— make something every day, something for an audience of one;
— give away the things I make, leave them behind, stash them on shelves in stores, send them to strangers, and otherwise cast them into the universe for others to find;
— look around with the eyes and curiosity of a child;
— talk to strangers to learn how they see the world;
— laugh at the things I find important;
— be me, because if I don’t nobody will be.
Slunk Emo ceremoniously attached the lens. The live stream on Stumbler broadcast through the universe video of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Slunk Ome, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the circuit when he threw it. The switch that would link, all at once, all the sprawling algorithms and computing devices—from servers to personal computers, phones, smart watches, and internet-enabled appliances, more than ninety-six billion machines–into the super algorithm that would connect them all to the 47.8 exapixel camera, creating one massive opti-cybernetics machine that would combine not only all the photographs ever taken but also all the photographs ever imagined.
Slunk Ome spoke briefly to the billions simultaneously refreshing the page. Then, after a moment’s silence, he said, “Now, Slunk Emo.”
Slunk Emo threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power through trillions of neural networks mining data from even the obscurest corners of the internet, including abandoned NoLongerMySpace pages. Servers strained and pages buffered and bandwidth limits were exceeded. After a few moments Stumbler’s network caught up to the surge in users.
Slunk Emo stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of requesting the first image is yours, Slunk Ome.”
“Thank you,” said Slunk Ome. “It shall be a picture that no single photographer has been able to take.”
He turned to face the opti-cybernetics machine. “Can you now create the perfect photograph?”
A mighty voice answered without hesitation, without a single click of the shutter.
“Yes. And now there is a perfect photograph.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Slunk Emo. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the hot shoe struck him down and fused the switch shut.*
Meanwhile, a guy with a camera sits at the local skating rink taking blurry pictures.
[*Based on “Answer,” a short story by Fredric Brown.]
I had an appointment in the city the other day. Given the train schedule, I would either arrive about 45 minutes early or 5 minutes late. I opted to arrive early so that I could spend half an hour or so taking pictures in the beautiful train station.
The station was bustling with people — commuters, students heading home for the summer, tourists arriving in the city. In the 30 minutes I spent in the station, I took a bunch of photographs that I will assemble into a small book, “30 Minutes in 30th Street.”
Once I make a bunch, I’ll leave them in local coffee shops and Little Free Libraries in the area. Just the latest in my pamphlet and limited editions projects. Let me know if you want one.
I went to see a show last night, an album celebration show. The music was great, but what really impressed me was the musicians. Sure, there were a number of people there to see the show, but our presence was irrelevant. Watching the band play and especially E.J., the front man, I saw a person who creates because he has to create. He would be writing and performing songs whether or not anybody listened. If he took the place of that famous tree in the woods and nobody was around to hear him, he would still be making and performing music. He creates. His creations might also be art, but that’s irrelevant to him.
The show reminded me that I make photographs for me. Some of them will be “original,” others will look like numerous other photographs. The last few weeks have been drippy around here. I started to notice puddles on sidewalks as an opportunity to look at trees in a different way, to take the season’s last photographs of trees before the leaf out. For the next week or so I took lots of photos of trees reflected in puddles on my commute to and from work. Pictures of reflections are a dime a dozen, even with inflation. I will not take an original picture of a reflection. But that assumes I take pictures with an audience in mind, one that has surely seen dozens of pictures of reflections. By that metric, pictures are little more than the subject captured in the frame. But this misses the point, at least for me.
I don’t care if at first glance my photos look like pictures everybody has taken. Those photographers are not me and did not take my photos. If, as Wim Wenders has asserted, the camera points both directions, forward at the subject and back at the photographer, then photographs I take of reflections are not like anybody else’s. They answer to my questions and concerns and aesthetic sensibilities. For that reason, when I take a picture or print a photograph, I think only of one audience, an audience of one: me.
I make the photographs I need to see in the world, not the photographs I think the world needs to see. Maybe that’s the difference between creating and making art. While the latter fulfills its purpose when an audience interacts with it, the former fulfills its purpose by existing. I am not an artist but rather a person who creates.
Winter never arrived this year. Except for a week in December, the winter months were balmy and snowless. Spring came early. The cherry trees had finished blooming weeks earlier than usual. While most people rejoice in spring’s colorful return, I don’t often join the festivities. I miss winter.
I enjoy the beauty in the stark landscapes, both large and small. The season and the bare trees and snow laden bushes lend themselves, I think, to quiet photographs.
Therein lies the key difference, for me, between winter and other seasons: winter is quiet, at times hauntingly so. Winter urges me to be quiet, prompts me to look carefully at the world around me, reminds me that I too shall pass.
Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a Love-thought, thro’ me, Death
And take a Life that wearies me.
Fragment, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Spring is here. Blossoms and leaves have brought color back to life. I lament winter’s passing but take comfort in knowing it will return.
The vagueness of a daily photography project or the magnitude of a “365 project” has always put me off. A more finite, one still life each day for a month, worked better. Even that project, however, lost some of its appeal by the end:
However, I have largely disliked this project. I find it dull. I have fallen into the habit of thinking that making the single photograph (which I do each evening) is sufficient. As long as I do that, I’ve accomplished something for the day. Consequently, I find myself taking fewer photographs as I wander with my camera. As if I’ve replaced taking photos of the world around me with taking my daily flash photo.
The monotony was both too boring and not sufficiently compelling. As I said at the end of that project, maybe something more focused — my version of Micheal Beirut drawing his left hand every day, or Joseph Sudek photographing things in his window. An important aspect of such a daily project, for me, is prompting me to look at the world in new ways. Trying to capture that aspect, I have been working on a daily project this past month: “One Thought Per Day.”
