cabinporn:

The Cadyville Sauna is built into a rock cliff, which forms one of its interior walls. The exterior is covered in mirrors. Designed by Dan Hisel.

(via herbgardening)

cabinporn:

Karlsbader Hütte in the Lienzer Dolomites of Austria.

Submitted by photogragher Andreas Jakwerth.

People are social animals. This was the premise of the journey, stripped down of all its lofty quirks and questionable pretense. Growing up in the the suburbs of modern America, we were hard pressed to know exactly what this meant. After all, the modern American is so disconnected from those who make our lives possible that we often romanticize ourselves as truly autonomous individuals, out on our own in a world separate and often devastatingly foreign. Not to say this world offers no companionship at all. We work together (although information technologies are making this increasingly unnecessary). Sometimes we get married and have families (also a fading trend in the industrialized world). And of course we all have friends.

But the farmers that grow our food, the artists who write our favorite songs, the manual laborers who build our homes? The very building blocks of our lives do not comprise our community. Rather, we find ourselves lost in an endless economy of strangers. It’s not easy to really grasp how far removed this is from our natural state, or even how new it is, when you consider the 200,000+ year time-line of Homo Sapiens.

Most of us don’t realize how peculiar this whole setup is, simply because it developed almost entirely before we we born. Yet despite the fact that none of us know a life anywhere near as intimate as our ancestors’, we pine for just that. We flip through pages of National Geographic or plan that vacation through Central America with a lost sense of nostalgia, hoping to resurrect ghosts we pray still lie dormant in our genes. We marvel at people who still live bound by a community that also comprises a local economy. People who get their food from their neighbor, and listen to their music while sitting around a fire with friends and family. Some places in the world, people still keep their doors unlocked. More and more of us have begun to abandon the conventional wisdom of our grandparents that these cultures are hopelessly primitive.

In short, a lot of the industrialized world just isn’t convinced anymore that we know what we’re doing. We boast powerfully sophisticated pharmacology and brain surgery, but about a quarter of America suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder. We wield the power to alter the very genetic make-up of our food, yet our rates of obesity and diabetes have never been higher. The digitalized knowledge of a world is at the click of a mouse, but we need an investigative journalist to tell us where our dinner comes from. Many of us have a disturbing hunch that we sacrificed something very human when we were making all this progress, which is to say nothing of the disastrous consequences some of our more bold advances have had on the Earth and its inhabitants.

This is how we ended up with bicycles. When Hunter S. Thompson’s editor refused to budget a Cadillac convertible for an assignment, he bluntly retorted, “Well I can’t cover the American Dream in a goddamn Volkswagen, what the fuck is wrong with you?” And of course he was right, as the editor finally recognized. Dr. Thompson’s ferociously bizarre voice was one of the first to really deal a crippling blow to journalism’s long-held prejudice of objectivity. He saw that a story comes from a storyteller, and like other humans, storytellers are brimming with opinions, intuitions, prejudices, and ambitions, all of which appear between the lines of even the most formalized newspaper article. No amount of AP styling can change that.

Honest journalism demands that we not hide behind the disingenuous veil of objectivity. These are the details thatI find relevant. These are the photographs that I feel truly characterize the situation. The first-person peeks out from beneath the armor of every ostensibly objective sentence and photograph published. The only way to come to terms with this is to embrace it, and make your own approach as sympathetic to and respectful of the story as humanly possible.