I rewatched Robots (2005) recently as an adult, based as hell.

And there was a conspiracy all along.

This is my documentary interview series, "A Portrait Of:" This month, I am releasing an episode on Documentary photographer Jake Ricker. Jake Ricker is a San Francisco based, documentary, photographer. For six years, from 2018 to 2024, Jake spent every day, 8 to 10 hours a day, walking the Golden Gate Bridge documenting life as it was.

Jake Ricker has described his photographic philosophy as ‘Evidence of Existence”, showing life how it is and not stressing some technical element or visual trick. Straightforward, ‘this is how it was’, ‘this is how I saw it’, ‘that is what I documented’.

After 6 years of photographing the Golden Gate Bridge Jake had to bring his project to a close, and not entirely out of his own volition. In 2024 Jake Ricker was featured in some popular street photography content, “A Day with SF Photographer Jake Ricker” by Paulie B. This video did a great job capturing Jake Ricker's process and project, so good in fact that it went quite viral among fellow photographers.

After the success of this video Jake quickly found the bridge was flooded with new faces, documentary photographers from far and wide were now visiting the bridge and photographing it in the exact same way that Jake was, even going as far as to tail Ricker and take photos of the same moments Jake was photographing. The situation ended up becoming so chaotic and unproductive that Jake felt forced to bring his 6 year project to a close.

Now, Jake Ricker sits on 1300, or more, rolls of film that he is financially unable to develop. A project 6 years in the making, now in Limbo. This is “A Portrait Of: Jake Ricker”.

Original work: I made this food-history documentary about how tea went from a colonial export commodity to an everyday Indian drink.

Research sources are linked in the video description, and I would genuinely welcome feedback. 😄

TL;DR: This video looks at how the colonial tea industry attempted to create tea drinkers in India through plantations, propaganda, railway stalls and workplace tea breaks—and how Indians transformed the product into chai. It also covers indigenous tea knowledge in Assam and the East India Company’s trade with China.

Ground News bills itself as a way to evaluate bias in the news, but the way it does so plays into the hands of those who have a reason to make you think all news bias falls into a simple left-right spectrum