It was Monday, the Fifth of July, 1982, and I had just given a dinner for people with AIDS at the Middle Collegiate Church on East 4th Street, where I was a minister. I was freshly graduated from Union Theological Seminary. The Orpheum Theatre was on Second Avenue, around the corner, and Little Shop of Horrors had just opened there, and for months before that, the rehearsals had been happening in the practice room across from my office. The music and the voices came through the wall while I worked. The Collegiate Church was always noisy and full of people you didn’t quite recognize. There were three floors of rehearsal spaces, constant performances, artists, actors, and musicians moving through at all hours. It was at a focal point of the East Village. This was when the neighbourhood was still cheap enough for artists and a recent small wave of immigrants from Ireland. Across the street, at the Kiev, I sometimes shared a table next to Allen Ginsberg, who off and on lived up somewhere around 12th street. My days were full with meetings, writing, reading, phone calls and visiting people in the neighborhood. But something was beginning to happen that nobody had prepared for. There was a dark cloud coming.

Two young men came to the dinner together. David Grubb, a landscape painter, and Dennis Embry, an actor and playwright, who had until a year ago been working in off-Broadway shows and busy getting his own plays read. Earlier that day, Dennis had called the church asking if there was a dinner that night. He said he would be late because he had trouble walking. We sent a cab to pick him up. I met them both at the table in the corner that night. We had dinner, there was live music, something easy to arrange in this place, and after dinner, we sent people off with a bag of groceries. I sent Dennis home by cab with two bags; he seemed very thin.

The next week, David and Dennis came by again, and David suggested I come to Park Slope to see his studio, where he lived. I think we took the 6 train from Astor Place and somehow got to the Bergen Street. Somewhere, we switched to the IRT Brooklyn line. I was lost, and a bit concerned because he said he was a landscape painter, and I was an abstract painter. I was expecting to be less than impressed. I was impressed.

It was a neighborhood of brownstones that in 1982 was still becoming what it would eventually be. His apartment was on Union Street between Prospect Park and Seventh Avenue. 747 Union. The kitchen had a table. Above the table, in a single wide frame of dark wood, gold paint lightly applied, and a burgundy mat, were three black and white photographs, each approximately the size of a postcard.

The left photograph showed a man from approximately the waist up, shot straight on. He was wearing a leather harness, the kind that crosses the chest in a specific geometry, two straps from the shoulders meeting a horizontal band across the sternum, the whole construction fitted to the body with precision. His face was not in the frame. The photograph ended at the jaw. What remained was the body, symmetrical, the harness sitting on it with the ease of clothing worn by someone accustomed to wearing it. The light came from slightly above and in front, casting the musculature of the chest and shoulders into a modest relief. The print was dark, the background a flat black, the body emerging from it a clear fact, almost documentary in tone.

The centre photograph showed a man full-length, standing, in a white tank top and brief underwear. He was leaning slightly, the weight on one leg, the other knee bent, one arm hanging loose at his side. His face was visible, looking directly at the camera, not smiling, not performing. His body had the specific quality of a dancer’s body, which is a body that knows at all times where it is in space. The light here was softer, coming from the side, and the white of the tank top held it differently than the dark leather of the first photograph, glowing slightly against a grey background. He looked like someone who had decided some time ago who he was and had not revisited the question.

The right photograph was shot from behind. A man from the waist up, head turned slightly to one side, his back to the camera. He was wearing black leather pants, low on the hips, and above the waistband, the back was bare. The light fell across the musculature of the shoulders and the long line of the spine in a way that was precise and deliberate, finding the form the way a draftsman finds a form, with attention to where one plane meets another. The back of the head, the dark hair, the slight turn. That was all. It was enough. The images were imbued with confidence that young people of that age have more than enough of.

I stood in that kitchen in Park Slope and looked at those three photographs for a while. I did not say anything immediately. I was not sure, at first, what I was responding to. I had not, before that visit, hung anything on my own walls that was this direct. This set of images presents the body, the male body, the gay male body in its specific iconography, without apology and without distance

An image by Robert Mapplethorpe.

It turned out the “photos,” which I still have, were actually postcards. David had picked them up at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Christopher Street, the first gay bookstore in America, opened in 1967, named after Oscar Wilde, where postcards and books and periodicals sat in racks and on shelves, and you could walk in off the street and find birthday cards, books, music, and all those things that had your name on them. That is how images moved in 1982, before the internet, before everything was instantly available everywhere. You walked into a bookstore on Christopher Street, and you found three postcards in a rack of dozens, and you carried them home on the 6 train, and you put them in a frame above your kitchen table. Right now, I can look at the boxes under my stairwell and see a huge plastic box full of post-cards. They’re from stores, museums, rest stops, art exhibits, and a lot that people travelling sent me.

I kept thinking about those three photographs above David’s kitchen table. Why are they up on the wall, and all the others are in the box? What they had given me, in the years that followed, was not comfort exactly. It was more like evidence. Evidence that the body, that specific body, had been looked at with complete seriousness, and that the looking itself was a kind of argument. It took me years to find the person who had made that argument most precisely.

By the mid-1980s, besides working at the church, I was spending a lot of my time working in hospitals, doing visits to people I often, actually usually, didn’t know. I was a member of ACT-UP and Queer Nation, and as I was the minister at the church in the East Village, my name often came up when the families of men who were dying of AIDS, often their moms, would call the church and ask for someone to visit because their own priests and ministers were afraid to go or had rejected their sons for some theological reason I failed to understand. I always asked, directly, what they needed from me. Some wanted a blessing, some a simple prayer, some wanted someone to read a Bible passage with them, and some wanted communion for their sons before they died. I wanted to know what to bring along. I had my “kit” in the bookcase. I had a Catholic priest show me how to give last rites, and even had a “Last Rites/Communion emergency kit” the size of a paperback book to take with me. These were not the beautiful young men of the photos.

A Self-Portrait by Mapplethorpe

I sat with men in the condition that AIDS produced before the drugs that would eventually make it manageable, when the body failed in specific and terrible ways. I knew, by the middle of that decade, what a body in that condition looked like. I knew it in considerable detail. When the elevator at one of the hospitals I visited came to my floor, the AIDS ward, I would step in, and people would move away, someone would press the button for the next floor and a lot of people would get off.

Dennis Embry had left home at seventeen, the way people leave home at seventeen when home had decided it could not accommodate who he was. He came to New York, the way young people come to New York in that circumstance, because New York was where you could be yourself, or at least where you could try. He was an actor and a playwright. He had worked in off-Broadway shows. But I remember this: Dennis had wallpapered his bathroom with Alcoa Aluminum Foil, it was a sight to see. When you turned on the light, reflections were everywhere. Sometimes when I visited him, he and two other guys would be sitting around his kitchen table discussing their pain meds, trading pills along with stories that I regret are lost now.

I was working in Virginia when Dennis called and asked me to come as soon as I could. I flew home the next morning. I needed a short nap before taking the train into Manhattan. When I got to his room, he was sealed in an orange plastic bag. Tape covered the zipper, just to make sure. The words on the bag said Contaminated Do Not Open. I lost my composure, leaving, yelling at the person at the front desk for letting me walk into that.

Later, Dennis’s parents called. They were coming to New York to see him, and I had to tell them he was gone. Dennis had come from the South, and his being gay had been met with something less than enthusiasm. He had left at seventeen in part because of that, and he seemed, in the years I knew him, to carry that leaving with him. I told his parents that Dennis had been looking forward to seeing them. That it meant a great deal to him that they were coming. When I hung up, I sat at my desk for a long time. I knew that what mattered at that moment was their grief. After the call, I sat there, and I cried. I tried not to keep too many important books on my desk because I tended to throw them across the room at the wall. There were a lot of things then that could make me throw a book.

Tulip, by Mapplethorpe

Dennis’s plays are in my bookcase. They have nowhere to go. I wish, deep inside, that I could remember everyone from then as beautiful. Like in those three photos. But I can’t. The photographs above David’s table did not know any of this. They hold still in a different time, when I guess we were all beautiful.

…

Desire

Dave Hickey was an art critic from Texas who spent a significant part of his career in Las Vegas, which he understood as a place where “people were honest about wanting things.” In 1988, he was sitting on a panel, barely paying attention, he admits, when someone in the audience asked what the issue of the 1990s would be. He said beauty.

The room did not know what to do with that answer. The word had been evacuated from serious art criticism and thought for the better part of a century, replaced first by the formal concerns of modernism and then by the theoretical concerns of postmodernism, neither of which had much use for the idea that a work of art might be valuable because it was beautiful, because it reached out and did something to the viewer, because it reorganized desire.

Portrait by Mapplethorpe

Hickey’s argument, made across a series of essays collected in “The Invisible Dragon,” first published in 1993, is that beauty is not a formal property of objects. It is not something that resides in the thing being looked at, waiting to be discovered by a sufficiently educated eye. Beauty is what happens between the image and the beholder. He said, “It is efficacious, which means it has effects.” It changes people. It reaches across the space between the image and the person standing in front of it and does something that cannot be entirely anticipated or controlled. And this, Hickey argues, is precisely why institutions, museums, universities, government arts bodies, the whole apparatus of what he calls the therapeutic institution, are suspicious of beauty. An institution that controls meaning cannot control beauty. Beauty bypasses the institution and works directly on the person standing in the room.

There was something specific about the way gay men in that neighborhood, in that period, attended to beauty. You saw it in how they dressed, in the care taken with a window box on a fire escape above Avenue A, in the way a bar on Christopher Street would be lit. Mapplethorpe understood this from the inside. He photographed calla lilies in vases and men in leather harnesses with the same compositional discipline, the same quality of light, the same refusal to rank one subject above another. I have several of his books, male figures and plants both, and what holds across all of them is the attention. The subject changes. The attention does not. Hickey’s argument explains why this was not incidental. A community that had been told its existence was shameful, its body wrong, its desire illegitimate, developed a particular relationship to beauty. Not as compensation. Because beauty is what you bring to bear on something you believe is worth looking at. The argument was in the looking itself. The East Village in 1982 was full of people making that argument, in the way they moved, in what they hung on their walls, the way they wallpapered their bathrooms in aluminum foil, in what they carried home on the train.

The essay in which Hickey makes this argument most precisely is called “Nothing Like the Son,” and it concerns Robert Mapplethorpe, specifically the X Portfolio, a series of photographs Mapplethorpe made in 1978 documenting the gay male S&M subculture of New York City. In 1990, a museum director in Cincinnati was prosecuted for displaying these photographs. The trial became a focal point for the culture wars of that period, the argument about whether public money should fund art that certain people found obscene. Well, not really the art, but that ability to have an effect on the viewer through the object.

About Hickey’s title, and why I mention it here: Hickey’s pun on Shakespeare’s line “nothing like the sun” is exact and worth sitting with. By replacing sun with son, the title moves the argument from idealized beauty to the specific problem that Dennis and Dave and Robert Mapplethorpe all lived inside: a culture that understood homosexuality as a failure of generational continuance, a son who does not reproduce the father, who does not carry the line forward in the way the father requires. The sun in Shakespeare’s sonnet is what ideal beauty is always being compared to, and always failing to match. The son in Hickey’s title is the person who fails, or refuses, to mirror the man who shaped him. That refusal is what the photographs are about. That refusal is what got the museum directors prosecuted for showing Mapplethorpe’s works.

Hickey’s position on the obscenity trial is counterintuitive and exact. He argues that the politicians and religious groups who wanted the photographs banned understood them better than the curators and academics who defended them. The defenders abstracted the photographs, praising the formal achievement of Mapplethorpe’s technique, the way the stark black and white prints owed something to Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, the high contrast light that Caravaggio used in paintings like The Calling of Saint Matthew, where a shaft of light falls across a group of figures in a dark room and one of them looks up, caught in the light, caught in the moment of being called. Hickey says the defenders abstracted the photographs further, into principles of free expression, the social value of art in general, and the importance of protecting difficult speech. What they did not do was talk about what the photographs actually showed, or why Mapplethorpe had made them so damned beautiful.

Portrait by Mapplethorpe

But the censors talked about what the photographs showed. They understood that Mapplethorpe had applied the full discipline of fine art photography, the discipline he had developed shooting flowers in vases and portraits of celebrities, to acts that the culture had decided were not entitled to that quality of attention. They understood that the beauty of the photographs was an argument. The photographs were saying: this is real, these are people, this is what some people do and who some people are, and it is worth looking at with complete seriousness. The censors found that argument dangerous. They were not wrong about what kind of argument it was. They were wrong about what to do about it.
Portrait by Mapplethorpe

Catherine Opie understood this, and her work extends Hickey’s argument in ways that make clear it is not an argument about one photographer or one subculture or one decade. Opie’s self-portraits of the early 1990s, “Self-Portrait/Cutting” (1993) and “Self-Portrait/Pervert” (1994), apply the same formal discipline, the same studio light, the same quality of complete attention, to her own body. The result is the same kind of argument Mapplethorpe was making: this is real, this is a person, and it is worth looking at seriously. I have owned a couple of her images for years. What drew me first was the directness, the same quality I had recognized above David’s kitchen table. Over time, as Opie moved toward landscape, toward the American West and its highways and its flat light, what stayed constant was the question underneath the work: who belongs here, who is entitled to be seen, who is trespassing. The New Topographics tradition she works within, photographers like Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz who photographed the ordinary, damaged, unbeautiful American landscape with complete formal seriousness, asked the same question about place that Opie asks about the body. Hickey’s idea of the image making itself available, reaching across the space between the photograph and the person standing in front of it, holds for all of it. Beauty, aimed at the wrong subject, is understood as provocation, whether or not provocation was intended.

But Hickey’s larger point is about the relationship between beauty and transgression. Transgression defines itself against a norm and therefore depends on the norm for its energy. A work of art that matters because it breaks a rule needs the rule to keep mattering. Mapplethorpe was not interested in rules. He was interested in beauty. He said, in an interview late in his life, that he did not see much difference between a photograph of a fist and a photograph of carnations in a bowl. This is not provocation. It is an aesthetic position, held consistently across an entire body of work. The same light. The same compositional precision. The same quality of attention, regardless of subject.

This is also what Hickey means when he talks about the image presenting itself, making itself available to the beholder. A Mapplethorpe photograph does not explain itself or justify itself or ask for your understanding. It simply presents the subject with complete formal seriousness and waits. The beholder is changed by the encounter, or is not, but the photograph does not modulate itself according to the beholder’s comfort. It holds still. It persists. It offers itself. And the offering is the argument. Those three photos on the wall over the kitchen table, it turns out, were not a provocation. They were just about beauty. And those three images above the table were the best argument against the coming dark.

…

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A Note on the Photographers who made the postcards:

For 40 years, I wondered who made these photos. A few times I searched, but never found any leads. This time, I guess with the advent of better internet searches, I have located these two photographers who have lived on my wall for 40 years or so:

Hans van Manen was born in 1932 in Nieuwer-Amstel, a suburb of Amsterdam. He became one of the most significant choreographers in the history of European ballet, creating around 150 works for the Nederlands Dans Theater and the Dutch National Ballet. He was among the founding members of the Nederlands Dans Theater, which began as what was described at the time as a rebel group, a company willing to break with the formal conventions of classical ballet. He served as its artistic director from 1961 to 1970. He was active in the Dutch gay rights movement. He married his longtime partner Henk van Dijk in 1999, when the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. He died in Amsterdam in December 2025, at the age of 93.

The photography was a secondary career, practiced quietly alongside the choreography, and it began because of Mapplethorpe. Van Manen came into contact with Mapplethorpe personally, and this contact inspired him to pick up a camera himself, as a way, he said, of finding peace in the studio and the darkroom, away from the intensity of working with large groups of dancers. He worked always in square 6x6 format. He photographed almost exclusively dancers. His book “Portrait” was published in 1986. Of his approach to the nude, which was a central subject of his photographic work, van Manen said: “I love the nude. Wearing clothing means filling the gaps in a story. I want to present something else: information, an impression, not a personal account. I make portraits of people and parts of their bodies that are as beautiful, objective, and unsentimental as possible, but not insensitive.”

Erwin Olaf Springveld was born on 2 July 1959 in Hilversum, Netherlands, and worked professionally under the name Erwin Olaf. He enrolled at the Utrecht School for Journalism, though he eventually went a different direction entirely, drawn toward photography after a teacher noticed he was unhappy in a writing-focused environment and invited him to a photography class.

In the 1980s, Olaf photographed Amsterdam’s party scene and documented the gay liberation movement taking place there. So in 1985, the year you’re asking about, he would have been 25 or 26, working in Amsterdam, embedded in that scene. He started out documenting pre-AIDS gay liberation in Amsterdam’s nightlife, and this activistic approach to equality would remain a through-line for his entire forty-year career.

He quickly began to move away from traditional documentary photography and embraced staged photography, asking punks and members of the queer community to pose for him in his studio. This shift, from witness to director, is what defined him. Starting in black and white series like “Chessmen” and “Blacks,” he increasingly sought and defined his own subjects.

It was “Chessmen” that made him internationally famous, winning him the Young European Photographer award in 1988. So by 1985 he was still building toward that. The work was there. The recognition came a few years later.

Like Gregory Crewdson, Olaf staged his large-scale images in a cinematic fashion, with orchestrated sets and dramatic lighting, and his practice often explored issues of historical and contemporary importance. Time magazine described his work as straddling the worlds of commercial, art and fashion photography at once.

He died on 20 September 2023, at the age of 64, after receiving a lung transplant. He had been diagnosed with emphysema in 1996 and had been told not to expect to live past 60. He made it to 64. In 2018, the Rijksmuseum acquired 500 key artworks from his forty-year career for their permanent collection.

Image Credits and Fair Use

Images are reproduced here for purposes of criticism, commentary, and scholarship under principles of fair use (U.S.) and fair dealing (Canada, UK, and Europe). Copyright remains with the respective artists, photographers, estates, or rights holders. If you are a rights holder and would like an image credited differently or removed, please contact me and it will be addressed promptly.

You can find excellent images by Mapplethorpe on his foundation’s page, and at MoMA.

A tree in the forest that keeps me thinking about David Smith
I carry two cameras these days, my Sony for Colour and Fuji for B&W

September 1973. Two friends came by my grandmother’s house, where I was temporarily living on the porch because I was painting 4X4-foot copies of record album covers for the local music store windows. My dreams of attending the University of Manitoba or Rocky Mountain College in Montana were crushed over a few hundred dollars I needed for housing. I had a full scholarship, but no other funds. No money for campus or off campus housing. Not a cent. I had just started a new job as “night manager” at Orange Julius at the mall. That meant I had to mop the floor, close the doors, and lock up all the oranges. My new dream was to get a job at Music City selling records.

These two friends, Mike and Merrideith, went around the porch, gathered drawings and paintings on paper, and drove me, with my “portfolio,” to Holyoke Community College for an interview. This was a dark moment; I was feeling rather hopeless.

The art department was the only department that required an interview. Their thinking was that you should start right at the beginning, learning to explain your work to people. The art department was weird the minute I got there. “Frank Cressotti,” the Painting instructor, started the interview. He invited two students in. They went through my work and made comments and asked me questions I had no idea how to answer. Then the real Frank Cressotti stepped in! “What are you guys doing now!” he asked, and dismissed them. I hadn’t been talking to Frank; these three students had pretended to be the faculty and interviewed me as a gag. I learned later they were always doing this, and soon started joining in on the “interviews.” It was, by far, the best interview I have had in my life, and I felt right at home. When I got back in the car with Mike and Merridith, I said, “I’m in!”

