Burning Man opens this weekend, and HBO just recently spent four episodes trying to explain the event. It’s basically impossible to completely describe what the festival is like, since we all experience it differently, but let me start with one of my most stressful days.

In August of 2015, a couple of weeks before Burning Man opened its gates to the public, I hid my camera under a folding chair and went to get a plate of food. I was hungry and tired, probably really tired. It was hot. It was dusty. Oh, so dusty.

I was on the playa early that year with the Temple crew, for me, the heart of Black Rock City. It is built over months by dozens of volunteers, and it burns in near silence on the final night of the event (Sunday). It sits as a complete contrast to the chaos of the Man Burn the night before, and it always happens after tens of thousands of people have filled it with loss and things they needed to let go of. It’s also a place of joy and celebration, with weddings and symphonic orchestras.

By then, I had spent months immersed in the project, driving to the build site in Oakland from my home in San Francisco, filming interviews and behind-the-scenes, hoping to make a documentary about the people who give up so much of their personal lives to construct a building that lives only for one week. In the ethos of art for art’s sake, nobody was paying me to do it. Nobody paid for my Burning Man ticket, my fuel, or my gear. I just really wanted to tell the story.

That specific afternoon, we were having a camp meeting under one of the big tents when dinner was called. The camera was heavy, and I didn’t want to risk getting it dirty in the food line, so I tucked it under my chair, where dozens of people I had worked beside for months could see it, and stood up to get a plate. I know.

When I came back, my gear was gone. Totally my own fault, of course.

At first, I assumed someone had moved it somewhere safe, but I was wrong. The problem then became, if I reported the theft, the police on-playa would have just cause to search the whole Temple crew camp, and a search could immediately halt the entire build. Not to mention, potentially opening a can of worms by going through people’s personal belongings.

I was younger then, and I didn’t have the self-confidence to confront it all over a camera. I was navigating brand new territory by myself, finding my own independence and self-worth as an artist, and I was learning it all as I went along. The lead artist was still the most supportive person there through it all, but I don’t think most people understood what that theft meant for me, and the emotional impact it had.

Something shifted then, and the documentary ended that day. Of course, I admitted my own mistake of trusting the space enough to begin with, and I learned a valuable lesson about radical self-reliance out there. I never forgot it after that. I kept everything locked in my car at all times for the rest of the event and in future years. I still photographed a lot, but I stopped filming. A lot of the footage I had filmed was lost on those cards, and it felt like I wouldn’t emotionally and financially be able to continue.

Sony Pro ended up still featuring my photography work with a huge featured spread on their industry magazine at the time, so at least I got some recognition for my hard work before losing my gear.

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I have been to Burning Man fourteen times now. If I ever go back, it will be my fifteenth. My quinceañera, my friends joke. The theft is one of the worst things that ever happened to me out there, and yes, I even got dust pneumonia one year. I am starting with this story on purpose, not because I hold any resentments against it at all, but because everything I am about to tell you about loving this place is only honest if I can frame it with the complexity of the challenges we all face going through it.

To better explain what I actually lost that day, I should go back ten years earlier to the younger version of me who was brand new to San Francisco and had never heard of Burning Man.

I moved to SF in 2004, at twenty-four, after seven years in England. I knew no one in the Bay Area, but I had found a roommate through Craigslist to help me settle in my first year. She was an amazing woman, a goth, who would ask me to walk her cats on a leash through Golden Gate Park, and ask me for help putting on her corsets. She also soon introduced me to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and I knew I could trust her.

We would go to Sparky’s Diner at 2 or 3 am to eat curly fries next to the local drag queens, and all the other San Franciscans that made me fall in love with the city so quickly.

At some point, she looked at me and said: You need to go to Burning Man. I think you’ll love it. She might not have known it back then, but she changed my life.

I honestly had never heard of it. This was before iPhones and before social media, in a version of San Francisco still cheap and strange after the dot-com crash, a city full of artists and all my kind of weirdos. I fit right in. I walked into Amoeba Records just a few blocks away from where I lived, and bought a physical ticket for something like $175.

That was it. I was going to Burning Man.

My first burn, as best as I can reconstruct it, was in 2005. I say it that way because after fourteen years, they all kind of blur, and I have almost no photographs from that era to check against. But Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast that August, and I remember learning about it on the playa through word of mouth, because there was no cell signal in the desert then and no other way for news to reach us. Memory is unreliable, but I was fascinated by how quickly everyone assembled to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

I had originally planned to go alone that year. Then a coworker at Pixar named Daniel needed a ride, and somewhere on the drive northeast, listening to Joni Mitchell, we went from co-workers to something deeper, and his camp of queer men adopted me for my first burn. Daniel still jokes about the version of me he used to see around the studio, barefoot, pierced, hair dyed, dressed like the London club kid I had been for several years. We have been close friends for over twenty years now, and I so love that we were strangers just before. He would be the first of several burners who became part of my family and would transform my life in so many beautiful and positive ways.

Here is what I love about the arrival. You veer out of the single-lane road from Gerlach, and the car drops onto the dusty, unpaved playa floor. Eventually, in the rightmost lane, there are small signs staked into the dust, and as you crawl toward the gate (please always obey those speed limits), they spell out lines written for that year’s theme.

Then a volunteer greeter pulls you out of the car and hugs you like family. You ring a bell. And then, because it is tradition for first-timers, you lie down in the dust and make an angel in it, or roll around on it, and the dust rises around you like puffs of flour. It covers everything immediately, and you register its unique smell. That smell will become a core memory for the rest of your life.

People ask what Burning Man is about, and I never have a good answer. But in dust we trust.

[Side Note: There’s a good chance you will get stuck in a major traffic jam at the entrance, sometimes for many, many hours. Congrats. You have arrived]

We got there on a Sunday at the gate opening (they open earlier these days), when the desert was still mostly empty. Most people came on Wednesday in those years, so for three days, the city was just its builders. You could hear hammering everywhere, some bass in the distance, and the desert wind making it feel like everything moves in slow motion. It’s oddly cinematic.

On one of those first days, Daniel and I biked into the open playa and found an artist named Kate Raudenbush building an installation. We didn’t know her, but we said hello, admiring her piece, and soon after, we were helping her build it. She has been one of my favorite playa artists ever since, even if she doesn’t remember this encounter.

That experience showed me immediately what Burning Man is about more than anything I had read until then: it is a city of dreamers and doers, of people who like to say yes.

My mornings also became a ritual I kept for years. Center Camp sold coffee then, one of only two things money could buy in the entire city (ice being the other one), and I would bike over early while the all-night people drifted home, buy a cup, and sit under the great canvas roof reading the local newspaper Piss Clear (it’s called BRC Weekly now) and talking to strangers, listening to the flags flap in the wind through the ceiling above. I love that sound.

Center Camp doesn’t sell coffee these days, so that ritual doesn’t exist for me any longer. My morning coffee is at my camp, or in the myriad of camps across the city that gift it throughout the week.

I did not photograph any of it at first. For those first years, I deliberately brought no camera at all. The photographer in me mourns that now, but I also feel those unrecorded memories are why the place got so deep into me. I hung out often with one of the official Burning Man photographers at the time, the Brazilian photographer Sidney Erthal, and his work inspired me to start thinking about bringing my camera eventually. We’d go on many adventures at Burning Man, laughing ourselves silly, so I owe him a lot for my own creativity on the playa.

Thank you, Sidney.

Almost every year after that first burn, I helped build something. I’ve done art installations, led theme camps, built art cars, helped with pieces of Center Camp, and even worked on parts of the city’s own infrastructure. For several years, I was among the small number of registered drone operators cleared to photograph artists’ work from the air. Most years, I arrived a week or two early and left after the crowds did. In 2015 and 2016, I spent more than thirty days each year on the playa.

My favorite part has always been the early build, when it’s quiet and all about work, the city barely exists above the dust, and the artists and builders hammer their lives away, and the bug infestations arrive. By the time the gates open and the bugs are dead, I usually feel I’ve already had my Burning Man. The event week becomes about me releasing the work, slowing down, and watching strangers experience it without knowing I touched parts of it.

2016 was the year that changed me most. I was freelancing in San Francisco and running out of steam, in more ways than one, already commuting to Petaluma to help build that year’s Temple, when a friend on the crew told me I should go work with an artist named Dan Sullivan on a project called Catacomb of Veils. It was a queer-led group in San Francisco behind the project, and I was feeling very out of place with my community at the time.

I trusted her, so I showed up to the first day of the build, and Dan and I ended up spending nearly every day for months on that project. We drove around between Petaluma and San Francisco buying silk, blasting music in his car. We sat over cold brew in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood where we lived, sketching, joking that we should make the pyramids bigger, and then, week after week, actually making them bigger. The crew became the closest thing I have to family in this country, and the build became the vessel for everything I was carrying that year: a breakup and the uncertainty of my financial stability.

I honestly can’t believe this project was already a decade ago.

After it burned, a few of us stayed behind, dragging magnets across the desert floor to pull screws and metal from the ash. We were completely exhausted, sunburned, and coughing. Leave No Trace is always very easy to talk about, but it's brutally hard to do at the end of the event, and we take it seriously. We didn't look great after more than 30 days out there, that’s for sure, but we knew it had to be done.

That year, we had the most intense of storms during build, destroying a big chunk of our project, and at some point, I was crushed under the weight of a wall and injured my shoulder. Ironically, exactly when Sidney was visiting the site. For longer than a month that I was there, I only had three days not working, and most of that time I spent it sleeping. I even missed meeting with one of the most important people in my life, a friend who had gone for the first time with another group. I was so completely burnt out that the two times I tried to find them, I didn’t. And I was asleep when they came to my camp looking for me, but my friends didn’t even know I was there.

The year I gave the most of myself to the playa was the year that almost broke what’s most important in my life. I learned a valuable lesson that year about managing priorities and taking better care of myself through projects like that. It has become a core part of how I even approach the insanely intense crunch times I would later encounter in film production, once again, after moving to LA.

Boundaries. What a great life skill to have.

At one point, close to the finish line of the build, photographer Brian Sullivan brought his wet-plate tin type setup and captured the most magical photograph of our crew. You can barely see us or the pyramids we had just built, but that is why it’s so remarkable. We lost one of our main crew members soon after, our beloved Crowe.

We all look like ghosts in this image. It’s like we are all still with him in some parallel, very dusty timeline.

Looking back, I guess I was attending so often because I had a great thirst for creative output, and I also needed somewhere to process both my grief and my burnout. Building beautiful temporary art with other people turned out to be the most comfortable blanket I've ever found. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t pay my rent.

Burning Man Project talks about an annual arts investment of nearly $6 million, 95 percent of it supporting Black Rock City art through grants, heavy equipment, and services. This current year, the Honoraria program awarded $1.3 million across 75 projects.1

Those numbers are important because they can make a big difference for any artist dreaming of creating, but in no way do they cover everything. The vast majority of the roughly 400 installations on the playa in a given year are self-funded. Someone always has to pay for all the metal, all the wood, all the shipping trucks, the food for the crew, and the whole cleanup. It usually comes from community fundraisers.

The number of fundraisers we had to do for the Catacomb of Veils was pretty intense. My friend Ricky organized so many incredible community events in the city leading up to the burn to help us fund the project, and I honestly don’t even know how he did it. It’s my least favorite part of art building, the asking for money, but I also understand in many ways it provides avenues for people to participate who otherwise couldn’t. We even had dinners with tech investors, because that’s where a lot of the art money comes from in San Francisco.

Currently, published ticket prices land between $550 to $3,000, with $775 described as the price that covers the cost of producing the city for one participant, plus a $165 vehicle pass and fees.2 You start adding transportation costs, water, food, shelter, and camp dues, and it probably starts around $2,000. Add taxes and fees, and it rises once again. There’s no way around it; it’s an expensive trip, but there are low-income tickets available, which is a great way to help defer the costs of attendance. In today’s economy, it’s still incredibly challenging to manage it.

The whole event is also dependent on selling access to a city that its participants build for free, which makes it a pretty big contradiction.

Radical Inclusion is the first of the Ten Principles.3 It reads:

Every year, a group of volunteers works on the Black Rock City Census, and the numbers have been moving in the right direction.4 The city used to be 79 percent white a decade ago, and it has now become measurably more international and diverse. I have seen that change with my own eyes, in art from Black and Indigenous artists and camps from all over the world that simply didn’t exist when I started.

Like most queer people, I spent my childhood hearing I didn’t belong, and have spent my young adulthood looking for places where I do. What Black Rock City offered me, from the first hour, was a place where all the insecurities I had about myself, all of a sudden, carried no meaning. Nobody expected me to be anything. I could camp by myself or with a friend, join a build one year, or wander into the deep desert at any point, and the playa would meet me either way.

