Episodios
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It took a bit to fire up, but once it did, the familiar rumble of my Dad’s 1974 Ford F100 took me right back to my childhood summers. As Art slowly backed the truck off of the trailer, Adrianne commented, “It’s smaller than I thought it would be, given how large it looms in your history.” Indeed, I thought. One of my earliest memories of this truck is of waking up on the bench seat at Buckskin State Park on the Arizona side of the Colorado river. It was cold that morning — though it was light, the sun hadn’t yet crested the red rock hills that bordered the campground to the East. Dad and my stepmother Linda were both awake after having spent the night in sleeping bags in the bed of the truck. Dad had made a small fire that was crackling and popping and I remember the faint smell of coffee on the chilly morning air.
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I’ve shared this story before, and regardless of whether it’s true or just the stuff of photographic legend, it’s so good that I think it bears repeating every so often. The story goes that a photographer was presenting his portfolio to the great Jay Maisel. He asked Jay how he could take more interesting pictures, to which Jay immediately replied, “become a more interesting person.” It may sound trite, but I think it’s often easy for makers to become myopic in terms of the types of things that inspire them. Painters are often looking at other painters, photographers look at other photographers, musicians are often listening to other musicians, and so on. If you’re always looking (or listening) to what’s familiar, the odds of you arriving at something that’s unfamiliar (even if it’s only unfamiliar to you), are pretty slim, which is why it can be helpful to look outside of your comfort zone for inspiration. I’m interested in almost everything so as you might imagine, my feeds are pretty eclectic. While I’ve gotten away from posts like this over the years, I think I’d like to jump back in and offer up an occasional look at some of the things that have caught my attention, and might catch yours.
LINKS
Long Hot Summers / The Story Of The Style Council
Mubi interview with Lee Pace
The incredible tiny home of Masato IgarashiYou can find all of the links I mention in this Iteration on my Substack.
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¿Faltan episodios?
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For a long time now — years, in fact — I’ve leaned toward the belief that I deserve to be paid for the creative work I do. And to be clear, I don’t think that’s unreasonable, at least not from a certain point of view. After all, in a capitalist system that’s sort of how it works, right? You do a job, you earn money, you buy things. On the other side, goods and services cost money and we generally accept that premise. Cars, houses, a gallon of milk, a bucket of chicken — whatever it is, we accept that acquiring those things is transactional. I exchange the money I earn for the thing that you produce. The same goes for services like electricity, gas, your phone bill, or internet access. That’s just how the system works. But there are gray areas. Some types of goods and services seem to be more or less exempt from that agreement — namely creative ones. Music, movies, and software often fall into that bucket. And, to make it more personal, art.
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Yesterday, I had a heart-wrenching experience. I was out for a morning walk with Adrianne and Cooper when I spotted a bird flailing in the grass under a tree. As I got closer, it struggled to escape, its life force fading away. When it finally stopped moving, I knelt down and tried to comfort it with a damp leaf (Adrianne advised against touching it directly due to the bird flu). Watching it die right before my eyes was incredibly painful. I still don’t know what happened, but it clearly had endured some serious trauma. Tears welled up in my eyes as I confessed to Adrianne, “I hate this.” She replied, “I know, but in its final moments, you showed it kindness and love.”
A NOTE: I know this isn’t the usual fare for Iterations, but I think quiet moments like this can be just as important as the big existential ones. I have dozens of these types of vignettes — sometimes it’s just me taking notes on my life and the observations and feelings are just for me, but other times, like this one, I think they are worth sharing.
