For even the early-turners few leaves are yellowing but the night gains on us each day. A few minutes more of darkness. the ground cooling slightly more each night, heating slightly less each day. tomatoes and other fair-weather friends wilt back a-gasp at the dank cool being savaged upon them. Always with the dramatics, those tomatoes. The yellow-jackets swarm and I cuss out the squirrel every morning for only eating half a cherry tomato here, another there. another there.

At least he leaves the real tomatoes. for now. The zucchini has wilt and bears stilted fruit. the lettuce seems as happy as it’s been to be free of the summer burn. The readying for winter begins all around but heavy rains come for days and we all get to sit in our now heat-running homes and think about future icy north winds and feet of snow and whatever else we try to forget all summer.

I try to hate fall for killing my garden but there’s unimaginable richness everywhere around me. The soil is dark and rich and smells sweetly of death and nutrients. the cycle must continue even if it feels like too much work to keep on going. to keep on thriving then abating.

I didn’t anticipate another post so soon but found myself slowly being buried in pictures. sometimes finding shots in the mornings, on lunch breaks, chasing the dying of the light. So many, so quickly, I had to resort to diptychs and triptychs again so as not to overload you (and substack).

and the fall colors haven’t even begun.

What engine drives the solitary work of photography and photographers?

We can talk about the usual suspects. gear. attention. the mental health, or lack of it. We can muse about the impact of social media on how we think about our own work, as well, but what made you make it in the first place? and maybe more relevant is what makes you keep making it when the world is over-run with great images?

For 4 years now (approaching my 20th as a photographer) I’ve been trying to untangle all this—often badly in emotional fits of writing here. It’s bordering on annoying at this point how many circles I’ve been, well, circling.

Where did my seemingly unending love affair with photographing the world go amiss? and while it’s been dwindling for some time why can’t I just say okay people change lets find a new passion and let it go.

Re-reading some older newsletters I’ve covered the challenges of relying on your location as your subject for going on a decade1. I’ve covered the changing political situation and the complexities of being a more left leaning person in a sea of very hard right (and hard working) folks and having trouble romanticizing a prairie life that’s riddled with facebook meme’s and twitter conspiracies2.

I’ve covered the struggle of moving to medium format3. The massive expectations of what I could make against the limited lens selection, the physical impacts of very heavy gear. How I had this lifelong dream of medium format based on very real experiences with medium format film and found digital to be considerably less than I’d hoped.

I’ve talked about my addiction to editing4. My inability to let go of the past. My mother’s death and the scars it left5. I’ve talked about technique. Black and white vs. color. Focusing on form6. or focusing on your subject. How a boring life can lead to boring photos, and how that’s actually a lie.

I’ve talked about cross pollinating your mind with other mediums like painting and drawing7. About philosophical approaches to how you approach and see the world8.

I feel like I’ve covered nearly every angle trying to fix myself. Trying to restore a passion I consider a fundamental aspect of who I am.

The apparent answer to much of this complex stew came in the form of a very cheap (by medium format standards) new lens and accidentally finding my lens in the medium format space. The very first photo I took with the new lens some part of me when ahhhh… finally.

But why.

It cost less than 20% of the last MF lens I bought. It weighs 3lbs. and has quite a few design.. characteristics, lets say.

It’s technically the worst lens I own.

And It’s not the quirks that tweaked my brain. I have a long history of lens modifications from vaseline to coupling two lenses not designed to work together with tape to shooting through crinkled up water bottles and every translucent material a model ever threw at me. I know quirky.

It’s not the manual focus, but that did reset some brain wiring.

It’s not the near 50mm field of view, or the f/1.7. both of which I’ve experienced in depth and decided 50mm is one of my least favorite ways to see the world.

This took some thinking about.

Following that first picture a fever to photograph the entire known world washed over me. I made more pictures in 3 days—whilst hobbling around with a compost shovelling hip injury—than I made all august.

It’s not the color rendition.

not micro contrast.

it’s certainly not the sharpness. Hitting F/1.7 is nearly impossible. Though you might argue the lack of sharpness is a feature. Digital sharpness is unnatural to my eye and it makes my heart grow cold to see it spread through the world.

It’s not that my mental health improved—though summer and gardens are great for my brain—or I had a zen retreat and refocused my chi into caring about photographs. It’s not that I was sure anyone else might see the images the same way I do and give that nice dopamine hit from social sharing.

It’s not that I finally made the images I wanted (though they are getting closer to what I want—past ruzz be damned). And possibly most importantly, they weren’t medium format film images which I crave so deeply.

We continue to wait for a real digital medium format sensor that isn’t marketing and obeys the laws of physics.

What it really came down to the in the end was… Curiosity.

Putting my eye to camera I can’t anticipate what I’m about to see. I can’t be bored by the same fuji standard lens “look”. I can’t be lulled by the same 4 focal lengths I’ve largely shot for 6 years. Jesus, 6 years of medium format lens restrictions.

When I raise the camera I’m trying to satisfy my own curiosity about what the world might look like and for a long time things have felt predictable.

This isn’t the same “oh I’ve been down that gravel road before” type of predictable. It runs deeper. It’s I’ve seen every picture I’m trying to make before. And worse, often many times.

That sort of predictable.

The curiosity engine has been fully restarted. my camera is welded to my hand (all 5lbs of it) and I’m back making pictures multiple times a day for the first time since mom passed.

lots of shitty pictures. lots out of focus pictures. But also little magical nuggets hinting the photographer I’d like to be, rather than mimicking whats already been.

success can be a trap. You’ll always be aware of what worked even if you’ve outgrown it.

And so we roll into the cool nights with red-gold dappled ditches. browning and yellowed-edged leaves expanding to entire forests. My tomatoes have stopped flowering, leaves wilting back. I made bread because it was cool enough to run the oven.

September is here.

Rich cool dusk air arrived with the early sunsets. The fields are emptying fast. reliable farmers trailed by walls of harvest dust. The yellow jackets are somehow more asshole than usual. more angry. I bring my hoodie when I set out most nights.

we dreamt of harvest feasts in spring. we buried our dead and our seed and now those seeds are lush, rich, beautiful food. It’s worth remembering when dreams come true. When winter garden plans became spring work, became summer chores became fall suppers.

Photographically, I have no idea what is out there anymore. It’s all new again, for now. It’s all potential to be surprised, elated, and weirdly satisfied.

What makes me make work is not knowing. It’s stumbling on beauty and harmony, order, and disorder and seeing the deeper patterns emerging all around me. It’s a rampant curiosity about this short life and gigantic world I inhabit.

When that engine is slowed, or stalled, or disengaged I’m lost and untethered. In photography and the wider world.

Curiosity is the very fuel that keeps me alive and moving forward and while my normal life is full of it (who knew how magical and deep gardening, painting, breadmaking could be) and my work life is always pushing me to learn and evolve—without that fuel in my photography it became rote. Habit. forced routine.

There’s been such little joy for so long and it’s hard to hold a camera you’d have murdered someone in the street to own for most your life and whine about how boring it all is. it’s hard but not impossible because I’ve been doing it.

I’m grateful I didn’t give up. I was very close this summer. I’m also very happy I took a chance on a “crappy chinese lens” as some people have called it. All of this is to say, if you’ve been struggling with your own work, and circling, and not making progress it might help to remember the person that needs to be excited is you. Other people being excited is great but you have to live with the time and energy and cost of doing this work. The toll on the body. The toll on your relationships.

I can’t say more gear would make you any happier. it probably won’t.

I can say if you find the right gear. gear which delights you. that engages your eye and mind you’ll be on the right path sooner or later. We can’t make all the work we want, or love, that’s why there are other photographers out there making their work. But we can keep evolving our work to be closer to who we are when we make it (rather than who we want to be, or who we were) and with some luck that will add up to something meaningful for you in the end.

A few more photos then a recommendation for a photographer whose work keeps me interested right now, reminding me of the richness and depth of things with nearly every post.

For those of you who are curious. The new lens is the Mitakon Speedmaster 65 F/1.7. I strongly recommend it if you like a less perfect, less digital feeling image and have a mount they make it in.

—

Lastly if you haven’t yet stumbled onto the work of Augusta Sagnelli you should give her a look.

Baby Blue

Bounty

I love the sun because she shapes the shadows. She creates the colors—changes the colors. Makes the day, makes the photograph—is the photograph…

Read more

2 years ago · 18 likes · 1 comment · Augusta Sagnelli

Sometime back in 2010 I had run my photography aground.

maybe my life too. hard to say now.

it’s only 14 years, but thinking about what’s happened online in 14 years is staggering. we’ve ushered in the era of “content” in full, and with it all it’s trappings and problems.

non stop content consumption, and production is long tail poisoning. slowly eroding. slowly changing. death by a thousand reels rolling past our glazed over eyes. we all know this isn’t normal but we still play along and tolerate it.

in 2010 my photography life was much different. I shot about 20 nude model shoots a year. I took random photo trips. I went for long walks, but often went weeks or months without making any photos. Production was scattershot.

instagram fixed us though didn’t it? really really taught us how to always be producing?

I hit a wall in spring of 2010. Couldn’t see photos anymore. Couldn’t get roused to action by another nipple or winding wooded pathway and nearly quit. Spoiler: I didn’t. Instead I explored several genres of photography I hadn’t before and very quickly fell in love with street.

deeply, psychotically, in love. the kinda love you burn your whole life down for.

A torrid summer of work followed by the utter collapse of my back (and life) sent me out to the rolling alberta prairie to rehab/recover and find a new way. I kept shooting street for a few years but it was just too hard to get to the city regularly. The passion fades.

This isn’t really about that.

shoot street every day for many hours and you’ll quickly learn good “content” is elusive. Humans are mostly boring. Check wikipedia. You’ll be rewarded by the unexpected but the long hours between those rewards could can lead to dark thoughts. I found myself having those dark thoughts again mere months after falling for street at the same time a meme was going around about “boring life, boring photos” which sums up the instagram vibe nicely and hit me hard.