No one cared, and I immediately felt welcomed.

I was a drifter for many years, camping in different camps and different groups, between art builds and city builds. One year, I was working with the org to help build the city, and they placed me camping beside two people I had never met, Nate and Sonal. I spent that whole burn biking from fire to fire with Nate, talking about life and death and creativity until sunrise, or eating the amazing vegetarian Indian food Sonal kept handing me back at camp. They are friends for life now, and I miss them often.

That is what the city keeps providing: converting strangers into family, at a rate I have never seen anywhere else.

I have so many of these stories, and so many of these names that became an integral part of my life. Numerous random moments that transformed me and carry meaning every day of my life still. Like being stuck in my car during a massive dust storm, with Berta and Caroline, and the genuine beauty of the conversations we shared as we watched the apocalyptic dust outside tear through the city. Or a day spent with Travis and Ricky, aimlessly drifting through the city, visiting random camps and making new friends. Or dancing with my partner, Timmy, and our friends at the annual Whitney Houston celebration. Or being showered in a giant foam party with dozens of other people, while dance-drying to Pink Floyd. It’s all so ridiculously joyful.

There’s only one guarantee out there, and that is that the desert will shake you. If you can stay patient inside that, I promise it will hand you things you keep for the rest of your life. It has with mine. Learning to let go of expectations frees you up to belong.

And, of course, we have to talk about climate change.

Burning Man’s own 2030 Environmental Sustainability Roadmap5 estimates the event’s carbon footprint at roughly 100,000 tons a year, most of it from the harsh reality of moving 80,000 people and all their stuff to a remote desert and back. That is more or less the annual exhaust of twenty thousand cars, spent in a week.6

The organization has committed to making the event carbon negative by 2030, a deadline now four years away, alongside multiple goals of handling waste ecologically and becoming regenerative.

This progress is very real, and I have watched some of it happen. The Man has burned atop solar power for three consecutive years.7 The organization has piloted renewable diesel and renewable propane, integrated batteries into power grids, and kept expanding solar infrastructure across parts of the city.

On my last burn in 2022, I got a demo of one of the big solar arrays being tested on Playa. It looked incredible. The dream behind it of a temporary city of 80,000 running on a fully sustainable grid is the kind of engineering ambition this community genuinely excels at. Burners are notoriously resilient and resourceful. If any group of people could make a sustainable city, it is this one.

And as I finish writing this, a huge fire is burning in the neighboring communities. The Hawk Fire started Saturday northwest of Reno, and within a day, it had grown past fifteen thousand acres, uncontained, driven downhill by wind toward residential neighborhoods. Reno is one of the last remaining cities that burners use for collecting and gathering their supplies before heading to the desert.8

I keep editing this piece and updating these numbers, but as it stands now (August 25, 2026), the fire has burned just over 15,000 acres and destroyed more than 30 homes. Some containment began on Monday, and some evacuation orders have been downgraded, but thousands of people remain under evacuation restrictions or warnings. Officials are saying that the fire was human-caused, the third one near Reno in just two weeks.9

By the time gates open, nearby fires might still be burning, containment for some will hopefully be complete, and tens of thousands of people will drive to a temporary city through fresh burn scars, some of them hauling generators and fuel, all to celebrate impermanence. That is a huge thing to process. At least for me, living in California for the majority of my life now, and having seen the devastation of fires firsthand. I also know a lot of these communities survive financially in large part due to Burning Man tourism, and it would really impact them if the event ceased to exist. It’s an enormous part of the economy out there.

I know every city, festival, and film production I have ever worked on carries a footprint, but Burning Man’s is uniquely visible because Leave No Trace was never just a compliance policy there. It is the whole identity, and it is exactly why the question presses harder on Black Rock City than on any other festival: at a time when even our own government doesn’t admit it exists, Burning Man has to decide what it all means in the middle of a climate crisis.

I have never used generators or fuel at any of my camps for the fourteen years that I’ve been there. The only fuel I have is my tiny backpacking camp stove, JetBoil, that I use to cook my dinners, make oatmeal in the mornings, and brew some coffee. But I’ve also seen the amount of energy a lot of the bigger camps and art cars require, and what their participants expect for comfort.

The 2030 deadline for a sustainable burn will answer that one way or another, and it arrives soon.

My last burn was in 2022, the hottest year I ever experienced out there, my first from Los Angeles, and my partner’s first ever. I was working seventy-hour weeks on a film and arrived completely exhausted. I didn’t dance much that year. I was chasing sunrises and sunsets instead, biking slowly through the heat of the day, and did my best to show my partner the version of the place that meant so much to me: the quieter and deeper one, the one immersed in the community, and in random conversations, and in art, and in biking, and in movement.

I had such a special time with him, and I’m so grateful we went, even if it was just one short full week.

Since then, I have been on what I call a TBD break. What little disposable income I have these days, I’d rather visit or travel to places my partner and I have both never been to. Perhaps ironically, what I imagine bringing me back is my camera, once again.

Photography has become the center of my life since 2022, and the one challenge I still think about is documenting the build itself, when the city appears out of nothing in the weeks before anyone arrives. That’s the part of Burning Man I always loved most, and the part almost nobody sees. So many volunteers work through the heat of the day to create the infrastructure you see. There’s a story there.

The challenge is that the one job I can typically still find in the animation industry that sustains me through the year usually lands during the short summer months around Burning Man. And finances and health care always have to take priority these days.

There is a joke burners have told for as long as I have been going. Next year was better. People said it in 2005, when the city was less than half its current size, and I was making a dust angel at the gate. They said it after the iPhones appeared, after the influencers and social media joined in, after the mud burn, after every single year. They are definitely saying it right now, in the packing lists and Discords of everyone driving in next week. The joke lives on because it doesn’t quite make sense, like most things on the Playa, yet somehow it embodies everything you’ve just experienced.

My favorite hours in Black Rock City were always the last ones. Staying until Tuesday, after the exodus, when only the builders and artists remain, and the city is coming apart around you. My friend Michael and I would usually stay behind, sitting alone in the emptiness of our neighborhood, watching the last sunset and the last sunrise, finishing a last beer, reminiscing on what we just endured once again. It is one of my favorite memories of the playa. The wooden art has become ash. The streets are disappearing back into the desert. All the street signs are stolen. There is no Man to orient yourself.

The hammers are back.

You can see all the way to the mountains through dusty air that enveloped eighty thousand people a couple of days earlier and now holds almost nothing, and the whole year of work, all those grants and fundraisers, the endless arguments and the friendships, the tears and the laughter, the grief carried into the Temple and released thereafter, all of it has gone back into the ground as if it were never there. And it’s ready to slowly begin rising again.

I used to stand in all that emptiness and feel the most unforgettable thing. Gratitude, mostly. Saudade, really. For being alive, for being able to live through this improbable coincidence of a universe where alkaline dust can build a city for a week, and make it disappear days later, all while bringing people from over 100 countries to live temporarily in one of the harshest environments out there.

The only thing asked of us is to give space for our beautifully flawed, vulnerable nakedness, and breathe it all in.

Fourteen times, I watched the whole thing fade away.

Thirteen times, somewhere on the long drive home, coughing playa dust out of my lungs, I caught myself already wondering what I would build the year after.

Sigh.

It was better next year.

Many moons ago, near the end of production on Ratatouille, I had a shot that would not render.

I was part of the lighting department, and the film was using ray tracing, which at the time was relatively new territory for us. One of my shots required the renderer to do something nobody fully understood yet. Our characters were holding a glass of champagne each, doing a quick toast in the kitchen. The glasses lightly touched and separated. The glass surface had multiple layers, the liquid inside had a few others, and in the brief moment they touched, the reflections and refractions became problematic.

In simpler terms, the rays were behaving in ways we couldn’t predict, and the shot was impossible to render. I don’t remember exactly how long the render times were, but I’m sure they were in the hundreds of hours. For three months, the technical directors and I worked to understand what was actually happening inside that render, and we ended up getting there with a cheat created in compositing: projection cards and snapshots of each glass, layered carefully enough to give us refractions and reflections that read as real. At the same time, the technical team created new tools and techniques that improved the underlying ray tracing algorithms.

This particular shot was one second long.

Three months. Multiple departments. Technicians and artists gathered around a single second of screen time, because the shot had to feel right and because the studio valued everyone’s effort. It was one of the last shots finished on the film, and when it finally came up for approval in the director's review, I was in the main theater, and Brad Bird applauded.

I have carried that moment for almost twenty years, because whatever I understood afterward about what creativity in this industry actually is, I partly learned it there. Films are made of many seconds like that one, under the creative and technical eye of people who have worked together long enough to solve a problem none of them could easily solve alone. It’s an incredibly collaborative experience to work on an animated feature film. Sitting right at that intersection of art and technology and letting each side motivate one another was something pretty remarkable to observe.

This last Tuesday morning, July 21, calendar invites appeared across Pixar based on reports and stories I’ve heard. Reports put the number between roughly 100 and 150, most of them in production and operations, part of several hundred jobs cut across Disney in the company’s third round of layoffs this year.1

The same week, Toy Story 5 passed $950 million at the worldwide box office on its way to a billion.

I know what those calendar invites feel like. In 2023, one appeared on mine.

In 2023, I had heard layoffs were coming to Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, and I had a feeling I would be part of them. When the meeting appeared on my calendar with HR joining by Zoom, I knew before anyone said a word. What I remember most is the depletion. And the timing: the film I was working on, Wish, still had two months of crunch ahead before delivery. I was being let go and asked to give everything during those two months anyway.

I gave it everything, of course. I always do my best, no matter what.

I had been at Disney since 2019, first on contract and then as staff. On the previous film, Strange World, an enormously complex sequence I lit with a colleague was chosen as the studio’s official submission for a Visual Effects Society (VES) award. We didn’t get the nomination, but the studio put the work forward as its best. A year later, I was in a Zoom meeting learning my position had been eliminated.

I put those truths next to each other, not to argue that I deserved better. That’s not what I think about. I put them there because every artist laid off this last week is carrying some version of the same thing, and I hope they see it clearly: the work was good. The work was, in some cases, the studio’s own chosen best. The layoff is a business decision made somewhere far above the creative artists, and it genuinely measures nothing about the person receiving it.

Knowing that at the time did not make my own layoff hurt less, no matter how many times people told me that, including in my own layoff meeting. What follows the news is a process of grief and identity, and it is very complicated.

You replay years of conversations. You audit everything you ever said in a review, every creative choice you made, looking for the moment you might have sealed your fate, and the search is exhausting precisely because there is nothing to find. And having been on the other end of it, I can also say surviving a round is awful in a different way. You feel for your colleagues, you carry a strange guilt about your own badge still working, and you go back to your desk quieter than before.

I’ve been curious about this, so I dug deeper into it. What I found says that quietness is real and measurable. Teresa Amabile, who has spent her career studying the conditions creativity requires, tracked a Fortune 500 technology company through an eighteen-month downsizing and found that creative output in its research groups fell into a prolonged slump that outlasted the cuts themselves.2 I believe this. I’ve seen the emotional toll, the fear and insecurity that stay behind on teams that have suffered this kind of loss. The institutional and leadership trust that is so important in a creative environment disappears, and becomes very challenging to recover from.

Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk, found it to be the strongest predictor of whether teams learn and perform.3 A layoff is, among other things, a company-wide announcement that risk is no longer safe. And isn’t part of what pushes the boundaries in technology and storytelling this opportunity for risk? For taking initiative, giving honest feedback, and summoning ideas to make things better or more original?

And Wayne Cascio’s long-run studies of S&P 500 firms found that downsizing did not, on average, improve financial performance at all.4 The cuts damage the thing that made the work valuable, and they usually don’t even deliver the savings that justified them. I’ve personally always been curious about this, because with the further compressed schedules, and the greater overtime, I wonder how many cost savings actually happen.

I didn’t need the studies, of course. I watched it happen from inside, and anyone working in production and in creative teams can confirm these findings with their eyes closed. But it matters that the studies exist, because the industry keeps describing these decisions as efficiency, and the research keeps failing to find the efficiency.

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The scale of what has happened to this industry over the past three years is hard to comprehend, to be honest, so let me try to lay it out.