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Last week, I got a text message from my friend Michelle, who works at the National Gallery of Art. “Lunch tomorrow or Thursday?” followed by “Come see the movie in Little Beasts. It starts at the top of every hour. I would love to discuss it with you.” Not only was Michelle one of the first people I met when I first visited DC in 2014, since then, she’s become a close friend and the National Gallery has come to be my happy place in DC. In fact, some of the best art and photography shows I’ve ever seen, including Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings (Catalog), Gordon Parks: The New Tide, 1940-1950 (Catalog), Outliers and American Vanguard Art (Catalog), The 70s Lens, and Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper (Catalog), to name just a few, have all been at the National Gallery. I’ve also learned about artists I’d never heard of before, like Rachel Whiteread, Philip Guston, James Castle, and Elizabeth Catlett, among others. And in nearly every case, when I’ve had the chance to walk through a show with Michelle, through her knowledge and experience of art and materials, I’ve come away with a deeper understanding and a greater appreciation of the nuances of both art and artists.
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Whether it’s a sheet of old plywood resting on a couple of sawhorses or a fastidiously crafted hardwood masterpiece, the workbench has long been the centerpiece of studios, workshops, garages, and maker spaces of all kinds.
Of the many standout features of our house, I think I was most excited about the multiple basement spaces that I would be able to use as studios for the different things I do. The previous owners were makers — she was a painter and he was a woodworker whose wood shop occupied one of the basement spaces. When we bought our house in 2016, I remember telling Adrianne that I wanted to make one of the spaces my paint studio and that I would make some benches “on day one.” Well, day one didn’t happen, nor did week one, month one, or year one. In fact, it’s taken me nearly nine years to finally build benches for my studio. So what happened?
See the photos I reference in this episode on Substack: The Ballad of the Benches
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The other day, I was going through my archive of work ahead of a website redesign, and I found a blog post that I wrote in 2014 that’s sort of an homage to my all-time favorite camera and how after finally acquiring one, I couldn’t bring myself to actually use it. Ten years later, I think the post is still relevant to how some photographers and artists have a tendency to fetishize the tools they use. I know that was me once. For what it’s worth, I think photography is unique in that, because it’s art and science, the potential proficiency of the craft often gets conflated with having the “right” gear. The irony is that it really is the purposeful practice of using our gear, whatever it is, that allows us to get better — to see better. I bought my first SLR in 1982 and I have enjoyed taking pictures ever since. Over the past 40+ years, I’ve used a bunch of different cameras and I’ve enjoyed almost all of them for different reasons. But the one thing that they have in common is the ability to look at the world through a viewfinder — and for me, that’s where the marrow is. As convenient as it is to have an iPhone camera in my pocket that captures fantastic pictures, I love the restriction of a viewfinder and I always have. It lessens the visual noise of the world (to a greater or lesser degree depending on what lens I’m using, of course) and it allows me to practice seeing. In fact, it demands it, doesn’t it? After all, you’re only given a tiny swatch of the world, surrounded by black. What you put in that swatch is up to you, whether you’re observing a scene or creating one from scratch. Photography allows us to impose a point of view on the world around us, or to build one from our imaginations that shows a world we want to see.
See the photos I reference in this episode on Substack: It's Still Just a Tool
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I love making things, whether that means making a conversation with someone or making a piece of art or writing, and getting to do that fairly unfettered is a massive privilege and it’s not wasted on me. That said, it’s okay to be disappointed in what you make — and maybe not disappointed with the end product itself, but in the reception or how it gets received. It’s okay to be disappointed that other people don’t love it as much as you do — because you poured yourself into it, so of course you love it. But then when you release it into the world and the world just shrugs, it’s okay to be disappointed with that.
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NOTE: To see the photos that I reference in this episode, see the post on my Substack.
On one of our recent morning walk and talks, a group of photographers and I were talking about how much worse Instagram has gotten over the past few years in terms of exposure and engagement. We all agreed that it seems like most photographers we’ve spoken to about it have very similar feedback. Subscribers, reach, and engagement are all a fraction of what they used to be. And the platform that was once all about sharing images no longer seems to care about images at all — instead they prioritize short-form video in a desperate attempt to compete with TikTok and YouTube. But in the process, I think the platform has lost its way and has just become a vapid mechanism to spoon-feed ads to users. To be clear, there are still a bunch of terrific artists and photographers on Instagram — which is the main reason I haven’t left — but that’s not what gets served up to me by the algorithm. Even the people I follow are in my feed less and less, which makes very little sense to me. I’ve told you “this is the work I’m interested in” and yet that’s not what you give me. So the whole experience just keeps getting more and more disappointing — and we haven’t even talked about the “Tech Bro” leadership, which is a whole other thing.