Deep in the forest, it’s hard to explain what the trees are doing, but they are doing something with purpose.

Two weeks later, my first class, art history, was in the basement of the art department building, an old elementary school. The studios down the hall were next to the boiler room, half underground, with windows only at the tops of the walls. Larry Smith, the design and art history teacher, started the first class with a lecture on the sculptor David Smith. I had never heard of David Smith. I had thought, until that day, that Picasso and Matisse were modern art. But it turned out they were not contemporary art, and that distinction was one I had not yet learned to make. Smith’s Tanktotems were on the screen, slide after slide, and I had not seen anything like them. Even Smith, whose work was such a surprise, was making work before I was born.

We were introduced to the “Tanktotems.” For some time, I believed the “tank” part of the name meant a military vehicle. I imagined David Smith standing in a scrap yard inside some industrial lot with a cutting torch and around him were the dismantled hulls of decommissioned tanks. Larry Smith corrected me. The “tanks” were industrial tanks, the kind that hold fuel or water or pressurized gas, and Smith had been buying them, or buying their parts, the round concave heads in particular, from scrap yards and from catalogs of industrial supply. He cut these parts and welded them and stacked them and stood them up. He was working “additively.” Such basic stuff, all new to me.

I learned that most of the sculpture I had seen until then had been subtractive, the form taken out of stone or wood, the figure freed from the block. Smith was doing the opposite. He was building. The piece was the assembly of its parts.

A drawing by David Smith the year I was born!

After Holyoke Community College, I went to Clark University and the Worcester Art Museum School, majoring in sculpture, working mostly in wood, leather strips, wire, twine, and small baseball-sized rocks. And by then my taste had begun to move away from the Tanktotems toward something more purely abstract. After a couple years Anthony Caro was my new man. The British steel sculptors of the nineteen sixties. Then I moved on again, this time, Isaac Witkin became my hero. On two occasions, I helped install pieces, first in Worcester and then in Springfield. Witkin had been Caro’s student at Saint Martin’s, and his early sculpture was in that same vocabulary, cut and welded steel, beams and plates and forms balanced against each other on the ground, no pedestal, no base.

But the older artists I learned about didn’t get tossed. They still resided deep in my mind. I still, on occasion, thought about David Smith, Tony Smith, and even Jackson Pollock. Their work resonated. They all seemed to bounce off each other. I wondered sometimes whether they were responding to each other, whether ideas were moving between them. Whatever distance separated a sculptor in a field in Bolton Landing from a painter working on the floor out on Long Island, I wanted to know that thread. What I eventually found was this: all of them had driven hard toward pure abstraction, and all had eventually let the dream, the bits of figurative image, a touch of magic and surrealism, back in. Smith, Witkin, and Pollack never completely let go of the figure.

Every time I go to the forest, there he is, David Smith, in the flesh.

The Tanktotems have heads, or shapes that read as heads. They have legs, or shapes that read as legs. He called them totems, and he knew what he was saying. And Pollock, in the years just before he died, had started painting figures again, shapes that carried the weight of the human form even when they would not commit to it. The symbol, the figure half-glimpsed, the unconscious admitted into the work.

Not the surrealism of Dali or Magritte, not the dream as illustration. The surrealism that André Breton had described first. That is where they both ended up. I did not understand any of this the first time I saw the Tanktotems.

Deep in the forest, trees seem to remember things we don’t want to.

After I finished my BA in Art and Philosophy (very career-minded majors) I moved to New York City, went to Pratt for a while, and worked at the Middle Collegiate Church on Second Avenue in the East Village. On Wednesday mornings, I ran a seniors group, older people from around the neighborhood, some of them with stories of working in Vaudeville along Second Avenue.

I was always doodling during these meetings, drawing on three-by-five cards I kept in my back pocket the way I still do today. I used pencil, pen, whatever was at hand. I used white-out as well, the correction fluid that comes in a small bottle with a brush. The secretary would hide it because it would always end up in my pocket. One Wednesday, I was serving cake to seniors and a tough old woman who came every week looked at my 3x5 cards and said, " You’re just like Jackson.” I asked her what she meant, and she said. “He was always drawing on anything. One napkin after another. He would talk and argue and draw and sometimes get into fights about the drawings.” Jackson, who? I asked. “Oh, she said, I used to run a bar a few blocks from here. Jackson Pollock used to come in. He’d argue and draw, and I’d throw him out. And then next week he’d be back.” I was stunned, not by her story, but that I had been giving her Cake for months and never bothered to really pay attention!

The following Wednesday, I told my daughter to come by and spend some time with this woman I had been half-ignoring, because it had become clear to me that she knew more about life than I did. Things do, somehow, flow together.

A Piece By Issack Witkin.

I took a couple of days off and went back to my college to visit with my old professors. a visit back to the school, but I found everyone in the museum courtyard. They were installing a piece in the courtyard, and everyone was helping guide it from a large lift. Witkin had been making welded steel sculptures, but he had grown tired of it, making purely additive, constructive work. He wanted to make his own pieces, his own parts, to construct with. He was talking with Bob Cronin, the sculpture teacher, about wanting more control. He did not want to find his shapes in a yard or to assemble them from off-the-shelf industrial parts. He wanted to make the parts himself. So he went to a foundry, and what he saw there were the spills, the puddles of metal that had cooled on the floor, where a pour had overshot the mold, the leftovers, the accidents. The shapes those spills made were not shapes anyone had drawn. They were the shapes that molten metal makes when it is free of any container, the shapes of pure flow, gravity, and surface tension. Witkin started to pour his own parts. He poured them the way the foundry floor had taught him to pour, and then he assembled them. The forms were his. But they kept the look of metal that had moved, the look of liquid that had cooled. I told him about how my family, as part of a New Year’s tradition called Bleigießen in German, literally “lead pouring,” would melt a block of lead over a candle and pour it into cold water. You then had to describe your next year from the shape. We kept these forms in jars, but now, because the lead is poisonous, they often use wax. He liked that. He liked the magic.

What I learned from Witkin was that the form has to record how it came to be. And that is certainly true of my collection of “tanktotem-trees.”

Now, forty years later, I find myself in the forest with my cameras. I am not making sculpture anymore, but I notice, walking through these woods, that I often stop. Every so-often, and look at the trees. Often, there is something about a particular tree. It is different from the rest. It presents itself. And what it most often calls back to, reminds me of, are the Tanktotems I first saw in the art department basement at Holyoke Community College. The shapes I had stopped looking for had not stopped finding me. It’s not that the tree is figurative, that it resembles a human form, though sometimes that is part of it. More often, it is something else, harder to name. The tree may be growing sideways, along the ground, following a path toward light, and then turning upward. Or the base may have spread and split in a way that records years of pressure and accommodation. Or a vine has looped around the trunk, and the trunk has grown around the vine, and neither one is separable from the other anymore. If you stand there for a while and walk around the tree, you begin to understand what stopped you. The form reveals itself through time and movement. It does not give itself up all at once. As Witkin says, the form slowly tells you its history.

The shape of the tree, how it stands, where it seems to be point to, is the record of what the landscape did to it: the snow load, the wind direction, the competition for light, the fall of a neighboring tree, the slow pressure of decades. What looks like a gesture is actually a history.

The word or phrase I use for this interaction between the tree and me is tableau vivant, a living picture, the term for those arrangements where a large group of people compose themselves into a static scene, holding their positions. When I turn and see one of these trees for the first time, that is the feeling. As if just before I looked, all the elements came together. The tree, the ground, the light, the surrounding forest. As if the space composed itself in the moment before I arrived. And the feeling is not only about the tree. It includes me. It is a dialogue between me and the space, without words, just an understanding. Anthropomorphism was the doorway. Tableau vivant is the room. The trees enact their parts. The forest is the stage. I feel this when the photo looks like everything was holding its breath while I pressed the shutter button.

To see this way, I had to give up something. I had to loosen my grip on pure abstraction. The Tanktotems had pulled me toward the abstract, then Caro further, and Witkin further still, until I had become suspicious of any work that referred too plainly to a figure or a feeling or a story. I wanted form alone. I wanted the steel beam to mean nothing but the steel beam. But the trees were not letting me have that. The trees were full of suggestion, full of figure, full of dream. And when I went back and looked at the Tanktotems again, I saw the same thing. They are sentinels. They are figures. They have heads, or shapes that read as heads. They have legs, or shapes that read as legs. Smith never pretended otherwise. He had used the word totem.

And that is where the trees are taking me. The form alone will not do. The form has to remember something. It has to remember where it came from.

References

Hickey, Dave. The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty. University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Krauss, Rosalind E. Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith. MIT Press, 1971.

Marter, Joan, ed. David Smith: A Centennial. Guggenheim Museum, 2006.

“Tanktotem I.” The Art Institute of Chicago. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/79379/tanktotem-i

“David Smith: Tanktotem II.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/488759
…………

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www.jimroche.ca

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“If that were my garage, I’d show art in it.” Jim Roche, 2025

The last time I was able to exhibit any photos was several years ago in a group show in the US and one here in Canada. Before that, there was a one-person show at a university in Georgia. Since then, I haven’t shown an image to anyone outside of my immediate friends and family.

Before making art with a camera, I had a gallery, private dealers, and even at the worst point in my career, on occasion, sold something for enough money to cover my costs. Those days are gone, and I’m feeling defeated. I’m still, on occasion, invited to submit to group shows, but they don’t want photos. They want a print or a painting, not a photo. On occasion, I donate works to local organizations having an art auction. They are more than happy to take a print, even happier to take a painting…but, no thank you is what I get when I offer a photo. Last year, I submitted works to the local museum’s rental gallery and got rejected. I thought, “Well, that’s hitting bottom.” I’m considering giving up this gig as an artist-photographer. I go to art supply stores and cost out replacing my dried-out paints. I talk to friends who are artists about new types of paint and my painting ideas. So here I am, at this moment. Very, very worn out by photography.

This Essay is about Action
This essay is a little different than most I’ve written, because I’m going to talk directly about my own experience working in the arts, but I’m going to ask something in return. I want you to read this and respond, with ideas, examples, resources, things that actually work, because what I’ve seen over the last few decades is that the structure of the art world, and especially photography, has changed in ways that make it harder to continue, even for people who have had some success.

When Art Was Working For Me
For about 15 years, I worked as a printmaker, making etchings, silkscreens, pochoir prints, and lithographs. For a time, it worked well, prints of landscapes selling in editions of thirty or forty, and selling my own small paintings. These works were sold through galleries in New York, New Jersey, and through a network of private dealers in Los Angeles, Chicago, and a few other cities. These sales often moved through designers, print houses, and most of all, hotel chains and corporate art collections. Then the corporate world reorganized. Companies like Johnson and Johnson and IBM, which had been serious collectors, moved people out of private offices and into open rooms and shared workspaces, and they didn’t just stop buying art, they deaccessioned what they already owned. The calls I started getting weren’t from collectors wanting to know what was available; they were from companies asking what a piece was worth so they could destroy it or sell it cheaply in bulk, and take a tax credit on their loss. That’s the ups and downs of my experience.

Making Money
I want to talk about the money for a few minutes, because people misunderstand it, thinking a gallery is either the answer to everything, or, if they can’t get one, a gallery is the devil’s business. My prints sold for a minimum of $1,200, and I usually printed in editions of thirty or forty. That was at the “request” of the gallery and dealers, who usually sold about 20-25 of any particular print and left me with the rest (still in a six foot pile in storage). Larger prints sold at about $2,200. Neither I, nor anyone I printed with, were well known. We had work that fit a particular market. Offices, and the homes of pretty wealthy people who hired designers. The framing usually cost more than the print, and the cost of framing was always high as it was pure profit for them. I also painted, a small painting, around 30 by 45 inches, sold for about $3,200. Everything I did was on paper, so a gallerist , designer or dealer could roll up ten pieces and bring it to a potential client and unroll them on the floor, move them around, and make the sale. Yes, galleries and dealers often asked: Do you have anything with blue? Yellow?

Those numbers sound reasonable until you understand what sits behind them. Materials alone could run $25,000 a year, including paint, ink, paper, shipping, insurance, and studio rent. Then, health insurance, dental, and medications. Then taxes: New York City, New York State, Federal, and because you are self-employed, you pay both sides of Social Security. So you could easily sell work worth $150,000 or more in a year, and come away with … $40,000.

The gallery/artist split is fifty-fifty while the work is selling, but if a collector buys more than one piece, that collector often receives a discount, ten, sometimes twenty percent. That discount comes out of your half. When an edition of prints stops selling, the gallery returns half of the prints to you and keeps the other half. If they sell one later, the gallery keeps one hundred percent, and you often don’t know it happened. And there are two expiration dates you need to be aware of: If a print from a 2-year-old edition hasn’t sold, the dealer and the client know it’s not worth the full price. Discounts arise from that date. Those dates next to your signature are a use-by date. There is also a quiet understanding among working artists that most careers also have an expiration date: ten-year careers, maybe fifteen, because you saturate your market. The bigger you are, the bigger your market and the longer your career will last. After 10 years the collectors in your market who wanted your work already have it. Many people have 3-4 of your pieces, and are moving on to something new, and the gallery moves on. That’s the system. After ten or fifteen years, it moves on without you.

This may sound like a horrible deal, but believe me, it’s not. The choice is a small gallery, where you get attention, sales and exposure, or setting up a table at the Saturday Farmer’s Market. The gallery is actually providing services you can’t get elsewhere, and spending more money than you know promoting you.

Sometimes, I would go into our main gallery in New York, Orion Editions, now gone, a prospective buyer would come in and the gallerist would tell me to stay in the office. I would hear him talking to the client, telling them that this or that piece was a great value right now, and that it would only increase in value. I knew this wasn’t true. I understood that as a second or third line artist, my work was worth, well, nothing, and would likely go down in value from there. And those were hand-made prints and paintings. I still think about the buyers sometimes. I worry I owe them money.

Art as Investment
The gallerist was not lying exactly, because he believed the market rewarded quality and quality should be recognized, and sometimes it is, but what he was always selling, as much as the work itself, was the idea that art is an investment. For the last fifteen years, this idea has reshaped the entire market. As Ben Davis, the national art critic for Artnet News and the author of “9.5 Theses on Art and Class” (Haymarket, 2013) and “Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy” (Haymarket, 2022), has written, art has been forced into the framework of collateral against private credit, treated as a yield-bearing alternative asset, flipped within months of acquisition, and that what looks like a market correction now is simply the market shedding the part of itself that should never have been there. Davis has also written the simpler version of this: almost all new art is worth zero, even most art that has its moment will be worth nothing a few years later, and the main reason to collect art is that you actually like it, or want to support the person who made it. That’s why I like Ben Davis, and read him and listen to his podcast. But remember, the big galleries are just a tiny percentage of the art market. Regretfully, small and mid-sized galleries that would usually serve us, as artist-photographers, are being squeezed out of the market. The number of medium and small galleries going out of business these days is staggering. Main reason: The work they sell is unlikely to appreciate, plus the costs of competing.

So art is now often associated with investment portfolios. But photography was never going to be part of an investment portfolio, and the reason is structural. A few years ago, I purchased a print by Alec Soth for $15,000. It has appreciated to around $25,000, which sounds like a reasonable return until you understand that it is unlikely to go significantly higher, because Soth’s prints are sold in editions, meaning there are twenty or so others at the same price, and the edition structure puts a ceiling on appreciation that painting and unique works on paper do not have. Photography is not a bad investment because photographers are less serious than painters. It is a different kind of object, one that was designed from the beginning to be reproducible, and the market has never fully reconciled itself to that fact. What this means in practice is that photography sits outside the speculative economy that has driven the broader art market for the past two decades, and while that exclusion has real costs, it also carries a kind of integrity. Photography has to be bought because someone wants to live with it. That is not a bad place to start.

The problem is that the structures built to sell it were borrowed from a market organized around different assumptions, and those structures are now failing. I still find it surprising how little photographers are paid for their work, but even in painting, where the prices sound higher, the numbers don’t work the way people imagine, and photography compounds the problem. A gallery might once hang a painting for $3,000 or $4,000, which adjusted now might be $5,000 to $9,000, but almost no one I know is selling photographs at those prices, except the top 1% or so.. Photography is sold in editions, which lowers the price per piece, and galleries think in terms of profit per linear foot, meaning what a given wall produces in a given year. For most photographers, the answer is not much, and the gallery has other walls to fill.

My Photo Disappeared!
There is also a problem with large-scale photos; they fade. There was a real crisis a few years ago when so many large-scale photos in museum collections were found to be fading, and some, enough to be troubling, were peeling off their backing, and while the museum may have paid a huge amount, the images were now worth nothing. I frequent art auctions, and there are often large prints by well-known photographers up for bid, worth nothing as they have been destroyed by being displayed. This crisis continues to be a problem for the field.

Pay-toPlay
There is also something else going on in photography that is harder to talk about. In painting or sculpture, you are not usually asked to pay to be considered. Galleries look for work. Gallerists visit certain schools, Yale, RISD, etc., and walk through the studios….they go out and find people. They attend university shows. But in photography, there is a constant stream of open calls, competitions, portfolio reviews, and submission fees, and you pay to be seen, often repeatedly, in a way that would once have been called a scam but is now considered normal. There is extraction at every level. Small prints sold under tight licensing restrictions mean you buy the work but cannot reproduce it, cannot display it in many contexts, and it begins to feel less like collecting an artwork and more like buying a page out of a book. Those modest works also occupy the few places where photographers might otherwise sell something, so that what should be an entry point is already taken, and it is not only that there is less money, but that more people are trying to take a piece of it.

Art Shows and Apartment Galleries
None of this is without precedent, and the gallery model itself is now failing in ways that are no longer possible to describe as a correction or a slowdown. Part of what is driving the collapse is the cost of participating in the international fair circuit, which has become the primary sales mechanism for galleries at every level. A booth in the main Galleries sector at Art Basel costs between $85,000 and $125,000. Art Basel Miami Beach runs from $11,000 for a small position to $199,040 for a large booth in the main sector. These costs forced galleries to chase sales at the top of the market and to reduce or abandon everything below it, and the galleries that could not sustain that chase are closing. In the eighteen months between mid-2023 and late 2024, at least ten galleries closed or went on indefinite hiatus in Los Angeles alone, including UTA Fine Arts, Praz-Delavallade, Lorin Gallery, and the New York-based Harper’s, which had expanded to Los Angeles during the pandemic and then quietly retreated. In the summer of 2025, CLEARING, which had operated for fourteen years, beginning in Brooklyn in 2011 and expanding to Los Angeles in 2020, closed both its Manhattan and Los Angeles locations. Its founder, Olivier Babin, said the gallery had been crushed by overheads, specifically rising costs for rent, shipping, and art fairs alongside declining revenues. That same summer, Venus Over Manhattan and Kasmin announced their closures within two days of each other. These are not marginal operations. These are galleries with serious programs, serious artists, and serious track records, and they could not make the economics work.

What is also true, and this matters for the argument being built here, is that some of the most interesting spaces to emerge in Los Angeles in the same period began not in commercial storefronts but in homes. Castle, which is now a recognized gallery with a location near Jeffrey Deitch in Hollywood, began in 2022 in the living room of Harley Wertheimer. Sea View, founded by Sara Lee Hantman in 2023, operates out of an artist’s family home and studio complex, a space that the Museum of Contemporary Art had already used as an off-site exhibition venue in 1998. These are not temporary arrangements or modest compromises. They are a new structure forming inside the wreckage of the old one, and they are being written about and taken seriously as part of the art world rather than outside it.

