I often feel like making art is like climbing down a ladder in the dark. Not up—I'm not trying to reach a great height. I'm trying to find the ground. Every step is by feel, by rhythm. Sometimes the rungs are further apart, sometimes closer together, but I keep my hands on the rails. And I can feel when my foot hits the next rung.
When I make something good, I can feel it immediately. I don't have to wonder if it's right. I don't judge by a standard, I don't compare it to other work; I'm not trying to create something specific. It's discovery. I think that's the most beautiful thing about doing something new—you can make something completely unexpected, something that surprises even you.
That's one of the things I loved about street photography. When I started taking photos on the street more regularly, I was shooting with manual focus, at waist level. When I saw a moment I wanted to capture, I focused and aimed the camera by feel, but the results were inconsistent. I got better with time, but it was a constant collaboration with chance and luck. When I reviewed the photos later, I deleted most of them immediately. It was part of the process. There was no drama, no wishing I'd caught something specific. I remember something my father said when I was working on homework when I was younger: is this your best work? If it isn't, it gets deleted.
And then, among the photos I delete, are photos that are instantly compelling. Just enough in focus to tell what is going on, and that capture something significant—an expression, a gesture, a moment of poetry. That moment of surprise, of having made something almost by accident, is why I make art.
My whole process is experimentation. It's intuitive, gestural; when I develop my work, it's with a tool that has knobs, and dials, and buttons, not with a mouse. I love working with my hands, developing a muscle memory for the actions that produce the results I want. If I want to make my photo look a certain way, I can feel my fingers move automatically. There is a part of me that wants to work with film to do more work by hand, but what I value so much about digital photography is how fast I can iterate—how fast it lets me go down the ladder. To be able to have an idea, test it, and either discard it or run with it, all in a matter of minutes. The speed of the work is not only a part of it, it's the point of it.
Some of that comes from being anxious. I've had anxiety for a long time. Now, with medication, it sits under the surface, but especially in spring, when the warmth comes back, I start to feel it again. These days it's less fear, and more a kind of restlessness. It's harder to sit still, to be indoors, to do the same thing for long periods unless I'm completely absorbed. It is a great and terrible asset for seeing art. I can go on a walk and seen dozens of shows in a day, but I might not spend much time on any individual work. I try to. But my inclination is to see things fast, to glut myself on sensation and then reflect and say, that was so much beauty.
To some degree, too, the speed is because of the way the world moves. It's what life demands, what the Internet demands, what the city demands. I used to be a much slower-paced person, and enjoyed it; sometimes I miss it. But there's a glory in being able to work fast, live fast, to experience so much sensation that it overwhelms you. I've been drawn to intense experiences for a long time. I haven't always sought them out, but it's what I enjoy.
I don't think this climb I'm on has an end. If I hit bottom, I'll stop for a while, stretch, and find another ladder. But just to climb is enough, and I do it because I love it.
I think art can be difficult to make, but I don't think it has to be. I struggled with writing in the past; it felt like pulling teeth to get words on the page. It's why I haven't written creatively for some time. It was a compulsion, despite the pain, and it led me to places in my head I didn't enjoy. I think writing especially can lend itself to a dark introspection; there are so many choices to make, so many decisions to lose yourself in. If you try to make every word an active act, I think it can destroy you.
But being able to make visual work has felt like freedom. It's less precise, more expansive. I don't feel the burden of trying to make myself understood. Instead of trying to be clear, to be exact, to present a very specific impression, all I have to do is point and say, See? And it will be seen. What people take from it is up to them.
03.13.26
Two men outside a pizza shop making conversation with a woman they had just met, who worked at a country's permanent mission to the US, joking that she had been sent as an assassin.
Two men embracing after stepping off the subway stairs, one telling the other it was so good to see you.
The subtle difference between the smooth print side of a sheet of transparency film and the slightly tacky back side.
The shock of snow after the warmth.
03.13.26
Some time ago, I was writing an origin story not just for an imagined world, but for a universe. I wanted to start at the very beginning, to imagine things back to the moment of first creation. I thought then—and still do—that in order to understand anything, you have to go back to its origin.
Because of that same belief, I struggled for some time before putting anything on the page; if the origin is important, then it should be right, because everything builds on that seed. In the end, I got down two words:
"First, light."
—
I love the act of creation. I think that every artist is the god of their own work, and that their work, their world, begins with the first mark they make, or note they sing, or step they dance. I've heard that to make art is human, but I think it's something greater. I don't know that I believe in the divine, but I think that to create anything at all is beyond human. It puts us in company with gods, but also with the universe itself.
But there is no way to make something from nothing. There is only change from one state to another. I've always been frustrated by that. I think any immutable law inherently frustrates me. But I think we can get close, or closer, and the closest I can imagine is to use the most elemental 'material' I have access to.
