I am fame. Do a worship!

One night in Mid-August, bored and not wanting to sleep, I posted 3 photos on a Reddit sub.
I shot the photos in question on a trip I took to an abandoned record store in late 2022. Several days later, I got contacted by Jack Beresford, a reporter from Newsweek asking if I’d be willing to do an interview about my travels and photography surrounding urban exploring.

I accepted the invite after a bit of Google sleuthing to ensure the party claiming to be Beresford was indeed a reporter. (He is indeed a legit reporter from Newsweek). We chatted for about 45 minutes over my lunch hour one afternoon the following week. I sent hi-res copies of the 3 photos I’d posted to Reddit and signed the requisite releases. Beresford promised to let me know where the article would be posted before it went live, and I went back to work.

I heard nothing from him for about a week and kind of forgot about it, given work and other ongoing life events. I mentioned this to some friends and family, and in passing while killing time in the break room at work, and thought no more. About a week later, I ran into the break room to grab some ice water. A Co-worker I had not met before struck up the following conversation:

CoW: “Hey we read about you online”.
Me: “My lawyer said I shouldn’t say anything else about Tijuana until at least 2027”.
CoW: “Huh?”
Me: “What did you read?”
CoW “Seems you get around some weird places and got famous for it”.

As I stood there momentarily bewildered, me Co-Worker thrust their cell phone into view, where I was greeted by my photos on newsweek.com.

Seems Mr reporter forgot to ping me and let me know that the article was going live….

This was 2 weeks after I was notified that I’d also received IMDb credit for an appearance in a short documentary about the temporary street art that spawned all over the core of Downtown Portland in the midst of the George Floyd protests over the summer of 2020.

I’m special now!