One of the photographers in the conversation asked whether I’d tried Flickr as an alternative. I told him that I used to be pretty active on Flickr — especially when I was still teaching Photoshop — but honestly, I don’t think I’ve logged in since 2017 or 2018 when SmugMug bought the platform. I said that I’d really been enjoying the upswing in artists and photographers on Substack so I hadn’t really considered other alternatives, especially one that in my mind had been all but dead for years. Still, he encouraged me to give it a look and later that afternoon, I was kind of amazed to see that my old login credentials still worked. The homepage feed looks different than I remember it, which is probably a good thing. What surprised me the most is that when I clicked on “Photostream” in the “You” dropdown, I still had more than 300 photos that I was sure I had deleted, but I’m so glad that I didn’t. It was amazing to see some of the things that I was focusing on from 2007-2011. Most of the photos are of architectural details, which I still love to photograph, but many of my photos from that time are street portraits and I remember the stories around every one of them.
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Reinvention is tough. Disrupting old patterns of beliefs or behaviors is tough. Even when we finally decide to disrupt the flow of familiarity, the fear of the unknown that awaits us can be paralyzing. I know that it has been for me. But one of the things that my therapist routinely encourages me to do is to sit with discomfort — to force myself to pause and breathe and stave off the instinct to move into “fight or flight” mode. In sitting with the discomfort or the pain or fear, we reduce its power and we might be more able to move through it to whatever is waiting on the other side. For me, I think that’s the possibility of making more work that I find interesting, finding an audience that will value it, and becoming more connected with a broader community of artists and makers.
LINKS
Better Than Ezra
Kevin Griffin From Better Than Ezra Advice On Songwriting
Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson | TED
Kevin Griffin (Wikipedia)
The Greatest Song by Kevin GriffinCONNECT WITH ME
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Yesterday, Adrianne and I went out to one of favorite little coffee shops to have breakfast and spend the morning working. About an hour in, I had this urge to check Instagram, which I rarely do, especially lately. In fact, I haven’t really done much online or on social media since the election — I actually leave my phone home more often than not — but for whatever reason, I stopped doing my Morning Pages and picked up my phone and checked Instagram. The first post I saw was a story from Wesley Verhoeve. It was a photo of my friend Pableaux Johnson with a caption that read, “Rest in peace, Pableaux Johnson. Beloved by so many, a true culture documentarian, and a New Orleans treasure.” I was stunned and, in the moment, I honestly didn’t understand what I was reading. My first instinct was to respond to Wesley with, “Wait what? Pableaux is a friend of ours. What is this news?” Wesley responded, “He passed away. I’m sorry to bring you this news. I discovered it this morning from various other posts.” After a brief search, a story on on nola.com confirmed it with, “Beloved New Orleans photographer, foodie Pableaux Johnson dies after collapse at second line.” I just sat there in stunned silence as I felt my eyes well up with tears. Adrianne looked up and said, “What?” I just held up my phone so that she could see the story. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Is that real? What is that?” She grabbed her phone and began searching for confirmation.
I re-watched Dead Poets Society recently and in learning about Pableaux’s death, I was reminded of the first stanza of this poem which was featured in the film.To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
By Robert HerrickGather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.
LINKS
Wesley Verhoeve
Pableaux Johnson
Beloved New Orleans photographer, foodie Pableaux Johnson dies after collapse at second line
Red Beans Road Show
Share Your Favorite Memories of Pableaux Johnson
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I’ve held off on posting this Iteration because I just didn’t feel like it was that important in light of what’s happening in California. But after some reflection, I actually think that it is important, because art and making are still important. Hope is important. Helping people to feel just a little less alone and trying to connect with them wherever that may be is important and it’s what I try to do with these Iterations. I write about my thoughts and experiences in the hope that it may help you navigate your own.