I think everything begins with light. It isn't a very scientific view. I think that light is the building block of creation, more than atoms or any other kind of particle. I think that at the very first moment of creation, that there was a light so bright that it contained everything in existence, a light that was every color through and beyond what we can see, so searing that it was able to push back whatever nothingness came before.
Light and its reflections are how we understand the world, and photography captures light. But I think what the camera captures is a half-truth, at best. Photography reproduces. Many things make up a good photo, and a photographer may control most of them; but traditional photographs, and even much experimental photography, capture images of what already exists. It is an act of creation, but an partial one. I wanted to use light as a raw material, to make something from the light itself, not just its reflection.
When I started into abstract photography, I imagined light as a kind of clay. I wanted to be able to feel it between my fingers, to feel the weight of it; when I think about what it might feel like, it has a grain like sand, it is soft and almost weightless. But it has weight. I imagined making shapes and objects with it the way others did with paint, working intuitively, not trying to make comprehensible forms but just to capture it at all.
The only way I could think to start was to hold up my hand in front of the lens, to try and shape the light without tainting it. But the world was still recognizable. I tried filters and papers, but taking the lens off the camera was ultimately the solution. Even then it was not an immediate success. But after experimentation, I found the right combination: a particular light, a particular shape of the hand, a particular shutter speed. And more. Angles and small variations, more light and less.
In development, I found that not all the light was obvious; sometimes it resisted being seen until the image was brightened, and then exploded into visibility. Colors emerged; unlooked-for beauty. It felt like creation, but also discovery, a sense of being witness to a birth. I don't know if gods exist, but I hope that this sense of wonder is what they felt like if they made the world, an overwhelming sense of awe. Something emerging from nothing.
There are difficulties. Light is not transferrable; it cannot be parceled and sold. Printing is only an intermediary step. An important one to get right, and one I am passionate about, but still not the end. If I could have it my way, the light would exist solely on a surface, unprojected, hung like a canvas. Prints reflect light, but I want the light to project itself; the best that I can think of is a screen or a projector. But even that feels like a denial of the original material—only a partial answer. It's odd to feel attached to the concept of material honesty when working with light.
In the meantime, I will keep making things, and keep experimenting.
02.27.26
A trio of workers shoveling out a Citibike dock, one of them tossing shovelfuls of snow to the other, who tries unsuccessfully to catch them—and laughs.
The stark cold, a cold with teeth. (I wish there were a way to photograph the cold.)
An empty room in a museum gallery that is between exhibits, empty except for the light through the windows.
02.01.26
I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about AI and photography.
If you've seen the post going around comparing Google's first-gen 'Nano Banana' image generation model to its new Pro model, you know how scarily realistic it is. It's not the first time in history that people have claimed that the photographic image is dead, but it does feel like something is different this time.
Between the oversaturation of images and the fact that no photograph can be immediately trusted without investigation, it makes me want to go deeper into the world of abstraction. I'm realistic about the fact that what I make can easily be reproduced by AI, and I don't know that there's any getting around that now. But I think there's something to be said for producing an image that's intentionally suspect—of an object that isn't an object—in a time when people are using AI to make images that look real.
I don’t know what will happen to photography in the long term. I do know that, at least for now, I am looking at fewer photographs online, and the ones I do engage with, I try to inspect before I show them to anyone else. But even though I like to think I’m a perceptive person, I can no longer tell the difference between what’s AI-generated and what’s not. The tells that I learned—strange fingers or text, overly smooth skin, a certain sameness in lighting that ChatGPT was known for—are rarer now. And that’s not even getting into how convincing video has gotten.
I’d need to read more history to know for sure, but I imagine this might be how painters felt during the invention of photography. Some painters used it as a tool, others scorned it. I think there’s some degree of equivalence there.
But generative AI totally removes creativity from human hands. I know some will argue that ‘prompt engineering’ to produce images with AI is art, and there is some skill in knowing what language to use—but is it creativity?
Instinctively, I want to say no; that unless you’ve made the work by your hand (whether physically or digitally) and design, and participated in each step of the process, it doesn’t count. But I’ve always been very strongly in favor of making art yourself from start to finish, and I know that’s not universal. I know that each new innovation in art and technology is met with naysayers who claim it has more negatives than positives—that it will kill jobs, that it is untrustworthy, that we should stick with tried and true methods and practices. But humanity moves on. We’ve never been able to pass up something new and interesting.
For now, I’ll restrict my own AI use to the ‘generative remove’ tool built into Lightroom. There’s a larger conversation to be had about AI being used for individual tools and tasks versus generation of a complete work, but I’m neither informed nor qualified enough to have it.
01.04.26
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