I fucking hated all of it and was a terrified of what happens next if street doesn’t keep me engaged. my life was decidedly boring. or, i felt like it was. Looking back now it was quite layered with people and relationships and interesting things.

still, non-boring lives are not handed out equally but beauty ought be. you might not be born with access to daddy’s yacht or grow up with the next big indie band but surely where you live the sun casts shadows. surely where you live there are man-made and natural structures altering the path of that light.

we call this form and what I learnt in that summer of street is it’s the stone we build our house upon so it can weather the malleability of our moods, cultural tastes, fads and fancies and sometimes speak to the non-language, non thought side of humanity in unexplored ways.

when we search for good content, or clever pictures (looking at you street photographers) or anything where the literal subject is information being passed we run the risk of reducing the visual world to just that. Information being passed. we can and will dress that up with story telling, and calls to hopefully universal emotion but it still boils down to transmitting ideas/information via photos.

you know, that sounds a lot like… marketing?

another great summation of instagram and everything that’s followed it.

form hits different.

And I will never use that phrase again. gross.

What then are we to do if not take pictures of our lunch (guilty) or of the space needle, a very cool windswept tree that defies logic (was jealous of this trend)? What does that leave?

The short answer is everything.

The long answer is everything.

shifting focus away from specific subjects and the information/ideas we have about them we find the world is just a collection of ever changing forms, colors, textures and literally every square inch of it is comprised of these things.

Including your lunch. your windswept tree. your spaced out needle.

Rather than shrinking the subject matter you’re growing it. That plate of broccoli (fuck yeah broccoli) is more than information. its a sea of shadows, highlights, tones, textures and damn if edward weston didn’t make like 200 large format prints of a pear. but he wasn’t, you know, snapping a pear for instagram. he was learning about pears. light. shadow. tone. texture and relating it back to the entire human experience.

which inevitably means a pear that looks like a woman’s ass. You can’t fault him for that. pears just do that.

And humans just do content. we do autopilot. we do the simplest work, with very sophisticated tools and then want rewarded for our efforts. myself included. we all want that instant feedback saying hey you’re amazing because why wouldn’t you.

but over time, this mindlessness, this simplistic approach will eat away the core of your motivations—looking at myself now, it ain’t pretty—for all the reasons listed above and many you already know about the toxic chase for likes, admiration and some reasonable modicum of self esteem in a world full of people hustling harder than you, more creative than you, with more access and time than you.

The focus on form resets all these inequalities. no one has more form available. okay, possibly Norwegians. those 24 hour sun days. endless forms.

I write this as I look over the gradual decline of my eye. Once very well trained in form, shape, tone and texture and now lazy and unable to sort through the noise of color and idea. They say making a bad color photo into black and white won’t make it a good photo but making an average black and white color often has the opposite effect. Color masks so much. Distracts from so much. You can get away with the shock and awe of deep reds. It will hide how bad your form is. or how absent. And if you have any form at all that pleases the eye slapping some color on it will surely make an acceptable photo.

All this in mind I’ve been very focused on my garden and making pictures of savoy cabbage, broccoli leaves, and the swoopy curve of flowering onion stem.

I can’t claim to have made many good pictures recently1. I’ve made a couple. because making a truly good photo is more than just pointing a camera at something. so much of it is chance, but so much of it is care and attention to form and texture, which are skills that atrophy. You can’t just switch it on and off. You must develop them, then maintain them. So, I’m on this long term project now of repairing my eye. Of working those muscles. and only those muscles. The content can wait.

I’m seeking good Form.

I want a pipeline to that part of your brain that doesn’t speak in language. Doesn’t have ideas. doesn’t know a chair from a collection of lines but knows fundamentally and indisputably when a pleasing arrangement of forms come together and gives that feeling you can’t quite shake.

people often love photos but can’t explain what makes it work. That’s form.

we need to think about what the last 15 years of rapid and constant content has done to our brains. if we care about making things, we should care about the slow diminishment of our skills and craft and be ready to accept making a bunch of mediocre work in service of hopefully making a small amount of good work.

even if it all comes out looking like a woman’s ass.

Also, the ridiculous and smothering heat encouraging a claustrophobic madness, interspersed with deep bands of smoke laying heavy on us; weighing only in coughs and red eyes. the girls might have worn lovely summer dresses to combat the heat but no one saw them. We all hid away behind our fans and denial portable A/C units. This is alberta someone would say, A/C is only for the rich.

The lack of storms—I was on two very mediocre storms all season—left me to find other subjects. The birds. the plants. the cows. the roads and rolling prairie. All fine subjects but I spent most of the month feeling a massive let down, photographically. A crow is marvellous but not in the way a drill bit tornado is.

My experiment in june to get me making pictures again worked at least partially. The thing is i spent most the month thinking most of it was garbage. 700 or so shots and I had to dip into june to find you a full post.

While struggling to make good photos out of a grab bag of average photos I had my happens-once-a-decade realization that color ruins photographers, or leastwise ruins me. I can hone my skills for years concentrating on form, texture, pattern and a few months of shooting exclusively color and it all comes out winnogrand. directionless. weak. like a drunk with an endless roll of film.

To undo it I switch back to black and white previews in camera. I focus on form, tone, shadow and shape and in time the utterly lazy color eye so pleased with the mess starts seeing photos again. I’m not there yet, but I can at least see the heap for what it is right now.

You can expect more black and whites. A more focused attention seeking texture, and pattern and shape. I will not be seduced by the deep greens.

Otherwise my life has never been so seasonal or deeply rooted in time. The plants and garden all anchor me to the earth in equal parts comfort and discomfort. The garden flourishes like I’ve never seen. All that spring work. The aching muscles and being cooked by strong may sun are rounding into a harvest beyond what I’d hoped. There is no substitute feeling for having grown something you just put in your mouth from a logic defying seed to a plump nourishing source of food. I surmise we’d have more poetry about it but the poets only want dirty souls with clean hands.

july is all but spent now. Soon the nights will become cooler and the fields will change colors. The harvest will begin, mine and the farmers. The world will ready itself for the brutality of canadian winter, again. How does summer go from this beautiful idea expanding so far into the future to mere weeks so easily. Every year it slips by no matter how much time I spend trying to be out in in rather than at a computer screen.

Without the 100s of plants depending on my care, and father who slowly needs more and more help with things, and work, life would feel somehow empty. It still feels some dimension is being ignored but you can’t feel at all shorted when you have tomatoes hanging all about you. When those rich yellow zucchini flowers open wide and promise. You’d have to be an asshole to not feel deep gratitude for the overwhelming complexity that keeps life living.

The birds, the soil and the magic of plants, fungi and nematodes. the bacterias and every kind of little critter and insect that all interplay to keep the cycle moving forward.

it should be enough for near anyone. leastwise, for now, it is for me.

June isn’t technically over. I will make more pictures but I couldn’t figure out how to handle the onslaught of photos and trying to cram them into a 3 part series. Turns out it’s suns out, cameras out.

A few things combined to making so many images this month. Summer is here. I picked up the GF 500mm telephoto lens for medium format—which is precisely what I needed at this moment. The world is new again. I can’t predict what the world might look like through this new lens and having travelled the same 40 square km for over a decade this is invaluable.

Seeing things with fresh eyes ignites curiosity and curiosity is the engine that drives this machine.

It’s a spectacular lens. If any of you are stupid enough to spend the kinda money to get into medium format digital and have arms like tree trunks I strongly recommend you pick one up.

There’ve been almost exactly no storms this storm season. We’ve had little squall lines move through. Rain storms, sure. But no organized super cell activity anywhere near me. By this time last year I think I had 2 tornadoes already.

The war with the birds, and squirrels over who owns the garden continues. Losses on both sides are deep. So many fallen plant friends.

I had one of the best days of recent memory with my daughter. We took the doors off lilah and went screaming into the badlands for a day of making pictures. It was a long cold trip home after sundown but very worth it. A jeep with no doors is a jeep worth riding in.

I’m continuing my slide into warm, soft, gentle pictures. maybe it’s the flowers. maybe it’s not wanting to clobber the beautiful bokeh available at 500mm on a large sensor. maybe i just want a beautiful soft warm dream of the world for a little bit. Without all the war and collapse and biting midges.

It feels, again, like things are shifting. I’m looking for different things. I’m making images that I’m not even sure are mine. This is what you want. you want to surprise yourself. Don’t buy the bullshit about having a “style”.

right now my focus is entirely on small details. strong highlights and not distracting you from the subject with my dark heart. Will I disavow these later. could be. could…. be.

lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about death. everyone’s death. Mine and yours and everyone we love. That sounds dark, maybe. But when you keep it front of mind (as many philosophical and religious traditions encourage) it can be sort of wonderful. Why be angry all the time. why be afraid. It makes room for kindness. death comes for everyone even the asshole who cut you off.

It takes a lot of energy to be angry, anxious, afraid, sad, cynical or any of the litany of emotions that often dominate our time. What i’m finding is—could this be the post 50 thing old people talk about—isn’t the lack of anger makes much qualitative difference in your life. It does, but not as much as the huge gain in free energy and momentum from just letting go of so much stuff.

this is basic barstool philosophy but if you can really take it in and sit with it you can find some interesting changes might follow.

on to the last of the june pictures unless something magical happens over the next two days prompting another post.

I’ve been around on this planet a while and it still amazes me our capacity for feeling deeply, for caring so hard and the variances in even the most mundane of lives. The world is a wide open spigot of sensations and experiences.

I didn’t get out riding in this period. The cold, the mosquitos. The hockey. but I did manage to get out shooting a bit and made friends with some cows. It took a bit but they warmed to me eventually.

It was a span of 10 days of work, covering and uncovering the gardens and flowers, weeding, and balatro (don’t google it, don’t play it, don’t speak of it or your entire life will be consumed).

I’m all over the map about photography. Shocking no one I guess. I went out without the medium format for a night, with the 100-400mm to get a new look at things. I love the compression of long lenses. I love being able to reach into spaces and have more framing options. I was generally happy with the night of shooting and thought i got some good stuff. Got home and hated everything. Something gets lost in the translation.