LINKS
American Red Cross
The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank
The Animal Wellness Foundation
The California Fire Foundation
Dark Matter
Labyrinth
Blake Crouch
Apple TV+
Texas Shakespeare Festival
Alabama Shakespeare Festival
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I don’t know about you, but this is by far my least favorite time of year. It really starts around Thanksgiving, but this stretch between Christmas and New Year’s Day is particularly brutal — and it’s not just because I spent the first 48 years of my life in Southern California and still haven’t gotten used to the cold of the East Coast, but yes that. And it’s not just that I’ve lost both of my parents and Christmas has never been quite the same, but that’s part of it too. It’s more that I find it extraordinarily difficult just to be present. I feel caught between looking back on the previous 12 months and looking ahead to what I would like to do differently (or better) in the year ahead (but in all likelihood won’t, at least not to the degree that I tend to expect from myself). I suspect that I’m not alone in at least some of this. When I shared this with a friend, they responded, “Yeah, I feel the same way. But also the feeling and fear of the inevitable sameness as the previous year(s).”
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A few weeks ago, I took the train down to DC to meet up with my friend Richard Boutwell to walk through a show at the National Gallery called The '70s Lens. The show features the work of a bunch of fantastic photographers, many of whom I’d never heard of, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to go through it with him. Richard is a terrific photographer who specializes in western landscapes, mostly New Mexico, Arizona, and California. In fact, for years his grandfather was a park ranger in Joshua Tree, so he knows the park like the back of his hand. But as talented as he is behind the camera, he’s an even better printer. Richard has probably forgotten more about printing — both in the darkroom and digitally — than I will ever know. On top of that, he’s got an almost encyclopedic knowledge of photographers. As we were walking through the show, he was telling me all about this picture and that — why they are considered important, and in some cases, how the various photographers influenced each other’s work. It was similar to walking through exhibits with my friend Michelle — who is a paper conservator at the gallery — in that the additional context helps me connect with the work in a different and often deeper way.
LINKS
Richard Boutwell
The '70s Lens
Hollyland wireless mics
David Bowie: Full Interview (1995) | MTV News
OTP (episodes 177 and 352)
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Recently, I picked up a copy of Barry Lyndon on Blu-ray. It’s one of those movies that I’ve had on my watchlist forever, but for whatever reason it just kept slipping through the cracks. As I was researching some of the other Criterion movies I was thinking about picking up, I saw a story about Google’s new AI-integrated NotebookLM and decided to try an experiment to see what (if any) insights AI might have to offer around Barry Lyndon. The results were both exciting and a little terrifying.
LINKS
The Criterion Collection
NotebookLM
Technically awesome, emotionally distant — Kubrick movie review (1975)
YouTube search results for "Barry Lyndon"
Making Barry Lyndon
How Kubrick Achieved the Beautiful Cinematography of Barry Lyndon
Achieving Perfection - The Cinematography of Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon - Stanley Kubrick's Meticulous Editing Process (Behind the Scenes)
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Saturday night, Adrianne and I spent the evening at the home of our neighbors Raj and Trupti helping them, along with about 60 other friends and family members, celebrate Diwali, which is the Hindu festival of lights. It’s hard to explain how incredible it felt not just to be invited into their home again, but to feel so welcomed by the other guests and to get the opportunity to participate in an event that is a deeply meaningful part of their culture.