A Small Revolution
Artists have always created alternative structures when existing ones stopped working. In Boston in 1971, a group of artists staged a show in the men’s room of the Museum of Fine Arts and called it “Flush with the Walls.” In Germany, apartment galleries have been used for years as serious exhibition spaces, carefully installed and attended, and written about as part of the art world. In Vancouver, the Will Aballe Art Project, known as WAP, began in a kitchen, with work on the cabinets, the walls, the refrigerator, sometimes simply handed to you, and over time became a serious gallery showing conceptually based work. Just one little mention: Black Mountain College, which ran from 1933 to 1957 in North Carolina, and Goddard College in Vermont operated on the principle that making, showing, and discussing work were not separate activities but a single one. The exhibition was not separate from the work but part of it. Getting your photos in front of eyes is essential, not just to sales, but to your self-image.

Japan and Photography
Japan understood this earliest and most thoroughly. In 1968, a group of photographers in Tokyo began publishing a magazine called “Provoke,” deliberately rough, deliberately urgent, and it became the context through which some of the most important photobooks of the twentieth century were made. Daido Moriyama’s “Farewell Photography” was published in 1972. Nobuyoshi Araki self-published “Sentimental Journey,” a record of his relationship with his wife Yoko, in 1971, and it is now considered one of the essential works of postwar Japanese photography. Eikoh Hosoe’s “Kamaitachi,” a collaboration with the butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, was published in 1969 in a limited edition of one thousand copies. By the 1970s, the photobook had overtaken the print as the primary mode of artistic dissemination in Japan, to the point where any serious discussion of Japanese photography now has to include the book. This did not happen because the gallery system failed in Japan. It happened because Japanese photographers built a parallel system, one based on publishing, on collectivity, on the book as an object worth owning, and that system proved more durable than the gallery walls it worked alongside. The Tokyo Art Book Fair, which began in 2009, draws tens of thousands of visitors and treats the photobook and the artist publication as primary forms, not supplements to a gallery show. In Japan, it is still possible to sell a small black and white print for around two hundred dollars as a normal exchange, not a discount, not an apology, but a transaction both parties consider fair. The context makes that possible. The context was built deliberately, over decades, by photographers working together.

It is worth noting that Araki’s decision to self-publish “Sentimental Journey” in 1971 is not remembered as a compromise or a workaround. It is remembered as the work. The stigma attached to self-publishing is a North American problem, not a universal one, and Japan is the evidence. What changes when a book is published under a named imprint rather than through a print-on-demand service is not the paper or the photographs. What changes is the frame, and in the art world, the frame changes the meaning.

This is the structural answer, and it is the one that seems most honest: not one gallery, not one show, not one collector, but a network of people making work together, publishing together, showing together, and building an audience through continuity rather than through institutional affiliation.

Alternative Publishing
Several friends and I have been producing zines, high quality photographic publications made through print-on-demand services like Blurb, and they are good. The problem is not the quality. The problem is the label. I have suggested that we take one further step: form a small collective publishing imprint, continue using print-on-demand production, but operate under a shared name, and include a limited edition print with each book to offset the cost and make the object worth collecting. The imprint would publish photographers and writers together. A writer who contributes an essay to one of these books receives a publishing credit under a real imprint name, a line on their resume, and a connection to the photographers they are writing about. The photographers receive a text that does the work a gallery wall card never quite manages to do. The books can travel, showing in homes, apartments, and studios across two or three cities, building an audience through return visits rather than through a single opening night. Resume lines for photographers come from those shows, lines that are real, that name a venue and a date, and that function in the larger system in the same way a group show at a recognized gallery would, because the credential is what it says it is: the work was shown, people came, and they came back.

Vancouver’s WAP, described above, built a version of it starting in a kitchen. Castle built a version of it, starting in a living room, and is now showing next to Jeffrey Deitch. The mechanism is not complicated. What it requires is people willing to work together rather than separately, and to understand that the collective infrastructure, the imprint, the shared shows, the writers and photographers in the same room, is not a substitute for a career but the conditions under which a career can continue.

What I would like to know is who is already doing versions of this? What has worked even in small ways, what has failed, what should be tried, and who wants to do this together, because the gallery model, as most of us inherited it, is not in difficulty. It is over. What comes next depends on whether photographers, and the writers and collectors who care about the work, are willing to build it. Davis wrote that the main reason to collect art is that you actually like it, or want to support the person who made it. That is where photography has always lived. The question is what structure we build around that fact.

An Outline of My Proposals (I have two)
A Small Publishing Collective
I’d like 3-4 dedicated people to join me in forming a publishing collective, focused on small editions of landscape photography books. That means editing a book, publishing it through, if necessary, a print-on-demand provider, and packaging it with a signed editioned print. Instead of a publication party, in Vncouver my small group had a weekend opening in a gallery space, showing the publication, and full prints on the walls.

A Travelling Collective Gallery
I’d like to join with 3-4 others in designing and establishing a small collective gallery. It would have an online presence, and quarterly shows that would basically travel in a box to 2-3 locations to be shown in home-based or studio-based spaces. You can read about home-based galleries in the NYT and art magazines. This idea has been with me since before covid, when I read about a group that turned photos into postcards and basically sold a deck to people who would have a home gallery on their fridge, and hold an “opening.”

Got any ideas?
Maybe in the comments you can find the 3 people you need to get it going. Let me tell you one more short story: During the AIDS crisis, at the NYC ACT-UP meetings, we would have a period where people got up and spoke for 1 minute: “I’m Nancy, and we are thinking about approaching high school students after school in front of their schools with AIDS and Sex Education information. We are going to meet over in that corner.” 15-20 people might get up. They would throw their ideas out, and invite people to join them, and point where. We would have a 15-minute period of people moving to things that interested them, and then everyone got back up, again for 1 minute, and said, “We’ve decided to go to Jefferson High School next Wednesday. Tomorrow night we are meeting here to review the material and agree on how we will proceed. We meet at 7 tomorrow.” From that little period of sharing, a group of high school students formed an organization that monitored AIDS and sex education issues. They saved many lives.

I think we could at least do some sharing and get a few photos in front of eyeballs. And not get suckered into pay-to-play schemes. Your comments are a place to start.

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## References

Ben Davis, *9.5 Theses on Art and Class* (Haymarket Books, 2013).

Ben Davis, *Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy* (Haymarket Books, 2022).

Ben Davis, “NFT Artists Are Not Selling ‘Digital Art Objects,’” Artnet News, 2022.

Annie Armstrong, “Just How Expensive Have Art Fairs Become?”, Artnet News, August 2025.

Katya Kazakina, “The L.A. Art Scene Was Booming. Why Are Galleries Suddenly Closing?”, Artnet News, November 2024.

Maxwell Rabb, “CLEARING to Close Its New York and Los Angeles Galleries After 14 Years,” Artsy, August 2025.

“Los Angeles Galleries Are Finding a New Rhythm,” Artnet News, November 2025.

“A Thrilling Crop of New Galleries Is Popping Up in LA,” Cultured, February 2025.

“7 Essential Japanese Photobooks,” Aperture.

“Japan’s Unparalleled History of Photography in Print,” Aperture.

A photo from my work in the forest this week.
I carry two cameras lately, one my Sony, and the second a Fuji for B&W

I often work in a small patch of forest along the Pacific coast. Hikers pass by, and every so often someone stops and asks if I’ve “seen anything good.” They usually have something in mind. An owl further back on the trail. Bears, that would be unusual, as the city is between here and the mountains. Coyotes maybe. Otters when there’s water. They could talk about the otters all day.

I understand the question. For a long time, I would have asked myself. It assumes that photography begins with finding something worth seeing, something you can point to and say, “There it is.” But working there now, I realize I am not waiting for something to appear in that way. I’m waiting for something less certain, something that does not announce itself, at least not loudly. I’m waiting for the place to become available. That sounds vague, even to me. If someone pressed me, I’m not sure I could say exactly what I’m waiting for. It isn’t an event. It isn’t even a subject, not in the usual sense. It is closer to an alignment, a moment when the parts of the scene begin to hold together without forcing them. Much of the time, that doesn’t happen.

I stand there, adjust the tripod, look again, move a few feet, come back. It can feel like nothing is happening at all. Yet I keep working there. Waiting for something.

Harder to explain, but recently I came across a passage in my reading from Martin Buber, from his book I and Thou. I first read it about fifty years ago, in a philosophy class, my teacher was Miriam Szicovick, and I didn’t expect to come back to it through photography. But something in it stayed with me. Buber describes two ways of encountering the world. In one, we treat things as objects. We name them, use them, admire them, classify them, and even photograph them. In the other, we enter into a kind of relation with these things. Not analysis, not possession, but a form of attention in which something passes between me and what’s in front of me. I’ll get to this later, but Dave Hickey, the art critic, would call this “attraction.”

When I’m out there, camera in hand, I am always tempted to turn what I see into something else. Make it a subject of my looking. Make it into a “picture.” Or worse, make it into a statement. Then the trees become elements. The light becomes effect. The place becomes something I already understand, but mostly because I’ve defined it.

For a long time, as a photographer, I have called myself an objectivist. The word seemed honest. It suggested restraint, accuracy, a refusal to impose too much into the image. It aligned with a kind of photography that tries to describe the world as it is. Objectivism, I thought, would avoid these pitfalls. But that description just isn’t enough.

The tree, fully described, has still not been met. The photograph, perfectly rendered, may still be closed. Determined. Defined. What I have come to realize is that I am trying, in a modest way, to resist that closure. When the photographers I read talk about closure, about a photo being “closed,” what they mean is that the photo we end up with, the final “product” of our effort, is complete. We know all we need to know about it. And there is little or nothing left to do. Little to figure out. Little to play with. The image is spent. Sometimes, for the past couple of years, people have called that “immediacy.” You “get it” right away. Easy-peasy. Very different than those other ways of looking, using terms like attraction or even that far more technical sounding word - alignment.

This is not an argument against other kinds of photography. There are photographs built on drama, narrative, timing, spectacle, design, memory, wit, and performance. Many of them are very good. I am describing something narrower and more personal, the kind of photograph I seem to be trying to make now.

It asks for patience. It depends on restraint. It fails when I try too hard to make the picture impressive. The difficulty is this: I want the photograph to be objective, but I don’t want it to tell you everything. I want it to respect what is actually there, but I want you to finish looking and turn back to check one more time. We all want that, don’t we? I also don’t want to manipulate the scene into something it isn’t. But at the same time, I want the image to remain open. Maybe a better word would be “available?”

I do not want beauty to be locked inside the object.
And I do not want beauty to belong to me.
I want beauty to remain in the relationship between the viewer and the photograph.
I want beauty to be require a relationship, while still being “available.” That’s where the problem becomes real. Because it is very easy to crush that relationship.

A photograph can be closed in many ways. It can be over-composed, over-processed, over-dramatized, over-explained. It can be so carefully crafted, so resolved, that the viewer has nothing left to do. The image presents itself fully formed, may be striking, even beautiful in an immediate way, but it leaves no space.

An open photograph works differently. It does not withdraw information, but it does not exhaust itself. It leaves room. It asks the viewer to stay. A closed photograph says, “Look what I found.” An open photograph says, “Stay with this.”

I sometimes think back to those hikers at this point. Their question still makes sense to me. It’s a practical question. Have you seen anything worth stopping for? But it assumes that value arrives already formed. You just need to notice it. But beauty requires a bit more than notice.

What I’m trying to do feels almost the opposite. I am trying to stay long enough for value to begin to form, if it does. This is why photos by Robert Adams matter so much to me. His photographs often appear uneventful at first glance. A road, a line of trees, a house at the edge of a field, a patch of light that does not insist on being the focus; instead, it’s just the bright spot over there. Nothing dramatic has happened. But if you stay with the photograph, something begins to gather.

Or it doesn’t.

And that matters too. The photograph does not guarantee anything. What Adams seems to understand is that beauty does not need to be imposed in order to be present. The more it is imposed, the more fragile it becomes. It turns into something immediate and consumable, something that can be recognized and moved past. When I look at his photographs, I am not told what to see. Or not what to think. I’m given time.

And over time, I have come to think that this is where beauty actually happens. Not in the object. Not in the photographer. Beauty is not talent or skill. It’s something that forms the relationship between the object and the viewer.

That idea returns me, again, to the forest. Most days, nothing happens. Or I think nothing happens. And then later, in the photograph, I see that something had begun to form, something I did not fully notice at the time. That uncertainty is part of the work. I deal with the uncertainty by going back, again and again.

The photograph, when it finally exists, is still an object. It hangs on a wall, it sits in a book, it can be bought, sold, printed, or reproduced. It becomes, inevitably, a thing. But I think it can still carry the trace of something else, something that resists being fully closed. It can still invite relations. I’ve heard and read artists calling this “attraction.” That is what I am trying to hold onto. Not a method, not a style, but a small discipline that leads to attraction.

The skill, like in sports, is discipline. Discipline to work long enough. To avoid deciding too quickly. To allow the photograph to remain open. Even if that means it risks being overlooked. I worry too much that a photo will be overlooked because it is too quiet. Because the alternative, for me, is to make images that are too certain of themselves.

And certainty, in this case, feels like a kind of loss.

……………………………………………….
Thanks for reading my Substack. Today’s essay had to wait for some photos that I thought might ring true to what I’m thinking about. I read and take photos, try to understand things, and sometimes get it wrong. Most of all, I spend time trying to simplify my thoughts, not for you, but for me. I still wonder why I stopped painting and took up a camera. That act will keep me thinking for a long time.

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Sunrise nearby, in the garden that I do much of my work in.

I went out yesterday with my Fuji X-T50 to take photographs, and as sometimes happens with this confusing camera, most of them did not work out. The exposures were off, the images too dark. By the time I went through them, I kept only one. It was a photograph of two trees standing next to each other, the same height, the same size, growing in a way that made them stand out from everything around them. They looked like twins.

I have noticed that I “can not-not” photograph twins when I see them. Two trees, two bushes, two plants growing side by side, twin cups, twin plates, twin chairs, something about the repetition of form draws me in. I do not decide to photograph them, I just do. The only twins I don’t seem to take photos of are people.

This has been true for some time. When I look back through my photographs, the pattern is there whether I intended it or not. Pairs appear again and again, sometimes clearly, sometimes almost hidden, but always doing the same thing. They organize the image before I have time to think about it.

These two trees reach so high, and you only notice the second one when you come close. From a distance, they seem like one single tree.

Two trees next to each other are a bit unusual, but not unexpected. They grow that way often enough. But when I see them, they just do not feel neutral. They stand out from everything around them, not because they are rare, but because they repeat. The eye moves from one to the other and back again, and the space between them begins to matter as much as the trees themselves.

I think about this later, not at the moment of taking the photograph. At the time, it feels simple. I see the trees, I take the picture. Automatic, as if a force overcomes me. Only afterward does the question begin to form, “Why this, why again, why two?”

I began to notice that this pattern is not limited to my own photographs. In the film Paterson (a film I suggest everyone interested in art watch), twins appear again and again, without explanation. They are not part of the story in any direct way. They pass through the frame quietly, as if they belong there. The repetition is noticeable and the fact that they are not explained gives it weight.

Arbus’ photo of twins, I would think the most well-known of any twin photo.

In other films, the effect is less quiet. In The Shining, a set of twin girls stand still in a hallway, identical and composed, and the image is immediately unsettling. Nothing has happened, and yet the repetition itself feels wrong. In the film Dead Ringers, the twins begin as indistinguishable, sharing a life so completely that the boundary between them starts to dissolve. What looks at first like harmony becomes something else, something unstable, as if the self cannot be safely repeated.

I do not think of these films when I photograph two trees. The connection comes later, when I look at the image and recognize something familiar in the structure. The repetition carries a charge that is difficult to name but easy to feel.

Sigmund Freud writes about this kind of experience in his essay on The Uncanny. He describes the double as something that was once reassuring, a second version of the self, a form of protection against loss. But over time, that same doubling begins to feel different. What once seemed to guarantee continuity begins to suggest division, replacement, or something not entirely under control. The ordinary becomes charged in a way that is difficult to explain.

This image of twin trees has been floating around the internet. I’m still unsure of the author. If you know, please share the name so I can give credit where it is due! All I have is the handle. Such a strange setting.

He also writes about repetition, how the return of the same thing, even in simple forms, can produce a sense that something more is at work. We begin to feel that what we are seeing is not entirely accidental, even when we know that it is. The repetition creates a pressure that the mind tries to resolve.

I find this useful, but only to a point. It gives me a way to name the feeling, but it does not remove it. I have read and taught Freud for many years, and twins still make me uneasy. The explanation does not cancel the experience

.Here, two trees, nearby, seem to turn into something other than trees and fight or struggle with a huge rock in the forest. My grandchildren love this spot.

When I return to my own photographs, the effect is still there. Two forms in the frame create a kind of balance, but it is not a simple balance. The eye moves back and forth, comparing, measuring, trying to decide what is the same and what is different. The image holds because of that movement. It feels steady, but not fixed.

This is not limited to my own work. Photography has always been drawn to repetition and pairing, sometimes directly, sometimes in more formal ways. The work of Bernd and Hilla Becher is built entirely on repetition, water towers, blast furnaces, and cooling towers, photographed again and again, arranged in grids so that each structure becomes part of a larger pattern. Looking at those typologies, you move across the images the same way you move between two trees, comparing, noticing small differences, trying to understand what is the same and what is not.

In Thomas Struth’s early street photographs, especially the streets of Düsseldorf or New York, there are often pairs, two figures walking together, two windows aligned, two architectural forms repeating. The images are not about twins in any literal sense, but the repetition is there, and it steadies the frame while keeping it open.

Even in a single photograph, the structure can be felt. Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women sets up a kind of doubling across the image, the photographer, the model, the viewer, all reflected and aligned so that the act of looking is repeated within the frame. It is not about twins, but it works through the same principle. The image is built on repetition and mirroring, and the viewer becomes part of that structure

Jeff Walls double image

These are very different kinds of photographs, but they share something. The image is not held together by a single object. It is held together by relation, by the movement between one thing and another. That movement is what keeps the image active.

I have come to think that this is part of the reason I am drawn to these images. The repetition provides a structure, something that organizes the frame quickly and clearly, but it also introduces a tension that does not resolve. The photograph remains open in a way that a single form does not.

I could try to avoid this. I could decide not to photograph pairs, to turn away when I see them, to force myself toward something else. But I do not think that would change anything. The trees would still stand next to each other. The forms would still repeat. I would still notice them. It seems more honest to admit that this is part of how I see. The photograph is not only a record of what is there. It also carries the patterns that draw me in, whether I understand them or not. I have read Freud since the 1970s, and twins still leave me uneasy, even if they are just trees. And I like, most of all, to photograph the uncanny. The more common and obvious, oddly, the more uncanny.

……………………
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Photo by Robert Adams

I feel, lately, a sense of despair deeper than I ever imagined. Yesterday, I went to a movie, a science fiction story about, of course, the destruction of the world. I found myself quietly crying in the dark, welcoming the shadows as a place to hide. It was a stark contrast to my first Earth Day, when I was full of hope. I wonder now how to regain that sense.

When I arrived home, a message came to me from an old friend at Riverside Church (New York City) with a link to a sermon by William Sloane Coffin, given just after his son’s death. I had been there both of those days. From the pulpit, Bill walked to a grand piano and spoke about the meaning of hymns and the solace he found in music. He mentioned a poem by Pablo Neruda, a phrase from it, really, that struck me. It reflected not who I am at the moment, but who I wished to be.

