These are words I have written and published over the years. Unless noted they have been published on Substack.com where I post every week or so.

I wrote this column years ago as the Chief Photographer at the Daily Journal in Kankakee, Illinois. It was an attempt to use humor to address digital alteration on photographs at the newspaper which, at the time seemed to be becoming a problem. As I look back from 2026 it seems that with social media and artificial intelligence we may have missed the point entirely.

Some of you older people, like me, might remember the Temptations. They were a Motown singing group from the 1960’s You might also recall one of their songs called, “I Can’t Get Next to You”. The lyrics, in part are,” I can turn a river into a raging fire. I can live forever if I so desire, but my life is incomplete and oh so blue because I can’t get next to you.” It’s an old song about unrequited love. There’s no gangsters or shootings or killings or mayhem. How times have changed. When they sang those lyrics, no one had heard of digital photography. ” Digital” referred to the hard-to-read numerals on your watch and “photo shop” was the place where you left your film and returned a few days later to pick up your pictures. You could hope the pictures would give you something to stare at instead of those numerals on your watch. Now (Adobe) Photoshop makes it possible for digital photographers to “make a ship sail on dry land”. As a digital photographer, I can do things we never dreamed of back in the day. I can shave inches off your hips and take years off your face. Those crow’s feet are a thing of the past on your face. That unsightly mole is already gone. As photographers we get requests all the time to use our “thin lens” or retouch wrinkles and crow’s feet. Trust me if I invent a “thin lens” you won’t see me hanging around here for long. I’ll be gone as quickly as your mole. News photographers know comments like, “please fix my nose” and “make me look younger” are made in fun. We hear them over and over, and take them in stride, but you might not realize photographers and art directors at some of the world’s most prestigious publications have been sent to the unemployment office when the temptation to alter photographs became too much for them. The list includes The New York Times and The Washington Post. Magazines have placed famous faces on thin models’ bodies and made O.J. Simpson look more menacing after he was accused of murder. Someone at National Geographic moved the Egyptian pyramids closer together so they would fit on the cover. I don’t think even The Temptations thought about rearranging one of the seven wonders of the world for their song lyrics. Maybe they couldn’t think of a word to rhyme with “pyramid”. Digital alteration of photos is not allowed at newspapers. We can do it, but we don’t, because you need to know that what you see in the newspaper is real. The photos are real. If there’s a telephone pole behind your head, well it’ll be there in print. If you have big hips and crow’s feet, well, sorry. Years ago, when I worked at another newspaper, a woman asked me to digitally insert her dead husband in a news photo. I thought she was joking, and she became very upset with me.  She called my editor to complain about my attitude, but his attitude turned out to be worse than mine. I couldn’t help wondering what her children might think when they opened the newspaper and saw that dad was back. I’ll bet the life insurance company might have had a thing or two to say as well. Another no-no for news photographers is staging photos. People say, “let me reenact what happened for you”, and I try to get as far away as I can. We don’t publish photos of people pretending to do this or that or recreating what took place before the photographer arrived. It’s a better idea to let us know what you’re doing while you’re doing it. Of course, when I’m not at the newspaper, it’s a different story, and digital photography is wonderful. Photoshop is an amazingly powerful tool. Recently I was able to move the head of our family’s dog so he was facing the way my wife wished in a family photo. She was impressed. Quoting the Temptations I told her,” I can turn a gray sky blue. I can make it rain whenever I want it to. I can build a castle from a single grain of sand. I can make a ship sail on dry land.” I think I’ve ruined the song for her. I hope to be out of the dog house in a day or two.