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On Saturday, Adrianne and I took an impromptu trip into DC after seeing an interesting post pop up in my Instagram feed. The post was about an open studio event at the 52 O Street Artist Studios, which is a four-floor building that features “50+ Artists & Creative Businesses.” I’ve loved visiting artists’ spaces for years. When I was still living in California, I would regularly go to The Brewery Arts Complex for their open studio art walks, which were always fantastic. The Brewery is the largest live-work arts complex in the world, and for me the “live-work” aspect is really what sets it apart. There’s a similar complex in Alexandria, Virginia, called the Torpedo Factory that I also enjoy going to, but it’s a very different experience than The Brewery was. The artists only work at the Torpedo Factory and I think the fact that the artists at The Brewery work and live in the same space gives you a deeper insight into who they are beyond simply seeing the work. That additional context can make an enormous difference in how or how deeply I connect with the work.
LINKS
52 O Street Artist Studios
The Brewery Arts Complex
Torpedo Factory
Dave Lefner
DC Arts Studios
Deep Natter
Process Driven
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What you’re hearing (if you’re listening, rather than reading this) are the sounds of me unboxing a new keyboard — specifically, an Apple A1048, commonly known as simply the Apple Keyboard. What makes this keyboard especially interesting to me is the period of time in my life that it reminds me of — that and the fact that this particular keyboard has been sitting unopened and unused in a box in central California since 2003. I found it on shopgoodwill.com, where it was listed in “new or gently used” condition. When it arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to see that not only was it in the original box — which wasn’t mentioned in the description — but it was also in the original unopened plastic packaging. The last “new” thing I bought on Goodwill was a Starbucks Barista espresso machine to replace my Saeco Via Venezia that finally gave up the ghost after more than 19 years of daily service and literally thousands of shots of espresso. And just like the keyboard, the Barista was unopened and unused, still in the original box, neither of which were mentioned in the description.
QUESTIONS
What are some of your favorite or most meaningful objects?
Hit reply, leave a comment, or email me at [email protected].
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Last week, I released a video review of a new book from Prestel about Gregory Crewdson. It was significant for me, not just because Gregory is one of my photographic heroes — although yes, that is part of it — but because it was the first project I’ve done in quite a while that was really just for me. I’ve been on a bit of a “creative hiatus” for the better part of a year and I’ve only done a few videos before this. So more than anything, I wanted to see if I could pull it off and have it be interesting and feel like me, rather than just another YouTube photo book flip-through. And before I get too far into this, I want to thank Andy Adams at FlakPhoto, without whom it may not have even happened. Andy is a good guy and if you’re at all interested in photography, he’s well worth a follow.
A few months ago I started seeing a new therapist, and part of what we’ve been working on is something called Somatic Therapy, which I’ll include a couple links to in the notes if you’d like to learn more about it. Basically, somatic therapy focuses on the body and how emotions such as trauma and anxiety manifest as physical sensations. When I’m sharing a particular story or experience, my therapist will sometimes interrupt me and ask me to focus on how it feels to talk about or relive the experience — and not emotionally or existentially, but physically. It’s been fascinating to start noticing changes in my breath or heart rate or feel tension start to develop in my hands and shoulders when I’m sharing something disturbing or painful. On the other side, and this is where the video fits in, we’re working on identifying objects, memories, and pursuits and activities that give me joy or pleasure and naming or defining what those things feel like.
LINKS
Gregory Crewdson video review
What is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic Experiencing Therapy
The Difference Between Reacting and Responding
What is Internal Family Systems?
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This is the audio track from my video review, which I encourage you to watch on YouTube or read on Substack.
In a new book from Prestel, simply titled Gregory Crewdson, editor Walter Moser — the head of the department of photography at the ALBERTINA in Vienna — has curated a selection of images from all of Crewdson’s major bodies of work. Prestel was kind enough to send me a copy for review and I couldn’t be more thrilled to talk about it...
LINKS
Gregory Crewdson - ALBERTINA modern
Making Eveningside
There But Not There - Gregory Crewdson Documentary
Crewdson Trail Log
Beneath the Roses - Crewdson Trail Log
Dream House Archive - New York Times Magazine
Gregory Crewdson on Process Driven
David Fincher - Invisible Details
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