The reason i was in the UK.

I have been receiving bags of fanmail (mostly from Europe, where i'm huge) asking me, "why exactly were you just in Scotland a few weeks ago anyway?"

I was hired to go take photos of a golf course in development on the East Lothian coastline of Scotland, also known as "the cradle of golf". Now i can already hear you art nerd cynics out there going, "ewwwww golf??? how borrrring". And that's sad really, but understandable. Chalk golf up as yet another thing that americans have pirated, gutted, and frakensteined into some new monster cash cow with virtually no soul. The truth is, if you go back to the roots of the game, beneath all the bullshit that has been piled on top since, you will find one of the greatest games that Nature ever provided.

Nature? Yes, i said Nature. The Firth of Forth, a bay in the east of Scotland, is lined with sand dunes. Over time a grass became strong enough to tame those ever shifting dunes, locking them in a frozen undulation. Rabbits burrowed their homes there, feeding on the grass. When you walk the dunes still in Scotland, you see that the grass is mown with machine like precision to nearly half an inch high... Add all this to the primal human instinctual need to place things in holes (and pass time) and there you have it: Golf. Hitting rocks to rabbit holes with sticks over rabbit mown fairways on grass covered dunes.

Since, men have figured a way to tack on lots of bullshit to the game... making it elitist, exclusive, expensive and environmentally exhaustive. Sounds a bit like art, eh? And like art (and most things), underneath all of the constructs and destructs and dump trucks, something pure is still there. Something worth knowing and participating in.

Because golf is a practice, like yoga, spiritual and physical, that teaches one how to align mind and body all in conjunction with the natural world. All of the principles, all of the information for our Selves, is in golf.

Now there are some Americans trying to get back to the roots of the game. Golf course architect Tom Doak and his crew are an excellent example. They have crumpled up and recycled the American formula for CAD drawn golf courses. Tom spent much of his young life playing the courses of Scotland and studying all of the original mastery of courses hundreds of years old. He has surrounded himself with people that share the same love and have the same creativity and concern for the future of the game and the future of our planet, and together they make courses that are not only environmentally sound, but would make Andy Goldsworthy look like color by numbers.

In fact, walking Tom's course mid process, listening as he and his coworkers speak about all of their intents and purposes, seeing it all without a time worn social construct, i couldn't help but think that this was one of the greatest contemporary works i've seen in years.

So here are the photos. There are lots so browse as you like or not at all. My intent was to capture just the slimmest impressions of a work in the middle of its process. Just to get the hints of what is going to make this course, like all Tom's work, so amazing.