The Following column was published on Substack.com on November 14, 2025

TRAINS

There are people who love trains and take photographs of them. I, on the other hand, am a photographer who likes trains. I didn’t realize this until a couple years ago while looking through my archives and seeing all the images related to trains. I don’t think I had much of a choice. I grew up less than an hour from Chicago’s south side. Carl Sandburg called Chicago the “Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation”. A map would show the area crisscrossed by rail rights of way. My family never went anywhere without crossing at least one set of tracks. I wish I had a dollar for every time as a child I sat on the huge bench backseat of a land yacht sedan watching what seemed like an endless line of freight cars rumbling past. My mother could never get anywhere on time. She was invariably, “stuck by a train”. This became a family joke. Her stepfather, my grandfather, worked for the Illinois Central Railroad. I don’t know what his job was. He wore a shirt and tie with a gray suit and fedora to work every day. He worked in an office, and he rode the train every day to get there. Sometimes on the weekends he would treat me to lunch, and then we would walk (he never drove a car) to a local rail yard. He would look at the train cars and I was allowed to climb on them and wander around. In hindsight I wonder if anyone knew we were doing this. These are fond childhood memories. I was six or seven. The Illinois Central was four blocks from my childhood home. We always called it the I.C., and it morphed into the Canadian National which is a mile from the home my wife and I built twenty-five years ago in another part of the area. The I.C. looms large in my legend as they say. I rode on the City of New Orleans on the Illinois Central long before Steve Goodman and Arlo Guthrie made it into a popular song. I was on the train as part of a junior high field trip. I can still recall the conductors and the porters, and I think of them every time I hear the song or watch Good Morning America on TV. The other take away from the trip was that my male classmates and I were obsessed that the train had toilets and we spent a good part of the trip flushing them. This was right about the age when male stupidity kicks in. I have also had passing encounters with many other railroads like the Grand Trunk Western, the Union Pacific, the Burlington Northern, the Norfolk Southern, the Rock Island, the Baltimore, Chesapeake & Ohio, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Metra Electric, and the Indiana Harbor Belt. At the Indiana Harbor Belt I applied for a job in the rail yard with the intention of dropping out of high school which I despised. The male stupidity had matured only slightly by this time. It appears I have unconsciously had a long love affair with trains, and all things related to them, and I never knew it. (Insert male stupidity line of your own here if you wish.) As I said the Canadian National Railroad is near my present home. At night we hear the trains as they blow their horns at each grade crossing in town, and when the wind is right we can hear the coyotes who have their dens along the abandoned road bed of the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railway to the north when they answer the trains. It’s kind of spooky.

This interview with Marcel Borgstijn for Darkrooms Magazine was published on Substack.com in June 2025

What does your creative ritual look like? Do you have specific habits or conditions that spark your creativity?

I’m not aware of a ritual. I’m a throw it at the wall and see if it sticks kind of guy. Then I read Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, and it made sense to me. I have no idea why I was standing in the right place at the right time, with the correct lens when the light changed for the better, but there I was. I believe creativity comes from somewhere and we need to be open to it because it can slip out the back door and be gone. So, I carry a camera all the time which becomes a habit. I think I see the world differently when I have a camera with me. I seldom shoot with my phone.

When you're feeling creatively blocked, what's your go-to method for breaking through?

After forty-eight years in the newspaper business where the motto was, GET THE PHOTO STUPID, I tend to simply soldier on. Most of my images are found images so I just keep looking for photos. The best days are the days when I find something I like, but I don’t obsess when I come away with nothing. Tomorrow is another day after all, and I’m doing this for the joy of doing it.

Describe a moment when your creative perspective shifted dramatically. What triggered it?

It was April 6, 2018 (How’s that for an answer?) when I was retired unexpectedly. I walked away from “work” with no idea what I was going to do going forward. I took some time away from photography, but it called me back, and it took probably a year, and a stretch of freelancing, to realize that I was free to shoot whatever I chose to shoot without justifying it to an editor or client. It was very liberating.

What recurring themes or elements do you find yourself naturally drawn to capture?

I like to photograph people. I’ve made portraits, but I prefer street photography because it’s more honest. There’s always so much going on and so many choices to make on the fly. I used to believe as a photojournalist I held up a mirror to society, but I’ve come to realize the image in the mirror is my own. As Minor White said,” All photographs are self-portraits.”. Ultimately my photographs tell me about me.

What non-photographic influences (books, music, films, etc.) most impact your work?

This a great question and I’ve had to think hard how to answer. I have always liked to read, and I enjoy history, and biographies. I hope I have learned something from reading history. I’m told I have eclectic tastes in music as well, and I’m partial to singer/songwriters (think Bob Dylan, John Prine, Paul Simon, Randy Newman etc.) because it seems to me they’re out there alone creating like photographers. As opposed to band members who are always collaborating and sharing ideas.

What photograph of yours feels most personally revealing, and why?

Another great question. I hope I have yet to take my best photographs, but this one in the snow is a favorite right now. In the interest of full transparency, the child is my grandson waiting for his school bus in front of his home. It had snowed during the night and when we went out to meet the bus which the snow delayed, he kept running back and forth. His joy was infectious, and as I watched him, I remembered feeling that way long ago. I considered lying down and making a snow angel but chose instead to grab a couple frames of him portraying my inner child.