i’m having some ideas about memes today.

but first, i hope yall are feeling so good. wild times here. fixed my truck, again. prepping to terminate cover crop. our baby is walking, and is one year old, and kisses each of us on the lips to wake us up.

just a couple weeks ago i finished teaching in an MFA program. i taught a class called studio seminar and loved it. the incredibly complicated morality questions of graduate art degrees at for-profit colleges put aside (just for a moment), it felt clear to me that this is the type of teaching i am best at… to my own detriment, i suppose.

i left the trimester, though, with some new feelings about pedagogy and image theory that i thought i should write down. my feelings, somehow, led me to a surprisingly clarifying conclusion in my own studio practice—and maybe helped me figure out why i’m making deepfried memes in the studio today.

i started teaching in BFA programs and grad-level workshops in 2022, and have felt pretty sad about them. i’ve been lucky enough to have nearly full control over my syllabi, but watch as colleagues and mentors assign On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others, or even Sekula early on. being so soaked in image theory every day, watching these ancient ideas of cultural image production metastasize through students’ brilliant creative brains is like watching an anarchist fall in love with Hillary Clinton. since starting to teach i thought it made sense to replace Sontag with Azoulay in my curriculum, but i’m not sure if that’s enough.

i partially credit Sontag for my sustained interest in photography, but the fear that comes over students as they internalize things like “to photograph people is to violate them” is numbing. students who were in high school during woke 2 being confronted with the very real, horrifying history and power that cameras hold does not seem like generative pedagogy. students are so smart. of course they’ll decide to turn the camera (gun?) around and point it at themselves—it feels important for us, their professors, to try to throw a stick in the spokes of neoliberal guilt-based consumer-object-worshiping art projects. i feel so anesthetized by photobooks in particular that gain popularity by mining their maker’s biographies.

fast forward a few years, and those students quickly become peers. they start showing in galleries and selling to collectors. having studio visits with museums, going to grad school, and actively producing content (eyeroll) within the culture of commodification that they have learned to value while performing critique. This phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to photography; obviously, all artists' identities become commodified branding and the unique pov brought with those identities are treated as product differentiation, often to the i wonder if, with this foundational theoretical background, it becomes much harder to make culture-shifting art. of course we get a flood of disappointed art critics and theorists—i’m thinking of Hito Steyerl’s work, Catherine Liu, the very fact that Doomscroll is in the Whitney Biennial, New Models, that Brad Troemel even exists, and Dean Kissick’s article. while i was teaching this summer, we had a visiting lecturer come and express loud disappointment to the entire class for making “identity-based therapy-art”. that doesn’t feel like a fair accusation if we, professors, are assigning the neoliberal doctrine that values work made from a position of guilt. oppression is such a constant under our contemporary american systems, it feels unsustainable to simultaneously demand performed guilt and power from culture producers.

i’m trying to not get too hauntological about all of this and keep my soupy new-parent brain away from Mark Fisher’s fears… but interacting with academic art spaces so much seems to require it. it seems like in the mid-twenty-teens, when i was in undergrad, this mode of neoliberal culture production felt freeing. as cultural interests turned to the micropolitical, mythologized artist biographies, and the reparative, it seemed like the self-portrait (metaphorically) became the most powerful piece of protest someone could make. ~~~taking up space~~ was everything.

this, perhaps, is specific to the strange (and increasingly boring) corner of the art world that contemporary photography occupies, but amazingly, this idea still seems to ring true. instagram-popular photographers making work that centers performed realities of their life seem to still get the pat-on-the-back from the neoliberals that have made up the gatekeeping vanguard for so long. as the revolutionaries work to reshape, it seems like artists are lagging behind, stuck in the mud of gaining validation from our oppressors.

i guess i am back to Mark Fisher in my thinking here. or Derrida. lost futures seem to be playing out so clearly in BFA and MFA programs that even Fisher’s ideas seem to be victim to themselves (Capitalist Realism has a knowyourmeme.com page, lol), and in my experience, the slow cancellation of the future has not been slow.

