A personal trainer was cleaning up his equipment the other day in the park. He was wearing a shirt that said: “You don’t have to train today. The world needs average.” An odd combination of snarky and motivational. Nonetheless his shirt is a useful reminder that everyday is an opportunity to practice and through that […]
It is common knowledge that a good photograph tells a story. Some go so far as to claim that “Every Photo Tells a Story.” More abstract photographs are surely exempted from this demand to tell a story. But what about other photographs? Do landscapes? Portraits? Astrophotography? Some, like street photography and documentary photography seem more […]
I really want to like this photograph, but something about it bothers me. It has nothing to do with what’s in the frame and everything to do with what’s not in the picture. Or more precisely: What bothers me is what I had to do to get rid of something that was in the original […]
I was wandering the city that overcast Wednesday afternoon. While not empty, as it had been in the early months of the pandemic, it was not bustling in any normal way. Most offices in the city remained closed or only sparsely staffed. So I took the chance to look for scenes that would capture the […]
Knausgaard’s collection of essays is a joy to read. While the essays in Autumn are all quite good, the real pleasure comes from the physicality of the book. The coarse texture to the dusk jacket. The pages are a smooth, heavy paper that has a sensuous feel. The illustrations and the printed words look better […]
Photography seems always to imagine a different world. Photographers don’t record the reality they see, they consecrate a reality they wish to see. In this way, photographs are always about a world that no longer exists. The lure of dilapidated buildings, of abandoned places, and of weed-choked roads testify to the photographer’s urge to record […]
Friday evening around 8:00pm. Tired professionals should have been driving home or to meet friends at a local restaurant or bar. But instead the street was empty. I stood there in the middle of Lancaster through two cycles of green-yellow-red, green-yellow-red. On one side a Chevy van sat empty with its flashers blinking. On the […]
Scrolling through any social media platform presents you with a mind-numbing series of photos of the same scene from the same place in the same light and processed through the same filter. They seem to have been taken merely to post to the internet in the hopes of garnering likes, or whatever counts as social […]
For a number of years now I have each morning written down a single thought. I had assumed a thought a day would be easy. It has been at times, however, surprisingly difficult. Some mornings I stare at the blank page and struggle to produce a thought, one that is my own. I take drink […]
I wonder why we have come to use “amateur” as a pejorative adjective when applied to photographers. People tend to elide the gap between the trite definition of an amateur — somebody who doesn’t earn a living or much money taking pictures — and the more condescending definition — somebody who is inept at taking […]