My eye can be so excitable. I love the sensations of traversing focal planes with my eye and then get back home and look on a screen and everything feels so flat, so 2D.

I recently picked up (another) Canon Selphy 4x6 die sub printer. They’re really magic for the 400 prints or so they can withstand before some roller fails. I have enough paper and ink to make 324 prints and it’s been fun to just fire off a quick print to see how it looks without the wallet and time hit of a real printer. I’ve made 40 or so and 3-4 of them are quite good.

The interesting thing about prints is what they need from an editing point of view is often quite different than these hi res, back lit monitors. I think about that a lot. Too much maybe.

What you’ll find here today is the bucolic late days of alberta spring where the greens have emerged and every thing is full and lush from the rains. I was, myself, surprised how peaceful and “spring” feeling all these came out.

I swear I’m not as mercurial the internet says, I simply record what the world gives me and often it’s full of rage, beauty and drama.

I want to keep working towards showing that honestly and simply. I continue to refine my edits.

till I see the rich crushed blacks of a tornado’s debris ball cast against blue shadow on a tiny print.

Then, who knows what I want.

I had a minor revelation while working through the last 5 years again. I shoot 10x the photos in June, July, August & September to any other months but I share 5x less photos because I’m too busy with the yard, garden, work, life and making the photos. I went through june 2023 and realized 80% of the photos never even got edited.

Why are we doing this.

When I really hit my stride a few years back over on thisherelight my process was simple. I had been transplanted out of the city at the peak of my street photography life and was mostly disabled, in strange surroundings and had to find a way to make life work. So I copied Kathleen Connally’s ethos from A walk through durham township where she’d get out shooting for an hour or so a day and share a photo. Simple stuff, but it took my drive for street and turned me into a landscape photographer over time. Taught me about life here on the vast canadian prairie and also helped me find a rather uncomfortably large audience back in the tumblr days.

I need to restart. again.

I’ve been out shooting 4-5 times in may. 3-4 sunsets and storms in june so far. I had one good golden night where i was excited to come home and see what I had.

be simple. do the basics. find some time to sit out there in the world and not demand anything of it. The prairie isn’t amazon.

Finding time and movable body parts during peak garden and yard work time has been challenging but I did pick up an ebike recently to ride around town and just look at this place again. so you may find more day to day small town life work mixed here and there coming up.

Things are in transition in my head right now and that’s just fine.

I’m going to do a post every 10 days or so, mostly pictures from that 10 day window, without worrying if they work together, or make sense. Just sharing life. sharing what moves me and keeping moving.

cya in 10 days or so.

You’re alive. you can breathe. Your guts are rotten. your eyes may be filled with a million million floaters, a sea of waving specular highlights against an already wobbly (probs damaged) optic nerve. you can move and your beautiful red jeep will take you where ever you want to go. The shoulder, yes, it’s falling apart. okay. You need it to lift heavy cameras. okay. but your blood pumps deep into your body, still. The desires are all muted and confounding but they still exist. you’re alive. you can breathe. tape the falling off or apart to the body. cinch what you can. massage, cream, medicate what you cant. you’re alive still, breathing. Still. go.

I had a longish post mostly wrote out but as I sit and think on what I’m saying I’m less motivated to say things.

I’ve been out shooting again. The rains and beautiful spring clouds. The dynamic light. They called me back again.

I’m also working in re-editing everything from 2020 forward into a single profile I’ve been honing for some time. Breakthrough’s all around.

I’m going to try hard in june to actually write and edit photos rather than just take them and let them pile up never to be seen again. We’ll see though. I trippled my garden this year.

who has time for all this living.

you quit drinking because it put you in impossible situations, and often you hated yourself for the punches and kisses and lies and long dark nights.

you quit the opioids because they never fixed the pain, only dulled it. made your guts thick as concrete. left you floating away from everything beautiful in life.

you quit the damaged, volatile and wildly exciting young women because you got old and your fat belly sagged like your hopes. mutual self destruction should only be a hobby, not sport.

quitting is sometimes the best you can do.

if you quit the right things.

spring comes and we start anew. we commit our dead to the cold ground and shallow-bury seeds of hope for late summer feasts. the rains eventually come. sheets against the light, against dark—covering everything. rains impossible as love nourish all. wash us clean. feed for seed and dead buried. then trees barren so long, so fucking long, daubed-green explode.

we start anew, rare and ready

to be knocked down.

you hunt for ideas of things. outlines moving in gust fronts, shapes flickering in and out, shadows of what could be. maybe the next set of lips will be softer. maybe the next photo will touch your robot heart.

always in abandoning, always in abandon.

this is a dangerous way to treat a human heart. always throwing aside today for tomorrow. this, for that.

you have to quit the right things.

a list of things to quit (so as to not quit photography):

1. sharpness

2. not having lens flares

3. not accepting the darkness into your heart—and shadows.

4. letting fences fence you off from more complex compositions

5. forgetting that the light is literally everything.

6. not using longer lenses. fuck your decrepit shoulder.

7. a lack of motion.

8. not posting what makes you excited instead of just sending it to daja and then forgetting about it.

9. forgetting you’re going to die.

   ---

It’s tricky getting excited about April in Alberta. So much open space with so little happening. Fresh black tilled fields waiting but offering nothing interesting to shoot. Usually, once per april I will catch a nice sunset rain/snow storm that sets the engine going for the year. Not this year.

Still, the light is always present.

I’ve spent many weeks thinking about what I love about making images, about looking at images and I want to continue to drill deeper into what excites my eye and why. Sometimes we make it more complicated than that.

I do, anyways.

I sorta lean toward devotion.

maximal in all things, despite deeply wanting balance.

I’m still not shooting. I’m still thinking I’m probably not a photographer anymore. Despite owning half the cameras in the free world. Despite packing up my bag for a typical spring sunset chase. Despite feeling nearly nothing about the value of photos in 2024.

I had this dream last night. Some girl, unknown, sat on my lap and hugged me and she smelled so good my entire body came alive. even the dead parts. even the parts which long ago fell. I woke to a deep ache to smell that random dream girl’s hair.

it’s been jangling around inside me like a memory of an old love all morning. walking askew with too-quickly paced steps to nowhere. anywhere but here. wherever-she-is. and all that noxious existential biological bullshit which btw, has nothing to do with me, prompted a little fit of unabashed cleaning.

cleaning, during which, i unearthed another aching. This photo printed nearly perfectly in 8x10. Aching for how dumb we all were in December of 2019 when Marla and I holed up at a fancy hotel with my street photos built into the lobby wall and made this photo in the morning after she snuck out and brought me back breakfast. Aching for how simple life felt back then and you all know I’m only truly firing when I’m missing something. The Elegiac sort.

So lovely. But I made no printing notes for it 2 years ago when I made it. Or, they’ve been subsumed by the A.I. revolution. Fodder for some abstract poem about toning explained like your 5 years old.

5 hours later I still have no print in hand.

so i had to miss marla too. despite not believing in missing people. or missing things. or missing.

all the fucking same.

Marla is just catching emotional strays. It had nothing to do with her either. Honestly, I think the girl in the dream, maybe, was a french girl I knew once, who sat with me by a fountain and the world unfurled before us. Everything was possible.

The girl in the dream smelled like everything was possible.

again. that my stupid body thinks girls or any of this is important is just, you know, the gods having a good laugh at us.

but my printer, which is a real thing, a real tangible, complex device for making realities out of tiny little droplets of ink, well, that not working is just the printer companies having a laugh at us fools who think we can self print.

fools who think anything can smell like possibility through the sour egg smell of fine printer paper.

fools, of the sort, who quit. but you know, can’t quite quit anything.

Printers are made for people who like, whether they like it or not, to suffer.

I don’t like it, but I can’t reasonably argue suffering isn’t just how I work. Most of the time. And so printing and I, and living in a small town filled with happily married young mothers, well, we’re hand and glove.

You stack your miseries.

the clogged heads. such a profound metaphor for photographer’s who don’t photograph. Lovers who don’t love. sensitive robot hearts that refuse to feel.

I did stop to wonder on how I got away from printing, and it was startling to realize I was in a sort of mourning for it. I’d carried around this romantic notion of getting old and just making beautiful prints and selling them and having that be a life a person could live because sometime in the early 2000s I watched a documentary about a photographer who did just that and that sun-kissed asshole had his very own creek running behind his A-frame print store out on his own plot of forest. the nerve of people to even exist like that.

in the 2000s before the internet taught us to envy and hate everyone not us, we foolishly made heroes of people who succeeded doing what we wanted to do then even more foolishly we admired them and tried to model our lives on them. Now, because modernity has taught us proper social etiquette a gang of us would drag his ass on twitter till he went away and probably some freedom fighters would burn that A-Frame down. Fuck you for winning the lottery I refused to buy a ticket for.

honestly, the nerve.

but anyway. I had that dream and had it summarily corrected by the reality of scale and the reality of you have to be likeable on some level to get a following large enough to just have the three poles for an A-Frame let alone the whole building and a creek. Likability isn’t a life skill I picked up. So my print sales were all to people who like difficult people. You run out of those pretty damn fast.

I spent an inordinate and entirely irrational amount of time making my winter box. I perfected each piece, one after the other. It might be the most attention to detail I ever put into anything in my life and well, they didn’t sell. I’m obligated to say that’s fine (see notes above about being likeable) but it wasn’t fine at all internally. It was crushing somehow and I just swept it aside and let it rot my love of printing from the inside. But quiet like. that’s the best kinda self damage. Where just sweep it away and let it fester till you pop one day.

so yeah, I realized I was mourning this silly dream for a while. A convincing idea of a future thats near impossible for all but the luckiest to achieve. That part is actually okay. You gotta make dumb dreams and lie to yourself about how likely you are to achieve them. if you don’t no amount of coffee or sweet smelling girls will keep you going.