In 2023, Disney eliminated roughly 7,000 jobs company-wide. Mine was one of them, along with several of my co-workers.5 Pixar cut 75 people that spring, including a director and a producer who had been with the studio for decades. In May 2024, Pixar executed the largest restructuring in its history, letting go of about 175 people, roughly 14 percent of the studio, many of them former co-workers, friends, and longtime employees of the company. DreamWorks made two rounds of cuts in 2023. Netflix restructured its feature animation division, shutting down films in pre-production. This April, Disney cut about 1,000 more positions, and Tuesday’s round was the third already this year.6

In the middle of all this, in the summer of 2024, The Animation Guild estimated through internal surveys that one-third of its membership, around 1,600 people, had been laid off within a single year.7 That figure is an estimate produced during contract negotiations, and I want to be careful with it, but nobody working in this industry has found it implausible. Otis College’s annual report on the creative economy documented Los Angeles County shedding thousands of film jobs, with employment still well below where it stood before the pandemic.8

Against that backdrop, the box office numbers read as if they belong in a different reality. Inside Out 2 earned $1.69 billion in 2024 and became the highest-grossing animated film ever released. Toy Story 5 opened this summer to the biggest debut in the franchise’s history. The films are definitely working. Yet the people who make them are being let go in the hundreds.

I won’t pretend to know what the spreadsheets look like from inside the studios. It’s way out of my league. Streaming basically reshaped the economics of everything, and the executives making these calls answer to pressures I don’t see. But I know what the cuts cost, because the cost is the thing I watched being built for seven years in Emeryville, and for several years at other studios.

I was at Pixar from January 2005 to January 2012. What I loved most, more than the technology and more than the films themselves, was the way the artists in my department communicated. We worked together on project after project, every day of the year, and over time, we built a shared understanding of how to move ideas and knowledge between us that I have never encountered anywhere since.

When we were between projects, the studio believed in letting us recover, mentally and physically, from the crunch of delivering a film, and in creating the space for us to be artists. For us to play. For us to learn. We improved documentation, collaborated on short films, and took lessons. I had art classes, language courses, cinematography lessons, and Chinese calligraphy workshops. We taught each other how to become better artists and better lighters.

This full package is what made the one-second shot on Ratatouille possible. It’s what made all the shots possible. The trust between people who have solved a thousand problems together is the real magic of a healthy creative team, and it appears on no spreadsheet and survives no reorg. I genuinely believe that.

Ed Catmull, Pixar’s co-founder and longtime president, understood this better than anyone. His 2014 book Creativity, Inc. is in many ways a manual for it. He wrote that candor is the key to collaborating effectively, and he described the Braintrust, the studio’s mechanism of honest, often brutal feedback among trusted peers, as the engine that pushed the films toward excellence.

The book describes the culture I lived in, idealized.

Which is why the rest of the story matters.

Three months after Creativity, Inc. was published, court documents surfaced showing that Catmull had spent years operating something else alongside the Braintrust: a quiet arrangement among animation studios not to recruit each other’s employees and not to bid up each other’s salaries.9 The scheme traced back to the 1986 spinoff of Pixar from Lucasfilm and expanded over the decades to include DreamWorks and other studios, running parallel to the broader no-poaching agreements among Apple, Google, and the big technology companies that the Department of Justice moved against in 2010.

The emails are public now. In 2004, when Sony began recruiting Pixar’s producers, Catmull wrote that “our people are becoming really desirable and we need to nip this in the bud.”10 In 2007, he warned Disney’s studio chairman that companies offering substantial salary increases would “seriously mess up the pay structure” of the Northern California studios.11 Deposed under oath in 2013, he defended the arrangement as protecting the ecosystem of studios and the long-term health of the industry, and he said, in words that have followed him since: “I don’t apologize for this.”12

The studios settled the class action brought by more than 10,000 animation and visual effects workers for about $169 million, without admitting wrongdoing.13 The covered years ran roughly from 2004 to 2010. I worked at Pixar for nearly all of them, which means I was a member of that class, and the wages being quietly held down included mine.

I received a settlement check, but I don’t remember the amount. It’s been incredibly hard since then to reconcile these two sides of the company leadership at the time. On one hand, I was at Pixar through the golden years of the animation industry, and so grateful for being in a space created by those executives that really allowed me to feel respected, cherished, challenged, and seen. On the other hand, salary collusion has had real marks on my own career and so many others, diminishing opportunity and reducing our potential quality of life in one of the most expensive areas in the world.

I understand that his stated reasoning, that bidding wars would gut the studios’ thin margins and push the work overseas, contained a real observation about the economics of animation.

The courts treat such agreements as illegal regardless of motive, and they are right to, but I don’t believe he sat in Emeryville thinking of himself as someone taking money from artists. I genuinely believe he thought he was protecting something.

The lesson of the collusion era is that an institution can genuinely love its artists’ work and still, through the accumulation of corporate America's business logic, treat the artists themselves as a cost to be managed. The book about candor and the emails about pay structures were written by the same hand. Both were sincere. Only one was disclosed.

Since my layoff, I have worked contract to contract, and the contracts keep getting shorter. I’ve grown my photography side of things and prioritized it since then, in huge part because of the forced industry contraction. This is the side of the industry’s transformation that doesn’t make headlines, because it happens one offer letter at a time.

So here is what the usual loop looks like. You get an offer to join a show. You spend the first stretch relearning a new pipeline, with new tools, new methods, new people. Even if you worked at the studio before, inevitably, tools change every year. Just as the knowledge starts to compound, you are expected to deliver at the highest level the craft allows, because the schedule was built assuming you would.

Then the contract ends, and you move to another studio on another show if you find an opportunity, and begin relearning all over again. Every cycle throws away the exact accumulated understanding that made the Ratatouille shot possible. As a way of making films, it seems deeply unproductive, and the fact that the films still turn out well says less about the system than about the resilience and passion of the artists inside it. We keep delivering despite the structure, pulling miracles every single time, and the structure keeps mistaking our resilience for its own success.

All of that is true, but it also sits alongside another truth: on most projects now, the schedules and the staffing are built so lean that you can feel yourself being set up for failure rather than success. Gratitude and unsustainability, both at once, all the time.

That contradiction is the texture of a working life in animation in 2026, and I have stopped expecting it to resolve. I’m the kind of person who will always try to improve things. I want artists to have better workflows, and I want us to be immersed in environments that will help produce the best stories. And now, I am constantly feeling like I need to resign myself to the realities of the industry, and that I really have no power over any of it all, because, genuinely, I’m just trying to recover financially from the lack of work during the in-between months of projects.

Photography is great, of course, and I love every minute of it, but even with all my clients, gigs, and shoots I’ve done since my layoff, I don’t make enough money to survive solely on it. It’s growing, fortunately, but it’s a long-term goal still.

The veterans I know, people with decades of mastery in a deeply collaborative craft, now often plan their lives in week increments. We count union hours toward keeping our health insurance, but these union gigs are harder to find than ever. We are grateful, genuinely, for every contract. I am grateful. I get to make some money, I get to work again with teams I love, and I get to pay my rent.

I keep coming back to those two months I had left on Wish. I knew my job was ending, and I still worked long days and weekends to get the film out the door, because the schedule needed me to and because I really enjoyed working with the team. That is the part of crunch nobody puts in a press release. It runs on people’s willingness to sacrifice themselves for the work, and the willingness holds even after the company has told you what you’re worth to it.

The research on this is a bit grim. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization found that long working hours caused 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease in a single year, and named overwork the largest occupational risk factor for disease on Earth.14 Crunch time has always been animation’s open secret, inherited from the same production culture that games and VFX workers have been documenting for many years. The film industry wears it almost as a badge of pride.

Meanwhile, fewer of us are now carrying the same volume of work.

I don’t have a policy proposal to end on, and I would not trust myself if I did. The forces reshaping this industry are larger than any essay, and there are so many variables that come into this game. I genuinely love this industry, and all the friendships and relationships I’ve built over so many years working in this medium.

But I think often of that one second of film in Ratatouille. And those three months of work. And the dozen people across departments who trusted each other enough to chase a problem into a place none of them fully understood, because the shot had to be right. The applause when it finally came. And the trust they gave to me at the time, a twenty-something still early in his career who had done nothing yet to earn it.

That is what a healthy studio does. It carries people who haven’t proven anything, long enough for them to become the ones carrying somebody else.

More than one hundred people in Emeryville lost that this last Tuesday. Some of them were the ones being carried. Some of them were doing the carrying.

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The first thing in the room is a language, and most of us cannot understand it. The sounds of Gabrielino-Tongva, which the exhibition calls the first language of Los Angeles, move through the opening gallery before a single object asks for your attention. The entrance wall explains that you are hearing the voices of community members working to bring the language back, and that colonial violence and forced assimilation broke the chain that once carried it from one generation to the next.

You stand in the veiled entryway as an arrival. That is the quiet work the sound is doing. It tells you whose ground this is, and how far the claim predates the building you walked into.

The Tongva are still not federally recognized. In 2022, they received a single acre in Altadena, a place called Huhuunga, the place of the bears, the first return of Tongva land in Los Angeles County in nearly two hundred years.1 The Autry Museum sits a few miles away, in Griffith Park, on the same homeland, and it calls itself the Museum of the American West. Its banners invite you to discover the view from here.

I came to this gallery from the streets. For the better part of this last year, I have been photographing the immigration raids and the civic protests that answered them across this city, and I walked into the show still carrying that. It changes what you see. A history museum is typically built to hold the settled past at a safe distance, but this one does not let you keep the distance.

The exhibition was organized by Carolyn Brucken, the Autry’s senior curator, with Virginia Scharff, the museum’s chair of Western history, and it reads American history from Los Angeles outward rather than from the East Coast in.2 Its argument is in the title, set in heavy blackletter on the first wall. The city has always been a place of competing claims to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The curators have written that they did not expect to open a show about those words in a season of such fierce political conflict and worry over the country’s democracy. They opened it anyway, on May 30, 2026, and they let the present in the door.

From there, the exhibition moves forward in time, and each object is another claim on the city.

A hand-painted Mexican flag hangs early in the show, the eagle and the serpent worked by hand above a nopal cactus, the cloth seamed and lightly stained with age, made in Hermosillo around the middle of the nineteenth century. It marks the decades when Los Angeles was Mexican. That period ended in 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred California to the United States and promised the Californios their property and their rights. The California Land Claims Act of 1851 then forced them to prove their titles in court, and many spent themselves into ruin and lost the land anyway.3 The promise and the fine print arrived together.

A few steps on, the promise is for sale. “California Calls You,” a Union Pacific railway poster, shows a young woman in white beneath a great tree, a parasol behind her shoulder, looking out at the distant mountains and a green valley. In the 1880s, the railroads finished their lines to Los Angeles and began advertising the city to the rest of the country, and the Los Angeles Times mailed a sunshine edition east in the dead of winter. The reformer Dana Bartlett, writing in 1907, wanted Los Angeles to be a city of homes and therefore a city without slums. The dream had a shape, and the shape was a small house with a yard.

The next wall shows who was allowed to buy in. A residential security map of Los Angeles, drawn for the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, grades the city in four colors. Green and blue mark the neighborhoods judged safe to lend in. Red marks the ones to avoid, which in practice meant the neighborhoods where the city’s nonwhite and immigrant residents lived. Yellow marks the slide between. The California Real Estate Association wrote racial covenants into new subdivisions, and a 1913 state law barred immigrants born in Asia from owning land at all.4 The booster dream and the lines that withheld it were drawn by the same hands. You can read the whole argument of the show in one framed map.

And those decisions also outlived the maps. The neighborhoods the corporation marked in red are still, on average, the hottest and least shaded in the city, carrying close to a third less tree canopy than the ones it graded green. Their residents breathe dirtier air and turn up more often in emergency rooms when the heat arrives. The home equity that the green zones were allowed to build, and the red ones were refused, compounded over three generations into the wealth gap the county carries now.

You can follow that line to Skid Row, the fifty blocks east of downtown the city spent decades steering its poorest residents toward. Most of the people who sleep there are Black, in a county where Black residents are fewer than one in ten and about four times as likely as their white neighbors to lose a roof.

The violence is in the room too, if more quietly. Framed prints recall the Chinese Massacre of 1871, when a mob killed eighteen Chinese men near the old plaza, the largest mass lynching in California history. The exhibition does not look away from how often the city's promise has been enforced by a mob or by the law.

Then the show reaches one of the sections that stayed with me, with exhibits about who had a right to the city in the 1930s and 1940s.

On one wall is a broadside I had only ever seen in historical articles about Los Angeles. “Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry,” issued by the Western Defense Command on May 5, 1942, orders the Japanese residents of a mapped portion of Los Angeles to report for removal. It lists what a family may carry, bedding and a few utensils, and it specifies that no pets of any kind will be permitted. It is signed by a lieutenant general. It was one of a series of orders that spring. About a hundred and twenty thousand people of Japanese ancestry were removed from the West Coast under them and held in camps like Manzanar in the Owens Valley until the war ended. The majority were American citizens. A government drew a boundary on a map and emptied it of its people, down to the disposal of their homes.

A few feet away, the museum pairs it with an earlier removal, the same act aimed at a different people. In February 1931, immigration agents and the police staged raids in East Los Angeles and at La Placita, the old plaza, a public campaign to frighten Mexican residents into leaving the city. In the months that followed, Los Angeles County paid for the trains, and by 1936 roughly a third of the city’s Mexican population was gone.5 Many of the people forced out were United States citizens.