In “Keeping Quiet,“ Neruda writes: “Let us think of the entire earth and pound the table with love. I don’t want blood again to saturate bread, beans, music… I want no more so much of everything.” The poem provides a simple list of the things that hold a life together without drawing attention to themselves. He is saying: look at what is right in front of you, what you eat, what you hear, what you share, and recognize that this is where damage shows up first. He asks for something unexpected: not withdrawal, but an insistence that these ordinary things be protected. To pound the table with love is to care enough about the common world to not let it be quietly worn down.

In the end, Neruda returns to stillness. “Now I’ll count up to twelve, and you keep quiet, and I will go.” A calming message: 12 is the number of months in a year, and the counting, like listening to a Philip Glass piece, with its protective repetition. Nothing resolved or finished. There is just a pause, and the sense that what matters is already here, if we are willing to see it and hold to it.

Happy Earth Day.
Pound the table with love!

………………………………….

To read the poem: https://www.bu.edu/quantum/zen/readings/quoteNeruda.pdf
To hear William Sloan Coffin’s Sermon: Bill Coffin
Bill Coffin was the first senior minister I worked with. He worked for the CIA, was a concert pianist, a chaplain at Yale during the Vietnam War, and led the delegation to Iran when the American embassy workers were taken hostage. He led a Christmas service there. Later, he headed the anti-nuclear program SANE. While he was away in Iran, I fed the fish in his aquarium.

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A pathway through the forest. Here, it seems like nothing special, but further in, there are neatly cut trees that form a wooden road for something on wheels to be moved through the forest. In one way, it seems like a normal forest. But what’s with those trees? Not a little bent, very bent. I know it’s from the snow. Still, I ask myself, “What happened here?” And those large rocks sitting randomly between the trees. Radicals? Glacier-related? No, the term is erratics, I think. What at first seems quiet and normal starts you asking questions, and in a quiet place where you should feel OK, you are instead a bit uneasy. I like a touch of that uneasiness, the uncanny. The photos about that uncanniness. I follow the path to see more.
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This past week, I’ve heard the same response to some essays and notes more than once. Someone writes to say they agree with an essay; sometimes they say, “entirely.” Then comes a qualification. There is one point they often set aside: the need to be able to say what a photograph is about. They tell me there is no need for that. Everything I need to know is in the photograph.

I return to this issue because it is a persistent ghost in the digital workflow. Even among people working very seriously, there remains a stubborn reluctance to move beyond the frame, a belief that everything of value must be self-contained within the pixels or the four edges of the print.

A few weeks ago, I tried to make a simple point. A photograph may attract attention once. But if it offers nothing beyond surface elements, composition, light, and shadow, it rarely holds attention. People don’t return to it. As an artist, the problem is not only making an image, but understanding what makes someone look at it again, and again.

That requires an answer to a basic question: “Why did you take this photo?”

“I was walking down the street and there it was” is a common start, but it isn’t a destination. Neither is: “The sun hit the horizon just as I reached the summit.” These are descriptions of luck and timing, not intention. If the work is to go further, if it is to be taken seriously and outlast a well-made calendar photo of Yosemite, it has to carry more than a moment of recognition. It must mean something to the person who made it, and that meaning must be available through the work to the viewer.

In the book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama shows how landscape carries meaning in ways that are rarely obvious at first glance. He demonstrates that a place like the German forest is not simply a collection of trees; it is tied to nationalism, myth, and identity. A forest or a field may appear neutral, but it is shaped by what has happened there: by settlement, labour, conflict, and use. What we see now is shaped by what the landscape has experienced.

I am suggesting another source for this approach, one that depends a bit more heavily on language. I first came to the book What Is Landscape? by John R. Stilgoe, thinking it was a book about seeing. It is that. It is also a book about how the words we carry into a place shape what we are able to find there. Stilgoe is not describing landscapes as scenery; he is asking how we name them and how those names shape what we notice. Is what you're looking at a meadow, a clearing, a field, a pasture, or a glade?

Without the words to name things, much of what is there passes by unnoticed. Language is the infrastructure of sight. If we lack the vocabulary for drainage, tenure, or conflict, our attention stays at the surface. Stilgoe spends time on things that are easy to overlook, road edges, cleared land, the margins where one use gives way to another. A road is not only a line through space; it records movement and intention. A fence marks a claim. A shoreline shifts meaning depending on whether it is read as marsh, inlet, or bluff. These are not scenic details. The names are uncovered evidence.

For a photographer, this matters because a photograph is never only about beauty. It is also about what is seen and what is missed. Fields in the Fraser Valley, laid out in drainage grids along the Fraser River, are not simply arrangements of crops and light. They reflect labour, ownership, and season. The image holds these things whether the photographer names them or not. To suggest that naming them is somehow damaging to the “art” simply doesn’t follow.

We see this recognition in the work of Sally Mann. In her photographs of the American South, she has spoken directly about the presence of slavery and the Civil War in the land itself. There is literally blood in the land. These are histories that are not added to the image; they are already there. When she photographs a road or a hillside, the subject is not only the form of the land, but the weight it carries. The meaning is not added later; it is recognized. If you have the words.

There is a resistance to naming these things, as if doing so would reduce the photograph. But the facts are already there. The photograph does not become thinner when it is understood; it becomes more exact.

The difference is best captured in the contrast between the two Adamses. Ansel Adams gave landscape photography a language of grandeur and clarity, presenting nature as an ideal, often apart from human use. Robert Adams turned toward roads, suburbs, and clear-cuts. He photographed land shaped by human choice and consequence. Where Ansel’s photographs invite admiration, Robert’s ask for recognition. One offers an ideal. The other insists on attention.

Many photographers still prefer the earlier model because it provides an immediate emotional response: drama, harmony, resolution. But the latter approach is stronger because it does not separate the land from the lives lived on it.

Stilgoe’s book, finally, is about attention. The photographer’s task is not simply to find a view, but to take the time to recognize the marks of use and the vocabulary already present in the land. As Stilgoe says, “if you don’t have the words for things, you are apt to overlook them, confuse them with something else, or simply pass them by.” Learning those words does not explain the photograph away. It is how you learn to see what is in front of you, which is, after all, the only thing worth photographing.

The thicket is growing back, spring is here, and already leaves are everywhere. Some branches are new and flexible when I make my way through to see if this tree wants to be in a photo. Some branches are dead and dry and snap. I wonder how this tree was able to grow through all the underbrush. In three weeks, it will be dark under the forest canopy. The density of the brush tells me this may be the last of the tree I see till late fall. This is, in a small way, a lucky moment.

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My 1960 spelling book. It called for more than just words. A hand. It says “I made this.”

As an artist, I am not worried about being replaced by AI. Not at all. Nor do I think any artist should be.

That probably sounds dismissive, given how quickly AI is replacing certain kinds of jobs. It isn’t meant to be. It comes from a different understanding of what art is and what holds it together over time. It helps to make a distinction that people don’t like to make, because it sounds like a judgment: Some people make things. They make them well. They are great craftsmen. Others people, however, are working on something they don’t yet understand, and they keep returning to it. Sometimes they never really finish what they are working on. Those are artists.

Artists do make things. Some perform, some dance, some compose, some paint, some photograph. I made screen prints, lithographs, and etchings for ten years. These require technical skill and a good eye. I was a good craftsman, I surprised myself because printmaking requires skills I didn’t know I was good at. But lots of people have technical skills and a good eye, and many of these skills can now be simulated by machines. That is not the issue for art.

With art the issue is what holds the making together over time. We used to have illustrators. They could draw well, and they commanded their craft. And they had a good eye. Many of them will, regretfully, be replaced by AI. But when we look at a drawing by Picasso or Dürer, we know something else is present. It isn’t just that the drawing is technically good or expressive. It’s that someone in particular made this drawing. To understand it, we look at their other work. We learn their history. We see them return to the same problems again and again, in different forms. There is a struggle that runs through their work, a sustained attempt to resolve something that does not resolve easily. Often, we understand the work not through its perfection, but through its imperfections, the places where it doesn’t quite hold. That is where the effort of the artist shows.

An artist often organizes their life around a problem. They return to the same place. They repeat themselves not because they lack ideas, but because the question isn’t finished. They want a fuller answer. Sometimes, most of what they make does not work. The “work” is not a series of results. It is an accumulation of attempts.

Sally Mann describes this plainly. The photograph is not taken once. It is approached. Besides using her camera to make the image, she writes, sketches, reads, looks, and then goes out and tries to make it. It fails, maybe. She tries again, changes something small, waits for different light. Sometimes, most of the attempts fail, and that failure is part of the process, not an interruption of it. What looks like a single resolved image is often the end of dozens of attempts, sometimes over months or years. And even then, it is not finished. The problem is only paused. It will return. She is both a craftsman and an artist. You or I might have been satisfied with the first image. She isn’t.

Mann writes that what she returns to, over the years, is not success but rejection. Private rejection, where the image fails and no one sees it. Public rejection, where the work does not land. Professional rejection, an exhibit cancelled. And she continues, which may be the simplest distinction. Not talent, not even discipline exactly, but a willingness to continue after the point where continuing stops making sense. In her latest book, “Art Work,” she names her most important skill: persistence.

Most people, at a moment of failure or rejection, stop. The artist does not. Not because they are stronger, but because they are held by something. The problem is not finished with them.

But there is a second condition, and it is just as necessary. And you won’t find this drive in AI. If you are an artist, the work has to leave you.

Some people say they make art for themselves, that they aren’t interested in an audience. I understand the impulse, but it removes something essential. Art is not just making. It is placing something into the world and allowing it to be seen, including being misunderstood, rejected, or not taken seriously. That exposure is not optional. It is part of the work. Without it, the work continues indefinitely without ever being tested. It doesn’t encounter disagreement, indifference, or resistance. And without that, it’s difficult to know what the work is doing, or whether it is doing anything at all.

There is a piece by Marcel Duchamp in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at the end of a hallway. You pass it if you aren’t paying attention. “Étant donnés,” a wooden door, nothing much to see, and then you notice the openings and step closer, lean in, adjust your position to see what is inside: a body, something strange, exposed, almost embarrassingly private. It feels like you are not supposed to be looking, but you are, and the whole thing is built for that moment. The distance, the obstruction, the act of leaning in, the delay before the image resolves, all of it works together. What appears private is carefully staged to be seen. Duchamp worked on this for years. Then it was finally ready. Maybe. He wasn’t sure until it was before the public.

That is what art does. It leaves the maker and enters a shared space. It assumes a viewer.

This is also what separates art from other skilled making. A carpenter does not need to be called an artist for his work to have value. The standard is different. Even if we use the word, we use it differently. The expectations are different. What confuses things is the idea that all making is the same, that the moment you pick up a camera, you have entered the same field as someone who has spent years working through a problem they have not resolved. To say everyone’s work is equal is a flattening of quality. That flattening sounds generous, but it removes the very distinctions that allow us to talk about quality at all. Once everything is called art, nothing has to be argued for. Nothing has to hold up over time.

AI is isolated from all of this. It has no reason to fail, and no way to build work out of failure. It does not return to the same question over years. It does not carry a question from one image to the next and the next and the next. It doesn’t reject it’s own work after six months, what artist hasn’t done that? It produces images one at a time but accumulates nothing. That is why so much of it feels interchangeable.

And the issue of presenting the work, of moving it from the private to public space, is crucial. When you walk into a gallery, you are introduced to an artist by the gallerist: she tells you how the artist works, what they return to, and how their work developed. You might be buying a piece of the artist’s work, but you are buying the artist as much as the work. You are not just looking for something you “like,” but buying into a struggle you understand, maybe even share. AI has no trajectory. Nothing to share.

I was taught the earliest art images we have are cave paintings. Some show remarkable skill, animals drawn with a confidence that still holds. Landscapes delivered with a few perfectly placed lines. Animals, other people, and distance expressed. Other works are simpler: a hand pressed against the wall, pigment spread around it, leaving a trace. They are often deep in caves, not easy to reach. But they are not sealed off. There is a reason for the difficulty. They are placed with purpose. Someone went there, placed something, and came back. Whatever else these paintings mean, they are like all art: addressed outward. They assume a viewer, even if that viewer comes much later. The Duchamp reminds me of these caves. They seem to echo back and forth to each other.

The line is not between old art and new technology. It is between work that is thin, immediate, replaceable, and work that carries time, attention, and necessity within it. AI will produce an enormous amount of the first kind. It may contribute to the second, but only when an artist restores what the technology removes: judgment, refusal, continuity, risk, and necessity.

The difference is not in the image. It is what the image is evidence of, something not available on demand.

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A recent photo from Tokyo.

I have noticed, over the years, a recurring resistance among photographers to asking even the simplest questions about the places they photograph. I have heard it said many times, often with a certain confidence, that what matters is what is in the frame, that the photograph should stand on its own, that knowing the history of a place risks contaminating the image. The claim is usually framed as a defence of honesty, a defence of direct seeing, as if the eye could remain innocent if only we refused to burden it with too much knowledge.

A simple example comes up often enough to feel familiar. A photographer stands at the edge of a forest and makes a series of images, drawn to the density of the trees, the darkness under the canopy, the quiet. When asked about the place, he shrugs, says he is not interested in what happened there, that he prefers not to know, that the photograph should not depend on anything outside of itself. He believes he is preserving something pure.

A Park in Tokyo

But in his book (and BBC series) Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama writes that even in that moment, the photographer is not looking at just trees. He is responding to an idea of the forest that has a long history. The forest as refuge, as danger, as something older than us, something untouched, something that precedes language and culture. These ideas about the forest don’t arrive at the moment of exposure; they are already present, absorbed over time through paintings, films, books, and other photographs. The sense of depth the photographer feels, the attraction to shadow, the belief that the forest contains something hidden, all of this is learned, burned into our memories, as well as the landscape, even if it feels immediate. As soon as the Jew’s reached the forests and wilderness….things go awry. The landscape is full of these hidden histories.

Not everything in the wilderness is good.

Even what we tend to call seeing is already a form of remembering. Not the retrieval of a fixed image, but a reconstruction, assembled from what we have seen before, what we have read, what we expect to find. Each time “re-member” the present is mixed with what we already carry, and what feels immediate is, in part, made from that memory and its relationship to other memories. Every day experience is imbued with details of our pasts. That is the neurological process, and it is unavoidable.

This is not something a photographer can step outside of. It is the condition of the work. The places we photograph are already shaped by what has been said about them, and our seeing is shaped in the same way. The question is not whether we bring this with us, but whether we recognise that we do.

This is what Simon Schama makes unavoidable in Landscape and Memory. In his account of the German forest, the forest becomes more than a physical place. It becomes an origin story, a national myth, something ancient and unbroken, something that can be used to define a people. What appears natural is shown to be constructed, layered over time with meaning, then used again and again until it feels inevitable. Once you see this, it becomes difficult to return to the idea that the landscape is simply there, waiting to be recorded. Or that you can take some pure, clean, unadulterated photo of it.

A similar shift occurs in the way we think about the American wilderness. Henry David Thoreau is often taken as the figure of direct experience, someone who went into the woods to encounter nature without mediation, to strip life down to its essentials. Walden has come to stand for that possibility, a place where one might see clearly again. But even this idea of the wild is not outside culture. It is shaped, named, and sustained through writing, through memory, through the expectation that such a place should exist.

The photograph of Walden Pond made by Herbert W. Gleason in 1906 makes this visible in a different way. Gleason’s photograph, taken from Pine Hill, is often reproduced at a small scale, and even in that reduced form it makes its point clearly. The pond is no longer something one walks beside or sits near. It is seen all at once, contained within the frame, its edges clearly defined. The surrounding trees form a boundary, the water becomes a shape, and the place itself begins to look less like an experience and more like something mapped and known. The photographic image does not deny the reality of Walden, but it alters it. What had been a site of immersion becomes something surveyed, something that can be grasped from a distance.

It is at this point that the idea of immediacy begins to slip. Even here, at Walsen Pond, in a place so closely associated with direct experience, the landscape is already layered, and the photograph adds another layer rather than removing them. What is there is already more than it appears, as the Gleason photograph quietly demonstrates.

I have found, in my own work, that I rarely arrive at a place without already knowing something about it, and that knowledge changes what I see, often in ways that are difficult to describe at the time. Before photographing temples in Japan, I spent time reading about Buddhism and Taoism, not in any formal way, but enough to understand how these spaces were used, how they were approached, what they were meant to hold. The result was not that I went looking for illustrations of those ideas, but that I stopped expecting certain kinds of images. I was less interested in the obvious views, the entrances, the formal arrangements, and more attentive to the spaces between them, the quieter areas, the places where nothing in particular seemed to be happening.

A similar thing happens closer to home. In the bogs and forests, where I have spent a great deal of time, I began to notice the condition of the birch trees, the way they were dying back or collapsing, and only later learned the reasons for it, the changes in water levels, the disease, the pressure on the ecosystem. Once I understood even a small part of that, the trees were no longer simply part of the landscape. They were evidence of something unfolding over time. I did not photograph them differently in any obvious way, but I selected differently. What held my attention shifted.

There are also times when the order is reversed, when I encounter something I do not understand and only later learn what it is I have seen. Even then, the knowledge does not close the image. It gives the photograph a second life, not by explaining it, but by complicating it.

Over time, I have also come to notice that many of the photographers whose work continues to hold attention seem to work in a similar way. They return to the same places, they learn something about them, they carry that knowledge into the work, and the photographs begin to reflect that accumulation, not as explanation, but as a kind of density.

The resistance to this kind of knowledge is tied to a belief that photography depends on immediacy, that the best images are those that present themselves clearly and without complication. In practice, this often means that the photograph resolves quickly. The viewer recognises what is being shown, understands the gesture, and moves on. The image feels complete at a single glance.

What I have come to realise is that this quick resolution is often a way of avoiding something more difficult. There are moments when the scene in front of me does not settle into a clear composition, when nothing stands out, when the light is flat or awkward, when I cannot quite say why I am looking at it. The easiest response is to adjust, to find a stronger angle, to wait for better light, to turn the scene into something recognisable. Most of the time, that is exactly what I do.

Another woodland scene, from Tokyo.

But occasionally I do not. I stay with it, even though nothing has yet been resolved. The image resists me. It does not agree with what I expect a photograph to be. This is what I have come to think of as friction, not as a theory, but as a working condition. It is the point at which the photograph stops cooperating.

Friction, on its own, does not produce anything. It can just as easily lead to failure or to a discarded frame. What matters is what follows from it. If I resolve the scene too quickly, the friction disappears and the image closes. It becomes clear, legible, and, more often than not, forgettable. If I stay with it, if I do not force it into a known form, something else becomes possible, although not guaranteed.

This is where the distinction between closed and open photographs becomes useful. A closed photograph delivers its idea and finishes. An open photograph does not. It remains unsettled, requiring time, not because it is obscure, but because it does not reduce easily.

The ability to stay with that unsettled state is what Teju Cole (whom I mention a lot, I know) describes as attention. It is not a technique, and it is not a style. It is a discipline, a willingness not to reduce what is seen to what is already known. It involves restraint and a recognition that what is in front of us exceeds our first understanding of it.

Seen this way, these terms begin to connect. Friction is the moment when expectation fails. Attention is the decision not to repair that failure too quickly. Openness is what remains if that decision is sustained.

Returning to the photographer in the forest, we can see the difficulty more clearly. He is not wrong to trust his eye, but he is mistaken in thinking that his eye is free of history. The very sense that the forest is worth photographing is already shaped. What he resists is not information, but the possibility that his own seeing is structured in ways he has not chosen.

