Last Saturday night, the Fourth of July, 2026 I was standing at the dark end of the Rutland fairgrounds with a tripod over my shoulder, and a fireman asked me a question I got wrong.
Let me set the scene. I’m known as being almost a photographic ghost. In and out of the scene with the shots before anyone sees I’m there… popping up for a few minutes in random towns… off in the shadows looking for a unique view. But I return to many locations over and over. Here, in the town where I was born, I shoot the Rutland fireworks almost every year. Every year I head away from the crowds, to the old unlit section of the grounds. I need the darkness. Shooting fireworks means leaving the shutter open for several seconds to collect a few bursts, and any bright light in the frame — the grandstand, the midway, a streetlamp — blasts out and steals the whole picture. But no foreground at all means a boring picture. So I hunt for near silhouettes in dimly lit areas: an empty building, a treeline, something dark and Vermont-shaped to anchor the sky.
This year I hunted a little too far and walked straight into the fire department manning the gates near the launch area. A fireman came over and told me what I already knew — nobody’s supposed to be back here, too close to the rockets, no way to supervise people, can’t let just anyone… the usual. But then his tone shifted. He was leaving a door open.
“Who are you with?”
I gave him the answer I’ve been giving for forty years. The one that wins some officials over and gets me kicked out just as often.
I represent me. Keith Edmunds.
Not even keithedmunds.com, which wouldn’t have sounded much more official. Just me. I talked about the old buildings, about overexposure, about needing the dark. He was good about it — had me fall back behind the next row of buildings, mostly out of sight — and I did my thing, running around in the dark with a heavy pack, feeding the mosquitos.
And the whole time the answer I’d given kept running through my head. Who was I with? Has that changed?
Forty years of shooting for free
Here’s the part I’ve never really said out loud, so I’ll be frank about it now: I have photographed Vermont at a loss for about forty years.
In the early days it was slide film. I remember eating bologna sandwiches and ramen because the money went to film and processing. I’d pick up my slides at the camera store, hold the chromes up to the sky right there on the sidewalk to see what I got — and then walk back inside and spend my food money on more film.
Eventually I decided to see if the work could pay for itself. I launched keithedmunds.com and started selling fine art prints. A few sold, mostly small ones. I built a relationship with Vermont Life magazine and published dozens of photos in their issues and calendars. I was in newspapers and other magazines. I got cover photos. I finally landed the cover of Vermont Life — and then did it twice more.
For a couple of years there, I almost broke even.
Then those three covers turned out to be the final three issues of Vermont Life before the State closed the doors on a decades-old institution. Print sales all but stopped. The math since then is not complicated: I’ve paid $45 a month for thirteen years to keep the print site running, and taken back less than $700 for more than a decade of work.
Mostly, I’ve been shooting for Facebook likes. And I got them — for a while my homepage was pulling 17,000 to 21,000 photo views a month. Views, likes, kind comments, shares from bigger pages. And zero sales. Then politics and AI-generated content started strangling social media, and the numbers pared down to a few hundred loyal followers and the people I grew up with. I was OK with that in some way. I had money. The pictures that I took were for me, maybe for legacy, but I was certainly no longer looking for income from them.
Then everything changed. After 19 years I was laid off from the day job that had been quietly funding all of it.
The hard look
Losing the job forced the question I’d been avoiding: if the work is good enough to earn twenty thousand views a month, why won’t anyone buy it?
I took early retirement and decided to take one serious, honest run at photographing for a living. Which meant admitting some things.
Nobody is buying landscape prints online. The internet lets everyone see great photography for free, and the few people who still buy prints only have so much wall space — with thousands of photographers competing to fill it. The art show circuit might move a few pieces, but I’m not up to hauling a trailer of inventory, racks, and tents around the state, and frankly I’m not that much of a people person.
So I stopped asking how do I sell what I make and started asking what do people here actually use?
And in Vermont, the answer was staring at me from every parking lot and general store: people wear their pride like a badge here. Gifts are huge here. But walk into any shop and the shirts all say the same things — ski areas, colleges, Burlington, Stowe. I love Burlington and Stowe. But I’m not from there. Most of us aren’t. Nearly the whole state was simply not represented.
Meanwhile, I was sitting on thousands of finished images — and tens of thousands of unfinished ones — of every Vermont town, shot again and again over decades.
Nobody’s spending two hundred dollars on a framed print of their hometown. But I’m more than certain plenty of people will spend twenty-five on a shirt that says exactly where they’re from — their actual town, not whichever one made the postcards.
Arts to crafts
That became MyHometownVermont.com, which launched this week.
It started as a simple idea — shirts carrying original photos of the towns they represent — and grew from there, because not everyone wears T-shirts and a photo alone doesn’t always carry the message. People want meaning with their town’s name on it. So the line grew: graphic designs alongside the photo designs, mugs, hoodies, sweatshirts, with things like puzzles and calendars on the way. The goal grew with it: every one of Vermont’s 251 official towns, plus the villages, gores, and unincorporated corners Vermonters actually call home.
That’s why I say I switched from arts to crafts. I mean it as a joke, but only halfway.
I’ll be straight with you about where things stand: the site isn’t finished. Every town — and a good number of villages — has designs to represent it. But not every town has a photo product yet. That’s not because I haven’t been there. I’ve photographed in every corner of this state. It’s because I don’t yet have a shot I consider good enough to put a town’s name on, and I’m not going to fake that.
Which is where you come in. If your town doesn’t have a photo yet and you know the spot that deserves it — tell me. If you’d rather see a different landmark representing your town — tell me. There are contact links at the bottom of every page, and after a year-plus of sitting at a computer building pages and products, I am genuinely eager to get back on the road doing the thing I love: photographing Vermont.
The answer I should have given
So back to the dark end of the fairgrounds, the mosquitos, the fireman, and his question.
Who are you with?
For forty years the honest answer was “just me.” One guy, one tripod, shooting the state he loves at a loss because the landscapes themselves were the point.
But that’s not the answer anymore. Next Fourth of July, when somebody in a reflective vest asks who I’m with, I’ve finally got something better to say.
I’m with My Hometown Vermont. I’m here representing the state — and every town in it.
Find your town at MyHometownVermont.com. The full backstory lives on our Our Story page.
