I’ve been quietly stepping back from social media, which is a big no-no as a photographer. We’re supposed to leverage these visual platforms to showcase our work but I’m tired of the circus—the chaotic flea-market environment and the relentless trends. I started by withdrawing from X/Twitter/Threads, then Facebook, soon I will likely abandon Instagram. I’ve been seeing more AI content and incendiary stories recently and it seems to me like the harm outweighs the hope, and that the newsroom mentality of “if it bleeds, it leads” has infested the digital space. The content relies on emotional reactions to drive profits. If they can make you angry, or feel like you’re missing out, they can make money. Remember, if something is free, you are the product. But I admit to the tension. Because of the massive influence social media has on our culture, this is where people congregate and share their latest projects. And, it is good to remain visible as a photographer. It is good to stay in touch and see what you all are doing. There are other platforms for sharing visual work and some even have their own social elements, but those are usually secondary to the primary mega media platforms and are often overlooked. So there is not absolute right or wrong here. You have to follow your gut. Yes, this will absolutely harm my virtual presence as a photographer (if people don’t see you, they can’t hire you) but it will help me be more present—which is a life thing, not a career thing. And that’s how I’m measuring these decisions. Am I winning back my own mental space? Am I freeing myself to create more of what I love? Am I exposing myself less to sewage and brain rot? Those seem like big wins. I really do love photography and writing, and sharing that is a gift. I just wish it wasn’t sandwiched between political memes and fitness clips. I wish we weren’t willingly stepping further into the current of commodity and expedience. Anyhow. I may hang around here a bit longer, and I’ll be on Substack too for a little while. But maybe not too long.

They say to write what you know but Oliver says “A writer’s subject may just as well, if not more likely, be what the writer longs for and dreams about, in an unquenchable dream, in lush detail and harsh honesty.” And so you could say that writers or artists or people—who obsess over their dreams and dance with their maybe ghosts—you could say that loneliness is a kind of knowing. That those familiar with aching are the best at describing that kind of hunger and those who see an absence are capable of tracing exact shapes in the air.

Notes on Deconstructing: Part 2 I should have taken a more chronological approach to the gradual unwinding of the cosmic yarn that balled around my identity as a kid—a way to keep track of the fraying miles of answers, the memorized scripture, the theology, the hymns we sung in that Baptist church with the white pews. So, friend, I apologize for the messy floor, with the tangled timeline and patchwork memories, and I apologize again for being overly compliant and non confrontational and apologetic—both now and then—which I think is the way some of us survived the sharp contours of religion. It was no small thing to hold eternal damnation and paradise in hands that could hardly hold a crayon. In all my earnest unraveling, it turns out that the confusing dimensions of the fabric were woven into me and so to continue in this strange craft would mean to be undone entirely—spools of parables and prayer like carrying my own guts, exposed and baking in the sun. And this is popular now, I understand. People are commodifying existential crises—“deconstructing” is a thing. But I was never inclined to climb onto the wall of a gallery for inspection in my nakedness. When you grow up in any kind of church, you never quite get comfortable in your most raw form. And I was never smart enough to sell my obfuscation and fist-shaking. I confess I am not sure I could ever tug at that last thread that held me together. And so you may call me a liar. You may say I never truly gave up the faith of my fathers and you may be right but I can tell you I did have a conversation with whatever was inside or outside of me or whatever was sitting next to me on the floor of the shower, about three decades in, when I said something like I just want the truth—I would rather have that than any kind of manufactured God—and it’s hard to tell when you’re in the water but I may have been weeping as I took a knife to the last strand of twine holding me to the ocean floor.

Notes on Deconstruction: Strange as it seems, I never saw much of God at church. The ritual seemed to be by us, for us—like a book club for the lonely or the socially inept. Or like CrossFit. And the only time I remember much of an encounter that could be called spiritual was when a man recited a poem in front of our congregation which was, I’m sure, not ready for the liminal space that spoken word creates. Because religion needs the hard corners of absolutes to build on, and we assume the universe is made of a familiar geometry we can build into houses of worship. God is more or less cubic in our frail attempts to grasp the divine, like a grade school drawing of the family with heavy lines and simple shapes. So poetry, outside of the Psalms and outside of the blunt lyricism of hymnals, is a potentially dangerous art—maybe shrouding subversive messages in the tangle of wordplay. When the knot of certainty unravels you might realize that the only thing holding it together was itself. And in the vapor of unknowing did I begin to have any assurance at all.