So the desire to feel prints in my hands again must suggest i can take off the black clothes and see what’s what outside the blinders of mourning silliness (but carefully never looking it in the eye. I hope you’re taking notes).

I’d say I digress but honestly I digressed about 8 paragraphs ago.

So, this stupid god damn near perfect print in lowly 8x10 where you can barely see her nipple hairs. Well. I had this quaint thought about how I should print it 16x20 and plop it in one of the 4 big frames that have sat by my door since i dragged them in 2 years ago, unused, reminding me to you know make prints.

clogged heads and noxious possibles and aches and whiling away the day then digressing all over your inbox and I’m not really any closer to that goal.

What must be progress is being willing to print a large image of Marla. I went through a period where I removed, one by one, the many images littering my home of her. Again, nothing to do with her, or me and her, our us. Just it felt like I had accidentally built a shrine of some kind and I’m not the sort to visit shrines. or, ostensibly live in one.

The shrine came together a piece at a time. organically. Buying a polaroid of her to help a fellow photographer, a gifted workprint of her from another, a couple of drawings she made on lazy mornings when we’d sit around and talk, fighting off the winter chill. A painting off a local artist. Then I got into printing and since she’s the model I’ve made the most photos of it stands to reason she’s going to be the subject of the most prints.

before you know it you’re simping in a shrine to a person you dated for a year a million years ago and it’s uncomfortable. you can’t untangle your work and your history. so forget your work was the thinking. just like maybe put up a print of a nice fucking hoarfrost covered tree for a change.

so I did.

and then I stumbled, all emotionally agape, onto that godforsaken print and wanted to see it every day for a time. large. in a frame that sat mute and stupid by my door for two years smelling of possibility.

thwarted, as usual by my printer, instead I write you this now.

hello old friends. hello girl who sat with my by the fountain while time unravelled before us.

spring is nearly here. the seedlings climb out of the dark wet soil. the grasses turn deep green. I see patches of green hills when i stumble over half awake for coffee.

it won’t be pretty but we will get there.

wintermind will have you believe nothing matters. that everything is ruined and spoilt. that everyone is rotten to their core (jury is still out on that) and well, just why bother.

so i didn’t. for a while. not with this. not with photos.

I kept on baking. kept on making things. made chocolate for the first time, delicious. Alto Beni 70% dark.

it bloomed like my rotten heart.

i ate it all the same. because rotten hearts and bloomed chocolate are still fit for consumption and we’re nothing if not consumers.

you can tell the stink of february is still roiling in me. such terrifically short days. a small burp of light then back to the night. who thought this was a good way to live.

whilst gone I got back into programming to burn cycles for this silly brain of mine. kept it hammering on vectors and shaders and pixels. it worked for the most part. self digestion was avoided.

we sit and tap our foot impatient for spring. for the waters to run. for the soils to open. we wait impatient for the robins. the geese. the seedlings pushing up and through. so wildly impatient. for shorts and sweat and the baking summer pavements. for things not mattering to not matter because suns out, guns out and go fuck yourself for being a philosopher snuggled bewteen the legs of june and august. revel in your profound good luck.

that’s all not here yet. the summer girls and tall grasses.

but what is here is my fancy new fujiflm x100vi (someone needs to learn japanese and go tell fuji they don’t have to keep adding characters to the name).

it is fancy. it is pocket size. it is the small bit of pixel magic that i’ve not had by my side in a number of years. i cherish that. the missing and the now having. they go together like the depths of my bereftitude (new word!) and the tawdriness of spring. you simply cannot have one without the other.

and i have the one. the x one hundred six? vee eye. god.

wintermind is no match for technology.

i’ve missed all your silliness. your to and fro and seriousness about writing, about the panacea that is substack. the gyrations and spasms of being such perfect human specimens. a thing to behold. i don’t desire to behold it much for now but I did manage to cobble a small pile of pictures together from carrying a camera with me that doesn’t weight 4 kilos.

for you.

not even all the way back and substack is whining about this being too long for email. never change susbstack. always be dumb and full of vigor.

I’m tired.

Tired of it being november. of the world falling through our hands. of people using the word love like an excuse for their bad behaviour. Tired of my own voice and tired of being tired.

maybe, we’re all just being spit out the other side of hustle culture, nicely ground through a divisive pandemic dropped into a bunch of wars that remind anyone who ever studied wars that man makes wars. the same man that pops up every few generations somehow ineluctable.

I’m no sage. beats me.

All I know is i feel existentially exhausted by denying everything i currently need to deny to get through each day. Stepping over the bodies, and wreckage of everything we could have had—but chose in selfishness (the source of almost all our foibles) to throw on a pile and burn, because, you know, we have the freedom to do so.

Social media seems profoundly pointless, and yes substack is social media. I’ve picked my camera up once this month, to document some beautiful bread. I’ve all but stopped painting. I write you now from a dark turn on a sunday because I gotta keep those fucking new subs coming in. that’s what they tell you incessantly.

no one tells you why.

I’m okay. Don’t call for a 24 hour psych eval. Work is getting done. Bills are being paid. bread is being made. plans for spring gardens are being, you know, planned. We aren’t entirely crashing here. But the short daylight hours of November in the western hemisphere being burnt through, scrolling lies and half baked wisdom, are taking a toll.

I’ve had to step back from twitter. again. The level of deceit, lack of concern for others, and general manipulation being foisted on me by my own provincial government (to say nothing of how true this is generally) throws me between cycles of blatant rage and fundamental despair.

A word I use so infrequently I had to spell check it.

I’ve got some work to do over here to hold things together till the days start getting longer. I’ll do the work. This isn’t my first trip around the seasons, and it’s not all bad.

I ache for people to care about one another more, but see in my own world how isolated everyone feels. How removed and stunned to find themselves stumbling through a world that looks the same, but somehow isn’t. You can’t quite put your finger on what shifted, or why, but something somewhere did.

If you think about it too much, well, it becomes too much so lets just keep on pretending and hope it all works out.

—

I said it isn’t all bad. I mean that.

I recently had the miraculous gift of being shifted to 4 day weeks for my work, with no pay cut—which is unheard of in capitalism—and we’re only a couple weeks in and I can feel it transforming my life.

I over schedule my life. I have too many hobbies, interests and long stretches of pain and combat with a wildly broken body. Everything feels rushed, even trying to not rush, i’m rushing that.

Having a new, unscheduled day blossom off the side of the week is nothing short of a revolution.

My first day off was spent nearly entirely with my beautiful daja (daughter for those new to things) browsing the bookstore, eating, and sitting in parking lots talking about life.

My second day off was spent slow rolling the baking process to really dial in and pay attention. It produced two loaves of sourdough, which not perfect visually, are the best sourdough i’ve had since 2008.

I stumble through the normal weekend confused about what day it is and reflexively thinking tomorrow is work. I’m way behind my own list. Saturday is sunday. sunday is monday. I catch myself lost, over and over. Panic. Relief. Panic. Relief.

And this is only week two. The pull to cement something into that free day. A new project. A book? a software company? a local 10 loaf a week bakery. It’s deep and the efficiency expert in me wants it filled. I’ll resist as long as I can but your list of things to do always expands to fill the available time.

I’ll cherish this small window.

—

this next bit, well, some of you close to me might feel called out. This isn’t about you no matter how true it rings for you. This is about what i see in a 100 people around me. About how i feel about how people close to me have treated me, or treat me. It’s about me reminding myself of what I think.

For some reason I have all these nagging thoughts about the nature of love lately. Though I swore it off entirely. Though I patently reject the idea love is real at all in the literal sense.

This thread of isolation creeping through everything is working in tandem with a structural selfishness both of which, I think are founded on lies about love. Lies about what is healthy and filtered through the whole self care movement. And while I have literally no energy to attack that problem right now I still feel compelled to write, pointlessly, about what love might be if it actually could exist in an animal as selfish as the human animal.

Love is not an emotion or feeling. it’s not something you have, or had. It’s not symbolic or persistent. Love is action. Love is a physical expression of caring about someone or some thing more than you care about yourself. About being willing to subjugate your needs, your wants, in love for someone else’s needs and wants. Loving something is realizing there are things in the world more important than you and your issues, and your comfort.

This is the power latent in love. The power to be free of your own disgusting weaknesses and selfishness for a couple moments.

I realize this goes against everything modern culture tells us about love. careful you don’t get groomed.

If you don’t care about the person you think you love more than you care about yourself, you just simply don’t love that person. nothing more complex than that.

if you don’t think another human could ever mean that much to you, you aren’t ready to love. do the work and by all the gods of kindness don’t go around lying to yourself that you love. I mean, on whole, lets try to lie to ourselves a bit less. It’s not helping.

and generally speaking ignore the word love. it doesn’t exists except in very extreme situations and when most people use the word, well, they’re either lying to you, or lying to themselves, or both.

You don’t have to agree with this opinion. I shouldn’t have to remind you of that.

—

Making photos of bread is nearly as challenging as making the bread.

I crash against the limits of a photo to convey the beauty. The texture and smells. The flavours. I feel defeated by the shifts in color and tone.

I won’t even address the contrast.

Fred, my beautiful friend, the sourdough starter deserves better than I can provide for now. He who is many. The yeasts and bacteria. Working together so beautifully. The magic of nature and organic processes fully removed from our day to day dramas. Like plants, starters need attention. they need work. They need love to survive and thrive.

This is overly romantic for a glass jar of bacteria and flour. However, the counter argument is my starter has made me happy in ways no human has been able to since probably before the pandemic.

Call that whatever you want.

Some shabby bread photos to close the week out.

This is my second try at this, Dear Reader.

I wrote a spiraling post about an idea I have and through writing it all out journal style (not intended) it uncovered a few things worth talking about before a little clearinghouse of thoughts.

You want to remember when someone loved you. When your feet ached and that guy told you he'd smash your fucking camera over your face, and you said 'try me' and the two of you, two young stupid men. drifted away against the late afternoon city sun. You want to remember her in that kimono. How she smelled of anticipation and disaster. How the heat poured into your car in the dakotas, like an ocean wave. How your family was still a family doing banal things like having bbq's and fighting over stupid shit. Ghosts everywhere, but you don't want to remember that.