I made a little booklet, a sort of diary. Early each day I write a thought, sometimes a question, on the day’s page. From that thought I generate a single word. That word guides me as I look for a scene (I don’t get to stage it — I must find it) that relates to the day’s word/thought. I get to take one picture.
The page above shows the thought for April 16, 2023. Posturing, pretending to be something I am not, was the thought that I sought to find as I went through the day. I found, standing on a windowsill in the department lounge, a small articulated mannequin (why an IKEA mannequin is in the lounge I can’t imagine). It became the day’s photograph.
At the end of the month I will print the day’s on a page the precedes the day’s photograph, and then assemble them into a booklet (the same dimensions as the diary I use to record the thoughts). In the end, I’ll produce a small booklet, 2 1/2″ x 4 1/4″, of about 60 pages — 30 thoughts and 30 photographs, which I will hand bind.
For me, the combination of thinking, writing, searching, and photographing has been really productive. Guided by an idea or thought, I have looked at the world around me for scenes that somehow capture that thought. I have found that I spend more time thinking about the world as I move through it. I don’t know if I have taken more pictures because of it, but I think that I’ve put more thought into most of those pictures.
I also just love making things, material things. I enjoyed making the little booklet in which to record my thoughts. I am looking forward to making the booklet filled with those thoughts and the photographs they generated.
As with most of my projects, I will likely make a handful and leave them places, cafes, Little Free Libraries, benches, wherever. I’ll probably send some to random people as well. For me, that is an important part of my entire project. Casting whatever I make out into the world (Nick Tauro Jr.’s version of this is brilliant — if only I had an old newspaper box).
Are we more or less alone now that we hold “the world” in our hands? Do we seek out empty places so that the real world doesn’t interfere with our experiencing the virtual world? Maybe in the 1980s Aztec Camera could remark, “They call us lonely when we’re really just alone,” but today I worry that we are both alone and lonely.
Despite considerable handwringing, a species of photographer seems insistent on drawing attention to the equipment used to make photographs. I am amused by how many electrons and how much ink is spent saying some version of “gear doesn’t matter” by people who are themselves focused on cameras and lenses. Whether it is a “film photographer” (a term I don’t like but seems to be important to a certain group of people) is explaining yet again that “film slows me down,” while loading film, taking a shot, and winding the crank on the side of some vintage camera, or it is a “large format photographer” setting up the tripod and camera, screwing in the cable release, inserting the film holder, and taking the picture, or it is a person with a digital camera boasting about whatever gear some company has “lent [them] to try out” as they pull it out of their bag, the camera plays a starring role in the performance. The camera, its settings, or the film stock — all that is irrelevant, as many of these photographers will, in other instances, remind us. Rather, it is the image and the message or story or emotion or moment it evokes that matters. The camera, the lens, the film, the processing are all just tools a person uses to produce a photograph.
Photographers are not unique in this obsession with cameras, deflecting our attention from the photograph to the tools used to produce it. People I would describe as “photographer-adjacent” reinforce and encourage the habit. Audiences continue to watch videos that foreground cameras. Exhibitions highlight the equipment used on panels describing shows. Publishers continue to draw attention to the cameras used. Over and over again book blurbs include statements like “photographing with an 8×10-inch Deardorff view camera” and “shooting with a medium format camera” and “everyday moments based on iPhone photographs.” Perhaps there was a time when photographers and the photography-adjacent didn’t draw attention to their tools, but if so those days are past.
Imagine if we drew attention to the tools we use to accomplish other activities. I use a teaspoon rather than a soup- or tablespoon when I eat soup, one that was manufactured in the 1980s. It slows me down and forces me to appreciate the flavors and textures. Because my teaspoon is constrained by volume, I have to choose where to put it and what to scoop up. Each mouthful costs more, both time and calories, so I am more careful with each spoonful. It takes me longer to finish my bowl of soup. Metal spoons are better than plastic. Their weight causes a reassuring sound when they strike the bottom of the bowl, and if you’re eating outside the metal spoon does a better job weighing down the napkin.
The boundary between me and the world is about 12 inches wide. But in that 12 inches there is another, if smaller, world. Shadows cast by light falling across various things sitting on the window sill. Shadows that shift and change over the course of the day, the weeks, the months.
Two eggs from the neighbor’s chickens. Hardboiled. Lunch if I remember. Now and then I glance over at them, like small sundials tracking my time here on earth. Empty glasses and coffee cups, evidence of having done something. Bottles of different sorts. Strangely, no flowers or plant life, for reasons I can’t explain.
Some cups get repurposed, a tiny coop that keeps an egg from rolling off the sill and onto the floor. I see now how Sudek was able occupy himself with nothing more than a window and the things around him.
I often feel trapped in my office, looking out at the world having fun. The tree blowing in the breeze, the sights and sounds of kids playing, the occasional snippets of conversation between people huddled beneath my window talking about something they hoped to keep secret. The window faces west. Lovely warm light streams in through the blinds each afternoon. Sometimes I raise them and look out. Sometimes I don’t.
I am not, of course, trapped. I can come and go as I please. But I work here and so spend most of my day in this office. It’s a comfortable space, filled with books and gadgets and notes and pens and old prints and scientific instruments. But always the outside beckons, especially in the afternoons when my motivation wanes. I stand at the window and look out.
The window becomes the interface between me and the outside world. Not a barrier but a liminal space where light meets shadow, a space where possibilities await. I linger in that space.