I’ve finished a book, which is good. Although it was short. I’m starting to think I should read short books. Short stories. Because my tendency to drift is a real threat to consuming literature and anytime an author writes something powerful I chase the thread like a cat through a house with many rooms. I’ve been known to start a book and if the prologue opens with a remarkable quote, I stagger off to discover who wrote it, and why, and which book was it pulled from. Recently I opened a book about photography (Robert Adams, Beauty in Photography) and the first paragraph mentioned three names I was unfamiliar with so I spent the next hours researching each of those. So, yes, my curiosity is a tumbleweed, a tangled mass of short and long inquiries and fuse-lit synapses, carried by a temperamental wind. But I prefer that to the manufactured chaos of being told what to think. I’d rather wander the desert, chasing tangents of truth and mirages of meaning. At least I am my own. And I’m not sure why that matters to me, except it does. And it has permeated my journey since childhood—this need to shun the convenience of answers others arrived to, the fabrication of certainty. I am made not for it. And this week I peered down the manhole to sniff at the raw sewage of algorithms flowing beneath our feet to learn what we must be mad about, and who to be mad at. And, predictably, it was you, or them, or someone else. So you’ll have to forgive my inconsistency (hobgoblin!), and my naivety to the calculus of our mayhem—the arithmetic of our value and what we value and why—I may be a threadbare witness to our unraveling but I would rather chase truth around the desert than grin at the gradual decay of our wonder, and reverence, and civility.

It’s 4:30 in the morning and I’ve parked in a vacant lot just south of the boardwalk in Myrtle Beach. I had already driven the strip with my windows down, letting the heavy sea air pool around me, drifting through the hazy atmosphere of empty but brightly lit arcades and food vendors that imply frenzy and noise and sugar. As I step from my car a single lurching man bellows across the lot asking for a lighter which, as anyone knows, is the breaching tool used by those who haunt the last corners of night teething for victims, prowling the edges of the dark for who don’t belong. I shout nope and take long purposeful strides toward the only population I had seen at that witching hour, which huddles within the neon haze pouring from a greasy 24-hour pizza house. Young people also occupy the night but instead of shadow, they flutter like delirious moths to the light, as their bodies bend into the road, lithe and at ease in the world, slumbering across the insistence and straightness of the traffic lines. I am no longer young enough to hedge in with their hazy vigil and the lighter man has skulked into one of the many dark shapes protruding from the looming hotels so I return to the car and drive off somewhere else to catch the sunrise but I’m thinking about the language of fire and how that is used to cross the threshold between parallel worlds that sometimes collide just before dawn climbs over the Atlantic like a bear from a den, and how the language of ignition follows us at all times and in all places—even when we believe ourselves to be safe and alone. Of how the world is made of tinder and is drenched in gasoline and each of us is a matchstick, struck against the rough skin of existing.

The body is not always willing but when it is I try to get to the silver-draped coastline before the rest of the world and it’s hurry and fervor come for us and at 4am it’s even early for the early birds so I sit by the lifeguard tower and the moon is whole enough so I can see every night-cloud that drifts in from the expanse and when I look north the lights on the strip are breathing and shimmering like earthbound stars running off the same grid powering the vacant arcades and the pizza shop feeding young lovers who are winding down while the world tips into morning. But when you sit alone in the dark by something vast you may feel small and you may wonder why you are not afraid to be in the bosom of immensity and beside its breathing and it’s because this is more a part of you (you a part of it) than everything else—and I do mean everything else. The bent metal of cities and groan of joints as we wake for mortgages and the implied urgency of being. But there are a few dark bodies now as some russet splashes across the horizon and people are in the water, on the sand, each part of this ritual where we wake the day together, willing more color into the heavy blues of night. I guess what I’m trying to say, at the risk of being gratuitous and overstated, is that we’ve done a disservice to sunrises and sunsets because Hollywood and Hallmark and travel sites use them like props so they might seem contrived or basic when we are always moving and flitting but my friends, these are anything but irrelevant and the lie is in what we believe matters, and in what we believe. And whether you believe in everything or nothing, the way dawn breaks over the Atlantic is worthy. And since you are made of the same stuff, you too, are worthy.

Note from my journal: It can be strange to move in and out of love with some kind of art until you recognize the enduring quality of love is a long companionship—a kind of porch-rocking familiarity that sits through years of summer storms until the time spent is evidence enough of affection. My fascination with photography changed over the years and nearly extinguished under the burden of a gig economy when I reluctantly joined the wave of people busking their photo skills for a few dollars. I don’t resent that. Despite the single-sided paper and envelope, those bills carry a lot of weight and I could see the mailbox sagging during particular months so was grateful to have the opportunity to work more. But the cost for paying those bills was the romance — for lack of a better word — with the art. The work was tethered to market demand that shifted like a wildfire from blushing and overexposed weddings to farmhouse-chic family portraits to volume-driven portrait work. Anytime leverage is imposed on imagination, the wings get clipped. At least for me. After years of this, I retreated to let my camera cool off like a gun barrel after a shootout. It sat for quite a while, like a relic from a world war that I would dust off from time to time to make sure it still worked. And I waited until a small hesitant curiosity grew inside. Insistence, might be a better word. I would itch for the opportunity to explore a new place in the morning light, sit with a new person, dig for a story, shape the light, and turn the dials until a new image became it’s own small eternity—beautiful and elegant simply because it was not required.

“And miles to go before I sleep” so I measure the distance by the storms that drag their teeth across my hill and by the length of shadows reaching from the towering oaks and by the long winnowing hand of time.

we wait for storms to roll in like front porch philosophers tasting the wind shear forehead slick from the way summer rests on your skin (like monarchs on a blade) and the clouds are strange and restless and wonderful the way beautiful things are before they break open.