The object the museum sets in this section is a pair of antique handcuffs, copper-colored, hung in a case. I photographed them over the shoulder of another visitor, the cuffs sharp and bright, the person in front of me soft and out of focus. I had been looking at evidence all afternoon. The handcuffs were the first thing that did not stay in the past.

I had spent the spring photographing what these panels describe, only in the present tense. In June 2025, federal immigration raids swept Los Angeles under what the government called the largest deportation operation in the country’s history, with agents working the car washes and the Home Depot lots where day laborers wait. On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court lifted a lower court’s limits on those stops, clearing agents to question people based on how they look and the work they appear to do. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in dissent, wrote that the country should not be one “where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”6

President Trump federalized roughly four thousand California National Guard troops and sent seven hundred Marines into the city over the governor’s objection. The deployment was wound down at the close of 2025, and the last troops left in January 2026, at a cost the state put near a hundred and eleven million dollars.7 At the Adelanto detention center, a couple of hours northeast, a facility that began the year nearly empty, the daily population climbed to about eighteen hundred.8

Stand in front of the 1931 panel with all of that behind you, and it stops reading like history. It reads like a set of instructions someone found again.

The show does not leave you there. It turns toward the people who keep arriving and keep building the city anyway.

Lilliana Castro was born in San Salvador and came to Los Angeles in 1989. Her "Temaquixtiliztli," titled with the Náhuat Pipil word for liberation, is a single carving in salvaged California sequoia. It carries three generations of women in her family, one to each of three carved faces, and traces their journey out of El Salvador.⁹ The sign lists them as her grandmother, Narcisa Barrera Zavaleta; her aunt, Teresa de Jesus; and the artist herself, without saying which face is which.

I photographed only the middle one, the grain running across the cheek, and a long crack opening at one edge. Behind it, the wood is cut in layered planes that give the face depth. The museum sets the work beside a poem of Castro's that moves through inherited time and the idea that forgetting and remembering can each be a privilege, toward liberation and a present anger. Most of the immigrants' pasts in this show arrive as documents. Here, the immigrant present looks back at you out of the wood.

The last wall says the quiet part out loud. The museum draws the line itself, in its own text, from Toypurina’s revolt at Mission San Gabriel in 1785 to the demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in 2025.9 Beside that sentence hangs a “No Kings” poster from 2025, designed by the Los Angeles cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, a white crown inside a red prohibition circle that, on a second look, is drawn as Klan hoods.10

I have stood on that line myself, camera up, in the same crowds the museum is now placing behind glass. The wall also keeps Proposition 187, the 1994 measure that tried to bar undocumented residents from schools and clinics before the courts struck it down, and the 1992 uprising that followed the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King. The museum has decided that protest belongs to the history of the city, including the protest still going on outside its doors.

The exhibition then ends by handing the question back.

On a low wooden shelf near the exit sits a small metal ballot box stenciled VOTE HERE, a wooden holder of stubby pencils beside it, a card rising from the slot. The wall above asks how you protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and tells you to mark a ballot and drop it in. The card lists the choices a person has. Vote. Educate. Organize. Campaign. Jury. The box was filling as I left, the words from 1776 worn down to a few verbs and a pencil, waiting for whoever walked up next.

I have lived in Los Angeles long enough to think I knew a lot of its story, and I walked into the Autry expecting the history to stay behind glass. It did not. The show works as a mirror, and the longer I stood in it, the harder it became to tell which period I was looking at. The civic unrest I have spent the year photographing belongs to a pattern this city has repeated since its founding in 1781, when a town built by multiracial families on Tongva land was already an argument about who the place would belong to.

That argument never closed. Knowing it clarifies the present even when it does nothing to soften it.

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I almost let this one scroll past. A clothing company and a drag queen fighting over a name looked like exactly the kind of small, loud thing that eats a week of everyone’s attention and leaves nothing behind, and there is no shortage of larger fights with a better claim in this day and age. What stopped me was the question underneath all the noise, one big enough that I have not been able to put it down since.

Who owns a name, and who gets to decide?

I want to be clear about what this is. I am a photographer and not a lawyer, and I am not here to tell you who should win. What I wanted, and could not find anywhere I looked, was an account of this fight built on what sits in the actual filings rather than on which side you already root for.

These last few days, my feeds have been certain. Every post about the case arrives already decided. One version has a heartless corporation crushing a queer climate activist for sport. The other has an opportunist who borrowed a famous name and cried foul once the bill came due. The takes are loud, and they rarely agree on the basic facts, which is usually the first sign that most people doing the arguing have not read them.

So I did.

Patagonia, Inc. filed its complaint in federal court in Los Angeles on January 21 and asked for a single dollar in damages, plus its attorneys’ fees.1 The dollar makes the real stake clear. The company wants control of a name and an injunction to keep Wyn Wiley, the photographer and performer who built the Pattie Gonia persona in 2018, from turning that name into a clothing and endorsement business. The suit targets the merch store Wiley launched in late 2024 and the trademark application Wiley filed in September 2025, clothing and marketing services among the categories it covers.

By Patagonia’s own account, the suit is not aimed at the persona or at Pattie performing. The company says Pattie can keep the character and the advocacy, and only has to stop commercializing the name. The relief it requests is broader than that, reaching the business they have built around the name and their claim to it for performances and speaking. Where the persona ends and the brand begins is the line Wiley says does not exist, because the name is how they make a living.

The history is messier than either camp admits. Back in 2022, when Hydro Flask wanted to collaborate with Pattie Gonia, Patagonia and Wiley traded emails about staying out of each other’s lane. Patagonia asked Wiley to keep its logo and its Belwe font out of the work, and not to put the Pattie Gonia name on a product at all. Wiley’s side answered warmly but loosely, with thanks and a note that they would keep it in mind, and never plainly agreed to that last part. Both camps now read those same emails in opposite ways, one as a binding deal, the other as a friendly exchange that bound no one.

That gap is the whole case.

The filings then show a second round in early 2025. By Patagonia’s account, the company wrote in February. Wiley wrote back on February 14, and not with a shrug. They disputed Patagonia’s version of the 2022 call. They said their merch had never carried the company’s logo or font, and called the clothing question “a moot point” on that basis. A follow-up that March went unanswered. So when Wiley says, as they did in late May, that the company moved against them without warning, the record is more complicated than that. There were letters, and there was a reply.

Wiley’s response, when it came, was not a boycott, whatever your feed told you. In a video and an open letter addressed to Patagonia’s chief executive Ryan Gellert, they asked the company to drop the lawsuit and asked their supporters to contact Patagonia respectfully to say the same. They called it, just a few days ago, a corporation trying to erase an activist, and pointed out, fairly, that they had built a community in the millions and raised more than three million dollars for environmental causes.

They also pushed back on the dollar itself. Patagonia frames the single dollar as proof it is not seeking financial gain, while Wiley says the number that matters is the cost of defending themselves, which they put at more than a million dollars in legal fees.2 Whatever that figure turns out to be, the asymmetry is real. A company with a hundred lawyers and an individual with a legal-defense fund are not evenly matched, no matter who is right.

Patagonia’s logic is also real, and this is the part that the other camp skips. The company argues that a trademark it fails to police is a trademark it can lose, and that if it lets one beloved activist use a near-homophone of its name on apparel, it weakens its footing against the next counterfeiter or the next oil-and-gas group that wants to borrow the brand’s goodwill.3 The complaint lists its own past targets by name, a run of puns from Petagonia to Fratagonia to Petrogonia, to make the point that it chases these everywhere. Patagonia has also sued companies far larger than Wiley. It went after Anheuser-Busch over a beer called Cerveza Patagonia and settled.4 It sued Gap over a fleece and settled.5 Enforcement is something the company does as a matter of routine, which complicates any story that this particular suit exists to punish a queer artist.

Before the law, there is the question of confusion, which is what a trademark case turns on. The scholars who have weighed in publicly tend to split the case in two. Mark Lemley, of Stanford, has said Patagonia should not be able to stop Wiley from using the name in performance, where the parody is obvious and few people would be confused, but that the merch sits much closer to Patagonia's own market and would be harder to defend. Alexandra Roberts, of Northeastern, a trademark scholar who studies how the law treats personal and persona-based brands, reads it in a similar register, noting that Patagonia is not trying to take the stage name, only to limit commercial uses that risk confusion or dilution, and that in her view the name and the goods are different enough to avoid both. The line they draw runs right through the case. The performance is one thing. The store is another.6

It helps to look at what the complaint actually points to, because the exhibits are more specific than the rhetoric. The products in Wiley’s store are original drag-and-nature designs, tees that read “Nature is Gay” and crewnecks for a “Pattie Gonia Hiking Club,” and none of them copy the mountain logo. Where Patagonia’s logo really does get echoed is in the promotion around the brand, like an old “pattiegonia” mountain meme and a pair of gloves Wiley wore to mark a follower milestone. The copying shows up in the marketing more than on the rack. That cuts both ways. It supports Wiley’s claim that they never sold the logo, and it sharpens Patagonia’s worry that the persona and the brand keep getting knitted together in the public eye.

One argument I keep running into online says Patagonia is a place, so the company has no business owning the word, and Wiley nods at it themselves when they call Patagonia "our namesake region in South America." It is an appealing idea that does not survive contact with how trademark works7. A place name can be protected as a brand when it has nothing to do with the goods it sits on. No one buys a Patagonia jacket thinking it was sewn at the bottom of Argentina, so for fleece and rain shells, the word counts as arbitrary, which is the strongest kind of mark there is.

The company could not stop a winery in the actual region from saying its grapes are grown in Patagonia. It can hold the word as the name of a clothing brand, because that is a different use entirely. So the case still comes down to the same question as everything else: whether a buyer is likely to think Patagonia stands behind the goods, and the map of South America does not settle that.

Which brings me to the other argument I keep running into online, the one that says Pattie Gonia is a parody, parody is protected, and the case should be laughed out of court. The instinct is understandable, but it borrows most of its confidence from copyright law rather than trademark law, and the two do not work the same way. Copyright protects the works people make, like a song or a film, and it gives parody real room. Trademark protects the names and logos that tell a buyer who stands behind a product, and there the same joke clears a narrower bar.8

Parody comments on the original work itself, the way Spaceballs imitates Star Wars in order to mock it. Satire uses a familiar thing to comment on something else, on whatever the artist is really after.

Parody gets more room because it has to borrow from the original to land the joke. Satire gets less, because it could have made its point without leaning on someone else’s work.

That distinction matters here more than the hot takes admit. Is Pattie Gonia a parody of Patagonia, or is it a satire that uses a Patagonia-shaped pun to talk about queerness and the outdoors? Drag is a parodic form by nature, and the name is plainly a play on the brand, which is the strong version of Wiley’s argument. But you could also argue the persona never really comments on Patagonia, the company, at all. It uses the recognition of the name as a doorway into something else entirely. If that reads as closer to satire than to parody, the borrowing gets harder to justify, and the protection people assume is automatic starts to thin out.

Trademark then adds a complication that copyright does not. In 2023, the Supreme Court decided a case called Jack Daniel’s v. VIP Products, about a dog toy that parodied a whiskey bottle.9 The justices agreed, unanimously, that the toy was a parody. They still ruled that being a parody does not decide the case on its own. Once you put someone else’s name on products you sell, a court has to ask the ordinary trademark question, whether a buyer might think the original company stands behind the goods.

A good parody can actually help with that question, because getting the joke means knowing it is not the real thing. But the joke no longer ends the case. So when Pattie Gonia appears on a shirt for sale or on a trademark application, the law after Jack Daniel’s treats it as a brand first and a joke second, whatever the spirit behind it. None of that predicts who wins. It is the legal weather both sides are flying through, and you cannot understand the case without it.

I keep circling this one because I cannot land cleanly on a side, and I have started to think that not landing is the more honest place to be.

I am a photographer, and authorship is not an abstraction to me. I now try to sign my images, especially my photojournalism work, with Content Credentials, a quiet piece of cryptography that records who made an image and stays attached to it as the picture travels. I started doing it because I want some proof that a photograph is mine, in a moment when that proof is getting harder to hold onto. So the instinct underneath Patagonia’s position is one I share. A name you spent years making mean something is worth protecting, and I would feel the loss if someone built a storefront on mine. From that chair, I understand exactly what Patagonia is guarding, because I would want to guard the same thing.

Then I move one chair over, and the same principle looks completely different. Wiley spent eight years making Pattie Gonia mean something, too. From that seat, the lawsuit is a threat to a livelihood, and whether Patagonia is right almost does not matter. The cost of defending a federal case can break a single artist long before a judge decides anything, so the expense becomes the weapon.

