Taking it Apart

January 15, 2025

For a while, maybe a decade or so, I’ve had this feeling that photos alone are not enough. Or they’re not as powerful as they used to be. As someone who fell in love with photography in high school and spent most of my life as a professional photographer, this is a hard idea to accept. From an early age, I thought that photos would be my life. I’d just keep shooting and looking and shooting and making pictures. And over my lifetime, my pictures would get better. My work would become more potent, more powerfully distilling an idea into a single, perfect image.

Starting out, my camera gear trajectory was a familiar one, where I felt like I needed all the lenses. I needed all the lights. I wanted to be prepared for everything, and believed that the answer was usually more gear. Add to that the pressure to have backup for everything to make sure that a big budget shoot wouldn’t be compromised by a single piece of faulty gear. As the saying goes, “two is one, and one is none.”

So while I was not as gear obsessed as other photographers out there, it was more gear than I could schlep around on my own. For the bigger productions, I needed help from other people. I paid excess / oversize baggage fees and rented vans. I blew my back out more than once hauling this stuff all over the country / world.

Then I reached a point where I started to wonder about all this gear. Things looked overproduced and overlit. What’s the point of all this visual complexity? Wouldn’t it be better to do more with less — to work with 3 lenses instead of 6, to set up 2 lights instead of 4? It was a challenge that interested me. So I started unloading gear. I used less gear for the big shoots, setting up a bounce reflector instead of another light. Over several years, I followed this gear trajectory downward to where I could travel with my gear alone, without the baggage fees or the vans. It felt great.

So I kept going. Eventually I was shooting almost everything with my trusty fixed 50mm/f1.2 lens, which approximates how the human eye sees. I was very interested in this relationship, where the lens on my camera was like the lens in my eye. I started shooting more with available light, then using the post-production not to enhance, but to make it feel more natural.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was on a path to getting rid of my camera altogether. I was taking pictures of sidewalks and rays of light that I found unusually beautiful. I shared these pictures with others but very few people understood or appreciated them. I loved them, but didn’t know what to do with them.

So I started adding things to these otherwise banal photos, in an attempt to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary. This was fun for a while, and led to some interesting projects. It also got me interested in using photography to communicate ideas quickly and clearly.

Around this time, the iPhone camera started to get really good. The resolution kept improving. Eventually it could capture raw files with even more latitude, and best of all, it was always in your pocket. I started shooting with my phone more, and using my camera less. To all the people that would ask me what camera to get, I’d tell them that they already own it. The iPhone is hands down the best camera ever created, because the best camera is the one that’s always with you.

The other effect that this had, was that it flooded our world with a million tidal waves of digital images. The iPhone was released in June 2007, and before long, photos were in abundance like never before. Aside from how this destroyed the commercial photo industry, it also made photos less able to hold our attention for long. Increasingly, I’d shoot images that felt great in the moment. Then I’d look at them a day later and feel nothing. They were just a few more drops in the onrushing flood. The still image was losing its magic.

This really messed with me. I’d watch in quiet sadness / frustration — everyone with their phones held up in front of their faces, recording another meaningless sequence of pixels to be thrown in the bottomless digital landfill. As Louis CK said so well, “everyone’s watching a shitty movie of something that’s happening 10 feet in front of them.”

I spent more time leaving my phone in my pocket, and instead using my eyes to try to “burn” images and moments into my memory with intention. I wondered about my future as a photographer — do I keep trying to make a commercial career work, while I’m losing my belief in the power of the still image? Ultimately, I felt like the writing was on the wall. While I still loved photography, it was going to be harder and harder to make a living doing it. The deliverables on each shoot were going up, but the budgets were staying the same, or going down. But most importantly, I wasn’t excited by images the way I’d been for so long. I had fallen out of love. And this was years before the current wave of AI, which is going to further skew this ratio in ways that are hard to comprehend.

So in 2020 I said goodbye to commercial work to focus solely on art. It was sad to say goodbye to a place that I thought would be my home forever — a place full of wonderful, kooky people and amazing, diverse experiences. It had been a wild, 20+ year ride, from my first photo internship at Powder, to my last shoots for Audi, Xfinity, ESPN, etc:

I wouldn’t trade those decades of work for anything, but it was time for me to go. Fortunately, I had always sold art prints, and had started setting this up more seriously in 2012, with my Alps // 40 project.

I went back to shooting film. I scanned the film and drew on them. I learned about presentation and framing, and hosted openings. I loved making the work. I explored my interest in printmaking, studying with some of the best at Anderson Ranch and in Japan. I even made a clock. I felt like I had reached escape velocity and broken free from the confines of the camera. I was in a new place where the only limitations were in my head.

While in Japan last year, I spent a lot of time studying and making woodblock prints. The tactile, analog experience of peeling prints off those hand-carved blocks is hard to beat. My time in Tokyo culminated in a body of work, Jungle Geometry, and a show, Genten, with my friend David — it was a great way to punctuate my time there:

But while walking the streets of Tokyo, I also took a ton of photos with my new iPhone 15 pro, which can capture 48 Megapixel RAW files. The image quality this little phone can capture is truly unbelievable. However, when I got back from Japan and spent time going through these thousands of images, I was having the same feelings from a decade ago — the photos didn’t feel special. They didn’t come close to capturing what I felt while standing on the street in Tokyo, awestruck by pure, simple beauty. I looked at the images over and over, hoping that this would change. I knew that there was something in these images. I just didn’t know what.

After many months of revisiting these thousands of images, I finally realized what needed to happen. I had to take the meaningful images — from the moments that had stopped me in my tracks — and I had to take them apart. I had to crack them open to see what was inside. To find the elements in these moments that drew me in…to explode them, to expand them into something that conveys the awe I experienced while making them. It’s started with an image of the train platform at Shibuya Station, something I was drawn to for it’s pleasing combination of color, form, lines, and texture:

For the last several months, I’ve been following this thread, and having a blast playing, exploring and building on this concept. It feels like I am tapping into something new, but also reconnecting with photography — my first love — in an exciting new way. They are not photos, but something that more accurately communicates the inner experience I had while standing on the streets of Tokyo. They are naturally evolving to be more complex, and with each piece, are getting me closer to an expression that feels true.

For now, I’m calling this project Expansion, and I’m planning to have a big opening this Spring. I’m also looking for a gallery in Tokyo to represent my work.

Looking back on the arc of my creative and professional path, this new project makes so much sense. As a high school newspaper photogtapher, I started with pure photography, then commerce pushed the complexity to where it was unsustainable, at which point my interests snapped back to a minimalist perspective, before flying off the spectrum and into space. So, after floating around for a bit I have landed on a tiny new planet that for now, feels like home.

These new works speak to my journey as a photographer, and continually finding ways to tap into the power of an image. They are also a reminder that the answers we’re looking for are usually right in front of us, but sometimes they are hidden from view. All it takes is a bit of courage to break a few things, knowing that the pieces can be used to build something better.