2026 - Nathaniel Morrow

on writing.

Edited and condensed from a lecture given to the youth class ‘Exploring The World of Opportunities for Photographers’ at the International Center of Photography.

I believe that you should write to be understood. When I started writing, I wanted to show off my vocabulary, and all of the tricks and technical things I knew. Style was the most important thing. But after working a day job, I found that trying to dress language up can get in the way of being understood. I try to use fewer words now, and more obvious ones. There are plenty of ways to be creative, even with fewer words. Style is the result of the choices you make, and if you are writing well, you will choose each word for a reason.

If you are going to make art long-term, you will have to do a lot of writing. You may write artist statements, project statements, grant applications, requests for representation, pages on your website, blog posts, biographies, and more. All of these—and all writing—are meant to communicate something; to take what you want someone to know, and present it in a way they are likely to understand.

Try to be clear. Understand what it is you want to say, not what you think someone wants to hear. If you've been asked a question, come up with an answer that you believe. I have read a lot of writing that I dislike, and I dislike most of it for one of two reasons. Either it isn't clear what it's trying to say, or it's trying to disguise the fact that it's not saying anything at all.

As far as practical advice on putting one word after another: your first goal should only be to put words on a page. They don't have to be good words. Your first draft may look nothing like your final one. Once you have words, you can move them around, add some, remove some, change some, and so on. Your first draft is your raw material. It needs to be wrong first.

If you are editing, and something doesn't feel right, pay attention to that. Writing well means noticing what doesn't work and editing until it does. Is a sentence too long, or too short? Are you using a word that's the right one for that sentence? If you are trying to persuade someone, does it sound convincing? If you are explaining something, would you understand it if you didn't know what you know?

Finally, when you are reading someone else's work, don't judge them on if the work meets your standards or not. Judge them on whether or not you understand them, and help them say what they want to say in the way they want to say it. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's bad. Take a moment to think about if there is something wrong with it, or if it's just something that you don't enjoy.

5.30.26

the makers are the message.

When I was younger, I thought artists made all their own work. I don't remember where that thought came from, but it seemed like a reasonable assumption. I thought that if something had made its way into a gallery, or a museum, that a single person was responsible. Otherwise, I thought, there would be more names listed, people who shared in the creation and production of the work. Realizing this was not the case was a genuine surprise.

I am mortified that there are artists who don't even touch some of the work that they take credit for. It disregards the entire industry that enables artists, the specialists and craftspeople that enable them to realize their largest and most dramatic works. Even on the smaller scale, I believe that framers should be acknowledged; their craft and the context their work provides can change art from ordinary to significant.

I have no right to dictate what others will do, and I don't have the knowledge to account for every circumstance. But in my own work, I create what I can and credit what I can't. This was not originally out of a moral conviction; I am not, artistically, a collaborator. I am specific about what I want, and about how I want it to be seen. That specificity is the same reason I stopped writing fiction. There are so many choices to make and to hold in mind, and the larger the project became, the more overwhelming it got. Visual art has been freeing, but there are still many choices to make.

Choice is why making work myself has been so important to me. There are no defaults, only assumptions. Every aspect of a work is changeable, and I can't know the choices available to me until I know the craft. When I print my work, I am limited by the colors of the process; by knowing those limits, I can make choices that I agree with instead of having them made for me. The same is true of mounting and framing. Paper, metal, adhesive, and wood all have limits, but also possibilities. Working with these materials myself lets me understand what those possibilities are.

When work is delegated to others, so are choices. Professionals may make good choices, but they will still have an effect on the work, or the way it is received. They are a part of the finished product as much as the artist is, even more so if assistants, interns, or other companies are fabricating the work itself.

In the same way that a work's medium shapes its message, so do its makers. Every choice matters. I am not against collaboration; I am fully aware that my view represents an extreme, and that not every artist will have the time, money, knowledge, space, physical ability, or other requirements to do everything themselves. But I at least believe that what artists cannot create, they should credit. That, at least, seems achievable.

05.01.2026

noticing.

A squirrel digging frantically for nuts in a granite flowerpot.
A brown fur coat slumped half on, half off a table like a dead bear.
Two pigeons feasting in a trash pile.
Experiencing the first warm weather of the season, and remembering that a college classmate used to say 'it's relationship season' every time the weather warmed up, as people frantically paired off with the first breath of spring.
A crow sitting atop a neon HOTEL sign, bathed in blue light.
A rusted wok wedged between the chains of two locked-up bikes.
The first bluets of spring in Gramercy Park.
A partially melted compost bin, the lower rear corner drooping onto the pavement like a Dali clock.
A woman on her cell phone saying, annoyedly, I'm not my mother.

03.26.26

a ladder in the dark.

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

light as origin.

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

trustworthy images.

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