Category: Theory

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.

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.

When I was a kid, I read all the Foundation extended universe books. One per day, I was obsessed. Not just because of the story but because the first book hit me hard: individuals don’t matter.

As a viewer of photography, when I look back at the images that truly stay with me, they almost always contain something strange. A detail that doesn’t belong. A gesture that seems out of place. A moment that cracked the frame open. In short: the unexpected.