Protecting a name reads as fair when you are the one who might lose it, and it reads as force when you are the one who cannot afford the fight. The idea is the same in both mouths. The leverage behind it is not.

I should be honest about where I stand, which is in neither of their seats. I am not Patagonia, with its lawyers and its half-century of goodwill. I am not Pattie Gonia either, with a vast following and a community that has raised millions for their causes. I am one artist running a small business, with no fortune and no platform like theirs, and a fight with either of them would flatten me.

What ties me to each of them is instinct rather than resources. I guard my own name the way Patagonia guards its, or I try to at least, and I am small enough to know in my gut what being outweighed feels like. That is why I can feel both pulls at once. The rest is the job. Reporting honestly means holding both truths at the same time and refusing to drop the inconvenient one, even when the two pull against each other.

The view from here is not comfortable, and I have stopped trying to make it so.

The detail I cannot stop turning over is that Patagonia gave itself away in 2022, when Yvon Chouinard handed the company to a trust and a nonprofit and announced that our planet, Earth, is now its only shareholder.10 The brand exists, by its own telling, to fight the climate crisis. Wiley is an environmental activist. The two of them want, more or less, the same thing for the planet, and they are spending a fortune in a federal courtroom over the spelling of a word. I find that sad, but I also find it clarifying.

A name is a strange sort of property. It can carry your values and your livelihood and your whole identity, and it can still belong, in the eyes of the law, to whoever can prove the better claim.

I do not know who should win this case, and I am wary of how many people are sure they do online. The ones posting with the most certainty tend to be the ones who have read the least. I would rather stay with the question a while longer, because the question is the part worth keeping.

The facts here are drawn from Patagonia's complaint and the parties' public filings and statements. The case was unresolved as of late May 2026.

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If you have ever built something around a name or a body of work that is yours, I would rather hear in the comments where this leaves you than who you think should win. Who gets to own a name, and what is it worth to the person who built a life on it?

The first wish I read said, I wish Donald Trump had died. Written in black ink, tied to a branch with twine. The next one I read said, I hope we get through this. The rest were variations. Wishes for peace. Wishes for health. Wishes for someone to come home. A woman in a pink shirt stood on her toes to tie one to a high branch. She had a small tattoo on her arm. I watched her finish the knot, smile, and walk off without looking back. I did not tie a wish.

The piece is Wish Trees for Los Angeles. Yoko Ono installed the first one in this city in 1996, at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica. She has since planted them in more than 250 cities. The form comes from the wish trees of the Japanese Shinto temples she visited as a child in Tokyo and Karuizawa. At the close of each show, the wishes are gathered up and shipped to her Imagine Peace Tower on Viðey Island in Reykjavík, where they are stored beneath the column of light that Ono dedicated to John Lennon in 2007.1 The tower holds more than two million wishes now. It is lit every year at sunset on Lennon’s birthday and burns until the anniversary of his death in December. Standing under the olive branches in downtown Los Angeles, it felt like a long migration for a piece of paper. The tags moved a little in the breeze.

The show inside is called Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind. It opened on May 23 and runs through October 11. It was organized by Tate Modern in London, where it ran in 2024, and traveled to Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Chicago before arriving here.2 Two hundred works across seven decades. Ono turned ninety-three in February. She no longer travels for openings. The show is held together by something quieter than its scale, something a typical museum never asks of you: almost every piece in the exhibition is an instruction. The art is the asking. The work belongs to whoever does what’s asked, and the show is incomplete without them.

You walk into the first gallery, and you are watched. Eyeblink (Fluxfilm No. 9), 1966, is a black-and-white film of a single eye blinking slowly, projected ten feet high on the gallery wall. It was shot by Peter Moore in a single static composition. Ono was thirty-three the year that eye was filmed, and for nearly sixty years now her eye has been opening and closing in front of strangers. It watches you the way a portrait subject watches the photographer through the lens. Patient. Unhurried. Slightly curious.

I make my living looking at people. Standing in front of Ono’s eye, the looking ran in the other direction, and the room slowed me down to its rhythm before I had read a single label.

Across the same room, in Ono’s own handwriting, a line is painted on the wall: This room moves at the same speed as the clouds. I believe it is from a 1966 work called A Blue Room Event, in which Ono inscribed dozens of such phrases across the walls of a gallery.

This room slowly evaporates every day.

This room is a half room.

The clouds line became the title of her 2022 retrospective at Kunsthaus Zürich. At The Broad, it lands as the show’s first written instruction. You can rush, but the room will not move any faster than the sky.

The early rooms are full of pieces that began as instructions and became canvases that became installations. Painting to Be Stepped On (1960) is a torn fragment of canvas laid on the gallery floor with no rope around it. A small sign on the floor invites you to walk on it. You can. Most people walk around it. A man in heavy work boots paused at the edge while I was photographing, read the sign, stepped onto the canvas, and stomped a few times with both feet before walking off. His boot is in my frame, and his face is not.

The painting was not finished by the stomp. Each person who walks on it sees a different version than the one before, and a different one than the one after. To photograph the piece for any length of time is to watch a canvas that is never the same twice.

I spent the longest time at Painting to Shake Hands (painting for cowards). It is a small canvas mounted on a low stand with a hole cut into the center, where a hand is supposed to come through from the other side and meet a stranger’s. The piece was conceived in 1961, when Ono was twenty-eight and living in a loft at 112 Chambers Street in lower Manhattan, where she hosted the Chambers Street Series with La Monte Young.3

I waited there for several minutes, hoping to photograph two strangers meeting through the canvas. The other side was empty. I watched four or five people approach, read the label, smile at it like a small joke, and keep moving. The discomfort was the point. Ono made a piece in 1961 that asks for a small, vulnerable gesture and called it a painting for cowards because she already knew, sixty-five years ago, what the rest of us are still proving in 2026. Most of us would rather walk on.

Somewhere through the wall, faintly, I started to hear a hammering. I didn’t yet know what it was.

The next gallery is given over to two pieces Ono made in 1964, the year she was thirty-one and performing across Tokyo, Kyoto, and New York. Cut Piece was first performed at Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto on July 20, 1964. Ono sat motionless on a stage with a pair of scissors placed in front of her, and audience members were invited up one at a time to cut a piece from her clothing. She did not move or speak. She let strangers approach her with a blade in their hands and remove what they would, until she had almost nothing left. Ono performed Cut Piece again in Paris in 2003, at age seventy, against ageism and against violence. The work plays at The Broad on archival film, as you watch a younger Ono let people approach her with scissors.

In the same room, Bag Piece (1964) is displayed in another corner. Two performers inside a single black cloth bag, moving slowly on a stage, sometimes still. You cannot see the bodies. The bag’s silhouette shifts. Ono has said the piece is about hiding the body so that something else can pass between people, soul to soul, without sight in the way. The audience sees nothing, and yet something passes.

Through the rooms, the hammering continued.

Soon after Cut Piece and Bag Piece, you walk into Shadow Piece (1963). A pool of light is cast against one wall. Visitors are invited to step into the light, let their shadow fall, and trace its outline in charcoal. The wall holds the accumulated shapes of everyone who came before. Some figures crouch. Some reach above their heads. Some are the size of children.

Pliny the Elder wrote in the first century that the origin of painting was a young woman in Corinth tracing the shadow of her lover on a wall the night before he left for war.4 Watching this piece made me think how photography is the same gesture made with light. What stays when the body is gone is the line of the body, traced once, evidence that it had been here. A young man moved along the wall, looking for his own outline among the others. I stood a few feet behind and thought about people I have photographed who are no longer alive, and whose shadows I had not thought of as shadows until that moment.

The hammering finally led me into the next gallery. Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961/1966) is a board mounted on the wall with two small hammers, one hanging by a thin chain on each side, and a jar of nails on the floor between them. Visitors drive a nail anywhere they like. The board at The Broad already holds hundreds of brass heads, packed close. The hammering is what I had been hearing through the wall.

The original instruction was longer than the version on the wall. Published in Ono’s 1964 book Grapefruit, it reads: Hammer a nail into a mirror, a canvas, a piece of glass, wood, or metal every morning. Also, pick up a hair that came off when you combed in the morning and tie it around the hammered nail. The painting ends when the surface is covered with nails. No one at The Broad was tying hair to anything, at least while I was there, but the original logic was in the room. A small private ritual, building day by day, until the surface is full.

Most of Ono’s instruction works are gentle. This one is not. The hammer in your hand has weight. The sound is harsh. It echoes. The board accepts the nail and keeps it. The mark cannot be undone. You leave something permanent on a work that began life as an instruction on a piece of paper, and the work belongs to you and to the strangers before and after you in equal shares.

It was at a piece exactly like this that John Lennon first met Yoko Ono, in November 1966, at the Indica Gallery in London. The exhibition had not yet opened. Lennon wanted to drive a nail. Ono said no. She then said yes if he paid her five shillings. Lennon told her he would give her an imaginary five shillings and drive an imaginary nail. Ono later said, That’s when we really met.5 The show was called Unfinished Paintings and Objects.

I made a small recording of the hammering on my phone. The cadence is what holds.

Through a corridor, the hammering still behind me, the show opens into a white room with a white boat in the middle of it.

Add Colour (Refugee Boat) is a wooden rowboat painted white, sitting in a white-walled, white-floored gallery. There is a station at the entrance where visitors pick up a blue marker. The instruction reads: Just blue like the ocean.

Ono first conceived the piece in 1960 as an empty room. She realized it as a refugee boat for the first time in 2016, after watching coverage of Syrian and African refugees drowning in the Mediterranean.6 Every iteration begins empty and ends covered in the writing of strangers. The instruction did not change. The sea did.

At The Broad on May 26, three days after the show opened, the inside of the boat already carried FREE PALESTINE and ICE OUT OF EVERYWHERE in large block letters across two of its slats. The walls carried hundreds of other messages in blue marker, written in several languages by visitors who did not know each other. The blue had built up enough that some walls read more blue than white from across the room. Inside that void of two colors, the visitors moving through were the only third color, and they stood out the way figures stand out in a Hopper painting, alone with their thoughts in a room bleached of everything else.

The next gallery holds two pieces that speak to each other in the same room.

A HOLE (2009) is a single sheet of plate glass set upright in the middle of the gallery, taller than a person, pierced once by a bullet. The cracks fan out from the hole in a starburst. Behind the glass, hung from the ceiling on thin chains, are Helmets (Pieces of Sky) (2001), German army helmets from World War II, upside down, each one filled with hundreds of small puzzle pieces of cardboard printed with images of sky. When you stand on one side of the bullet hole and look through it, the cracks distort the helmets behind. You are looking through the violence of the war that produced them.

Ono made A HOLE in Tokyo in late 2009, the year she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale.7 When she showed it in Berlin a year later, she was asked whether the work was about Lennon’s killing. She said no.8

The piece refuses to belong to one death. What it asks of you is to walk around it. To stand on one side of the glass, then to walk to the other and find the same hole from the opposite direction. The bullet is in front of you, then it is behind you. You are the one who was shot, then you are the one who fired. The piece keeps you in motion between those two positions for as long as you are willing to stay in the room.

The helmets behind the glass are upside-down hands holding pieces of sky. The label says Take a piece. Know that we are all part of each other. The puzzle pieces are stamped on the back: y.o. Los Angeles ’26. Every city the show visits gets its own stamp. I took one piece. It is at home now, on our entryway bookshelf, one piece of a sky shared with every other visitor who took one.

The last room of the show is the room of mothers.

My Mommy is Beautiful (2004) is a long white wall with a wooden desk in front of it. The desk holds plain sheets of paper and small pencils. The instruction is the title. By the time I walked in, the wall was already hundreds of notes deep, the layers overlapping where newer visitors had taped their handwriting on top of older. The notes were in many languages, but mostly English. Two visitors sat at the desk, writing slowly. The hammering had finally gone quiet here, the last room of the show, far enough from the nail that I could hear mostly pencils on paper.

I stood in front of the wall before I picked up a piece of paper. Most of the notes were short. People had thanked their mothers. Missed them. Apologized for the calls they hadn’t made or for things they hadn’t said in time. Some notes had photographs taped to them, women clearly long gone, women still living and still being thanked. The whole wall was an archive of small love, accumulated by strangers.

Ono made the piece in 2004. She is a mother herself, of two children. Kyoko, born to her and the filmmaker Anthony Cox in 1963. Sean, born to her and John Lennon on John’s own birthday in 1975. My Mommy is Beautiful asks for one bond and one only. Not the whole family. Not a story of your origins. The single woman who carried you, isolated from the architecture of a family, and given her own white wall.