something i need to think about more is why some of the art students that i’ve met in the last few years are interested in what i might call a neoliberal, self-mythologized, self-reflective mode of making. some have told me that it feels like a position of power to show the world their therapy, but i wonder if it is more from a position of fear? much of the art i have seen in galleries and museums lately has not even come close to lighting a fire in my brain. so many press releases for books and exhibitions feel generated by LLMs that were fed on buzzwords from 2016 black-square-posting instagram comments.

in my experience, this noise seems to become brain-rot to the radical and gospel to the privileged liberal only desperate to prove allyship to the disempowered by opening the gates that they keep. I buy Catherine Liu’s depressing identification of trauma being capital, but to inject some optimism into her idea: those in my political friend group no longer blink twice at the conversion rate of that capital. It seems clear that those attempting to wield trauma as weaponry are unintentionally validating the right, alienating the left.

~

the last piece of this puzzle that i’ve been thinking about in my own work is how this is all coalescing aesthetically. the main lens-based tools i’ve been using for the past year have been a point-and-shoot film camera, discontinued polaroid film, two VHS cameras, a 2 megapixel body camera, magnetic cassette tape, public access tv stations, and a 4x5” field camera. i know that Fisher would tell me that i’m interested in these tools as tools of obsolescence (not to be confused with obsolete tools, because the distance of the tool from the subject it’s pointed at is the content… i.e, tape hiss as a reminder of the downfall of capitalism, lol).

but i don’t think that’s quite right. I’m not alone in this interest, that’s for sure. the images that TrueAnon makes, Këkht Aräkh album covers, ethel cain music videos… there’s something more poisonous than nostalgia here. it feels to me that there’s an important cultural swing that is missing from these conversations about this type of aestheticized hauntology, i wonder if it’s about vulnerability. the neoliberal identity-based cultural stagnation is a problem. Dolly Parton’s death feels relevant here too. there’s probably an argument to be made that camp is all tied up in how culture values or disavows the importance of vulnerability—i’ve been wondering if Dolly’s real magic(k?) was that we all trusted her. queers, rednecks, trillionaires, unionizers… that level of trust can’t be planted by industry.

performed vulnerability doesn’t feel that different from other performed aspects of identity to gain cultural capital. This reminded me of what it seems like Catherine Liu’s upcoming book might be about. a few months ago i emailed her asking if she would do an interview with me for a longer book-length project about some of these ideas, and one sentence she wrote back stuck with me:

“you seem to be casting the burden of imperialism on photography itself. I am not into liberal approaches to technology that ‘center’ guilt regarding politics and aesthetics.”

this, of course, is sort of the opposite of what i was thinking. but it did get me wondering about how, if at all, i was unknowingly letting my own neoliberal guilt-centering affect the aesthetics of my work. was i accidentally performing vulnerability?

this idea sent me back to a long-term project i had made about memetic magick. if memes could be used as magick (particularly non-chaos), then the meme might actually be a piece of content that holds a true and deep (non-performative?) vulnerability. i grew up with an internet that treats irony with a power akin to the divine. the vulnerable were subject to the ire of the edgelord.

so here i am, baby. trying to make memes with obsolete tools.

love y’all.

d

oh hey, by the way, my sweetie and i are about to leave to do a traveling residency for a month. we’re going to the south. want to hang? recs?

i almost forgot about this newsletter, which i promised myself i wouldn’t do.

but gosh, i don’t know how anyone is able to hold onto these efforts to push work out into the world while making it, bless you for real. my sweetie and i bought an old church this winter—it’s unbelievably beautiful. it will also be the first time in my adult life that i have lived in one place for more than a year. special.

this means i can finally have a real committed garden. because we have this divine 9 month old who is attached to me for nearly every hour of the day, it’s hard to find time to plant, but after 8:30pm bedtime i get to go nuts. i got a little impatient this winter and planted nearly 300 tomato seedlings in March. after a little facebook marketplace selling to make room i’m thrilled to report that nearly every seedling is now in ground. not just tomatoes—i’m particularly thrilled about the paw paw trees, luffa, dozens of moonflowers, foxglove up the wazoo, tobacco, and a literal ocean of herbs.

anyway, as much as i’d be happy to change this substack into a garden blog, i wont.

art things i’m thinking about:

::: i’m making a movie, but hate editing.

