clean, simple, aesthetically pleasing presentation. Unlike any of my past work, I am celebrating (elevating?) the everyday, taking the small details and making them sacred. At face value a clean, traditional presentation implies images of a very photo-worthy subject.

How photo-worthy is my bedroom lamp? Dust clinging to the edge of an old box? Who would put these things in a gallery? At the root, I think this question connects back to the idea of incorporating journaling or postcard musings. What do these pictures show us? Do they reveal different meanings to different viewers based on context? Why are we looking at these images in the first place?

Ah, now that I'm asking these questions I feel like I'm back in art school again.