You want to remember how her ginger hair glowed against the falling light in that window while she drank a coca-cola in a white dress. How the ocean smelled and was cold at your feet after 100 miles of snaking highway. How your arms hurt from turning the wheel. How your mom would put up her dukes when you'd point a camera at her. How terrified you were when you chose wrong and fell into the bear's cage, complete white-out around you and prayed there was no tornado. How the car shook and you were alone with your choices. and how that was okay.

How the light burns red against the badlands. how the night, full of invisible mosquitos came alive with northern lights. how you'd joke and laugh with your friends. How she looked, here, and here, and here and.. How strong you felt and how weak. You want to remember every single thing, because remembering is how you know things happened, and how you know you were alive.

I've edited the same photos likely hundreds of times.

I enjoy finding new expressions of the same thing. Using weird techniques. experiments. going too deep into color theory then rejecting color outright. hundreds of times, though. thousands of hours. hours that could be spent making new photos. or friends. or baking, or reading, or painting.

I get paid, at least in part, to produce videos. to film, to edit, to craft. I've spent 10s of thousands on video equipement. I do not make, but for a handful of experiments, videos for myself. I record videos. I have videos of so many models, and travels and places. But they don't mean anything compared to the feeling of a well edited photo. The motion is magical. The cadence of correctly timed beats. but there isn't room to unfold inside each single moment.

The story is the motion, not the stillness.

Each year brings new tools. New apps. New techniques. and I thought i was chasing film, that beautiful film look, I realized this fall I'm not.

I thought for a time I was trying to inhabit the photos of my childhood. The off color slide film reds of my grandfather--who never had a kind word for me in my life, and I have none for him now, aside from his archive of pictures hinting at there being more there, somewhere, under the anger an smell of whisky. I am not.

I realized after 20 years of digital photography that digital photography and editing is garbage. There's so little truth in it. The highlights are all wrong. Every year gets better, but what I've really been chasing is how I remember the moment I took the photo. How real life, wrapped up and filtered through me, felt and looked.

It nags at some fundamental part of me to not have been able to show that. So i return, time and time again.

You feel old now. more yourself. more stable and calm. richer, deeper, but your arm fat sags. your eyes look tired all the time even when you're not. The greys are winning. Everywhere. You back won't let you carry a pack of cameras anymore. Your back won't let you even wear a camera strap for more than an hour. You're doing fine. The bills are paid. Those rotten teeth are being fixed, one by one, a little out of every paycheque and aside from the rollercoaster ride of body issues, which never bore, you can't complain about much.

You aren't actually old yet. But you feel old. The world thinks you're old. You're oldish in a young facing world. Your body is probably a lot older than it should be, but you are not yet.

Except you can clearly see the end. it's right there. You can easily project your mind further into the past than you'll ever get to the future. the hump, is behind you now. The curve of life is sloped downwards now and this is natural. However loudly you scream into your pillow.

Sometime this summer I realized I probably enjoy editing photos more than taking them.

It's easier.

No mosquitos or skunks. No pissing in bottles while tornados scrape by you. No dealing with the highs and lows of models. No border crossings, no carrying 50lb bags of gear. No spending hours waiting for something, anything, worth remembering.

We aren't supposed to admit this.

No making work for the sake of making work.

You have secret dreams of deleting it all. Driving over the hard drives--so many fucking hard drives and their constant whirring--with the jeep on your way to not caring anymore. You'll throw away the beauty. The sacred. the haunting and magical. The resonant and the overwhelming pile of mediocrity you drag with you birthday after birthday as each moment's relevance recedes into the past, but somehow their power never changes.

That off hand look she made. The way the grasses bent and swayed. The blue black shadow creeping out from church brick in the shape of a bird. A mountain of images, of life.

You dream of clicking yes, I confirm deleting cannot be undone.

You have secret dreams of locking yourself in a room and not being allowed out until something makes sense.

It's easier to just not care. To accept that things didn't go according to plan and the plan was how everything was held together. The constant motion. The incessant wearing of the body to this state made sense of, and by, the plan. Which, never found its mark. which never realized.

Recently, I had an idea. Allow myself one more pass of edits on the work that matters to me. The model work. the street. the travel. the storms. To finally decide on the value of this frame or that. To delete what doesn't matter. To export what does in some final state and maybe share them in some logical sense on a second newsletter.

To work through this process, a step at a time, shrinking my catalog. Letting go of the past. Putting it away.

Isn't that what old photographers do? They cull and pare and whiddle and contextualize. Preparing to leave some cohesive body of work behind. eventually. The eyesight goes. the hands get arthritic. the back, o the fucking back. The body fails and what was it all for then.

You know none of it matters. you know the only one who cares, by and large, is you. It doesn't stop the ache for it to matter. It doesn't ease the wish someone could see the beauty. The magic.

You know you could make 20 books. You could delete it all. You could just tuck it away and forget it or spend the rest of the little time you have lost in it. you could stumble over the curl of her lip till the world or you falters. it won't change anything, either way.

Not really.

When at a philosophical crossroads I fall back to frameworks. To core principals. To safe ground.

The desire to be free of my own work and own relationship to my work is at war with my love of being lost inside it. The need to have it in a more finished state where humans, who might connect to it, have a chance to, competes with my neurotic sense it's still not true. Still not right.

The need to have 20 years of self sacrifice and hard work amount to something more than navel gazing and things to fill your calendar up with wars ever against knowing most of life is just in the living and most of it doesn't matter outside your own physical lived experience of it. Mattering to others, isn't proxy for mattering. However much we like to tell ourselves it is. Likes and even deeper connections with the work, real ones, by others, does not change the math. We just want it to.

We just want anything to matter, and people telling us it does makes the lie go down easier.

Safe ground is that the things choose to focus on, to spend time on, to do and live decide the quality of your existence, and that is how you make choices, not on the external, or the promise of some salve for an aching heart.

What moments make you feel most true? Do more of that.

I never feel so fully myself and nothing demands I meet it more fully than when an image works--being deep into a flow of writing is a close second--but the pull to stare at an image, to get lost in it, when it is right has always been the single thing in my life that never wavers. The gaps between those moments can be large, and confusing, but when it clicks i know that's what I was doing all this shit for. The world doesn't matter. Likes don't. Love, loss and lonesomeness are just abstractions. Light and color. tone and texture. The graceful physics bound relationship of highlight to midtone to shadow hum with harmony and gesture completes the circle.

Looking, alone, in the deep cold of winter prairie, at an image that works, that is true is at least while doing it enough and chasing those images, trying to uncover them, birth them, disentangle them from clunky editing tools, from barbaric raw defaults, is a passion that never tires. It's only when i have to explain myself to myself, leaving experience and entering the intellectual, that things get messy.

And to please both parts of me, the seeker and the autocrat, I have to have some bullshit external built to justify the borderline crazy passions. Which is how we end up here, issuing decrees.

For the autocrat, I will make a second newsletter. He can make a bunch of rules about how things need to be done. He can enforce order and faux meaning. He can play to the crowd, or scowl when they ignore him. Whatever.

For the lover of tone and color I will just keep searching for truth. For honest light. For balance in my tones. but maybe with more of an eye to resolving things. More effort to decide when good enough is actually good enough, when truth is there, however imperfectly and locking in that decision until I'm compelled to make more images, not making them because making them is what I do.

I told you clowns this was therapy for me, not a newsletter for you.

Last bits:

• I'm currently thinking I will shut down my print shop next month. Alberta Beautiful costs $500 a year and while it pays for itself it seems the bulk of folks who wanted prints over the years have got them now. Sales trickle post instagram, and printing is fantastically time consuming So if you wanted prints, you should get on that, in case I pull the plug.

• I recently read The Burnout Society. Wow. What a book. it's more academic paper than book, and tiny, you can read it in a couple hours but it will take months to sort through the ideas it left behind.

• Like I said above, I am going to start a second newsletter for older pictures. I have no details about that yet as I'm only now being told I'm doing it, by me and me and me need to have a talk about how.

oh look, it seems our hour is up...

You may read this as a departure from my normal subject matter. Fine. I have no idea who I am or what this newsletter is about. It will be as chaotic as the ever changing blacks of my heart. Most of this was fleshed out prior to getting sick with stupid covid, and I wanted to post it before it lost its wind.

THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE.

Time is the only asset you have any purchase over.

but, the moment you start thinking of time as an asset it immediately begins undermining you at every turn.

is that worth doing? is it worth the time?

you have no idea what is worth doing or worth the time until you spend it and even then it can take years to fruit.

you have no idea about anything. honestly. you know this.

There is one part of the world you can make sense of if you work at it that's your own internal state at any given time. It's not as sexy as a large online following. It's not as distracting as doom scrolling or leveling up whatever we're supposed to level up on this week. It won't fire those sweet sweet dopamine hits like picking online fights does.

we all want those sexy uses of time. to hell with developing ourselves into something more than a gangle of reactions.

I've come to see time as a microcosm of the primary human problem, and also it's answer. Our awareness of the passing of time against the ever looming end of us finds us in a (presumably) unique position in the world and at some point we all come to value time above most things, however good we get at squandering it on close call traffic accident reels or obsessing about how marjorie from middle school owns a lambo now.

I spend a lot of time watching oven spring timelapses lately. literally watching bread rise.

Who the fuck even are we.

but also, have you seen that magic when a loaf just explodes out of nowhere. Flour. salt. water and some yeast.

explodes.

wanting all the time, all the time.

The problem with valuing time (while not valuing time when it's past our threshold of forcing ourselves to submit to the demands on our time) is abstractly that time is more valuable than literally anything we can use it for. You get a fixed, but unknown amount of it. How are you going to evaluate anything as being worth what could be your last day in existence. You're not. Choice fatigue will kick in an you'll end up just idling on instagram.

