Personal photography
Photography requires something other arts don’t: you have to be there. A thing happens, a camera records it, but you (or your apparatus) must be positioned in relationship to something real. Without that presence, there is no photography.
This might seem obvious, but it’s actually an important constraint that sets everything about photographic practice.
Out of cycle post. This is something I’ve been noticing and I’ve been trying to articulate for a while. I’m not sure it’s completely clear in my head yet, but here goes nothing.
When I started writing on Substack, I was already moving away from pretty pictures. I’d been getting interested in people more than landscapes, in human presence more than nice light falling across empty scenery. But I hadn’t yet articulated why that shift was happening or where it might lead.
In today’s near infinite storage space, it’s easy to lose track of the photos you take. You stop seeing any of them because there are so many of them. They become wallpaper, a continuous scroll of undifferentiated moments that mean nothing precisely because they were supposed to mean everything.
I have cameras I haven’t touched in months. In fact I have cameras I’ve never used. They sit on a shelf, visible every time I walk past. Some moralists would tell me to sell them. To clear the clutter, to free the mind. Be honest about your actual practice. Stop kidding yourself.
They’re plain wrong because they’re looking at it from the wrong angle.
Photography sells itself as preservation. We take pictures to capture moments, to remember what happened, to hold onto people and places before they disappear. The promise is that the image will keep the past accessible, faithful, ready to consult whenever memory fails us.
That’s not what actually occurs. What happens instead is more complicated and more interesting. Photographs don’t preserve experience. They create scaffolding for reconstruction, and nostalgia is the primary material we use to build with.
Some of us maintain that gear doesn’t matter. And technically, we’re right: a camera won’t make you a better photographer. But there is another side to the debate.
Photography typically tries to stop time. We capture moments, freeze them, extract them from the flow of duration. But there’s another approach that interests me more: using photography to make time visible through its effects. Not the moment itself, but what happens across years of moments. Not the pristine object, but the object after it’s lived.
Is this what New Year on social media looks like? I’ve never spent New Year waching social media before. Substack is new territory for me. But something immediately stands out this new year: the remarkable uniformity in what photographers are declaring they’ll do in 2026.
Like me, you’ve probably carried both phones and proper cameras through countless streets, events, and gatherings, and the difference in people’s reactions is stark enough to make you question everything we think we know about privacy and consent in photography.
I’ve always tried to understand things: how objects are built (I was the kind of kid that wanted to understand how his toys were made), how knowledge works (that led me to a PhD), and what makes me tick. When I started photography, that also became something I looked at to understand its mechanisms and how I relate to it.
That is why I started a newsletter on Substack. And it created a strange and unexpected feedback loop.
