About

I mostly make images to say that life—in the natural, social, and built worlds—is astonishing. It’s also important to convey that, at the same time, modern human society is organized in a way that drives grave harm to life.

I seek to make photographs, a thing whose meaning has changed relatively recently.

Photography was an essentially objective form for offering subjective perspectives of the world. This was true despite the fact that even traditional photography inherently transforms in ways that our eyes do not (e.g., blurring motion, reducing color to monochrome, unnatural contrast). These distortions are limited and generally understood. A photograph of, say, a full moon breaking through a circular opening in an otherwise frame-wide expanse of billowy cloud, reliably conveyed—at a minimum—an extraordinary occurrence presented through craft.

Capitalism, among its other impacts (including making photography available to the masses in the first place), has in the end largely destroyed the photograph.

In its relentlessness it has broadly deskilled the craft, making the photograph something harder to appreciate. Autofocus, camera modes, in-camera processing, post-production effects, play-with-me sliders, presets, and other widgets to various degrees do it for us, at its worst simply offering variations of machine work from which to select and call our own. That remarkable moon-break no longer suggests an understanding of light and exposure, dedication to capturing the natural world, nor even a photographer having to look up.

By enabling photographic digital art (which includes clearly unreal images, but apparently real ones too), capitalism has also transformed the photograph from something essentially authentic (or obviously not so) to something overall disinterested in authenticity. The moon-break image, however artfully presented, has been rendered possibly imaginary, a drawing, a moon on a page with clouds around it.

By enabling digital manipulation—and also fomenting both commercial and personal frenzy for the wow shot—capitalism has created a photography that mystifies and downgrades the actual world. Better than real, seemingly real photographic digital art renders the actual inferior compared to our increasingly artificial expectations of what compelling things look like. A grand stand of sequoias, a building with intriguing form, an attractive person—all that which is not superlative is increasingly demoted to the realm of four or less out of five stars.

To make photographs, I openly neglect techniques that make images less authentic.