::: i’m reading two new verso books, trevor paglen’s how to see like a machine (which i wish i wrote so far) and claire bishop’s disordered attention. it’s sort of embarrassing to be reading the latter so far—i might only be able to read it at all thanks to my relatively new adderall prescription. disordered indeed.

::: my book, what the rain might bring, sold out. but i’ll be selling some from my own collection, stay tuned.

::: i have some very exciting shows coming up, but now’s not the time to lyk.

::: going on a travel residency with my sweetie and bb in september. we’re touring midwiferies. if you know of any places we must go to, please get in touch <3

::: going to be in pmw at sitka’s ecology residency for a month in november/december. i love oregon.

::: i think this is one of the more coherent lectures i’ve given. if you want to hear me talk about memetic magick:

::: bricks and minifigs puts nathan fielder to shame.

::: we have a sauna, come sweat.

::: i’m teaching a workshop in a couple days, only a few slots left!

::: i made a music video.

::: i have some pics in a comme de garçons book, lol.

::: and even more pics in the program book of the opera walküre

::: i got a alumni grant from yale for $400, whatever that means. i bought film with it.

::: i’m going to lift the volvo next week. so hot.

::: my new website is going to be sik.

::: starting to teach grad school next week. i’m writing this instead of finishing my syllabus. i really have to do it so i’m going to stop writing this.

::: i’ll write a whole post about this project i’ve been working on soon, but here’s a preview:

prayerbooks.me

i’m wondering if it might be exciting to put things other than updates on this thing, so i’m going to give it a whirl.

today is friday, the 13th of february, and the birthday of the legendary willet knight.

i highly suggest you take a moment to look at will’s website here. will died nine years ago, but not before leaving a wildly influential impact on me, and i would argue, contemporary art.

will was the founder and owner of the spiderweb farm, a barn and workshop up the road from where i grew up in vermont. at his farm he housed orb weavers, funnel weavers, grass spiders, and all sorts of mysterious eight-leggers who each crafted their own unknowable shapes. will would spray paint the webs and adhere them to black paper, selling them in frames for $40 since 1978.

will called his farm the “original website”. which melts me into a pile of mush.

nearly a decade ago i got interested in taking this childhood icon’s brilliant move into a photographic space. what if i attached these webs onto film and printed them in the darkroom? in 2021 i made hundreds of these and wallpapered a wall in them for a critique at the yale mfa program. one of my heros, teju cole, asked if i removed the spiders when i used their webs—an act of colonialism, no? take a living thing’s home to commodify it?

i didn’t remove the spiders, i only used abandoned webs—but it got me thinking. image making can obviously not be separated from its fucked history of ownership, but what if i tried? all the sudden spiderwebs became the camera to me.

some creatures hunt to survive

some creatures forage

spiders, though, seem to be fishermen. they set a trap and wait for their calories to tell them that they’re ready to be eaten.

were spiders dodging the inherent darkness of authored photographs that susan sontag warned me about? what if the camera wasn’t a gun, but a net? does that cause less harm? or is it only a gesture?

i stopped removing spiderwebs from their sites, and started using them as photograms. i would hold 4x5” sheets of film as close as i could to them without touching them and flash the film, printing those sheets in the darkroom.

spiderwebs as subject, perhaps you know, have become something radically different in popular image-making in the past few years—these tiny masterpieces tragically seem to have become over-saturated symbols of instagram art; fine-line proof that you spend time in the woods and reject critical content.

i mourn the state of these life-changing shapes, honor the true designers of them, and kneel at the alter of willet knight for offering them to me. hbd.

<3

it’s a new year, and i very much like that. ‘25 was tripped out, in both bliss and darkness. thankfullly, mostly bliss—a bliss that has every indication of staying with me.

happenings as of late:::

::: the last four months with osa rue have been extraordinary. i’m not sure what the gender neutral term for maternity leave could be (eternity leave?) but it’s been heartbreakingly special.

::: i’ll be ending that eternity leave to start teaching at maine college of art again this semester. see you in the big city.