Concretely, the problem is more subtle. Time is an additive ingredient not a product. Time is used to change the state of one thing from another. That's literally all time does. All. of. the. time. Being an ingredient not a product means it somehow has less value than the finished product. You see the rub? You don't go around printing your printer test sheets on wafer thin sheets of pure gold because you don't waste the precious on the banal and trivial.

but recall, you are a dumbshit on your best days; boldly wandering around proclaiming to anyone who will listen you know what is banal, or trivial, or even, gasp, what is important. yet, how's that working out for you?

yeah, i know.

The pandemic set you back. your back aches. your girl won't stop sleeping with all your friends. Those interest rates. That boss that just doesn't see your value. Those clients.. oh those fucking clients with their ridiculous ideas and demands. The dog has the shits. Again. The world is sorta, you know, burning, or freezing. Depends which twitter you live on. Oh god, don't even get me going on the pointless texts. so many, yet somehow not enough. Don't they know we're trying to pretend to have a real connection? how can you pretend with this few empty texts about nothing? The illusion demands you commit.

Life, it turns out, is ever chaotic, ever not what you thought it would be, ever less and ever so much more than you can handle. Simultaneously. it's like the magic of the oven spring rise. It's so simple yet so astoundingly shocking to find yourself in the middle of, you know, actually being alive.

sensory. overload. but you know, with a side of for the ages existential boredom.

How quickly we can alternate between feeling we have the entire thing figured out and we're pumped for the next thing to not being able to decide what to watch next because like, why are there literally 80000 streaming services with 4,000,000 shows. no, seriously. who asked for all that in the first place. what reasonable person wants to have to work through all that noise to find the gems? wait for it.

Who has the time?

you do. schlub. mountains of it. heaps. buckets of time just like, spilling over the sides. you have so much time it's logically infinite time (to you). all you have is time. all you will ever experience is time. you will never not experience time. from the very beginning of you to the sad sack only 2 people logged into your virtual funeral (but six people liked it on facebook) end is time.

you have the time to grow from a child (you're still working on that. okay. you're only 39--what do they expect, really). you have the time to fall in love (you don't want hear my thoughts on love) and you have the time to learn that language, to read 1000 books, to fuck a thousand whatever you want to fuck, but like, get checked you whore. you can lose that weight, gain that phat ass. whatever it is the kids are excited about, you have time to do it.

I will refund your money if you run out of time.

try me.

You. problem.

So if you don't have a time problem what kind of problem do you have?

You have an internal state problem. It's not broad enough. deep enough. slow when it needs to be slow, fast when it needs to be fast. able to filter out noise and distraction, able to dial into the stinking heart of the reaches of human experience when it needs to. you have a you problem.

we all have a you problem. (this goes double for you white CIS middle aged people. you gross fuckers).

How we think about time, how we marshall it, not in an everlasting search for the next productivity hack unlocks the human experience. Allowing time to work on your life always changes your life. The human experience is dark and rich and deep and ridiculous. it's absurd and the range of experiences is so wildly varied and so unthinkably deep it staggers the mind. It's more than we're living in 2023. But we can work back to it.

There are a couple parts to this that are not prescriptive. Your own situation will determine which parts matter most and i trust your lizard brain to key in on what you need to read right now. I trust my inner gecco to just write words and hope they tie up nicely in the end. I'll be in the corner, over there while the words fall from the sky and deny I ever thought any of this if I can't bring this together in the end.

You need a time toolbelt. I need to trademark that immediately and sell an online course.

In this magical toolbelt, mine is neon green like my jeep, you need a few things. They're at hand so no need to fire up amazon. Bezos has no quarter where we're going. You need the ability to slow time down when you need time to slow. You need the ability to speed time up when you need time to pass. You need the ability filter noise and listen to your internal voice about what you want to do (not what you don't want to do) and you probably need to come to terms with the fact that nothing means anything. Like, at all. None of it. Not a lick of it. zero. meaning.

Figure out those four things. figure them out hard. figure them out every day when you get up and again the next day and you might have a chance to enjoy, or feel enjoyment during this short, brutish, isolating and bleak existence.

I know your heart got broken. i know it fucking aches. I'm sorry. No one cares. We're all fucking aching. no one cares. Everyone is busy running from their own demons. They don't have time to fight yours. true story.

Like i said, these 4 things are not prescriptive. I can't draw you a map on how to develop them. Your relationship to time is unique. Your relationship to yourself is unlike anything in the living universe. get it together. Don't get it together so you can be a master of the universe, or get a blowy in the bar bathroom, or amass a trophy following. Get it together so every single fucking second of your time on this planet doesn't feel like torture. Doesn't feel like punishment.

Get it together so the one relationship you have your entire life is a good one. The one you share with yourself. the one you take in the bathroom when you have the squirts. that's love. or. being trapped in an abusive relationship and dragged around places you don't want to go. Who can say, really.

Why do you want to have control over these four things in relationship to time? a few examples to frame this for you.

Slowing down time.

The most lost of lost arts, circa 2023.

Digital life has nearly entirely robbed us of any silence, peace, quiet or slowness. I'm not slow cooking here. I'm not saying walk to the bathroom slowly. I'm saying watch your relationship to how time passes. Make note of when time expands around you and crawls by. Minutes become achingly long. Usually we experience this in the wrong ways. You're waiting for a bus in -35 weather. you're having a root canal. Someone wants you to read their blog. (cough).

But it also happens in the quiet of the night, when you pause a few moments between pages of a book you're loving. It happens when you just turn off the tv in a fit of I can't find anything to watch. It happens when you're waiting for someone you're really into to show up and you have no idea how the night might unfold. It can be anticipatory, positively or negatively. Those are spontaneous, and the trick is to learn from them, how got your internal state there so you can enhance the choices you're making to bring yourself there more often. This is the space of depth and richness. Free from the volume and pace of our daily lives we can meander in ourselves, our ideas, and our experiences. For me, it's reading. If i stop reading books (yes, those paper things) I tend to stop being able to slow my mind, and time down. Reading while getting random texts is not reading. And maybe that's part of the recipe to slowing time down, for me at least, is focusing on one thing and one thing only, but not something deeply passive like a tv show, or actively engaging like a video game. There can't be goals, or you trip from slow time to flow time (flow time being when you're immersed to the point time seems to fly by without you being aware of it).

Slow time is one of your most valuable creative, and stabilizing tools. It allows you to feel, even briefly, like there is indeed enough time to go around. There is indeed time to learn, to grow, to waste on pet projects and curiosities that have no clear value which often end up forming the bounds of your life. Slow time is where your internal voice speaks up and says hey, shit for brains, what if we made hand painted t-shirts for our friends--without that inner accountant shitting all over your ideas by reminding you time is precious, you're going to die, and oh by the way, you're going to die. Even brief side trips into positive slow time can really change you. That grounding we are all missing as our online lives tear by as we watch in wonder, is a salve for so much of our problems. You won't get control of this easily, or quickly, or permanently. But try.

time so fast you can’t outrun it

Fast time is the inverse. Fast time is when you actively speed things up to help you escape from overhwelm. From a deeply bad situation. From quitting something and needing time to move ahead. From your mother dying a horrible death. From the ache of having not achieved any of the things you thought you'd achieve (hello, middle age). From the regrets, which pile on from week to week, but only when you're lucky enough to be alive and have real choices to make. Regrets don't form in a vacuum. Even regrets are a sign you're engaged in your life. It's when the regrets stop you have a real problem. But, that's another topic. Fast time is holy shit my life is horrible I need to jump to the next part of it, like now. This is a hugely valuable skill we use all the time, burying ourselves in mindless things hoping our lives will change. The shift here is to know you're doing it, why and planting a couple seeds before you begin to let them germinate while you speed through to the next part.

Filtering noise so you can hear your own voice is the most critical life skill you can try to develop. We often feel cut off from ourselves. Making choices, doing things, hell living entire lives that aren't ours because we can't hear anything but the silence, in the silence. Training yourself to hear that part of you that often isn't very loud, and often sounds ridiculous, is vital to finding your ground. To having a base from which to carry out all your other plans in life. It's also the voice that spurs creativity, whispers ideas in the night, notices patterns and problems and comes up with solutions. It's your internal guide to life and not hearing it, because the noise of the world, or the noise of your feet running from your shit is so loud it gets drowned out is a recipe for suffering. Find some slow time. Take a listen. Then filter enough noise out to actually do some of the things you hear. try it.

The last tool is to be able to wrap your head around, and selectively turn on and off, the idea that nothing means anything. There is no meaning. Even no meaning means nothing. Your life is a biological exercise. physics. chemistry. You'll experience the most wonderful and disastrous things interspersed between soul crushing mundanity and when they finally plant your ass somewhere it will have all been for naught. If you're outsized in your contributions to human kind, perhaps some bits of you will carry forth. You'll leave photos that matter. A book. A painting. Your kids won't be horrible fucking self involved assholes ruining everything for everyone. But all these things will be washed away in time. That's just the truth of it. You mean nothing. I mean nothing.

But that doesn't change the fact we're here. Alive. Feeling. Experiencing and while we're here, alive and experiencing we can shape and change what we're feeling, what we're experiencing and we can limit our suffering, increase our euphoric moments, we can have a bland, or magical life. It doesn't matter that nothing matters.

This becomes a tool when you can turn it off and on. Often we care too much about everything. We are too attached to outcomes outside our control. Too vested in our own successes or failures. Too traumatized by the things that happen to us. Too waylaid by life and it makes us smaller, less vital and less alive. It's not the load that breaks you it's how you carry it and learning to actively hold space for the idea nothing matters, your stupid little life doesn't matter, can free you in times of need from the weight of whatever has you pinned prostrate to the floor. It feels like her picking him over you matters. it feels like starving your mother to death matters. it feels like putting your best friend down because the dumb dog went blind and senile matters. It feels like everyone is doing better than you matters. they're all so shiny and sparkly and what you feel isn't that, and that feels like it matters.

nothing. matters.

not your old man whaling on you your whole childhood. not your wife leaving you for your best friend. not being published in the NYT, not falling in, or out of love. Not becoming a master of the universe. they are just moments in time. things that happened. Things you made happen, or happened to you. They are gone now. behind. over. let time wash them clear. fucking let them go.