The divide between those who continue working at photography and those who do not is often described in terms of skill, but the difference is more often whether one continues to resolve the image quickly or begins to recognise the limits of that approach. At that point, the images begin to resemble other images, including one’s own, which begin to set expectations for what a photograph should look like.

It is here that books like Landscape and Memory become useful in a practical way. Not as theory, and not as something to be mastered, but as a way of making it harder to pretend that what we are seeing is simple. For a photographer, or a painter, or even someone walking through a landscape, the book does not tell you what to look for. It changes what you notice. It introduces a kind of pressure ( I use the word in a psychoanalytic way), a reminder that what appears empty is rarely empty, that the ground itself carries forward what has been said already, believed, and what was done there.

This is also why such books are worth spending time with, even if they are not read straight through. I first encountered Landscape and Memory through the library, reading short sections, returning to it, trying to understand how the argument was being made, how the language worked, how the examples accumulated.

That mattered more than simply knowing the ideas. I wanted to see how someone could take something as familiar as a forest, or a river, or a piece of land, and show that it was not simple. That there was a hidden complexity, hidden layers. Reading it that way made a difference. It changed what I noticed, and over time, it changed what I selected.

Eventually, I bought a copy, not to finish it, but to keep it close by, to return to it when I needed to be reminded that what appears empty is rarely empty, and that the relationship between landscape and culture is deeper and more persistent than it first seems.

I have found that the most useful way to think about this is not in terms of better or worse photography, but in terms of time. Some images end quickly. Others do not. The ones that do not tend to begin in uncertainty, in that moment when the scene does not yet make sense, and continue because neither the photographer nor the viewer has rushed to resolve it.

The photograph, in that sense, does not begin when we recognise what we are looking at. It begins when we realise that we do not.

Please, you can help me with these essays and conversations by sharing, recommending, and joining the conversation. Some essays, like this week, are more formal, other weeks, mostly photos, and sometimes very direct and to the point. I hope they give you something to think about.

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Photo by Steve McCurry

I have been rereading Teju Cole’s essay on Steve McCurry, and I find that it clarifies something I have long felt while looking through photographs online. And why I have several individual artists’ books on India, but not McCurry’s? If you like McCurry, good for you. He is a giant in the field. Anything, anything I have to say about him is like a single grain of sand on the beach. It will have no effect, but I hope it has one on your photography.

Teju Cole’s essay can be found here: a-too-perfect-picture

Cole’s argument is direct. He describes photographs that are technically accomplished, emotionally legible, and widely admired, and then calls them, quite plainly, boring. Not because they lack skill, but because they rely on repeated visual motifs, familiar arrangements that begin to stand in for seeing. A certain kind of portrait, a certain kind of colour, a certain arrangement of foreground and background, all placed just so. The pictures show us what we think we want to see, confirming a version of the world already edited into clarity. In doing so, these photos slip, almost without noticing, from observation into fantasy.

Cole’s essay is worth reading because it names something important. You see the same motifs everywhere now: the perfect sky, often a “replaced” sky. People purchase sky replacements online! What was there just wasn’t good enough; the light is balanced so nothing is lost; the colour is pushed just enough to feel vivid but not strange; a single subject separated from whatever might compete with it. Even the small things repeat, the same puddle reflection, the same figure placed just off-centre, the same clean horizon. None of this is wrong in itself. The problem is the accumulation, and the way the photograph begins to arrive, it’s already known. It was inside your head before you saw it because you know this type of photo.

Some photographers have worked very deliberately against this: Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore in his early work, Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, and Lee Friedlander, again, in his early work. You can recognise their work; you know one when you see one. There is a style, of course, there is, but the effort is directed elsewhere, and the photograph is not meant to be about the photographer.

Baltz photographs the edge of an industrial park, a blank wall, a stretch of ground with nothing to recommend it. Shore makes a photo of a parking lot, a street corner, a meal on a table, and leaves it as it is. The Bechers photograph water towers, one after another, usually frontally, without flourish. Gohlke photographs a landscape where the horizon sits awkwardly, where the frame seems to include too much. Robert Adams photographs a tract house, a stretch of road, light falling across something ordinary, and does not push it any further than it should go. Friedlander turns toward the street and lets everything in: reflections, shadows, signs, fragments of people. The frame is often crowded and slightly off, so that the eye has to work to find its way around. With Friedlander, you ask yourself: What have I missed? Because there is so much to take in. But it’s qualitatively different than the planned any staged like confusion of McCurry. Isn’t it?

As I mentioned before, in all of these, the photos do not announce the photographer, avoiding obvious authorship, or press toward a single message. They leave things in and allow the frame to hold more than one thing at once. Not because these photographers lacked control, but because they understood that too much control closes the image. Once everything has been decided, there is nothing left for the viewer to do, and nothing left to discover.

What I encounter now, day after day, feels like the opposite of this. Too many photographs are made with a single goal: to demonstrate skill. They are not trying to show you something in the world; they are trying to show you what the photographer can do. The camera, the lens, and the location all become part of the display, and when that is not enough, there are tools to complete the process: replace the sky, clean the edges, and remove whatever does not fit.

One of my images, a bit less “planned” and a bit more “open.”

Each step is small, and each step is understandable, but taken together they produce a photograph that is closed. The problem is not only that the photograph is too perfect, but that it gives itself away too quickly. The subject, mood, and meaning arrive all at once. We have come to expect that a photograph should be understood without effort, without engagement, without the need to stay with it.

Photography has followed a path toward what is smooth, frictionless, and immediately pleasing. The smoother the image, the faster it can be taken in; the faster it can be taken in, the more easily it circulates; and the more easily it circulates, the less it asks of us. At the same time, the smoother the photograph becomes, the more it turns back toward the photographer, so that what we are shown, very clearly, is control. Control of light, colour, composition, and mood. Everything is decided. Nothing interrupts, nothing resists.

One of my images of the Niagara Falls is a bit smoother, but again, not as planned.

Without a bit of roughness, without something that does not quite fit, it becomes hard to know what we are seeing. The image passes too easily and does not hold. Friedlander’s pictures, in their density and slight awkwardness, do the opposite; they hold you there.

I took a photograph recently of a row of flowering trees in a nursery garden. At first glance, it has everything these other images aim for: blossoms, blue sky, fresh green, early spring light. It could easily be turned into a very successful photograph in the current mode. The black nursery pots could be cropped out, the red and white hoses removed, the muddy ditch excluded or made into a clean reflective surface, the exposure evened out, the composition simplified so that the blossom reads instantly and without distraction.

It would not take much, but that is not the photograph.

The trees are in plastic pots, waiting to be sold. Hoses run across the ground. A ditch cuts through the right side of the frame, holding water that is not especially beautiful. A rough plank crosses it. The ground is uneven, still wet from weeks of rain. Nothing resolves cleanly, and the eye does not land and stay. It moves, it has to move, it has to decide what matters, and the photograph takes time.

That, I think, is the difference, not style, not beauty, but time. The instructions say: Some Attention Required. Not because the photograph is difficult, but because it has not already decided what it is.

This photograph is part of a larger set, more than a hundred images of the same garden. It is never still. Trees are moved, trimmed, cut back, brought in, and taken away. The ground is often muddy. Water collects, drains, and returns. It is a place in constant adjustment, not a finished landscape but a working one, and to photograph it as if it were complete would be to misunderstand it. To smooth it into legibility would be to lie about what it is.

And yet that is what many contemporary images do. They take a place and remove whatever does not fit the idea of a finished picture, smoothing it, simplifying it, making it immediately legible. There are tools now that make this very easy; besides replacing the sky, they can balance the tones and clean the edges. None of these decisions seems unreasonable on its own, but together they move in the same direction.

This one path leads toward the photograph as a product, an image that demonstrates skill, satisfies expectation, and can be understood at a glance, where the photographer becomes, in effect, an illustrator, a maker of images that circulate smoothly and without resistance. The other path is slower and less certain, leaving things in, allowing for what does not quite fit, accepting that the photograph may not resolve at once, or at all, and asking more of the viewer while giving more back over time.

Standing in that garden, with the mud and the hoses and the trees waiting in their pots, it does not feel like a difficult choice, but it is a choice.

Image Credits and Fair Use

Images are reproduced here for purposes of criticism, commentary, and scholarship under principles of fair use (U.S.) and fair dealing (Canada, UK, and Europe). Copyright remains with the respective artists, photographers, estates, or rights holders. If you are a rights holder and would like an image credited differently or removed, please contact me, and it will be addressed promptly.

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I went to Trout Lake Park in the morning, planning to photograph trees in the open fields. When I arrived, they didn’t amount to much. The light was flat; heavy clouds blocked the sun, and the trees were scattered in a way that never quite coalesced into a photo. I walked down toward the pond instead.

At the end of the pond, sometimes more of a bog, I came to a patch of flooded ground where several willows bent low over the water. Water was covered with the thinnest layer of ice. As I walked past, something about the scene caught my attention. A trunk curved across the view. Thin branches hung down into the water. Their reflections appeared beneath them. A strip of moss along the bank was catching. light breaking through a long, tiny slit in the cloud cover. It wasn’t anything dramatic, but the pieces lined up just for a moment.

Then a cloud moved across the sun, and the whole thing went flat again. I kept walking, but after a minute or two, I noticed the light coming back, and it seemed to be falling in that same small area. So I turned around, went back, and quickly set up the tripod and camera. Because the branches were running in every direction and went from foreground to background, I switched to focus stacking so everything would stay sharp from front to back.

Then things started interfering. A duck landed and stirred up the water. No ice on this side. A few runners came along the path on the right. The clouds kept moving across the sun. I stood there waiting while small ripples moved slowly across the pond from the far side toward me. One after another, they faded out until the surface finally went still again. I stood away from the camera with my remote control. When the water settled down, I started the exposure. Several similar images appeared: wash, rinse, repeat.

A day or two later, while editing the photographs, I began to notice a few things I hadn’t thought about while standing there. The pictures are clearly of trees and water, but the eye doesn’t stop in one place right away. The branches cross each other, the reflections repeat the trunks, and the water makes it hard to tell exactly where the ground ends. The eye keeps moving through the frame before finally settling somewhere.

A painting by Paul Cézanne

While looking through the images over the next couple of days, I found myself thinking of certain landscapes by Paul Cézanne, where trees interrupt the view, and the eye wanders through the painting instead of stopping immediately. The feeling is not the same, of course, but the photographs behave a little that way.

That may also have something to do with the way the photographs were made. Each final image is built from several exposures combined. I use focus stacking so the whole scene would stay sharp, the branches close to the camera, and the reflections farther back in the water. Because of that, nothing in the picture immediately tells you where to look first. This is almost the opposite of how someone else would take the image, with a shallow depth of field and controlled composition guiding the eye to where the photographer thinks it should go.

A painting by Paul Cézanne

I noticed something else. The place looks slightly strange in the photographs, even though there is nothing strange about it. It is just wet ground in a park, with a few willows growing along the edge of a muddy pond. For a few minutes that morning, the branches, the water, and the light happened to fall together in a way that looks arranged, almost composed. It reminded me a little of a museum diorama, except this one was empty. Everything comes together inside the little rectangle, within the constructed box. And everything is so still. I remembered how walking down the path had cleared out the scene. Emptied it of activity.

And how the lack of activity gave the scene a strange feeling. Freud would use the word “uncanny.” The word is a perfect description. A few minutes later, a duck landed again, the reflections broke apart, and the surface of the pond filled with ripples. The wind came up, and more runners passed by.

The place went back to being what it normally is: a stretch of park that most people walk past without thinking about it.

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For years, I’ve kept a photo of Hugh Thompson Jr. on the shelf behind my desk. It sits in a simple frame, the way someone might place a picture of a family member in an office, visible but not obvious. People sometimes assumed it was personal in the ordinary way. They glanced at it while settling into the room and asked: Is that you? Were you in the military? Is that your father, your brother? The answer was always no. I would not ordinarily keep family photographs in my office, for ethical reasons. I never thought that was the right thing to do. But this photograph stayed with me for years, first on a wall, later in the bookcase, because it was needed to start a story. One like you would tell about a family member you never want to forget about. It’s now at home, sometimes in the bookcase, sometimes on top. Sometimes on a shelf.

In the frame is a standard military portrait, almost aggressively ordinary. Thompson is young, younger than the story attached to him would lead you to expect; he is seated upright in uniform before an American flag. His name is stitched above the pocket, THOMPSON. The cloth is flat, the pose formal, the expression controlled, serious, perhaps a little wary. There is nothing in the photograph itself that signals heroism. It looks like the kind of official portrait made by the thousands, the kind of picture meant to record a person’s place in an institution, not the kind of picture that prepares you for what this person might one day do. That is one reason I have always been drawn to it. The photograph withholds the story. It gives you a face, a posture, a uniform, and then leaves the rest for someone else to tell. And for me the best moments are when people make assumptions and ask questions, because that’s when I can tell them the story.

We do this with portraits all the time. We read them as complete stories even when they are not. That is part of the purpose of school portraits, yearbook photographs, the pictures parents tape to refrigerators, and carry in wallets. They often give you a dozen little tiny versions, so everyone you know, who cares about you, can carry it around. With portraits of people we don’t know, we look at a face and begin creating a life around it, either remembered or imagined. We decide who the person is, whether they are shy, decent, vain, troubled, ambitious, lonely, or bright. A portrait, and this is a portrait as much as the most coveted portrait by Sally Mann, invites fiction as much as fact. We tell ourselves that the story is there in the face, when usually what is there is far less and far more: a surface, a pause, a prompt. The Thompson portrait works exactly that way. If you knew nothing about him, you would never guess why the photograph remains with me. But you would have some feeling about who this young man was.

Then, in my office, because people ask, I tell the story.

On March 16, 1968, in the hamlet Americans called My Lai, a subdivision of Sơn Mỹ in Quảng Ngãi province, Charlie Company entered a village it had been primed to read as hostile territory. The area had been dubbed “Pinkville” on military maps. The company had already taken casualties from mines and booby traps. Intelligence had wrongly suggested that the 48th Battalion was in the area. At a briefing the day before, Captain Ernest Medina told his men they would finally have the chance to engage the enemy that had eluded them for weeks. Believing civilians had gone to Quảng Ngãi city, he directed that anyone remaining should be treated as a Viet Cong fighter or sympathizer. The troops were also ordered to destroy crops and buildings and kill livestock. Shortly before 7:30 that morning, the village was shelled. The barrage, meant to prepare a landing zone for helicopters, had the effect of driving civilians back into the area in search of cover. By 7:50, Charlie Company had landed. They met no resistance. They killed anyway. Women, children, and elderly men were rounded up and shot at close range. Soldiers raped women. At 9:00, Lt. William Calley ordered the execution of as many as 150 civilians herded into an irrigation ditch. By 11:00, as many as 500 Vietnamese civilians had been killed. The sole U.S. casualty was a soldier who shot himself in the foot while trying to clear a jammed weapon. It is one of those facts that sounds invented, but because it is factual, it lands harder than anything one could invent.

(Above: A young man at the Vietnam Memorial)

A photographer was there that day too, Sergeant Ron Haeberle, carrying one black-and-white camera for Army records and a personal camera loaded with colour film. His official photographs showed questioning, searching, burning huts, the standard visual language of a search-and-destroy mission. His personal colour photographs showed what that language concealed: bodies on a trail, terrified women and children moments before they were shot. Those pictures, later published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Life, helped galvanize the anti-war movement and became some of the most recognized images of the Vietnam War. They are part of why My Lai remains visually present in American memory. They are burned into my memory.

As the massacre unfolded, Hugh Thompson was flying a scout helicopter at low altitude over the village. At first, he saw wounded civilians and marked their locations with smoke grenades, radioing ground troops to give aid. After refuelling, he returned and found those same wounded civilians dead. Then he saw a squad of American soldiers closing in on more than a dozen women and children. He landed his helicopter between them. Lawrence Colburn, his door gunner, and Glenn Andreotta, his crew chief, manned their weapons while Thompson called in other helicopters to evacuate civilians to safety. This is the centre of the story for me. Not Lt. Calley, who directed this mass killing. Not the grotesque afterlife of Calley in American politics. Thompson. A young warrant officer who, in the middle of a massacre carried out by his own side, placed himself and his crew between armed Americans and unarmed Vietnamese civilians and was prepared to defend those civilians.

(A young man at the memorial wall to read the names, touch the stone, and perhaps find someone important to him)

For years, Thompson paid for that act. The institution did not know what to do with him. He was denounced, threatened, treated by many not as a man who had preserved the only piece of American honour left on that field, but as someone who had broken faith with his own. Only in 1998 did the Army award Thompson, Colburn, and Andreotta, posthumously, the Soldier’s Medal for extraordinary bravery not involving direct contact with the enemy. Later, Thompson was brought back to speak about military ethics. That delay matters. It tells its own story about how long it can take for a country, or an army, to recognize the shape of moral courage when it appears in front of them.

I was in high school during the Vietnam War and attended anti-war marches almost weekly. That probably needs to be said plainly because I do not want this story mistaken for anything like nostalgia, patriotism in the cheap sense, or some right-wing rehabilitation of the war. My admiration for Thompson comes from the opposite direction. It comes from the need to hold on to evidence that even within a corrupt system, even inside a disastrous war, even on a day of atrocity, a single person can still decide what is right and act on it.

When I told this story in my office over the years, people rarely left thinking about the massacre itself. They left thinking about the soldier who put his helicopter between the troops and the civilians. They left, oddly enough, not depressed but steadier, even uplifted. The story shifted the emotional centre of the room. It moved from horror to responsibility, from what human beings can do at their worst to what one person can do in reply.

That is one reason I wanted the essay to remain about portraits and photographs rather than become only an account of My Lai. The photograph on my shelf is not evidence in the usual sense. It does not show the massacre. It does not show the ditch, the bunker, the smoke grenades, the evacuation, the dead. It shows a young man before a flag. It is meaningful only because the story has been attached to it, told and retold. In that sense, it resembles the three Judith Joy Ross portraits I want to place near the end of this page. Ross photographed visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., in the early 1980s using an 8×10 camera. The pictures are quiet and frontal. A hooded teenager, uncertain and slightly open-mouthed. A young man in a plain shirt, standing still, gaze direct, context withheld. In one image, below, there are two Marine recruits in dress whites, one standing forward, one leaning back, both composed, both unmistakably young. Without knowing where these images were made, they are simply portraits. But with that knowledge, with the wall and the names and the private reasons each person had for being there, the pictures deepen immediately.

Ross later described the awkwardness of bringing a camera to that place, the discomfort of standing at a memorial where people came quietly to remember the dead, and asking if she might photograph them. She said, looking back, that it felt inappropriate to go to the Vietnam Memorial with a viewfinder and ask for pictures, but that, in her youth, she half believed the photographs might somehow end the war, or at least compose a kind of requiem through images. That unease is present in the work. These are not explanatory photographs. They do not deliver their meaning all at once. They wait for the viewer to bring knowledge, memory, location, and history. They ask the viewer to do some of the work.

The Thompson portrait on my shelf has always worked that way, too. It sits there like a family picture, and in a sense it is one, not by blood but by affiliation, by moral preference, by the fact that over many years I have wanted this one face near me. The portrait is young, formal, and almost anonymous. You could look at it and miss everything. But then someone asks. Who is that? Was he your father? Your brother? And the story enters the frame. That is what photographs often do. They prompt a story, real or imagined. In this case, the story is true, and because it is true, it does not close down the room. It opens it.