::: i’m also teaching one of my fav classes ever at icp. it’s called Documentary Myth: Telling True Stories of Fake Things. it’s a grad level workshop, and starts in late feb. you can sign up here. come play.

::: my sweetie katie and i are going on a residency late this summer, a traveling one with Brooklyn Darkroom. We’ll be going to alternative birth spaces throughout the country, do you know of any? hmu

::: i’ll be doing a residency in the pnw fall of ‘26. i cant wait, it’s a real special one.

::: i have a handful of enormous peices in a v sweet show in my hometown museum called Vermont Vice, up now!

::: i’m in a siiiick triennial at the ICA in portland maine called lines/loopholes opening in a couple weeks. it’s only video work from me 0_0.

::: my book with tbw was shortlisted for the lucie prize! wild honor. there are not many left by the way, buy em while ya can.

::: speaking of what the rain might bring, my heart swelled so much the day after christmas seeing people get my book under the tree. bless, for real.

::: i’ve started working at the ellis-beauregard foundation residency here in rockland, maine. i’m very proud of the work we do, if you make art, i hope you apply. it changed my life.

::: not much is more embarrassing than this sentence in the history of humanity, but: I’m writing a book. it’s early days. i think it’s about contemplating why contemporary image making is stuck in liberalism and why photographers have such trouble making actually radical work. i’m mostly mentioning this here to hold myself accountable to keep writing, heh.

::: two brilliant portuguese designers made a little book about my creative practice a few months ago, and i must shout them out. they were so cool. Beatriz Florim and Joåo Ferreira, luv yall.

::: my sweetie katie and i are about to buy a renovated church for our family to live in. no joke. it’s wild. come visit. seriously.

::: lastly, and very excitingly, i have started a book publishing company. i’m so excited about it. i keep selling out of my own tiny runs of self-published books, and am SO thrilled about the lineup of folks who are excited to collab with me on their own projects published through this imprint. once i tie a few bows on things i will be sure y’all are the first to know. but for now, know that it is called PRAYER BOOKS.

don’t change that channel.

here’s something i said in that sweet book that beatriz and joåo made:

i’ve started an email list for studio news. i hope as a way to send those i love and admire updates about things i’m making. i will rarely invade your inbox <3.

happenings as of late:::

::: my sweetie and i had a baby, named osa rue, two weeks ago :)

::: i am in a gorgeous show at casemore gallery, open only for a couple more days.

::: i have a very large exhibition up at PhFEST in italy for the rest of the month, giant lightboxes. so fun.

::: i have a new self-published riso book out called bathers of my friends at skowhegan getting dirty and getting clean. you can buy from me here and at dashwood. i only made 100 and they’re almost gone. all proceeds go to aid for gaza through The Sameer Project.

::: i’m part of a lovely book project about haunts and new england with some extraordinary friends. pre-order here.

::: my friend and i bought a piece of beautiful land in midcoast maine and are building such beautiful things with it. it’s named hell llc.

::: i wont be at the printed matter fair this weekend, this newborn needs us! but i will be at the icp book fair with tbw books on october 4th and would love to see you.

::: i’ve been so touched by the recent press about my new book, What The Rain Might Bring. lensculture, lenscratch, yogurt, american suburb x, the guardian, el pais. also a very lovely interview with jenna crowder on page 29 of & magazine. here is Elle Pérez and I chatting about it with Miwa from dashwood.

::: i’m taking this semester off from teaching in person to be with this new angel, but am teaching online at ICP. sign up if you’d like! i’ll be teaching full time again at maine college of art and design and university of southern maine in the spring.

::: i made the album art for the legendary band Old Saw, available for pre-order here.

::: i did a whole bunch of lectures this past year—at bard college, palm press, vermont center of photo, penumbra foundation, millay arts, bowdoin colege, icp, and a few photo fests. i feel uncomfortable about videos of them being online- but i’m really proud of them… if watching one of my talks might be interesting to you, lmk!

::: i was so thrilled to do a commission for feeld, in which i wrote and photographed about changing bodies, my own disappointing body, and august.

^^^ a couple of weeks before birth, collab with Kathryn McElearney during our residency at hewnoaks.

here’s what i said about my work for the upcoming book about haunted new england:

luv <3

d