When you use this tool, in combination with listening to your internal voice (or muse, or inner stinking child, whatever) and make time variable to your needs, you'll see parts of yourself you never knew existed just explode out of nowhere. You'll be that beautiful oven spring but in a meatsack form that coughs and farts at the same time (yes, i see you) and you might even figure out what the hell you want to spend your time on while you're here.

if all that seems like too much work, your phone is right there. go ahead. open twitter.

Jangling around inside what still works of this body are a few upcoming posts. Half done, probably over-thought and none ready for the rather surprising 1 year anniversary of Wide Open. Even now, too many years on in life, I marvel at how complex time can feel. A year which literally liquified into nothing when looked at, gone so quick as to almost not have happened, yet when inspecting it closely had some real twists and turns (Friends Episode: The one where dad almost dies). I'm sort of in my wheelhouse when i'm caught between feeling nothing and everything at the same time. The year felt inconsequential to me. a throw away. But looking back I wrote a couple good things, things that suggested to me maybe there's still some spark for words left in me.

I wrote 25 posts in this year and I want to share links to my favorite three. They were early on before many of you found your way here and perhaps you haven't found them yet. After that, a few rambling thoughts and some dark contrasty (fall always gets me back here) shots from the abandonment of summer in this derelict wasteland I call home. Oh, berta..

3 good posts from Year One:

• This deeply emotional post was my reaction to a sudden major health event for my father (he lived) and not having untangled my ongoing malaise (I did). They combined for what I think is some good writing. I spent too much time on pacing, layering and structure but it worked.

• This post was about realizing how you can become something you never meant to be by accidentally assuming goals and internalizing other people, or cultural, or group standards.

• Is it a coincidence all three of these posts I recommend have women in the cover photo? Probably not. the emotions tend to flow most freely when combining women and cameras. We will not be getting into that today.

Some Photos of this transition into winter

If you don’t know, winter here in the great north, in Alberta Canada starts on July 1st and runs through to.. okay. It’s not really that bad and this year we’ve been given a nice long lead up. It still hasn’t even snowed but I went down with covid and while I regained control of my own RNA the world moved on without me so it really feels abrupt.

Some thoughts and more things you should read:

I’m pretty much still mr. covid brain at this point. my thoughts jumble together. words magically become other words and I don’t notice, so this post is light on words. Light on thoughts. I won’t trouble you to follow the threads I can’t untangle for now. But, I do have some other things I’d like to recommend if you’re looking for more reading.

Too Much at Once

The Turn for Home

Read more

3 years ago · 12 likes · 8 comments · Joel Rhymer

I could recommend nearly any post from his recent trip. I don’t want to call the photos simple, because they aren’t. But they are simple in what they ask of you. There’s a feeling here on this substack that reminds me of the book “The line becomes a river” 1 though they are quite different subjects. I think about simple, honest, undemanding but offering lots if you want to dig in.

Nostalgia Kills

Goodbye Twenties

I wrote a version of this post and then I read Anne Helen Peterson’s essay “How Millennials Grew Up and Got Old.” So I obviously had to make a few tweaks (and you should go read her essay). While I do think that having your entire identity based around when you were born is a tad silly, the…

Read more

3 years ago · 4 likes · Maybe: Tyler

A scathingly honest—though circling—post about his experiences in the online and offline social worlds of his 20s. No one can say what’s accurate or impression here, but parts of it will ring true regardless. I think often about how isolating the 2020s have become. A convergence of technology, the pandemic, and ideology seem to be pushing us all into a new human space. Not a good one. Tyler is a friend of mine, he’s a handful and his posts are wildly long but you won’t accuse him of hiding behind a facade.

Aaaaaand with that I wrap up my first year on substack. it’s good to be back writing. It’s not good to be back feeling bad about not writing enough. About not feeling up to creating something worth reading very often, but taken on a long enough timeline you build out a good base of words. I hope to keep on that timeline and I’m glad to have you weird folks come along for the ride.

It was sort of a bad idea.

Day 9 now and still testing positive but feeling better. My brain is entirely turned off, still. I told my daughter when you’re this handsome, who needs a brain.

I managed to get out for a couple hours in the quiet bustle of the end of September. It wasn’t "magical” or “breathtaking” it was a very perfunctory display of a range of muted colors, mostly yellow—Alberta has nearly no red in fall—and the shrubs, grasses, bushes, all were ready for their winter rest.

I sort of prefer the perfunctory fall. it’s less in your face, but just as moving. Everything cycling into the next stage of life, quiet cues driven by night time temperatures, and daylight. That is magical.

I hope you won’t mind this second letter so soon. I have a serious medical condition that prevents me from sharing september photos in october and so it was wait till next september or force feed you a second letter.

At bottom, you’ll see one of the first two loaves of sourdough that didn’t entirely fail. I made them the day I came down with rona, and somehow somewhere managed to snap some pictures. I’m late to the pandemic on the bread front, but hopefully with some panache.

okay.

I had the images for this post mostly together before. They may feel different. Long time followers might reasonably argue they feel more like what they expect from me.

fair enough.

I’m being ravaged by our good ol’ spikey headed friend right now. the one that’s airborne, but not, exists but doesn’t. you know.

third time is the charm.

I had a bunch of writing done about the flow of time, how we can alter how it feels, how we can manipulate the speed at which it passes then, well, i got sick. And given how many words I’ve had to retype just now—it’s probably best to leave those words for another post.

What I do want to say, before sharing a sense of September with you, and it could well be just fever induced, dragging my corpse around trying to cope style thinking but something I’ve been fixated on this past couple weeks since my last post—which, literally feels a thousand thousand years ago—is simplicity.

I long so deeply to be free of my own whims. To be able to settle on something and stick to it. To trade the possibility of Raw photos for the finished, ready to post simplicity of jpgs. The idea that you could make some pictures and not still be editing them 10 years later seems like a sort of heaven to me.

I am tired. of rehashing the past. of laboring against my own inability to just accept something is done, and realized its full potential—which often times means it never had a lot to begin with.

I’m tired of over-reaching. over working. over trying. Tired of wondering what is around that corner. even if I have a toque that says “what’s down that road”.

I’ve written previously about the emotional weight of 20+ years of photos, of wanting them to mean something more than they do and maybe being dog sick, and tired, and crawling into a missed fall, with the door of september closing without me having been able to get out there and meet it has me in a sort of mood.

i’m not known for my self censoring. for good or bad.

So these may feel less.. refined. less fine art. less something. but they for the moment felt like I feel when I’m out there and the air is cool, the sun sets all too early, harvest dust covers everything and we dance around the long coming winter in our minds.

we’ll figure out when the fever breaks if I should have made a post.

see you kids in october.

As I am wont to do come September I am folding into myself and using the gradual slow down between summer frenzy and the brief fall flurry of color to brace myself emotionally for another hard winter.

This winter however I look forward to continuing to learn watercolor painting and hopefully sucking a lot less at it so i have, at least, something i’m aspiring to. And, already my mind is on the next year’s seedlings and garden. Which is to say, my birthday which came and went quietly on the 30th of August has always been the dividing line for me between summer and fall and I cross it violently every year meaning to or not.

As I’ve been waiting to write this next newsletter I’ve been thinking—and being wildly frustrated by my life—too much. I feel this immense pressure come the end of the summer to share everything worth sharing because I know myself and I know as the world changes I won’t allow myself to share those August photos till next August, and only if i remember they exist, and don’t have an over abundance of new August taking precedence.

I’ve been picking through them trying to decide what is worth sharing, and what is worth forgetting, what might be ripe for purging and I had a minor realization that I often share images I think you’ll like, keeping the ones I like for myself because I don’t feel like I can explain to you why I like them, or why they are good and I suppose I don’t trust they are strong enough to explain themselves.

I stumbled into some older photos last week and realized how many never get shared. Tens of thousands of photos being carted from hard drive to hard drive, year after year and it set off some weird feelings about why we even bother to do this at all. Strange to end up there, after starting with I have too many images I want to share but September minds are a thing a part.

This feeling has been rolling around in my head for a bit and every night I tuck myself into bed and spend a few moments with the above painting, which is hanging on my wall, a couple feet from my bed, before putting out the light. This is unusual for me, and I can’t recall a photo I’ve made that inspired me to look at it so much.

I have boxes of prints. Printing has been a serious passion now for years and I spend a small fortune every year on frames. I have frames in front of frames in front of frames because I’ve run out of wall space but not the desire to see the prints. However, this one accidentally good painting has brought in something new to the mix and I’ve been chewing on what that might be, and if it’s why I keep my little stash of photos you’ve never seen, and if it’s part of why we make things at all.

Some of you may audibly guffaw when I say this painfully obvious, but easily forgotten point about the things we make. Some may give up on me entirely. Fair enough.

We make things because the things we make please us.

Fantastically obvious, but something I might have forgotten along the way until I lay still for a few moments and let my eye roam around this painting, and let my mind roam around the ideas and feelings it brings up. The stories of what might be happening around the figure in the car. Where his life is, as he pushes forward.

Some part of my deeper nature finds pleasure in this. Not the pleasure of a torrid sexual escapade, or beating a video game, or making a client really happy. Not the sort of pleasure we feel after a good movie, or even a good book. it’s not an accomplishment or an achievement. No goals have been reached. No new experience is being created.

it’s more like the pleasure of the sun breaking through the bottom of storm clouds and casting every edge alight in a wash of gold. Or the pleasure of sitting in your garden and just appreciating how fantastic nature is, the living things exploding in every direction around you. The molds, and fungi, the bacteria, the insects, the plants and critters all coming together for a few moments to make this little patch of food. Each tomato or zuchinni sort of a work of wonder rather than a transient thing we traded some cash for.

So often, today, in the social media era, we make things and make things and we forget the point of making them is to create this feeling inside ourselves of pleasure. To have artifacts of memory, or place, or feeling blending with the physical (yes, the god damned physical print still matters) to make us feel something richer, deeper and more real than the plastic, artificial world of the internet, media culture and everything else around us.