I have sometimes hoped, especially when telling the story to a young person, that the photograph might work indirectly, the way photographs often do. Not by instructing, not by arguing, not by declaring a lesson, but by remaining there until the question comes. Then the facts arrive. A date. A place. A helicopter. A ditch. A bunker. A young pilot. A young crew. A refusal. And after all that, after the massacre, the army, the delay, the medal, the ethics lectures, the years, the portrait returns to what it first seemed to be: a quiet official photograph of a very young man in uniform, seated before a flag. It looks ordinary. Thank God, it is not. Try to take photos like these.

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Last week, someone got me writing about Susan Sontag. Someone I had thought, a long time ago, I could forget about. This week, of all things, it’s Roland Barthes. I find myself wondering why we keep returning to these writers? Why, in conversations about photography, do we circle back to books that were published fifty years ago and addressed a world that no longer exists? I gave my copies away to the library book sale years ago. Not out of contempt, but out of a judgment: these books were no longer earning their shelf space that I needed. The shelves beside me are filled with books on contemporary art, photography criticism and landscape theory, and really, none of them depend on Barthes or Sontag. Photography criticism has moved on. The conversation has moved on. It is only in certain circles, it seems, that we have not.

The argument I want to make here is not that Barthes and Sontag should be erased. They belong to their moment. But their moment was not ours, and pretending otherwise costs photographers something they cannot afford to waste: time.

Before explaining why, it helps to understand what Barthes was actually doing in Camera Lucida. The strange vocabulary that still clings to the book, “punctum”, “studium” often sounds artificial because it is. Barthes invented those terms deliberately. He was not trained as a photographer or historian of the medium, but as a literary theorist working within the structuralist traditions of French intellectual life. Creating a vocabulary was part of the method.

Studium refers to the cultural field of the photograph, the information we read through our knowledge of history, politics, or social life. Punctum, by contrast, is the small detail that unexpectedly pierces the viewer, a fragment of the image that carries emotional force for a particular person. Barthes illustrates this with a photograph by André Kertész, “Wandering Violinist.” What strikes him most about the image is not the violinist but the dirt road running through the image. The texture of the road reminds him of villages he once passed through in Central Europe. For him, that detail carries the entire emotional weight of the photograph.

But even Barthes admits the experience is subjective. The punctum may affect only one viewer and not another. It might be different for every person who looks at the same photograph. It might even be something the photographer never noticed when making the image. Because of this, the terms never quite function as a stable “theory of photography.” They describe an encounter between a photograph and a particular viewer rather than explaining how photographs are made or how they operate in culture. Maybe you can see why, besides when this idea came up briefly in art history class, I have never, ever heard a working artist or photographer use these terms. Except in a joke.

The book also comes from a very specific and devastating emotional moment, and this matters more than is usually acknowledged. Barthes wrote Camera Lucida in the months following the death of his mother, to whom he was extraordinarily close. He spent much of that time looking through photographs of her, trying to locate her presence in them. The Winter Garden Photograph, a picture of his mother as a child that he never reproduces in the book, that he refuses to show us, becomes the emotional centre of the entire argument. He is not really writing a theory of photography. He is trying to understand why a photograph of a dead person feels the way it does. He is trying, as people do in grief, to find something that will hold.

Many who knew Barthes felt that after his mother died, he had simply stopped wanting to live. He was struck by a laundry van in Paris in 1980 and died a month later. What can be said is that Camera Lucida reads, in retrospect, less like a theory of photography than like a philosophical diary written during mourning, and possibly during depression. It is a moving book. It is also a compromised one. A theory of photography built on grief, on the photograph as trace of the dead, is a theory built on a very particular and very narrow experience of what photographs are and do. The punctum, that detail which pierces the viewer, turns out to be almost always a detail that reminds Barthes of loss. That is not a universal theory. That is a symptom.

Sontag’s On Photography moves in a different direction but is similarly rooted in the cultural debates of its time. She treats the medium largely as a social and political problem, connected to consumption, spectacle, and the accumulation of images. Those concerns were understandable in the 1970s. But they are only part of the story, and an increasingly dated part at that. Many photographers working today are operating in traditions that Sontag and Barthes barely considered. Photography I have grown up with is dramatically, if not wholly, different in nature.

During art school, what I eventually understood was that the distance between Barthes and the photography I knew was not accidental. The photography I knew had grown not out of pictorial romanticism, but out of conceptual art, and more specifically out of a shift that became visible in 1975 when William Jenkins curated an exhibition in Rochester called New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. The photographers in that show, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, the Bechers, and Stephen Shore among them, were doing something that looked, on the surface, like simple documentary work. Deadpan images of parking lots, tract housing, industrial buildings, and the altered western landscape. Nothing obviously beautiful. Nothing that announced itself as art.

But the deadpan was a position, not an absence. The suppression of authorship was a deliberate theoretical choice. These photographers were saying, among other things, that the expressive gesture of the individual artist was no longer the point, that the subject itself, rendered with clarity and without drama, carried more meaning than any stylistic intervention could. This is conceptual art’s influence arriving inside photography, and it produces work that the punctum model simply cannot handle. The Bechers’ typologies, their grids of water towers, cooling towers, blast furnaces, each photographed from the same angle in the same flat light, only function because there is no punctum. Any single image is almost deliberately inert. The meaning is entirely in the system, in the accumulation, in what you understand when you see forty water towers side by side. Barthes gives you no way into that work at all. His entire framework depends on the individual image, the individual viewer, the individual wound. The New Topographics photographers were building something else entirely.

Then there is Jeff Wall, who is something else again, who represents, to my mind, the clearest roadblock for Barthes of any photographer or writer working today. Wall’s large-scale transparencies are constructed, staged, and cinematically lit. A Sudden Gust of Wind, Mimic, Dead Troops Talk, these are images that have been thought about, built, and controlled to a degree that makes the idea of an accidental piercing detail almost absurd. I own a copy of A Sudden Gust of Wind, printed by Wall on sheets that hang loosely together and move in actual air currents. It is an extraordinary object. And everything in it is there by decision. Wall knows exactly what is in his frame.

Which means Barthes’s framework doesn’t just fail to illuminate Wall’s work, it actively misleads you. If you go looking for the unintended detail that escapes the photographer’s control, you will invent one, because the real story is precisely the opposite: total, theatrical control of every element in the image. Wall comes out of Vancouver, out of conceptual art, out of cinema, and painting simultaneously. He is about as far from the Parisian literary intellectual looking at a snapshot as it is possible to get, and his work quietly makes the argument that a completely different account of photography is needed.

This points to something that neither Barthes nor Sontag were equipped to address: the contemporary photobook. The photobook today is not what it was a few decades ago. It is not simply a collection of images between covers. It is a designed object in which sequence, pacing, the relationship between images across a spread, the texture and weight of the paper, the presence or absence of text, all of these are part of the meaning. The book is the work. You cannot extract individual images from it and expect to understand what is happening, any more than you could read isolated sentences from a novel and claim to have read the novel.

Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens makes no sense outside the book. The images accumulate obsessively, returning again and again to the bird as a figure of solitude, menace, and grief. The meaning is built through repetition, through rhythm, through the experience of turning pages and finding the ravens again. There is no single image that carries the argument. The sequence is the argument. To approach Ravens looking for a punctum would be like approaching a piece of music looking for the one note that matters. You would miss everything.

The same is true of much of the strongest work coming out of Japan. Trying to understand Rinko Kawauchi took me months. I found myself reading Japanese literature, philosophy, Buddhism, and Shinto just to begin to understand what Japanese critics mean when they speak about pathos in photography. Kawauchi’s photographs rarely depend on a single puncturing detail. Their meaning unfolds gradually across sequences of images, often across entire books. The experience is cumulative and atmospheric, operating through rhythm, fragility, and attention to small transitions in everyday life. Barthes gives you no way in.

Something similar can be said of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s theater photographs. Sugimoto placed a large-format camera inside a movie theater and left the shutter open for the entire duration of the film. The resulting image shows a glowing white screen surrounded by the architecture of the theater, a single exposure containing the entire duration of the movie. The meaning lies in the conceptual structure of the act itself, not in any detail within the frame. There is no punctum to locate. The whole point is the whole.

The limitations become even clearer when photography moves outside the Western intellectual framework that shaped both Barthes and Sontag. Their ideas arise almost entirely from European and American cultural assumptions. That does not make them wrong, but it does make them provincial in the literal sense of the word. The work being made now, in Japan, across Asia, across traditions that have entirely different accounts of what an image is and does, requires a different kind of attention and a different kind of reading.

And this brings me back to the practical point. We only have so much time. It seems unwise to spend it circling theories that no longer help us understand the work most photographers are actually making. The books I kept, the ones that actually changed how I think about photography, were often not about photography at all. Dave Hickey wrote almost nothing about the medium, yet his essays on beauty, music, taste, and cultural change can alter how one thinks about art altogether. Reading Hickey can change how you look at pictures, even though he rarely discusses them directly. Robert Adams, whose essays return again and again to attention, clarity, and moral seriousness, writes about photographs from inside the practice rather than from outside it. And. Then there are the Marxist critics. Let’s leave that for another day. But these are the writers worth your time.

By comparison, neither Barthes nor Sontag will do very much to improve your work as a photographer, or deepen your understanding of what photography is doing now. They may even misguide and confuse you. Their writing belongs to another moment and another set of concerns.

Next week, at this rate, someone will bring up some Freudian interpretation of photography. That, at least, I might find more enjoyable to discuss.

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Three times this week, I have encountered a reference to Susan Sontag’s On Photography. Three times I have smiled at being told something I already know. I have a background in philosophy. And art history. And considerable experience making art with a camera. And I wonder why this book, of all the critical books, journal and magazine articles on photography, would be considered an important text in the field? I am genuinely puzzled. I ask myself: did this person read the same book I did?

Because the book I read is not primarily about photography, it’s about Susan Sontag’s anxieties. And the difference matters, especially to Diane Arbus, who, due to this book, has been misread and misrepresented for fifty years by Sontag's attacks to promote her ideas and career. Just reading Sontag’s comments about Arbus’s death, you have to realize there is something wrong here. Some unexplained animus.

Stand in a room full of Arbus photographs and watch what happens. I’ve done that a few times. People slow down. They lean in and look closely. The line of viewers moves so slowly. They talk to each other in low voices. Not the polite murmur of people engaging in the act of just appreciation, but something more, recognition. In front of the famous photograph of Eddie Carmel, the “Jewish giant,” with his parents in their Bronx apartment, you hear people notice the same thing. He is crouching. Bending himself almost in half to fit, literally, into his parents’ world. His parents stand physically leaning against him. He looks somewhere past the camera. The room in the photograph is small, ordinary and full of love. It is a home, nothing more than a very typical home. These are people who struggle with something and continue to be who they are, proudly, every day.

This is not what Susan Sontag told us we would find.

Sontag’s essay in On Photography, published in 1977 and never quite out of print since, may be one of the more consequential misreadings in modern art criticism. Sontag described Arbus’s subjects as “pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive.” She argued that the photographs were built on distance and privilege, as if she wasn’t the one focused on being privileged and special, that these photos turned human difference into spectacle, and that the viewer was being invited to stare. The argument was stated not as an interpretation, but as a verdict. Arbus is guilty of everything, it would seem. Sontag did not leave much room for other readings. She rarely did in her writing.

Listening to the people standing in front of Eddie Carmel I note they did not get the memo. They used words like noble. They talked about community, about pride, about the way Arbus’s subjects, many of whom called themselves freaks, meant it as solidarity, as a kind of joyful claim on the word, seemed to be winning something. Winning on their own terms. Looking back at the camera, and through it at us, with a composure that made the viewer the uncertain party in the exchange.

That gap, between what Sontag said the photographs were doing and what people actually feel and express when they stand in front of them, is not a minor discrepancy. It’s the whole question.

Arbus did not photograph strangers. That is the first thing her biography makes clear, and it is the thing Sontag’s essay most conspicuously ignores. She spent weeks, sometimes months, building relationships with the people she photographed. Some subjects she returned to for years. They knew her. Many of them directed their own image, chose how to stand, how to look, and what to wear. The woman with the pearl necklace and the sash. The identical twins in matching dresses. The man at home in curlers. These were not ambushes. They were collaborations. If you lived in NY, you might remember hearing, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” a famous LGBTQ+ rights chant and slogan popularized by the activist group Queer Nation in the early 1990s. It was used to assert the presence and visibility of LGBTQ+ people in public life, demanding acceptance and challenging heteronormative societal norms. Starting with simple presence. That’s what I feel looking at these photos.

What these photographs give their subjects, consistently, is presence. Not pathos. Not pity. The people in Arbus’s portraits look back at you with full self-possession, sometimes with humour, sometimes with pride, and sometimes with a directness that borders on confrontation. They are not victims of the camera. If anything, they seem more comfortable in front of it than most of us would be.

To read this as exploitation requires overlooking a great deal of what the photographs actually show. It’s in the range of writing a book on photography and overlooking including any photos.

The literary biographer Carl Rollyson, who has studied Sontag’s career in depth and written extensively about her public intellectual persona, has observed something striking about On Photography’s reception. Students and general readers love it. Working photographers, the people who actually practice the medium, largely do not. Rollyson has noted, in interviews and public discussions of his work, that he has been unable to identify a serious practitioner who regards the book as either accurate or useful. Richard Avedon, not a minor figure, reportedly told the photographer Peter Hujar that he had come to think of Sontag as, in some sense, the enemy. Hujar’s long friendship with Sontag ended when On Photography was published.

This is not the reception history of a book that got photography right. Rollyson’s work is not always easy to locate through standard academic channels, but he maintains an active website and has discussed his conclusions in a series of accessible video conversations, both of which are findable by searching his name. For anyone who wants the documented record of Sontag’s life and intellectual career examined without deference, he is a great place to start.

What Rollyson’s work makes visible is the mechanism by which Sontag’s authority was constructed and maintained. She wrote in the New York Review of Books. She moved through the most prestigious literary institutions of her era. Her prose was elegant and assertive and fearless in its generalizations. In the intellectual culture of the 1960s and 70s, this combination: the right venues, the right confidence, the right enemies, could establish a reputation that specialists in a given field would spend decades trying to dislodge. By the time photographers pushed back, the book was already canonical.

Rollyson has also documented the more personal dimension of Sontag’s relationship with photography and with photographers. Not exactly evidence that would be accepted in court, but it is necessary to make a judgment about what, emotionally, was going on with Sontag’s issue with Arbus.

For many years, Sontag was in a relationship with Annie Leibovitz, one of the most celebrated photographers of the twentieth century. Leibovitz, by her own account and those of biographers including Benjamin Moser, spent nearly eight million dollars supporting Sontag. I still don’t understand that calculation, but I get the point. In return, Sontag was at times dismissive of Leibovitz’s work in public. Belittling her photography in front of others, treating her professional achievements as something less than serious art. The woman who wrote so confidently about the ethics of the photographic gaze, about exploitation and distance and the misuse of other human beings, conducted herself toward her own photographer with a contempt that is, as the record now makes plain, rather difficult to read about or understand. Draw your own conclusions. The evidence is there.

The critic and photographer Teju Cole has also written about the ethics of image-making with a clarity that cuts through most of the theoretical noise on the subject. For Cole, the ethical question is neither complicated nor abstract. It is about attention. Did the photographer stop? Did they look, and keep looking? Did they allow the subject to be fully present, not as an illustration, not as mere evidence, but as a human being whose particularity deserves recognition? The ethics live not in any theory of the camera, but in the quality of presence the photographer brings to the encounter. Cole practices what he argues; his photographs and his critical writing are inseparable from this principle. His essay collection, Known and Strange Things, is a place to start looking for an alternative way of approaching photography.

There is another, deeper, problem with Sontag’s framework, and it runs beneath everything she wrote about photography. She believed, at some level, in the old folk anxiety about cameras. That cameras take something from their subjects. Steal a piece of them. Diminish or consume. It is a feeling as old as photography itself. But as a general theory of the medium, it is difficult to sustain. A photograph is less like a theft than a kind of contract between photographer, subject, and viewer, in which the subject determines, consciously or not, the terms of their appearance. Arbus understood this. Her subjects were not victims of the camera. They were parties to the agreement, and most of them knew exactly what they were signing. What they gave the viewer was not their vulnerability. It was their self-possession. Sontag, who reduced all photography to a single anxious category, never saw the transaction for what it was. She was too busy worrying about the camera to notice what the people in front of it were actually doing.

None of this would matter if On Photograph were simply a minor period piece. But it isn’t. It is still assigned in universities. (Often editions with photos included, but not photos selected by Sontag.) It is still cited as authoritative. Students still read Sontag’s verdict on Arbus before they have had a chance to stand in a room full of her photos and form their own response.

The conversation around Arbus has shifted significantly in recent decades. Scholars have documented her working methods, her relationships with subjects, and the deliberate and often playful self-presentation of the people she photographed. The work is now widely understood as one of the major achievements in twentieth-century portraiture, not despite the directness of its gaze, but because of it. Arbus looked at people others looked away from. She gave them the camera’s full attention. They gave it back. Sontag looked at the same photographs and saw exploitation. What this tells us about Arbus is, at this point, very little. What it tells us about Sontag is a different matter. Read the critics, read the photographers’ words, then don’t forget to go look at the work. In the past year the greatest pleasure in photography for me is seeing the actual prints of some of my Japanese favourites. In the gap between what you are told to see and what you actually see is where your own thinking begins.

CODA:
Finally, a couple of little things: None of this excuses the rude street photographer who shoves their camera in someone’s face, takes a shot with flash, and walks away with their smirk on, or those who proudly present images on Facebook/Instagram of homeless people in distress as if they have taken a wildlife photo. Nope. Another note, I think there is a tangible difference in viewing Arbus’s images on a gallery wall, with people around you, and flipping through them in a book of photos. In the books, there are just too many things to look at and flipping the page is too easy, but that’s a topic for another time. The lesson is not complicated.

Image Credits and Fair Use
Images are reproduced here for purposes of criticism, commentary, and scholarship under principles of fair use (U.S.) and fair dealing (Canada, UK, and Europe). Copyright remains with the respective artists, photographers, estates, or rights holders. If you are a rights holder and would like an image credited differently or removed, please contact me and it will be addressed promptly.
_________________________________________

Thanks for reading. There were just too many mentions of “On Photography” the past week or so to ignore it. Your comments would be welcome. You can really help me out by subscribing. There are no fees. Just a request that you take a minute and share my writing, recommend it on Substack and elsewhere, and Re-stack it. Repost. Comment.

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At dawn, the greenhouse glowed softly in the wet field, its plastic walls catching the first light of the morning. One moment, things are dark, then suddenly, the sky begins to light up.

Recently, I returned from Japan, where I had been working on a photography project. While there, I saw an exhibition by the photographer Toshiya Murakoshi. I later wrote a longer essay about the show, trying to understand why his photographs stayed with me. What struck me most was their density. As a printmaker, I really appreciated the quality of the printing.

His prints are small prints, often dark, quiet pictures, but they carry a surprising weight. Nothing feels hurried. Shadow gathers. The surface of the photograph seems to hold time rather than simply describe a place.

After seeing the exhibition, I began carrying a small Fuji camera set to display the world in monochrome, almost like working with a digital negative. Even after returning home and editing the work from Japan, that way of seeing stayed with me.

For the past week, it has rained continually. I had been indoors working through those photographs. The first clear morning, I went out at dawn to photograph a group of greenhouses. The ground was still oversoaked from days of rain. Even with waterproof boots my feet quickly became wet. The boots were too short. I knew there would only be a short window before the sun rose higher and the place changed into something flatter and more ordinary. I set up my tripod and camera. When the wind stopped, I would take a focus stack, usually twelve images. If it didn’t stop, seemingly to slow me down, I took a single shot.

