The images in TO THE COMFORT ZONE AND BACK were recorded over a three-day period in late November to early December 2011. They were inspired by the adventure of travelling to a city I had never visited before.



TO THE COMFORT ZONE AND BACK was originally published in December 2011; this is a slightly tighter version. Jeff Beddow very generously wrote the following thumbnail review upon the title's first appearance:



"Great sense of solitude and sensitivity, a controlled sensuality that is reflected in unyielding spaces of promise without accountability. The outsider's polite intrusion into urban niches and vistas that are almost empty, yet too full to be very welcoming. Shiny, muted color, intensely seen detail, the whole life of the foreign city sensed around the corner or on the other side of the wall. Utne has captured the traveller's psychic doubling, the split of self between the repressions of home and the excited but tentative touching of another city's surfaces... a sense of longing translated into attention to the color of a wall, the shape of a coffee cup, the surrealism of a stranger's television world." (Jeff Beddow: www.flickr.com/zeitguy )