The painting is so very not great. but it’s effective enough to work and it’s hanging there like a torture device promising more paintings I might somehow luck into, but can’t seem to force my way to. They emerge from the process of making the work, over and over and to tie this back to the little photos I keep mostly for myself, I think those also are perhaps not the best photos. Perhaps don’t have all the elements they need to work in a social world, where the screens are small and the attentions smaller still, but I care about them for what they raise up in me when I look at them and to send them off to die against the ever scrolling wheel seems somehow improper to me.

Something is lost in this conversion.

This giving you photos I like enough, or that might thumbnail well. Photos with enough spectacle to steal your attention so you’ll at least see them. It’s a trade that isn’t working for either of us very well, honestly. You get less chance to see what moves me, and maybe be moved yourself, and I get a hard drive of photos which fleetingly touched something in me, and nothing more.

Such is the nature of audience building. The insidious thing we do even when we don’t meant to do, sometimes even when we clearly mean not to. validation is so soothing to the unrest of the mind, but it’s no balm like something that aesthetically touches us somewhere honest. We need not forget this.

For this moment, I’m convinced if I woke up with 1000 more subscribers tomorrow I would get less pleasure (though perhaps more opportunity) from that than I get for a few minutes each night staring at a painting and mulling and then wondering how I did that, and why everything I’ve painted since is literal garbage.

I think when we consider things the question should not be why do we make things at all, rather, why do we share the things we make? why do we need that external loop. I don’t have a resolute answer but my immediate sense is because we’ve spent too much time making things we only half care about and need the world to fill the other half up for us.

Of course, this excludes all the money stuff. The earnings off subscribers, followers, courses, prints, whatever you do to make a bit of money—or even a living. But to my mind, these are very different projects. One a business, which would do well to listen to it’s audience, and to try to shape it’s offerings and comms to find and keep connected to that audience and the other is a single person exploring the world visually, trying to create something out of nothing for hard to understand reasons, and very murky end goals. If you’re pretending to be one of those, while behaving like the other it seems frustration will follow you all of your days.

I’m not sure where I sit in all this, but I’d like to think more about it, maybe find a way to a second painting I like, and try to remember this stuff I share with you is meant to be me sharing things that move me, not things I’m guessing will move you.

to that end, here’s a smattering of images from august i enjoy. not well, sequenced, and probably not even properly finally edited but i want them out in the world.

—

and now having added the images.. I did it again. I put in a bunch of “I kind of like that, its worth seeing” images alongside the ones I really care about.

—

Till next week…

All the whimpering mute passions of this semi-apocalyptic dead-of-summer are closing, now. Night chills, light frosts curling tomato leaves, a litter of crab apples a fallen feast for that asshole squirrel.

shocks all.

every single year.

but if I’m going to get this post out I can’t linger in my pre-fall emotions.

The first year I can clearly remember the creative malaise of being past competent at photography was fall of 2011. A Feverish summer of falling in love with street photography come a never-stop-walking fall and I hit the wall. For some months I was wholly unable to see a photograph.

Looking back I see the street as trying to thwart what was coming and it worked. For a time. New cameras, new lenses, new places (for all you travel junkies) all work for a time. But time runs out and you find yourself back in the same spot looking at the world and wondering how you ever felt so in awe of it.

I’ve always thought hey, I’m a bit of a depressive maybe this is just how it is for me. Ebbs and flows, ups and downs. Darkness following light.

But maybe there’s more about our wiring and how we as animals must process information, at play, than we realize.

Having spent, now, over 20% of my life rolling down basically the same gravel roads, seeing the same structures, the same seasonal setups, the same wildlife, you might wonder how it is that at some point I haven’t quit, or relocated to a new place, or picked up a new focus.

I’ve wondered too and sometimes when deeply restless I’ve toyed with just quitting and being done with it.

This malaise had been growing season after season since 2020. Never fully letting me into the world I’ve always known as a photographer—which is seeing photos everywhere, all the time.

It seemed like after my mother passed and all the struggles leading up to it, somehow I broke.

As time passed, and regular markers which usually break up my cyclical malaise failed to have any impact—storm season, fall, hoarfrost and fog—I grew concerned I’d never see the magic again. 2020 passed. I made work but rarely if ever broke through. 2021 passed. 2022. winter of 2023 and into spring and while shooting regularly and making work I liked I still felt disconnected.

and then one day, I didn’t.

So what happened and why? and can we use this experience to help burn away malaise, perhaps on demand?

I think… maybe.

Let’s try to get a handle on what the malaise actually feels like. Maybe you’ll see some of it in yourself, or remember times you’ve experienced it. It’s not complex. In fact it’s so common as to be hard to catch when it’s happening.

You imagine going out to shoot and you think I’ll go to X spot and before you’ve completed that thought your mind fills with all the previous images you’ve made there. All the times you’ve seen it before and serves you up a general sense that you know everything there is to know about it. It’s worked out. Sorted. Filed. Done.

But, being a committed creative you soldier through this—btw, this very thing is part of depression too. When you project yourself into the future you cannot see a positive, or imagine wanting whatever is in that future—and you go to spot X, and lo’ what is before you is the farm you knew was there. The road you knew brought you there. That ditch, that shed. it’s all there. Bob’s farm. his cow’s.

And you see those Things, You see the shed. You see the ditch. The farmhouse as discrete things you’ve seen a million times before. When you project out in your head to where to go next you project blocks of land in every direction which you know, full of things you know. Houses. Roads. A nice donkey. but you can go over each part of it identifying the contents of the area and none of it, not a bit of it, in your mental map, excites you.

sound familiar?

It should because that’s how humans are able to function in a world of never ending complexity. We abstract away a billion details into concrete Things which makes them more manageable for our brain. We literally cannot function if we don’t do this.

Read this quote:

“There are then two ways for memory to destroy imagination: by retaining too many abstractions (thus failing to perceive fresh detail) and by retaining too many details (thus failing to perceive abstractions). The point is worth repeating because two beneficial categories of forgetting recur in these notebooks: in one, a mind has become too attached to its concepts or thought-habits and needs to drop them so as to attend again to detail; in the other, a surfeit of detail clogs the flow of thought and must be winnowed so as to see the larger shapes of concepts and abstraction" - Lewis Hyde1”

When I read the above quote years of trying to make sense of my own experience immediately clicked for me. The thing I’ve called the malaise is quite literally being unable to see the FRESH details of a particular thing in front of me, and seeing only abstractions built on experiences and memories.

bob’s farm, so to speak as bob’s farm. Not bob’s farm as it really is, ever changing, entropy and life fighting it out in real time.

The meat of life is in the details and so too is the beating heart of photography. One of the magical things photography can do is use specificity (details) to create a feeling of the general (abstractions) which get coated in nostaliga, or romance and turn bob’s farm into an idea about a type of life, or time of history.

But it always starts with the details, and each new picture starts with the fresh details.

For years I used light as my escape hatch from caring much about details. I shot light not things. I shot darks not places. if the light was good, the subject was good. Even with that escape hatch if you’ve ever suffered through a modern summer of smoke, or haze, or muted light. or a bleak grey winter. or a rainy non-descript spring or a fall which lasts all of two days you’ll know that we must also let the things matter or we will hardly shoot at all. Waiting around for good light, or the right light, will leave you sitting around holding your camera a lot more than using it.

So what brought me out of the malaise?

What brought the details back into focus, and pushed the abstractions, ideas and notion that I know all I need to know about this patch of prairie out of the way?

Painting. Bad Painting.

When, earlier this summer, I started learning to paint I found myself thrown into deep waters with no skills or soft landing spot and I found it both invigorating and terrifying. To thwart the terror I’ve approached it as a skillset like I approach all things you need competency in before you can begin to imprint your own vision on. Just doing the work. just painting a lot of bad paintings and trying to understand how light and color, which i know so well through a camera work on paper.

Which lead me to start looking for paintings around me rather than photos. Light setups, or scenes that might translate to the simplification of a basic painting well. A strong focal point, mixed with an idea of place.

Which if you were paying attention to the above quote is exactly the balance needed to open your imagination and curiosity up again. The right amount of details, the right amount of abstractions.

Within a couple weeks I began seeing photos everywhere again and despite the horrible hazy light of 2023 I began making pictures I cared about again.

Probably more significantly, I completely lost the sense I knew anything about what was around me anymore. I knew the roads, but I couldn’t know each patch of grass, or tangle of weeds, or flowering bush. I got back to not being able to make it more than a few kilometers from home when I went out because each few hundred feet was another entirely new, and detail laden, entirely unique thing I’ve never seen before.

When we dive too deeply into the details we get paralyzed by the scope of details in the world around us and stop making things. This I think, is why sometimes traveling somewhere new at first feels magical then can become overwhelming. Everything is new, everything is detail you don’t know and have to work through. Which excites the mind right up to when the mind can’t manage the amount of new information.

When we get too into the abstractions, we feel theres nothing new under the sun, and stop making. This is the standard I’ve been shooting my own close world for too long and now it all looks rote.

Can this be turned on and off at will? Maybe. I suspect the solution to going too far down the abstractions road is to force ones self to find a spot of at least some interest and sit with it a while. Trying to focus on each part of it in detail, observing. Making discoveries. I think the rest will follow naturally once the brain has a new job it’s tasked with.

It’s subtle but if your brain thinks the priority is small detail, not simplification your experience of a place can be very different.

It seems invariably we cycle through these phases and given enough time, if the world and circumstance don’t force you too deeply into one side or the other you’ll right yourself eventually but maybe understanding these two poles we bounce between creatively will help you stay out of the ditch in the future.

I hope to follow this up, possibly before the end of the month with a photo post. August was a good month. Two good storms, a huge roll cloud with the best light i’ve seen in 2 years, a dense summer fog (seen in today’s photos) and some time with my old friends the longhorns. I’d like to share those before we ramp up into the frenzy of fall.