What interested me was the way the early light passed through the greenhouse walls. These buildings are meant to be transparent, but months of rain had changed them. Moss, condensation, and the slow trails of snails and slugs had thickened the plastic. Instead of looking through the walls, I found myself looking at them.

The interiors appeared only in fragments. A bucket. A coil of wire. The faint shadow of a tool. The rest dissolved into the dim surface of the wall. Although the photographs are in colour, they behave almost like monochromes. The palette narrows to muted greens, browns, and dull yellows. Colour does not open the space. It compresses it. The photos become dense.

Walking around the greenhouses, I found myself thinking of Junichiro Tanizaki and his small book In Praise of Shadows. Tanizaki writes about a beauty that emerges not from brightness but from shadow, from the way filtered light allows surfaces to deepen and objects to appear slowly.

These greenhouse walls had begun to behave almost like accidental shoji screens. Light passed through them, but imperfectly. The surfaces withheld as much as they revealed.

For a brief moment in late winter, the buildings exist in this state. In a few weeks, the walls will be cleaned and the beds prepared for spring planting. Much of the moss will disappear, and the plastic will become transparent again. But that morning, the surfaces were still heavy with the season that had just passed.

Standing there in wet soil, looking at those dim walls and the faint interior shapes behind them, I realized I was searching for something I had learned from Murakoshi’s photographs. Not spectacle. Density. The kind of density that comes when light, weather, and time are allowed to gather quietly on the surface of things. For that way of seeing, I remain grateful to Toshiya Murakoshi.

Thanks for reading my essays and for giving some of my photos your attention. This process takes a good deal of time, and I would really appreciate it if you could take just a moment to share the essay, re-stack it, or make a recommendation on your site. Also, it’s good to discuss photography, not just look, so please, add your voice to the conversation.

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The Vernacular Turn
Recently, I have been reading a book of short stories, The Maples, by John Updike. The stories are quiet and, on the surface, uneventful. Almost nothing dramatic happens. People talk in kitchens. They drive somewhere. Someone pauses in a doorway before answering a question. Updike notes where they stand, how they hold themselves, where their hands are, and where they turn their gaze. Everything is in a minor key, and instead of building up becomes a diminuendo. Yet the effect is overwhelming.

Updike builds these stories from details so small that they almost disappear while you are reading them. A remark that lands slightly wrong. A silence after a sentence. The way someone leaves a room rather than finishing a conversation. It causes you to pause, and I find myself rereading something I clearly understood but now find myself unsure about.

By the time I finished one of the stories, actually, the very first, Snowing in Greenwich Village, I found myself unsettled. Not because of anything dramatic in the plot, but because the details felt so exact. So true. So real. Walking home afterward, I realized that the uneasiness came from something entirely unexpected. Overlooked. Updike seemed to understand the small emotional structures of family life in ways that I was not sure I understood about my own parents and family. And it was through small, seemingly insignificant details that meaning grew, details I recognized in my own life.

There is a word for this object of attention: the vernacular. The vernacular is often misunderstood as a category of subject matter: ordinary objects, everyday scenes, the unnoticed corners of life. In reality, it is something else. The vernacular is not a type of thing. It is something that became, over time, and to notice we need a special way of paying attention. When observation becomes precise enough, the ordinary world begins to reveal its structure. It is the nature of something, not the thing itself.

It is a much better word than these alternatives people often reach for: unimportant, common, everyday, mundane, boring. Words that miss the point entirely. The vernacular does not mean trivial. It refers to the structures of life that develop naturally, through use and habit, the forms people create simply by living, by being human.

The vernacular is where truth quietly accumulates and sticks to things.

Once you begin to notice it, you start to see the same discovery appearing across many different fields in the mid-twentieth century. Writers, geographers, choreographers, architects, and yes, photographers, all began turning their attention toward the ordinary structures of daily life. The subjects of their focus were different, but the shift in attention was the same.

God Is In The Details
Architects have long understood this principle. The phrase “God is in the details” is often associated with the modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. But what he meant was not mystical at all. A building may begin with a bold concept or an elegant drawing, but the success of the building ultimately depends on very small decisions.

It depends on how two materials meet at a corner, on how steel resolves itself against glass, on how the base of a column finally touches the floor, and on how a window frame sits within the thickness of a wall. These moments are easy to overlook because they seem minor. Yet if those junctions are careless, the entire building begins to feel wrong. If they are resolved with precision, the structure suddenly feels inevitable.

The truth of the architecture lies not in the grand idea but in the details where the parts meet.

For photographers, this lesson should sound familiar. The success of an image rarely depends on the subject alone. It depends on the small relationships within the frame: how forms meet, how edges resolve, how objects occupy space. If those relationships are careless, the photograph falls apart. If they are precise, the image suddenly feels complete.

The Vernacular Landscape
The intellectual discovery of the vernacular probably begins not in photography or literature but in cultural geography. J. B. Jackson spent much of his career studying how ordinary people shape the landscapes they inhabit. Through his journal Landscape and books such as Discovering the Vernacular Landscape and A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time, Jackson helped establish the field of cultural landscape studies.

He was not interested in picturesque scenery or monumental architecture. Instead, he examined the structures of everyday life: houses, roads, farms, towns, and the ways these elements gradually organize themselves across the land. Jackson’s great insight was that the landscapes people inhabit are rarely designed in any formal sense. They emerge gradually through use, habit, and necessity. Understandably, he loved trailers and small buildings.

On the other hand, consider the grain elevators that stand across the agricultural plains of North America. Many photographers are drawn to these structures because they appear weathered and nostalgic. The faded advertisements and peeling paint make them look picturesque. But the significance of these towers lies elsewhere.

Photographers often treat them as isolated objects, yet the elevator is meaningful because of its relationships: to rail lines, to roads, to surrounding fields. It is part of an agricultural system. The building is not simply an object. It is part of a landscape economy.

Jackson’s great insight was that the vernacular landscape reveals itself through relationships like these. If you want to understand the significance of grain elevators, one book to read is by photographer Frank Gohlke, Thoughts on Landscape, Collected Writings and Interviews. There is more going on than a faded Coca-Cola advertisement.
Gohlke writes: “I discovered that my affinities were with the human artifacts around me, the new and the old… and the ways in which the vast spaces of the American midland were humanized by these artifacts.”

The Vernacular Body
The same discovery of the power of the vernacular appeared in the field of dance. During the 1960s, choreographers began dismantling the idea that dance required theatrical virtuosity. Instead, they began exploring everyday movement.

Earlier, Merce Cunningham had already begun loosening the narrative structure of dance, treating movement itself as a primary subject rather than a vehicle for storytelling. Then Yvonne Rainer stripped dance down to walking, bending, turning, and shifting weight - movements that resemble ordinary physical behaviour. Later, Twyla Tharp reorganized those gestures into complex choreographic structures. In works such as The Fugue and Push Comes to Shove, dancers walk, lean, pivot, shrug, and shift their weight in ways that appear almost casual. Yet the choreography is extremely precise. The discovery was simple: the body already possesses a vernacular vocabulary of movement.

The Vernacular Image
Photography underwent a similar transformation. The roots of this approach go back earlier to the work of Edward Steichen. Above, at the start of this essay, is Steichen’s photo Milk bottles on a fire escape, 1915. I think it’s one of his most important, and all it does is show two milk bottles sitting on a fire escape outside a New York apartment window. The image is almost austere: two bottles catching the light, the iron bars of the fire escape forming a quiet structure, the dense city beyond. Nothing dramatic is happening. Yet the photograph carries extraordinary clarity.

Steichen was not photographing milk bottles as objects. He was photographing the structure of everyday urban life. In this sense, he is doing visually what Updike does with language. Both of them isolate small fragments of ordinary life and reveal their structure. Suddenly, everything comes into clarity.

Later, with Steichen in mind, the photographers associated with the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, show that they turned their attention toward the built environments people actually inhabit. Photographers such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and Stephen Shore photographed subdivisions, parking lots, industrial parks, and roadside architecture. Their photographs are quiet but exacting. They examine the landscapes people actually live within. And focus on it’s vernacular components.

The Democratic Forest
William Eggleston later described his photographs as existing within a democratic forest, where every object in the frame has equal potential importance. The keyword here is potential. We have all seen photographs of “stuff I saw” or “daily walks” with unrelated snapshots, where nothing has truly been observed. They contain little more than moments of interest.

The democratic forest is often misunderstood. Eggleston did not mean that everything is interesting by default. He meant that any subject could become meaningful if the photographer truly saw it. The hierarchy of subject matter disappears. The hierarchy of attention remains. But taking photos of “stuff” requires real effort. Mistakenly, many photographers search for the unusual, rather than the vernacular.

The artists and thinkers who taught us to look at the ordinary, writers like Updike, geographers like Jackson, choreographers like Tharp, and photographers like Eggleston, did not aim to make the world more trivial. They demonstrated that the ordinary world is where meaning actually lives.

The Misunderstanding
Many photographers today encounter the idea of the vernacular without understanding the intellectual tradition behind it. They hear about the “democratic forest” and conclude that any object will suffice: coffee cups, doorways, breakfast tables.

But the artists who understand the vernacular are anything but casual observers. Updike studied the smallest emotional gestures within a marriage. Jackson studied how ordinary settlements shape the land. Tharp examined the mechanics of everyday movement. Evans and Eggleston examined the visual structure of ordinary objects with extraordinary care. The new emphasis on the vernacular was not an excuse for indifference. It was a demand for deeper attention.

Returning To Updike
When I finished that Maples story and drove home that evening, what stayed with me was not the plot. It was a short story, but I could still barely summarize it. As I’ve said, what stayed with me were the details: the pause before someone answers, the way someone stands in a doorway, the slight emotional distance between two people in the same room.

At the time, the feeling was simply uneasiness. Now I think the uneasiness came from something else. It’s so surprising: Updike was simply paying attention. He was looking at the small structures of ordinary life with a precision most of us rarely allow.

The same attention appears in Jackson’s landscapes, in Tharp’s choreography, in Steichen’s photograph of two milk bottles on a fire escape, and in Eggleston’s Democratic Forest of objects. The ordinary world is not trivial. It is where life actually happens. And the artists who turned toward the vernacular were not lowering the standards of art. They were raising the standard of observation.

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A Word About Writing
In high school, I took a theatre class. Twice a week, we were all sent downtown to find someone who interested us, and to come back to class the next day and “do” the person. Other students would guess the person’s age, sex, where they were going, whatever they could from our acting. We were trained to look for the details that made the person who they were.

These days I often go to McDonald’s and read from a book of short stories. But I pay attention to what is going on around me. I listen to bits and pieces of conversation that drift over my table. When I get home, I spend 5 minutes or so writing every detail down I can remember. Who was there, what they wore, what was on the TV, what music was playing, and as much about their interactions and the bits of conversation I overhear and fall on my table. I’ve been doing this for the past year. Sometimes I go for walks and come back and write down everything I saw. I’m trying to get in touch with the details, as my high school theatre teacher taught me.

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Next week, far more photos.

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A Closed and Locked Entrance, 3:30 am, Tokyo.

This week I have been confronted by several more of the usual statements about the importance of “intentionality” than I am capable of quietly ignoring. What I can tell you is that these statements, essays, and even some training ideas on the subject are usually made by people who like to compare digital photography with film photography, and often by street photographers. I am at a loss as to why these writers and photographers feel such an urge to discuss this topic, but most of the time it seems they see themselves as more intentional than others.

Often, their claims come with descriptions of how their film process resonates with intentionality. Usually, that means they don’t take images very fast. They take their time. They look before they press the exposure button. And film somehow makes them do this better. Oh, they also like to focus manually.

What nonsense.

Flowers Celebrating the Opening of a New Store, 4:00 AM, Tokyo

What these arguments usually confuse is method with intention. Slowness is not an intention. Film is not an intention. Pressing the shutter carefully is not the intention. At best, these are working methods. Habits. They say little about whether the work itself is thoughtful or purposeful.

Let’s start with the film versus digital argument. I personally think people take images with cameras that meet their needs. Ed Ruscha famously photographed all the buildings on the Sunset Strip. Ruscha made his Sunset Strip project using a modified and motorized camera mounted on a pickup truck. Every few feet, the camera clicked. He didn’t carefully compose each frame with intention. He didn’t stop and inspect what the camera saw. It was a motorized 35mm Nikon taking photographs automatically as the truck moved down the street.

In other words, he removed many of the elements that these modern “intentionalists” claim are essential: slowness, careful composition, even the act of pressing the shutter. Yet the project is one of the most intentional works in the history of photography. The intention existed at the level of the idea.

Ruscha created one of the most important documentary works the medium has produced. His intention existed at the level of the project, not in the ritual of each individual exposure.

The truck and the auto-camera.

And while these “intentionalists” (my new name for them) often dismiss work by photographers like Gregory Crewdson as not being “intentional” because he didn’t personally press the shutter release, Crewdson controls every element of his photographs. From the humidity in the air to the dust on a window and the dirt on the floor of a room. Every detail is carefully constructed. Storyboards, drawings, long written explanations, and conversations with the actors explaining what he wants. That seems rather intentional. Still, the “intentionalist” often dismisses his work for lack of intent. Crewdson, by the way, has left behind the 8x10 and moved into the digital world.

And guess who is taking images now with a Leica, and not an 8×10? Sally Mann. She uses the camera that gets done what she wants done. And, based on the project, Catherine Opie uses digital as well. Photographers choose tools for reasons that have nothing to do with the mythology surrounding them.

I myself use a Sony A7R5 because I want my images to be a certain size, which it can just barely produce. I often take stacked photos to achieve corner-to-corner sharpness. I have my reasons for that. I want the viewer of one of my images to go through the same process I went through when making it. Looking to the left, the right, seeing the subject, and because they are looking there….bokeh is automatic and in their eye, not the camera. And I want them to feel the discovery of the composition, if there is one. They see it. It’s not created for them. Often these are more like photographs of objects, and I want the viewer arriving at the image through the same kind of effort I took to see it. Hence, the size and corner-to-corner sharpness.

That seems fairly intentional to me.

Personally, I usually go back and photograph the same subject half a dozen times. When I arrive, I estimate where I think the camera should stand, Then I walk around, looking at the scene from several points of view. I often stand near the subject and look back at the camera. Sometimes I take images with my phone simply to think about the scene.

But because I use a digital camera, some of these people reject the work as easy, without intention, as if it were some sort of drive-by shooting.

Matisse

Too much control, however, isn’t what everyone wants. I assume you have seen photographs of Matisse standing at his canvas with a brush tied to a stick or pole. He intentionally created distance between himself and the surface of the painting. Jackson Pollock dripped paint from brushes and sticks. Brice Marden was known for using long sticks, sometimes bamboo, with a brush attached to the end so he could create sweeping lines across large canvases.

In each case, the artist intentionally created conditions where the hand could not completely control the result. The artist struggles to remain faithful to his or her intention, and the best part, what makes the work live, is where that struggle is best seen.

For these painters, there was intentionality, but not too much control.

Brice Marden
These artists had ideas and concepts. They began with intention, but the execution of the work involved responding to what happened along the way. Most really good artists start with an idea and then enter into a dialogue with it. They respond to what happens as they try to execute the idea and alter the plan as they go. Often, they end up somewhere they didn’t expect.

Alec Soth’s 2024 book Advice for Young Artists documents his visits to twenty-five American undergraduate art programs between 2022 and 2024. The book contains portraits, classroom scenes, and found objects. It explores themes of aging, mentorship, and the creative process. It doesn’t actually offer advice in the conventional sense. The project evolved into something quite different from what its title might suggest.

Plans change.

When the subject of intentionality comes up, I often think of Teju Cole. If I am reading him correctly, he equates intentionality with attention. Attention is not about slowness or film or technical ritual. It is about the ethical act of noticing. In that sense, intentionality becomes almost ethical. It means giving the work and perhaps the subject, the respect of real attention.

Cole often writes about attention as a kind of responsibility, not wasting other people’s time, and not wasting your own. Intentionality in this sense has less to do with rigid planning and more to do with the quality of attention you bring to the work.

Notice. There is what I notice, and what I don’t.

John Szarkowski once wrote that the photographer’s art lies in “the decision to include this and exclude that.” That sounds right to me.

A final thought.

In that sense, intentionality becomes almost ethical. It means giving the work — and perhaps the subject- the respect of real attention. Marcel Duchamp famously said that anything can become art if an artist says it is. His “Fountain” of 1917, an ordinary urinal placed in an art exhibition, became one of the most influential works in modern art. Duchamp’s ready-mades became art because of the artist’s act of selection and designation. The object itself did not change. What changed was the intention behind presenting it as art.

The intention was conceptual.

If you are trying to make art, not snapshots, or lifestyle images, or product photography, you need to understand the history of art. In art, there is no detour around Duchamp.

Ironically, Duchamp might agree with the people who are currently agitating the hell out of me when they insist that art requires intentionality.

But he would mean something very different by it.

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For the past six weeks, I photographed at night in Japan. Urban streets, hard light, and strange colour. During the day, with another camera, I took black and white images, trying to see if there was another way of taking images that was very different from what I do now. When I came home and began editing, I could feel how much it had tightened my attention.

So this morning I took a break, which meant I picked up a camera and drove to a forest near my house.

The forest is in that late winter state where everything is ready, but nothing has happened yet. The stems are red, darker than they first appear. The buds are full, but closed. Moss is bright against wet bark. The ground is soft and uneven. The news says it will snow again tomorrow. You can feel that suspension in the air. Everything is poised.

The first thing I notice is that there is no view. No clearing. No horizon. In these eight photographs, the depth collapses quickly. Thin stems multiply until they form a woven surface. Fallen logs cut across the ground at angles that interrupt movement. Birch trunks stand upright but do not open the space. They make the density more obvious. These are not curtains of vegetation. They are walls.

There is one small side path in this woodland that I used to take regularly, but I stopped using it after I nearly stepped on an underground nest of wasps. I did not see it at first. I disturbed it. The sound changed. I stepped back. Since then, I have avoided that entrance. As I walked past it today, I thought, the wasps are just waking. They will be in a bad mood. Move on.

There is one path. I stay on it. I am not wandering. I am assessing. I am aware that the ground itself may not be neutral. It is a bog, and a few steps off the path have consequences. When I pick up the camera and frame the thicket, I am not approaching something decorative. I am approaching something that has its own internal life and its own defences. I photograph from the edge because sometimes that is the responsible place to stand. I carry a set of clippers, because on occasion the thorn branches grab me. Just pulling away can ruin your clothing.

Someone once described the painter Joan Mitchell’s work, which this place reminds me of, as calm but aimless, and as I remember it she rejected that description. She spoke about struggle, about fighting for order, about holding complexity without crushing it. Those may not be her exact words, but that is how I remember them. That memory feels true to her paintings. What I remember clearly is that for there to be art, there has to be struggle. A problem. A solution.

That is what I am trying to do here. These woods are not calm. They may appear still, but when I stand in front of that wall of stems, I feel tension. The struggle is compositional. I move slightly left or right. I adjust the height of my tripod, still taking eight to ten shots of each subject to stack. I include one trunk and exclude another. I wait until the density reaches a point where it almost coheres, where the chaos gathers into balance without becoming neat. I am not simplifying the woods. I am trying to hold their complexity long enough for structure to emerge. It happens right at the edge of whether it works or it does not.

