Adrain Chesser is not just a photographer, he's an envisioner. What he makes, he wants to make happen. And the people he photographs want something to happen; they're in a moment of longing, desiring, rewriting the old stories.

Several years ago, when Chesser had to break the news to friends that he was HIV-positive, he took their portraits right then and there, as part of their process together, as a community. Despite the delicacy of the moments, nobody wanted to stop him. For a later series, he returned to his Pentecostal Floridian home turf, but to a campground that serves now as a queer safe space—the kind of space he needed growing up but never had.

He began to create small campgrounds of his own with friends. He'd get a crew together, of maybe 10 or 12 people, and go out into the wilderness. These small worlds—seen in photographs, some staged, some candid—are marked by rituals, but the rituals are not performances. They enact ways of living that diverge from the cruelty, competition, greed, waste, despair, and materialism the mainstream calls "normal" life.

This work is called The Return.

The subjects in The Return are predominately not Indigenous. Most carry European ancestry. And most come in one form or another from the disenfranchised margins of mainstream America. Most are poor, some are queer, some are trans-gendered, some are hermits and some are politically radical. All believe that major shifts are needed in the way modern society interacts with the natural world. And all are willing pioneers, stepping off into uncertain terrain searching for something lost generations ago. Perhaps poetically, those attempting to live these ideals could be viewed as a rainbow tribe. In their search they struggle to be released from old ways of being. Cars, soda pop, cell phones and cigarettes follow them. Convenience has a magnetic power. Addictions, cravings, and desires are hard to break. These pioneer's seek a new way in the world, while still learning to let go of the old. These are uncommon Heroes shedding layer by layer the learned domestication of the dominator culture.”

Those are the words of Timothy White Eagle, Chesser's collaborator. White Eagle lives in Seattle; Chesser has moved to Portland. I wrote about their extraordinary lives last year. (Steven Miller, another sometime collaborator, recently showed at Vermillion.)

The Return is now becoming a book. On Kickstarter, where it has just one day left in its campaign, you can reserve a copy for $50. The book will be printed in spring. The project hit its original funding goal, but that accounted for only half the actual cost of printing, so Chesser's throwing in free signed prints to try to break even. Want to buy art this holiday season? These photographs get under my skin. I find myself having all kinds of reactions to this alternative world—excitement, jealousy, suspicion, curiosity. On top of that, they're flat gorgeous, of course. It's hard to ask for more than all that from a body of artwork. See what it does to you.