A photograph decides in an instant. Here I take longer.
Notes, essays and observations on making images, and on everything that presses in from the edges.
Why photography increasingly begins with a camera but does not necessarily end with an image.
Most of us were raised, visually, on the rectangle. You point a camera, you get a frame, you print it or you don’t, and either way the world gets divided neatly into what’s inside the border and what isn’t. It’s a tidy contract. Photography has spent close to two hundred years honoring it, the way an aging rock star still squeezes into the leather trousers because that’s what fans expect.
When reference culture stops inspiring images and starts making everybody look alike.
Reference culture used to be a gift. Now, for a lot of commercial photography, it’s closer to a script everyone secretly agreed to follow, and nobody wants to be the first to put down.
What portrait photography reveals in the fraction of a second before identity becomes performance.
Roland Barthes wrote that the instant he felt himself observed by a lens, he began “posing,” instantly manufacturing another body for himself, one built specifically for the camera rather than lived in the rest of the time. He wrote that in 1980, decades before anyone had to worry about their face turning up on a colleague’s phone mid-sentence. He would have hated video calls. He would have recognized, immediately, the particular exhaustion of watching your own face perform itself back at you in a small rectangle in the corner of the screen, all day, every meeting.