I had walked through the entire show without leaving a single mark. I had not tied a wish. I had not stepped on the canvas. I had not put my hand through the hole in Painting to Shake Hands. I had not written on the boat. I had not traced my shadow. I had not hammered a nail. I had photographed strangers doing all of it, which is what I do, which is what I came here for.

But I picked up a piece of paper and a pencil.

I wrote in Portuguese, the language my mother gave me, even though she also speaks English. She lives in Portugal. I was raised in Portugal. Portuguese is the language we use when the words have to mean what they mean.

Mãe, deste-me vida e serás sempre o universo. Love you.

Mother, you gave me life, and you will always be the universe.

I taped it to the wall among the others. It looked like every other note. I photographed it briefly and stepped back. The wall accepted my handwriting, and the room held still.

On the way out, I passed the wish trees again. The wishes had shifted a little in the afternoon breeze. The one that said I hope we get through this was still there. I did not tie a wish on the way out.

I had already left mine inside.

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Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is on view at The Broad through October 11, 2026.

Los Angeles, California. May 26, 2026.

On the morning of August 26, 2025, on a floor of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan, a man named Luis stepped out of an immigration court hearing and was detained by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He was Ecuadorian, a father of three, the sole provider for his family in the Bronx. According to his wife, Cocha, he had no criminal record. Their three children, ages seven, thirteen, and fifteen, were waiting in the hallway when the agents took him. The two daughters reached for him as he was pulled away. Their younger brother stood between them, and a photographer named Carol Guzy raised her camera and made the picture that, eight months later, would become the 2026 World Press Photo of the Year.

The image was announced on April 23 in Amsterdam. The jury’s citation noted something that, at first reading, sounded incidental:

“[The hallway was] one of the only courthouses in the country where photographers have been granted access — a single hallway where Carol Guzy and others showed up, day after day, to document what was happening.”

Read it twice, and the sentence opens up. This image, the one that has been chosen out of more than 57,000 photographs from 141 countries to stand for the year in news photography, was made in one of the last places left where it could be made at all.

That fact is the subject of this essay. Not the photograph itself, which is doing its own work in the world now, but the conditions under which it was possible.

What does it mean to make pictures in a country where the rooms in which history is being decided are closing one by one?

And what does it ask of the photographers who keep showing up to whichever rooms remain?

Carol Guzy is now seventy years old. She has won four Pulitzer Prizes, the first journalist ever to do so, and the 2018 Robert Capa Gold Medal for her coverage of the children of Mosul after the fall of ISIS. She has photographed the Armero mudslide in Colombia in 1985, refugees in Kosovo in 1999, the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and the war in Ukraine. The 2026 World Press Photo is her ninth award from the contest, and her first Photo of the Year. By any measure of a career, she has nothing left to prove.

In an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, the day the prize was announced, she described how she ended up in that hallway. She had wanted, for a while, to do something on immigration. She had covered the Republican National Convention the year before and seen the crowd unfurl signs reading mass deportation now. She understood that what was being chanted was a promise that would be kept by the administration. So when she traveled to New York the following summer, ostensibly to photograph the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, she stopped by 26 Federal Plaza for what she imagined would be a single day. Six months later, she was still going, daily.

On her own website, under a brief professional bio, there is a passage that has been quoted everywhere in the past weeks and is worth rereading slowly:

Dedicated, not obsessive.

That is the discipline. It is the practice of returning to a single hallway, on a Tuesday and again on a Wednesday and again on a Thursday, when no one has asked you to, and at times no one is paying you to, because the people walking through that hallway are arriving in good faith for hearings they have been told to attend, and what is happening to them is being made invisible by design. The discipline is closer to a kind of attention, sustained past the point at which most people would conclude they had seen what there was to see.

When I asked Guzy what changes about a photographer’s seeing between day one and day thirty in the same hallway, she described the shift as instinct sharpening into anticipation. “The longer time you spend, instincts evolve about the nuances of behaviors of ICE agents and a better ability to anticipate actions at which courtroom to wait,” she wrote. “You build a rapport with agents, lawyers, court observers, and security guards. And also realize the importance of speaking with family members affected by detainments to gather information, and allow access to continuing documentation of the aftershocks they experience while navigating a new normal.”

Repetition is its own kind of access. The hallway looks the same on day one and day thirty, but what the photographer is reading inside the hallway has changed.

The World Press Photo jury, in its citation, named this directly. In a democracy, it wrote, the camera’s presence in that hallway is not incidental; it is essential.

It is essential precisely because the rest of the building, and much of the country around it, is shutting its doors to journalists.

Begin with the building itself. The tenth floor of 26 Federal Plaza, a couple of levels below where Luis was detained at by the courtrooms, is officially classified by the Department of Homeland Security as a “processing center,” not a detention facility. The distinction matters because Public Law 116-93, passed in 2019, gives members of Congress the right to inspect, unannounced, any DHS facility used to detain immigrants. By calling the tenth floor something other than detention, ICE has, throughout 2025, barred members of the New York congressional delegation — Nydia Velázquez, Adriano Espaillat, Dan Goldman, and Jerry Nadler — from entering it.

The press, with rare exception, was not allowed in either. The exception was a single hallway, where Carol Guzy and a small handful of other photographers were permitted to stand. Everywhere else in the building, the camera was a problem to be managed.

What the tenth floor actually contained became public in July 2025, when a detainee using a smuggled cellphone managed to record video of the conditions inside and pass it to the New York Immigration Coalition. The footage, eventually published by THE CITY, showed roughly two dozen men sleeping under fluorescent light on mylar emergency blankets, two open toilets behind a half-wall, no privacy, no sunlight. A voice recording made on the same phone described, in Spanish, men being held without food, without medicine, without contact with their families. The phrase used was “like dogs in here.”

The first images of the conditions inside the tenth floor were taken on a smuggled cellphone by a detainee. Not by a press photographer. The press camera had been kept out by classification, and the only camera that made it in was the one that was not supposed to.

A class-action lawsuit, Barco Mercado v. Noem, was filed in the Southern District of New York in early August 2025. On September 17, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued a preliminary injunction requiring ICE to provide detainees fifty square feet of space per person, three meals a day, sanitary supplies, sleeping mats, and confidential attorney calls within twenty-four hours of detention. The court certified, as a class, every immigrant detainee at 26 Federal Plaza, present and future. ICE appealed parts of the order. Conditions, by all subsequent accounts, only partially improved.

This is what it looks like when access narrows. Not a single sweeping policy, but a slow architectural closing. A floor reclassified to evade Congressional inspection. A press camera was kept out by that reclassification. A smuggled phone substituted for the press camera. A photographer was permitted in one hallway and not the others. A federal building that has come to function as a place where photography is mostly forbidden and where the absence of photography is part of the design.

Carol’s hallway is the residual case in a much larger pattern.

In February 2025, the White House barred the Associated Press from press-pool events because the wire service refused to adopt the administration’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Two months later, a federal judge ruled the exclusion unconstitutional in language that ought to be read into the record of every press freedom case to come. “If the Government opens its doors to some journalists,” wrote Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, “be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere — it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.” The administration appealed. A divided D.C. Circuit panel later granted a partial stay.

In October 2025, the Pentagon issued new rules requiring credentialed journalists to acknowledge that information must be approved for public release before they could publish it, even when unclassified. Reporters from more than thirty outlets, like the AP, Reuters, the Times, the Journal, the Post, NPR, even Newsmax and Fox, all refused to sign and surrendered their press passes. The Pentagon Press Association issued a statement noting that, for the first time in living memory, badges had been confiscated from virtually every news organization in America.

In June, a Salvadoran journalist named Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winner who had spent two decades documenting immigration enforcement in Atlanta, was arrested by sheriff’s deputies while live-streaming a “No Kings” protest. The criminal charges against him were dismissed within days. ICE took him into custody anyway. He was deported to El Salvador on October 3 after more than a hundred days in detention, despite a Georgia immigration judge’s order that he be released on bond. Asked by a reporter how he understood what had happened to him, Guevara said, “I am the first and only journalist who has been arrested and deported under the Trump administration. But, possibly, I will not be the last”.

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker recorded at least 32 journalist arrests and detentions in the United States in 2025, and 170 physical assaults, nearly as many in a single year as the previous three years combined. Almost ninety percent of the arrests occurred while journalists were covering protests, and almost all of those were tied to immigration enforcement. The Committee to Protect Journalists, in a report released a hundred days into the second Trump administration, warned that press freedom in the United States was “no longer a given.”

Reporters Without Borders, in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index released on April 30, ranked the United States 64th out of 180 countries, a seven-place drop from the year before and the lowest position the country has ever held. RSF named Guevara's case among the evidence.

Globally, 129 journalists were killed in 2025, the highest number CPJ has ever documented. Two-thirds of those deaths, roughly 86, were caused by the Israeli military, most of them Palestinians reporting from Gaza.

The hallway in New York sits inside this wider architecture, and the wider architecture is what makes Carol’s daily return both extraordinary and ordinary at once. Extraordinary because most rooms in this country are closed. Ordinary because somewhere, in every closing country, there is a photographer still showing up.

Reading through Carol’s earlier work in the days after the prize was announced, I came across her photographs from the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the assignment that earned her a fourth Pulitzer in 2011.

I was there too, three and a half years later, on assignment for a small NGO building a daycare in a village outside Port-au-Prince. Carol had photographed the country in collapse. By the time I arrived, in September 2013, Haiti was living inside what came after the collapse, and the work was straightforward: photograph the families the school would serve, photograph the construction, photograph what the donors’ money was buying. We were interviewing the families ourselves on the ground, sitting beside an interpreter, listening as parents described what they earned and how many children they fed, trying to find the families with the deepest need. Many of them had lost everything in the quake and had not begun to recover. The country was also, that year, three years into a cholera outbreak that would eventually kill more than ten thousand people, and the smell of chlorine was in everything we touched.

We were prioritizing the poorest of the poor, which in practical terms meant earnings somewhere below the equivalent of twelve American dollars a month. Most adults we talked to were making seven dollars or less in a month. I was younger then, less practiced than I am now. I crouched in the corner of a tent that contained a mother, her two children, and everything they owned in the world, and I made the pictures I knew how to make.

The tent was small. The children were small. The mother sat on a thin mat against the back wall, and I sat on the opposite corner, my knees nearly touching hers, the interpreter beside me. I remember thinking, very clearly, that this was their home. It was made of canvas and held together by whatever they had been able to find, but it was a home, and I was a guest, and the rules of being a guest in someone else’s home do not change because the home is a tent. You sit where you are invited to sit. You do not move objects you have not been invited to move. You photograph what you have been told you may photograph. You leave when the visit is over.

What I did not do, and could not have done well at that age, was understand that the work of making the picture begins long before the camera comes up and continues long after the shutter releases. The framing was fine. The pictures did what they were sent to do. What I think about now is the seeing itself, the kind of intuition you only develop after years of returning, after sitting in enough corners of enough lives to begin reading what is actually in front of you instead of just the picture you might make of it. I had none of that yet. I had the willingness and the rules of being a guest, and that was enough for what the campaign required. The deeper thing, the part of seeing that comes only from a longer life and a longer practice, was still ahead of me.

I made the pictures. They went into a fundraising campaign. The campaign raised enough money to buy the land and build the daycare, and the daycare Rise2Shine, as far as I have been able to follow it from a distance, has fed and educated children for years now. The photographs did the work they were meant to do. That much I know.

What I do not yet know, what I am still building toward, is the longer thing. The thing that Carol Guzy did in a hallway in Manhattan, day after day, for at least six months. The thing where you come back. Where you let the room change you, slowly, day by day, until you start to understand what you are looking at instead of merely recording it.

A few weeks after I came home from Haiti, I was sitting at a coffee shop in San Francisco’s Mission District, a place called Four Barrel, where the lattes cost seven dollars. I was with friends. The light was good, and the conversation was light. Somewhere between the second sip and the third I realized that the cup of coffee I was holding had cost more than the family in the tent had earned in a month, and that the difference between their morning and my morning was not a fact about either of us but a fact about the world, a structural fact, and that no amount of meditating on it was going to dissolve it.

A lot of people in this country are sitting at some version of that coffee shop right now. The dissonance of two simultaneous Americas, one in which a coffee costs seven dollars, one in which a father is led out of a courtroom in handcuffs while his children reach for him, is everyone’s burden, not just the photographer’s. Photography is the lens that makes the dissonance briefly impossible to look away from.

What I learned, slowly, in the years after Haiti, is that you cannot reason your way out of that dissonance. You can only sit inside it long enough to recognize it as the room you actually live in. The meditation practice I have kept, more or less, since my early teenage years, is for me the way I sit with it. My photography, I have come to understand, is part of that meditation too.

