Writings

Artifacts and moments

Last summer, a concert by The National totally recontextualized the songs on the band's latest record, and made me hear the music in a new way. I got to wondering if photobooks are photographers’ ...

Being boring

The World Cup is boring. Novels are boring. Baseball is mostly boring. Anything that's not a constant highlight reel is boring.  So let us now praise these and many other things uneventful. It's w...

Victoria Williams, photographer

“Whitman has the photographer’s eye, but no camera,” says Wright Morris in his essay “In Our Image.” The (vastly vastly underappreciated, in my humble opinion) singer-songwriter Victoria Williams ...

Rescued from oblivion

“What we, or at any rate I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytel...

On cultivation

Over the years, I’ve had a number of friends who, after we’ve known each other for a while, have put it to me delicately that they don’t “understand” photography as an art form. Most of them actua...

The Sharpest Stake

This movie “Only Lovers Left Alive” is pretty good, maybe even great. There’s certainly worse ways to spend a couple hours than gazing upon Orlando and Loki. But it’s sticking with me not because o...