Wednesday greetings, my collector friends! I hope you're all clearing your schedules, booking last minute travel and making excellent wardrobe choices in preparation for next week's 20x200 Collectors Confab. Our excellent venue, White Rabbit, is well within the confines of my natural habit, allowing me to dispense with the travel planning part. Free of that, I can focus on the important things, newsletter writing being amongst the most important of them.

Highway 94 Location, #1 and Jones Boulevard Location, #1, from photographer Kevin Miyazaki's Fast Food series, have gritty beauty in common with yesterday's release. (Less interesting, but also in common: the artists' first names.) Both artists coax aesthetic pleasure from the detritus of inattention and time's passage, but they find it in very different places. Mr. Cyr's paintings focus on the layers of what's been left behind, whereas the desolate beauty of today's photographs is delineated by absence.

I've been familiar with Kevin and his work via his blog for quite a while now, but my first opportunity for a real world encounter came last summer, at the wonderful Photolucida portfolio reviews in Portland, Oregon. Unsurprisingly, both Kevin and his work are best enjoyed in person, and we agreed then and there that 20x200 editions from Fast Food were a fantastic idea. It was actually tough to decide which series to choose from — if you browse his site you'll see that he's got several excellent bodies of work.

I am drawn to Kevin's photographs for how they make me think and feel. The thinky stuff comes via the documentary aspects of his practice. The Camp Home series addresses the Japanese internment camps of our not-so-distant past. Fast Food gets me thinking about how what we eat needs to change and also puts Alison Arieff's recent writings on the future of the suburbs at the forefront of my mind.

Although the work can provoke the consideration of some big ideas, no one would mistake Kevin for a straight documentary photographer. His photographs are subjective, personal, occasionally nostalgic and often intimate. That's the aspect that really gets me, and especially so, since it's reminiscent of the type of work that had the greatest impact on me at the beginning of my curatorial career. There's something uneasy about finding beauty and yearning in the uglier aspects of our culture and past, but it's also honest and, ultimately, optimistic.

As for me, I am optimistic that I'll be able to tackle a whole lot of my to-do list for the day. Honestly, I absolutely must; there are a few things on it that are long overdue (apologies!) and tomorrow morning is blocked out for... newsletter writing. That's three in one week, which means a lot of writing for me and a lot of Jen for you. I can assure you, however, that it's well worth it for all involved. Just you wait and see.