Historically, landscape painting was not always the central subject of art. In European painting, it was often the background, a setting for religious scenes, mythological narratives, and portraits of power. The land framed the action. It was not the action. That changed in America. There was no cathedral past to paint, no ancient empire to reconstruct. The land itself became urgent because the land was a fact. Understanding it became part of understanding who Americans believed themselves to be.

This is where Thomas Cole, the American landscape painter associated with what we now call the Hudson River School, becomes important. In his Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve are driven into a landscape that does not accommodate them. The vegetation is thick. The light is harsh. The terrain resists. The land carries the drama. In other works by Cole, a pilgrim reaches the end of his journey only after passing through terrain that has cost him almost everything. These are not comfortable landscapes. They are moral terrains.

Barbara Novak, the art historian who wrote American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, approached this work differently from earlier formalist historians. She did not treat these paintings as isolated aesthetic objects. She argued that they emerged from a Protestant intellectual culture in which nature was understood almost as a second scripture, something to be read, interpreted, and morally engaged. Landscape painting in America, for Novak, was inseparable from theology, philosophy, expansion, and the question of national identity. The sublime, in that context, did not mean pretty. It meant standing before something larger than you, something that could overwhelm you. Sometimes there are hornets where you least expect them.

Standing at the edge of these brambles, I feel closer to that older seriousness than to any modern idea of scenic calm. I do not see serenity here. I see density and uncertainty. The absence of horizon unsettles me. The blocked depth creeps me out. It reminds me of the fairy tales I read as a child, where someone enters the forest, and things are about to go badly. The bramble closes. The path disappears. The prince falls into the thorns and cannot see. Those stories pause at that moment, before escape, or rescue, and even before resolution. The outcome is unclear. The density is real.

It feels contemporary. The world itself feels dense and tangled right now, without a visible horizon and without an obvious way in or out. But I am not photographing despair. In those fairy tales, the prince does get out. Not because the forest becomes less dense, but because he endures it. He survives because he pays attention.

When I frame these woods, I am not claiming there is no way forward. I am holding the density long enough to find balance inside it. A trunk steadies the frame. A diagonal locks the chaos into tension. A patch of moss absorbs the red. These are small compositional decisions, but they are the difference between collapse and structure. I photograph places I do not enter. I stand at the wall and compose it until it holds.

After weeks of solving exposure problems in Japan, it felt good to stand somewhere that did not need to be solved in that way. The forest does not perform. It does not offer spectacle. It does not give me a ready-made view. It exists in layers: red stem, wet bark, moss, fallen trunk, closed bud, and most of it remains out of reach. Accepting that fact and working within it connects this work quietly to the older American landscape painting tradition. Not the panoramic grandeur and not pastoral comfort, but seriousness. The knowledge that the landscape is not a backdrop. It sets terms. Here, the term is simple. I can look. I do not get to pass through.

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The images are taken on my SonyA7R5, on a tripod. They are focus-stacked images, from 5-15 images, stacked and made into a single TIFF. They are usually printed 45x30. For today’s essays, these images are not edited, pretty much straight out of the camera. They would be a bit darker in print. I took just 12 images today.

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Dan, my friend, is with me, plus seven or eight kids in a Suburban, coming back from, well, I honestly don’t remember. One of them starts it. Stomp. Stomp. Clap. Then another. Then all of them, feet on the floorboards, hands on the seat backs, the whole car vibrating down a forest road, a shortcut to the highway. The song is not a song I like. It is four chords and a chant, that’s it. By the time we hit the highway, I’m doing it too, one hand on the wheel, one hand slapping the door panel. The song is already inside your head before you decide whether you want it there or not.

I want to make photographs that do that.

I came to understand what I meant by that in a roundabout way, which is often the best way I understand complicated things. I understood it through reading Dave Hickey and through a question he kept discussing about popular music. Then I brought the thought back to photography. When I first read Hickey’s writing about “democratic songs,” I misunderstood him in the most predictable way. I heard the word democratic and pictured something loud, major-key, built for a crowd, maybe even a little simple-minded. I pictured the musical equivalent of a slogan. It took me a while to realize he was talking about something quieter and harder to do. He was talking about how a work addresses its audience, and whether it assumes the audience is competent, whether it leaves room for them, and whether it treats them as equal partners in meaning rather than targets of instruction. Yes, he was clearly talking about political ideas. He could become very political in a quiet way.

This scene is familiar now because it gets told and retold, but it still feels like a small piece of usable evidence. Queen, the band, are playing big rooms, and something keeps happening that irritates them. The audience sings. Not politely, not at the right moments, but insistently, through everything, as if they had decided the songs belonged to them. Brian May described coming off stage after one show and looking at the others “in amazement” because the singing was so extreme, and then saying to Freddie Mercury that maybe, instead of fighting it, which they were, they should “be harnessing this kind of energy.” You may think this song is about being loud and pushy, but May had decided what it needed was some less loud (not exactly quiet) control and a good helping of give and take with the audience. Shared control.

Once you notice what May does next, you can’t unsee it. He asks a very practical question: what can you ask an audience to do if that audience is crammed together? He answers it with almost comic restraint. There’s not much they can do except stamp their feet and clap their hands, and if they can chant, what would they chant? He hears it in his head: “We will, we will rock you.” Then he remakes the song so the audience can lead it. No drums on the track, just the stamping and clapping the band recorded, multi-tracked until it sounds like you are in the middle of a thousand people.

This is the part that matters to me, and it is the part that tends to get missed. The democratic move here is not that the song is big. The democratic move is that it is permeable. The band leaves space, and the crowd fills it. The song is not a display of mastery; it is a structure the audience can occupy. Participation is not a side effect; it is the design. Imagine doing this with a photo. What might we call such a photo? Democratic.

Hickey’s writing has always been a defence of that way in, and he defends it with a kind of combative warmth. In one place, he describes his own project as: “I write love songs for people who live in a democracy.” That line refuses the pious posture that criticism sometimes adopts. It also reframes love songs as a civic act. Love songs are not propaganda. They are not a programme. They are not “correct.” They are a form of address that assumes the listener is free to respond. I hope you’re still with me here on how this applies to photography.

Hickey’s deeper point, the one that keeps resurfacing in different guises, is that pleasure is not trivial. Pleasure is evidence of equality. Pleasure is where people meet without credentials. It is where the hierarchies soften for a moment. He is not naive about markets or power; he simply refuses the idea that seriousness requires a scowl. He refuses the idea that difficulty is the same thing as value. He refuses the idea that the audience or viewer is the enemy.

This is also why he talks about beauty in such a blunt, unfashionable way. In the early 1990s, when he was asked what the issue of the decade would be, he answered: beauty. Then he defined it in plain terms: beauty is the “agency that causes visual pleasure in the beholder.” There is something almost stubborn about that definition. It is not mystical. It is not moralizing. It is functional in its simplicity. It describes an effect in a viewer, and it insists that the effect matters.

If you accept that, then “liking” a work can’t mean merely having a positive experience, as if art were a pleasant meal. Liking, in Hickey’s sense, is closer to being engaged, to being moved, to being altered, to recognizing something that you did not have language for until the work gave it form. That engagement can be joyous, but it can also be grief, transience, emptiness, or doubt. Sometimes the feelings that hurt are also the feelings that steady us. Sometimes they even feel good, not in the way sugar feels good, but in the way recognition feels good. You feel less alone. You feel, for a moment, that your private experience has a shape that can be shared.

Now translate that back to photography, where everything is harder because the medium is silent and solitary. A photograph cannot literally cue a stadium to clap. It cannot hand you a beat. It cannot pace you through time. What it can do is something closely related. It can make room.

A democratic photograph, in the sense I’m after here, is not necessarily a photograph of democratic subject matter. It isn’t a photograph of crowds voting, or protests, or ordinary people smiling. It is not “for the people” in the patronizing way that phrase can sometimes sound. It is democratic because it does not close the viewer out. It does not require a credential to enter. It does not demand that you agree with it in order to be allowed to feel it. It assumes you are capable of making meaning.

This is why I keep returning to William Eggleston. His democratic move is not his subject matter alone, though subject matter matters. It is also his refusal to rank the world. A red ceiling in a rented room. Wires. A light bulb. A tricycle. A grocery store. A street corner. The photographs do not explain themselves. They do not apologize for their attention. They do not ask permission from the hierarchy of “important subjects.” They simply insist that this is worth looking at, and then they leave you alone with it. That’s the power of the vernacular.

The leaving-you-alone part is the democracy. The picture isn’t a lecture. It doesn’t tell you what emotion to have. It gives you a structure, and you complete it.

Robert Adams does something similar, though the register is different. His pictures are often small, restrained, and almost always without obvious drama. His photographs of tract houses and clear-cut forests are not cheerful, and they are not neutral in the sense of being indifferent. They are full of disappointment, regret, and, oddly, a kind of tenderness that refuses to become sentimentality. He does not need to exaggerate the damage for you to feel the damage. He does not need to instruct you to care. He trusts that you can see. That trust is the democratic gesture.

This is also where contemporary art, and contemporary photography in particular, can go wrong in predictable ways. Much contemporary work is closed. It is closed because it tells you what to think. It is closed because it uses virtuosity as a wall. It is closed because it assumes the viewer must be corrected. It can even be closed while being politically admirable, because admirable politics do not automatically produce an open aesthetic experience. The work may be right, but it may not be generous. It may not leave room for you to participate as a free person.

Hickey has a phrase that is useful as a diagnostic tool: “Art that is for the people must be accepting and forgiving.” That is the opposite of school-marm art. It is also not the same thing as being cozy. Accepting and forgiving does not mean flattering the audience. It means not humiliating them. It means not making the viewer feel that the right response is a test of their moral worth, their education, or their social position.

That is the part that matters to me in photography right now, because I keep making pictures that are not about happiness. I have been drawn, especially in Japan, to images of emptiness and loss. Empty parking lots at night. Stairwells with fluorescent light. Stones in Buddhist cemeteries. Tree hollows in parks. Places that feel like they are holding an absence.

Not as a metaphor. As a fact.

I am not looking for drama. I am looking for a particular kind of quiet weight.

If I say I want someone to “like” these photographs, I do not mean I want them to feel pleased. I mean, I want them to feel contact. I want the photograph to activate something in them that they recognize as real, even if what they recognize is transience, emptiness, or grief. These are not “negative feelings” in the simple sense. They can make us feel good in a deeper way than recognition does. A photograph can steady you by giving form to what you already carry.

But there is a risk here, and it is a practical risk. Quiet work can become private work. Dense work can become sealed work. A photograph can become a closed system, full of personal symbolism, full of tonal heaviness, full of a kind of self-protective opacity. The viewer arrives and has nowhere to stand. When that happens, the photograph isn’t democratic. It’s a wall.

This is why popular music is such a useful corrective for me. Popular music is merciless about entry. If there is no way in, people leave. If there is no place for the listener, the song is only a performance. It might still be impressive, but it won’t be shared territory.

Photography has its own ways of leaving space, and they are not mysterious. Legibility. Restraint. A refusal to over-determine meaning through theatrical lighting, exaggerated contrast, or symbolic props that announce what the photograph is “about.” And, oddly, clarity—not simplification, but the kind of clarity that tells a viewer: you can stand here, you can look from here, there is a place for you in this frame.

This becomes very concrete when I look at my own work. In my monochrome forest photographs, the frame can fill with brambles, fallen branches, and interwoven trunks. The density can be the point; the density can also become a trap. If there is no path for the eye, if there is no tonal breathing room, if every surface carries equal visual pressure, then the photograph becomes private. The viewer can admire the texture, but they cannot enter. There is no stomp-stomp-clap. There is no beat. There is no place to stand.

The fix is not to make the work louder. Especially by making the work more technically perfect. (The original sin of art is perfection.) The fix is to make the work more open. Sometimes that is as simple as allowing a small clearing, a slight depth cue, a shape that anchors the eye. Sometimes it is a matter of letting the highlights exist, not because you want a “pretty” print, but because the print needs air. Sometimes it is choosing a vantage point that gives the viewer a foothold, the way a path in the woods gives you a foothold, even if the woods are thick and the day is grey.

The enemy of participation is not sadness. The enemy is coercion. (Perfection.) Popular music shows you the difference immediately. A song can invite participation and still be sad. A song can invite participation and still be dark. The participation collapses only when the song becomes manipulative, when it forces a crescendo, when it tells you what you must feel, when it turns emotion into a cue you are required to obey. Photography has the same problem. Overwrought drama, sentimental editing, images that turn suffering into a stage. These are closed experiences because they eliminate the viewer’s freedom. They do not leave room for the viewer to complete the work.

Hickey’s bluntness about taste is useful here. “Bad taste is real taste,” he writes, “and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.” I don’t take that as an excuse to celebrate junk. I take it as an ethical warning. Taste can be used as a gate. Taste can become a way of saying you don’t belong. Democratic art does not do that.

So the lesson of popular music for photography is not “be popular.” It is “be open.” Be hospitable. Leave room. Trust the viewer. Don’t confuse difficulty with value.

The best part is that this can be done quietly. It can be done in a small print. It can be done in a photograph of a cemetery stone. It can be done in a photograph where almost nothing happens, as long as the photograph remains permeable.

A democratic photograph is not a photograph that gives the viewer a happy experience. It is a photograph that gives the viewer a real experience they are allowed to have.

That experience might be loss. It might be transience. It might be emptiness. The photograph does not need to announce those themes. It needs to create the conditions for them to arise in the viewer without coercion.

This is what I mean when I say I want my work to be shared ground rather than private territory. Shared ground does not mean mass appeal. It means the viewer can enter without humiliation. It means the photograph does not require a guide. It means someone who has never heard the phrase mono no aware can still stand in front of an image of a dark stairwell in Tokyo and feel what the stairwell feels like, not as an exotic symbol, but as a place.

In the end, the question I keep asking myself is embarrassingly practical. Where does the viewer stand in this photograph? Not metaphorically, not theoretically, but visually. Is there a foothold? Is there air? Is there a beat?

Queen found their beat by stripping the song down to what an audience could do together. May said he wanted “a song which would be led by the audience,” and he built the recording so it sounded like you were in the middle of a thousand people. That is not a lesson about spectacle. It is a lesson about design. It is a lesson about giving other people a role.

Photography can do the same thing, quietly, without ever asking anyone to clap. It can offer a structure large enough for another person to enter with their own history. It can hold sorrow without dramatizing it. It can make room for recognition. It can treat the viewer as competent. It can be accepting and forgiving without being sentimental.

That, for me, is the usable definition of democratic in art. It has nothing to do with shouting. It has everything to do with openness.

Eight kids in a Suburban, and the whole car is a drum. I didn’t choose the song. The song chose me. That’s the thing about permeable work. It gets in before you can decide whether to let it. Then the kids start singing “We Are the Champions.”

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If this is your first time reading, don’t worry, my essays are usually shorter. Usually. And usually have more photos. I’d appreciate your help right now. You can help me by restacking the essay, recommending it in your Substack feed, and of course, subscribing and taking part in the conversation. Dave Hickey, if you don’t know him, was a critic and songwriter who had a way with words that puts most of us to shame. Take a book of his essays out of the library! He will make you feel good about art and life in general.

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On April 14, 2018, shortly after dawn, David Buckel walked into Prospect Park in Brooklyn and set himself on fire. He was sixty years old. He graduated from Cornell Law School in 1987 and worked for years as a civil rights attorney, known for advancing LGBTQ rights, including litigation connected to the murder of Brandon Teena. In later years, he left the practice of law and worked in Red Hook, Brooklyn, leading a community composting program. He was married to a man, and together with a married lesbian couple, they were co-parenting a daughter who was preparing for college.

Before his death, he emailed a statement to several media outlets in which he wrote that he was destroying himself by fire as a protest against fossil fuels, that most humans now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and that his act was an early death by fossil fuel. His body was found near the lake in the park where, on another day, families might picnic, and couples circle the lake in paddleboats. The story appeared in newspapers for several days and then receded.

Joel Sternfeld was in Prospect Park that morning with his son, a fact he has stated publicly. There is no public record that he witnessed the ignition itself. He returned the next day and began photographing the site, continuing over time. The work became the book Our Loss, published in 2019, following earlier projects in which Sternfeld addressed climate change, including Oxbow Archive and When It Changed.

The book contains photographs of the ground where the act occurred. The images are steady and frontal, the colour clear and descriptive. In some photographs, the grass appears darker and pressed down, the soil slightly disturbed. In others, the difference is faint. Later, snow covers the area, and the ground appears uniform again. With time, the grass grows back. The site is photographed across seasons, leaves falling, light shifting, the park resuming its ordinary use.

Buckel’s words appear in the book alongside these images. The act took place in a public park. The ground shows a disturbance and, over time, shows less of one.

There is precedent for this form of protest. On June 11, 1963, the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in Saigon in protest of religious persecution, and a photograph of the act circulated internationally. During the Vietnam War, Americans, including Norman Morrison and Alice Herz set themselves on fire in protest of the war, entering public memory as images. Buckel’s act occurred in 2018 in a different media environment. Unlike then, there was no single defining photograph that circulated in the same way, and the questions his act raised remain unresolved. Court challenges have narrowed federal authority over emissions, and atmospheric carbon levels continue to rise. I understand the frustration. After law school, I practiced mediation until one day I just stopped, frustrated that I had studied to bring about justice, not get everyone to shake hands.

I was in Tokyo when I found Sternfeld’s book, at one of the bookstores I visit on each trip to Japan. In Japan, the art of bookmaking is taken seriously, and I spent time with the photobooks, of which there are many. The range of formats and approaches was always surprising before moving on to the Western books, most of which were American. I pulled Our Loss from the shelf because the colours on the cover caught me. I opened it and knew immediately where I was: Prospect Park, where I had walked my dogs for ten years, near where I had stood with a small Brooklyn crowd on New Year’s Eve. I felt at home, and I wondered why I had never noticed the colours of that ground quite like this before. I went through the photographs first and only afterward read the text.

Only after reading the text did I understand what I had been looking at. The details accumulated: lawyer, composting, email before dawn, son in the park that morning, and I felt pressure behind my eyes and went to the men’s room to wash my face. It was the same park where I had once sat on a bench after the death of my partner, David, many years ago. We had both visited that place in moments of despair.

The logic of the act is clear. If fossil fuels are destroying planetary systems, then using fossil fuels to harm oneself makes that harm visible. The consequences are less clear. Reports at the time described his husband and friends as shocked. His widower later urged others not to follow his example, saying that sustained activism while alive has more impact. The daughter’s life remains private.

When I was a child, I saw footage on television of Buddhist monks during the Vietnam War setting themselves on fire, and I remember finding it difficult to look. After earning a degree in neuroscience, I went to law school, studied international law and environmental law, before focusing on jurisprudence, on how laws are made and justified. David Buckeland I left the law out of frustration. To different ends.

Buckel left law and worked in composting. Sternfeld photographed the regeneration of the ground where Buckel set himself on fire. I stood in a bookstore in Tokyo holding those photographs and felt the connections as facts rather than metaphors. I suppose a metaphor would not have scared me as much.

The photographs do not show flame. They show ground altered and then less altered, a place across seasons, the title reading Our Loss, and it feels wrong to object and wrong not to, while the park remains, the grass grows, and the questions do not disappear.

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One frustration I experience in photography is those who say they need to know nothing about a work, and proudly declare they go to a gallery or museum and don’t need to read the name of the work, the artist’s name or the artist’s statement. Today was a clear example of that folly. If you can, at least see if your library has this book. Take it out, thumb through the pages and take a moment to read.

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