When I asked Guzy how she decides where to stand in a chaotic, tight space, she described the body's work as instinct trained by repetition. "Detainments are fast and unpredictable," she wrote, "but we use instinct to decide what floor and courtroom to wait. When it happens, there is chaos as ICE agents surround a respondent who reacts with anguish and tears or walks quietly to their new destiny." And then, naming what photography itself is for:

The empathy she named in her bio came up again, anchored to a piece of her own history. "My own father died when I was six," she wrote. "I understand the eternal hole the loss of a parent leaves in a child's heart."

Empathy in this work is, as Carol said, both a blessing and a curse. It is the thing that makes the picture possible. It is also the thing that makes the picture impossible to forget. In the half-second the camera is up, empathy decides which moments are yours to take and which are not.

The discipline is to know what you are leaving out.

I came to documentary work and photojournalism the long way around. Photography has been a passion since I was a child, but my career began in animation, moved through portraiture, and only recently has also settled into something I would call, with full seriousness, photojournalism, after I started getting paid editorial assignments during the pandemic lockdown. I carry an NPPA card now as a promise that the journalistic ethics it stands for will guide everything I do. I am trying to build a practice that lasts, in a moment when even the most established photojournalists are watching their careers become harder and harder to sustain.

Some of the deliberateness is personal ambition. Most of it is something else. The work matters more than it has at any point in my lifetime, but the room to do it has never been narrower, and these two facts have a relationship I am still trying to understand. The photographers I admire most are the ones who have decided, in the face of that narrowing, that the answer is to commit harder rather than to step back. Carol is one of them. There are others.

The line between the photographers in Carol’s hallway and the photographers who used to work the rooms of this country freely is a line drawn by power. Power decides which doors close and which stay open. Power decides whether a floor in a federal building is a detention center or a processing center, whether a wire service can stand in the East Room, and whether a journalist livestreaming a protest will sleep in his own bed that night.

Photographers do not draw those lines. We work them anyway.

Carol Guzy’s photograph hangs now in De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, where the World Press Photo exhibition opened on April 24. Luis is somewhere. His wife, Cocha, and their three children are somewhere. Guzy told me the family had been expected at St. Peter’s Church, which she described as “an epicenter of assistance, including legal aid, resources, and solace.” They never showed up. They have not responded to messages from her colleague Dean Moses, the amNY reporter who interviewed the family the day Luis was detained and who has been covering family separations alongside her. “I wonder a lot where life has led for the family,” Guzy wrote.

The most enduring document of one of the worst mornings of their lives now belongs to history, and the people in it have walked back into a country that is built to lose track of them.

There is a creative lineage here, and it is worth naming. Mary Ellen Mark, who in 1976 moved into a room next to a women’s psychiatric ward at Oregon State Hospital and stayed thirty-six days. Susan Meiselas, who returned for four consecutive summers to small-town carnivals in New England with a Leica and a tape recorder. LaToya Ruby Frazier, who photographed her own family and her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, for more than a decade as the steel mills closed around them. Donna Ferrato, who has documented domestic violence inside shelters, emergency rooms, and police rides for more than forty years. Dorothea Lange, who pulled into a pea-pickers’ camp near Nipomo on her way home from a Resettlement Administration assignment in 1936 and made the photograph we now call Migrant Mother, after which the federal government delivered food to the camp and the country at last began to understand who the migrants were.

Most recently, Carol Guzy, who returned to a hallway in the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan, day after day, for at least six months in 2025.

I asked Guzy what she would tell a documentary photographer trying to build a practice now, in a moment when access is closing across so many beats. She answered with characteristic plainness. “It’s very difficult these days with the spiral of journalism to find resources and support, especially for long-form documentary projects,” she wrote. “Access is an issue, especially for freelancers. But I believe if someone is dedicated to the story and believes in the vital need to tell it, they will find a way.”

The hallway shrinks, but the work doesn’t.

That is the lesson the lineage offers, and the question it leaves me with: when the rooms close one by one, who decides what we get to see, and what is it worth to a photographer to keep showing up to the room that’s left?

I do not know the answer for Carol. I am still learning it for myself. The question is not, in the end, only for photographers. We all have rooms we have stopped showing up to. We all know what narrowing access feels like, in our own lives, in our own democracies. The discipline of return is something every citizen of a country in the act of forgetting itself has to choose, separately, every morning.

And so the hallway holds. Carol arrives, and the lawyers arrive, and the families arrive, and no morning inside it is quite the same as the morning before, and that is part of what she has been learning by going back. Most of us will never set foot in that building. The only reason we know what is happening there at all is that someone is standing in the corner with a camera, refusing to leave.

Carol Guzy kindly answered questions for this essay by email between April 28 and May 9, 2026. All other quotations and facts are drawn from the public record. Her 2026 World Press Photo of the Year, "Separated by ICE," can be viewed at the World Press Photo Foundation's website.

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The wall above the dais at LAPD headquarters carries the department’s stated commitments in italic lettering: commitment to leadership, continuous improvement, and reverence for the law. On Tuesday morning, May 5, 2026, public comment at the Police Commission hearing turned into a sustained argument about the department’s recent conduct toward journalists.

Friday’s May Day protests in downtown Los Angeles brought twelve arrests, including credentialed reporters. According to testimony delivered to the board, one journalist was held for two hours without charges. The equipment was damaged. The LA Press Club’s lawyer was among those arrested while assisting reporters in the field. Chief Jim McDonnell told the board he would order a formal after-action review of the day and an investigation of media complaints using body-worn camera footage.

The hearing came two days after World Press Freedom Day. It also came against a backdrop the room knew well. The LAPD has been operating under a federal court order since July 2025, when Judge Hernán D. Vera granted a temporary restraining order in a lawsuit brought by the Los Angeles Press Club and Status Coup1. The order, later converted to a preliminary injunction in September, prohibits the LAPD from using less-lethal munitions against journalists, from arresting or detaining reporters covering protests, and from preventing the press from accessing closed areas2. A $500,000 settlement in a separate wrongful arrest case landed in 20253. The Press Club's contempt motion is still pending4. The City's appeal to the Ninth Circuit is still pending5.

Speaking from the public comment podium, Adam Rose addressed the commissioners with a specific kind of standing. He is the deputy director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the press rights chair of the LA Press Club. He helped draft California Penal Code §409.7, the state law that shields journalists from arrest while reporting. Rose has been tracking incidents between the LAPD and journalists for years. The number he and his colleagues cite is nearly 200 documented incidents over six years.

Photojournalist Nick Stern read from prepared remarks. Photographer Eric Langberg followed. The pattern in the room was hard to miss. Each speaker took the podium, and behind each speaker, an officer in uniform stood watch. The composition repeated through the morning: working press testifying about police treatment of working press, framed by police presence, on cameras broadcasting to a livestream and to a screen at the front of the room showing the speakers back to themselves.

The numbers landed in the room as commissioners listened. The United States dropped from 17th to 64th in international press freedom rankings. The Australian journalist shot by the LAPD with a less-lethal munition during recent protests, 9News correspondent Lauren Tomasi, prompted a public statement from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who called the footage "horrific."6 The 2026 FIFA World Cup brings international press to Los Angeles in a matter of weeks. The 2028 Olympics follow.

McDonnell’s framing for some of the May Day incidents centered on a recurring claim from the department: that officers in the field face genuine difficulty distinguishing legitimate press from protesters with phones. Press credentials are not always physical. Journalists working independently sometimes lack badges. The federal court order, however, has already addressed this question. A lack of physical credentials is not a legal ground for detention. LAPD’s own chief’s guidance reflects the same standard.

Tuesday’s hearing was about practice. Policy already exists. The court order exists. The state law exists. The question being put to the board, hearing after hearing, is whether the department’s conduct in the field reflects any of it.

The hearing ended without resolution. The Chief’s commitments to review and investigate were noted. The commissioners requested a report on complaint outcomes. Public comment moved on to other items: license plate readers, allegations involving the Church of Scientology, and crime statistics.

The press freedom story did not end on Friday and will not end this Tuesday. International coverage of Los Angeles is intensifying. The lawsuit remains pending, and the court order is in force. Whether the LAPD will treat journalists as journalists is a question answered in practice at every protest. The cameras themselves often become part of what is contested.

The motto remains on the wall above the dais. The reverence for the law it advertises is being measured, week after week, by the people who came on Tuesday to ask whether the law applies.

Many thanks to Eric Langberg, who flagged Tuesday's hearing. You can follow his work at:

Parts Of A Novel I'm Doing

from los angeles: musings on photography and meaning-making in a world losing both

By Eric Langberg

The rally starts at MacArthur Park, which is the only place it could have started.

This is the park where Central American refugees rebuilt their lives in the 1980s, where pupuserías replaced the paddle boats. It is the park where, on May 1, 2007, the LAPD’s Metro Division fired roughly 150 rubber bullets into a peaceful immigrant rights rally1, injuring more than 240 people including women, children, and journalists. The city of Los Angeles paid out almost 13 million dollars in damages, Chief William Bratton issued a formal apology, the commanding officer was demoted, and 17 other officers faced penalties.

It is also the park where, on July 7, 2025, about 90 California National Guardsmen and federal Border Patrol agents on horseback paraded through with armored vehicles2 while children attending a summer day camp were hurried indoors. Mayor Karen Bass called it a city “under armed occupation.”

If you wanted to choose one piece of ground in Los Angeles that holds the entire history of labor, immigration, and the fragile contract between government and the people it governs, this would be it.

So on the morning of May 1, 2026, twenty years after well over a million people walked down Wilshire Boulevard against H.R. 4437, a bill that would have made them all felons, the May Day Coalition gathered at MacArthur Park again. The wooden welcome sign at the corner was barely visible behind a forest of flags. People kept arriving. They kept arriving for two hours.

May Day is celebrated as the international workers' holiday almost everywhere except the country where it was born.

The holiday was born in Chicago in 1886, when 80,000 workers walked up Michigan Avenue chanting “Eight Hours for Work, Eight Hours for Rest, Eight Hours for What We Will.” Three days later, police fired on strikers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Works, and the day after that, an unknown person threw a bomb at police gathered in Haymarket Square.

The state of Illinois hanged four anarchists for it, even though the bomb-thrower was never identified. One of them, the German-born labor organizer August Spies, who had led 80,000 workers up Michigan Avenue three days earlier, said from the gallows: "The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today."

The Second International, a global congress of socialist and labor parties meeting in Paris in 1889, took that day and gave it to the world. May 1 became International Workers’ Day across Europe and Latin America. The American government, fearing the socialist and anarchist associations of the date, manufactured a different one. President Grover Cleveland signed Labor Day into law in September of 1894, four months after federal troops broke the Pullman Strike. The United States and Canada became the only major industrial nations not to celebrate workers on May 1.

For most of the twentieth century, May Day in this country was a thin, defensive ritual. Los Angeles changed that. The Justice for Janitors strike in 1990, when the LAPD beat largely Salvadoran cleaners outside Century City and sent more than 60 to the hospital, was the moment American labor became inseparable from American immigration. By the mid-1990s, under Miguel Contreras and Maria Elena Durazo, the LA County Federation of Labor and the immigrant rights movement had fused into one organism. By the spring of 2006, when the House passed H.R. 4437, the Sensenbrenner bill, that organism was ready.

The bill is worth pausing on for some further background. It would have made unauthorized presence in the United States a federal felony, transforming roughly eleven million people into criminals overnight. It would have also criminalized anyone who knowingly assisted them: doctors who treated them, teachers who taught their children, clergy who counseled them, even family members who sheltered them. What happened in Los Angeles on May 1, 2006, has no real precedent in American protest history. Estimates ranged from one to two million people in the streets. The bill died in the Senate.

Twenty years later, the people I photographed today were standing on that same ground with full knowledge of what it meant. The signs in English and Spanish read Solo el Pueblo Salva al Pueblo. Only the people save the people.

The rally moves slowly. SEIU members in yellow shirts pressed against the rope line with hand drums and megaphones, chanting Sí Se Puede. Justice for Janitors signs rose above the crowd, the same campaign that started this whole arc thirty-six years ago.

The Teamsters arrived in force. They gathered behind a black banner that read Stop the War on Workers, members of Local 630 in matching shirts with arms crossed and signs held high. There is something specific about watching organized labor in Los Angeles in 2026. The rank and file is overwhelmingly Latino, mostly the children and grandchildren of the people who walked Wilshire in 2006, who have inherited both the work and the fight.

I left MacArthur Park as the march itself was beginning to step off, and took the Metro from Westlake to Civic Center. By the time I came up at Grand Park, a different scene was waiting.

City Hall on May Day morning is a quieter place than the park. Smaller crowd, more space, more time to look. On its steps, two women were waving flags in the empty late-morning light. One held an American flag. The other held a hybrid flag, an American flag with the green stripes of the Mexican tricolor woven through it. One of them wore a sweatshirt that read Daughter of an Immigrant. Above them, carved into the stone, ran the inscription Righteousness Exalteth a People.

