Author Archives: J.S. Graboyes
A Tale of Two Portlands
Flannel shirts and hipster chic unite them both, but there’s a continent between them. TL;DR: Maine > Oregon.
A Beach Town, After the Season Ends
New England’s last true honky-tonk seaside resort empties out after summer’s done. Photographs of a snowy November day at Old Orchard Beach, Maine.
New Mexico: Revisiting the Land of Enchantment
Traveling again through an unforgettably beautiful land of clouds, mesas, chiles, and quiet.
Why I Hate Boats (It’s All Nova Scotia’s Fault)
The lasting effects of a particularly rough ride in a high-speed catamaran across the Gulf of Maine.
You Can’t Go Home Again – And Sometimes That’s a Good Thing
The changing face of a Southern city rediscovering itself.
Scandinavian Color: The Houses of Visby
Photographs of the colorful cottages of a medieval walled city in the Baltic Sea.
Visby: The Floating City
Traipsing through the medieval city of Visby during Sweden’s annual political convention reveals something about the soul of the country.
The Many Faces of an Antique Mall
At a small-town Midwestern antique mall, faces from the past peer at you from every shelf.
Vanished Chesterfield
I spent most of the first decade of my life in a relatively new development in a then-exurban part of Richmond, Virginia, called Midlothian. Midlothian as a community dates back a couple hundred years and was, for a long time, known for coal mining. If my elementary school teachers told the truth, it was the […]
The Old Man and the Sea: My Great-Grandfather, from Latvia to Key West
The way I understand it, Key West, way back when – way back before the spring breakers and Girls Gone Wild, back before the pride parades, back before Jimmy Buffett and Margaritaville, back before the leather shops on Duval Street, back before the Conch Republic, back before Tennessee Williams, back even before Papa Hemingway and his […]
The End of a Benetton
Last winter, I wandered into the United Colors of Benetton in Dupont Circle in its final days. I managed to snap a few photographs of the Terracotta Army of nude mannequins that stood guard in the back of the store.
The 8 Weirdest Museums I’ve Ever Visited
As humans, we like to amass stuff. Personally, I’ve collected Pez dispensers, keychains, Troll dolls, and, as true child of the 90s, had a unfortunate collection of Beanie Babies. Since childhood, I’ve moved onto collections that take up no space: states, countries, even counties and state capitals for a brief period. But, thankfully, others have […]
The Vulgar Pleasure of 1970s Food Photography
In a fascinating series of articles over at The Foodie Bugle, food photographer Helen Grace Ventura Thompson describes how food photography has changed over the decades. In the 1950s, she writes, “the pictures looked as though they were taken from the top of a ladder, six or eight feet away.” Beginning in the 1960s, higher-end […]
Duck Pie 