Food vendors had set up under rainbow umbrellas on the lawn. A two-story Trump balloon was being inflated near the steps, dressed in a military uniform decorated with medals he never earned.

On the main stage at City Hall, three elders from the American Indian Movement had gathered in beadwork and denim vests. One held a feather staff. Another held a Native flag. The man at the microphone closed his eyes and chanted, a blessing of the land, the original land, the ground that all of this was happening on.

Soon after, the head of the march arrived at the plaza. Drummers led the way, accompanied by a giant papier-mâché puppet of a woman, taller than any building she passed. A young woman walked beside her holding a sign that read: The only reason you are a citizen today is because your ancestors believed and practiced immigration. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Then the LAPD line started moving.

The officers were already in position along the courthouse wall, dozens of them, riot helmets and shields and less-lethal launchers loaded with foam rounds. The protesters had three vehicles parked across the road on Spring and Temple, blocking traffic in front of the rally. Soon after, an unlawful assembly was declared. The line of officers began walking forward, pushing the crowd back toward the stage. As the line advanced, the protesters had to move their vehicles closer to the stage, and the officers kept pushing the people standing in the street in the same direction. The crowd compressed.

Tension was high. Some protesters refused to move, and the officers pushed them physically. Voices were raised on both sides. But it didn't escalate past that, at least not while I was there. The line of helmets and shields held, the protesters held, and the rally on the stage continued underneath it all, speakers carrying on while a wall of body armor pushed in from twenty feet away.

The signs on the stage are in Spanish and English, and the speakers move between both languages without thinking about it. The crowd around me does the same. This is what May Day looks like in Los Angeles in 2026, and it has always looked something like this. The cast changes. The script does not.

The 1886 Haymarket strikers were fighting for an eight-hour workday. The 1990 janitors were fighting to be seen. The 2006 marchers were fighting against a bill that called them criminals. The people I photographed today are fighting for all of those things and one more: the simple right to walk through their own neighborhoods without disappearing into a Penske truck.

I left City Hall around two in the afternoon. The rally was still going. The line of officers was still pushing in. The elders had said their blessing, the drums were still beating, and the people who came out today were still standing where they had decided to stand.

That was the whole point.

They were there.

I walked the grounds for a while. There was a small petting area with goats in it, drawing families. A perimeter of city booths and community partner tables along the grass for the Earth Day portion of the program. The staging area for the main herd stood empty inside a low white electric fence, with a portable podium and the city seal set up in front of it, so that whoever spoke later would have the enclosure at their back. To the speaker’s left, a livestock trailer. To the right, the hillside rises above the park toward the nearby freeway.

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Then I noticed people beginning to point up at the hillside, and I followed their gaze. You could just make out a few goats high on the near-vertical cliffside, working at the dry brush. Someone next to me said they had done a test run the day before, and a small group had stayed up there overnight.1 I walked around to the trail that runs between the freeway and the base of the hill, and from down below I could see them more clearly. They were grazing with the patient indifference of animals that do this for a living.

A loose rock broke away from the hillside above me and came tumbling down fast enough that I took a step back and made a note to pay more attention. The goats noticed nothing. They went on eating. I could see them observing me at times, perhaps wondering why I was pointing my cameras at them so intently. The morning light came through the trees in soft diagonals, and there was enough dust in the air from the hillside to catch the light and hold it.

By the time I walked back to the event, the yoga class had wound down, and a different kind of work had begun. The handlers were staging roughly half the herd inside the fenced enclosure, a detail that had not been in the official schedule. A bystander explained to me that the program had been split into two releases. The first group of goats would be staged behind the empty podium and then sent up the hill before the speeches started. The second group would come out of the trailer after the remarks, at the countdown.

The city of Pasadena had partnered with the One Arroyo Foundation, a local nonprofit that crowdfunded the $85,000 needed to pay the contractor, Capra Environmental Services, an outfit based in Roseville, CA. that keeps a working herd of several thousand goats and sheep.2 The two-month pilot would graze nearly a hundred acres of invasive vegetation in the arroyo. It was the first program of its kind for Pasadena. It was not the first in Southern California.

Inside the staging area, Paul Abess, the operations manager and chief financial officer at Capra, worked the herd with a staff in his hand, and a second herder in a bright yellow vest moved with him. Two large light-coated dogs threaded through the goats alongside them. These were likely the Anatolian Shepherds that Capra uses as livestock guardian dogs, an ancient breed from what is now Turkey.3 They are not herding dogs. They live with the flock around the clock, and exist primarily to stand between it and whatever might come for it: coyote, mountain lion, loose domestic dog.

The crowd was pressed close to the fence, close enough that the herd would gather tighter at the far end of the enclosure, reluctant to move. A couple of minutes later, the people up front would notice and take a step back, and the goats would relax and drift forward again. This happened more than once. They were not unaccustomed to crowds, but they were not relaxed about them either.

Then, quietly, without announcement, the first group was released. The herder stepped to one side, the border of the enclosure opened, and the goats walked out at their own speed in their own direction and began to move up the hillside. By the time the speeches began, the first hundreds were already working the slope, and the staging area behind the podium stood empty again.

Four speakers took the microphone in turn: Mayor Victor Gordo, Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, Pasadena Deputy Fire Chief Tim Sell, and Daniel Rossman, the executive director of One Arroyo. Gordo joked from the podium about whether the animals might qualify as city employees, whether the workers’ comp claims would be complicated, and whether the overtime rules would get tricky given that goats eat through the night. It was a small joke at a family event on a sunny morning, but it landed because underneath it was a real fact about civic financing. The animals on the hillside were there because residents of Pasadena had put their own money toward something the city’s budget could not otherwise reach.

Pasadena has been through something. On the evening of January 7, 2025, during a windstorm that drove gusts past a hundred miles an hour through the San Gabriel foothills, the Eaton Fire ignited in the hills above Altadena. By the time it was contained, it had killed nineteen people, destroyed more than 9,400 structures, and burned through fourteen thousand twenty-one acres.

It is the second most destructive wildfire in California history.4 The official cause remains under investigation, but in December 2025, the president and chief executive of Edison International acknowledged publicly that Southern California Edison equipment was the likely ignition source.5 Surveillance video and federal lawsuits have focused attention on a transmission tower decommissioned in 1971 that may have been re-energized by contact with a live line during the storm. As of January, nearly a thousand lawsuits had been filed against the utility. The first trial is scheduled for January 2027.

That is the shadow the goats were walking into. Nobody at the podium said the word Edison. Nobody mentioned that in January of this year, the utility filed cross-complaints against the city of Pasadena’s own water department, arguing that inadequate water supply during the January 2025 blaze had contributed to the damage.6 Pasadena’s public response at the time was that the city considered Edison’s equipment to be the cause of the fire, and the cross-complaint does not change that. What the speakers on Saturday did say, in different ways, was that something had to change about how Pasadena manages its hillsides, and that the goats were one part of the change.

“Pasadena is no different than the many communities that are lining the foothills of Southern California,” Deputy Chief Sell said. He invoked the fire-science triangle of heat, fuel, and oxygen, and made the case that fuel is the only one of the three that a city government can meaningfully manage at scale. “These animals are natural firefighters. They reduce the fine fuels and ladder fuels that allow the flames to climb. They break up continuous vegetation that would otherwise help fire spread. They reach terrain that machinery can’t safely access.”

The phrase natural firefighters is a useful one for a press event, and on the fuel leg of the triangle, it is accurate. A well-run grazing operation can significantly reduce invasive plant biomass in the right window. A 2025 peer-reviewed study of goat grazing on black mustard at a Southern California site recorded an 87% reduction in biomass during the first year of the program.7

But the same study found those gains did not carry over into a second year after a wet winter, which matters in a place where black mustard seeds can remain viable in the soil for decades. More pointedly, goats don’t work on ember cast. Decades of research by the fire ecologist Jon Keeley and others has shown that most home losses in Southern California wildfires come from wind-borne embers that can travel a mile or more ahead of the fire and ignite homes through attic vents, wooden decks, and the debris people forget to clear from their gutters.8 The Eaton Fire moved that way. It leapt. It flanked. No amount of brush clearance in the Arroyo Seco would have saved most of the homes that burned in Altadena.

None of which is an argument against the program, and what Pasadena is counting on is cumulative. A fuel-reduced hillside is harder to ignite. A slower ground fire buys time for suppression and evacuation. A thicker margin between the built environment and dry brush means a slightly better chance of an ember not finding what it needs when it lands.

Southern California has been down this road. Laguna Beach has run a continuous goat program since 1991, the year of the Oakland Hills firestorm, after which modern California fire-mitigation grazing was largely built.9 Programs in Glendale, Anaheim, Rancho Palos Verdes, and elsewhere followed. Ventura County Fire has used goats since 2018, including at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, which credits a grazed perimeter with helping save the building during the 2019 Easy Fire.10

What has happened since the Eaton Fire is a specific local acceleration. Arcadia launched its first-ever goat program in July 2025 on acreage adjacent to the Eaton burn scar. The city of Los Angeles brought five hundred goats into the Sepulveda Basin in February. San Clemente extended its pilot. Now Pasadena. The grazing wave is not novel. It is a regional response arriving in a specific place at a specific time for specific reasons.

When Rossman, the One Arroyo executive director, took the microphone, he did something I did not expect.

Instead of selling the program he was there to launch, he cited a book. “One of my favorite authors is Robert Putnam,” he said, “who wrote this book called Bowling Alone, which really emphasizes the importance of getting involved with community.” He talked about looking at the person next to you. He said the salve for the weight of the world is getting involved in local things. He mentioned Teddy Roosevelt, who visited Pasadena in the early 1900s and said the arroyo should be protected as a park. He thanked the civic leaders who founded One Arroyo as an advisory group the city could lean on to care for a natural corridor it could not afford to fully steward on its own.11

The eighty-five thousand dollars for the goats had been raised through a campaign called Goat Fund Me. Donors could name a goat, sponsor an acre, or receive a sticker or a plushie for their contribution. The arroyo is a thousand-acre urban forest, the largest natural feature inside Pasadena city limits, and the foundation has estimated that roughly a hundred million dollars in identified but unfunded stewardship and trail work still waits on it. Rossman had described the campaign on stage as a way for people to feel, in his words, connected.

Then came the countdown for the second release. It went like this: "Starting at five. One, three, two, one." The trailer opened, and the goats did not come.

They hung back inside, unwilling to step down the ramp into a ring of people pressed close to the fence. The crowd read it, or someone in the handler’s area asked them to, and people took a step back. Then, slowly at first, the animals began to move. They came down the ramp in their own time and joined the stragglers already working the slope.

Between the two releases, while the speeches were still being set up, I had walked back up onto the trail I had taken earlier and kept going higher. The crowd noise fell away within a few minutes, and the hillside took over. I climbed up past where the first group was now working the brush and stood on the cliffside among a group of them. They paid me no attention at all. The view opened from up there. The Rose Bowl below, the Aquatics Center, the freeway beyond them, and the San Gabriel mountains rising over all of it.

The sound up on the hill was nothing like the ceremony below. It was jaws working. A soft ripping as the goats tore the tops off the black mustard stalks. Occasional movement through the brush. A slight breeze. I stood there and photographed a single white goat chewing slowly at a branch, its face catching the morning light. It looked back at me for a moment and went on eating. I stayed for a while and stopped trying to document anything in particular. I was just listening.

The question the goats can’t answer is the political one. Who pays for fire resilience, and who bears the cost when it fails? Pasadena is funding roughly a hundred acres of vegetation management through a crowdfunded nonprofit campaign. The utility whose equipment was the likely cause of the Eaton Fire is defending itself against nearly a thousand lawsuits and has, in turn, sued the county and the city’s own water department. The federal government has filed suit over damage to national forest lands.

Transhumance, the seasonal movement of goats and sheep between lowland and highland pastures, has been practiced in the Iberian Peninsula for roughly six thousand years. UNESCO added it to the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2019.12 Portugal launched a formal fire-mitigation program called Cabras Sapadoras, or Sapper Goats, in 2018, after wildfires across Portugal in 2017 killed more than 110 people, including 66 in the Pedrógão Grande disaster alone. Spain has been running a payment-for-environmental-services grazing program in Andalucía since 2005, paying local shepherds between forty-two and ninety euros per hectare to keep fuel loads down. California cities reaching for this practice in the 2020s are reaching back toward something the Mediterranean never fully let go of.

What you could see at Brookside Park on Saturday was the small American version of that reach. A foundation had raised money. A contractor from Placer County had driven six hundred animals three hundred miles south and turned them loose on a hillside in a city that had just lost its neighbor to fire. A deputy chief stood at a podium and called those animals firefighters, and the word was imprecise in the scientific sense and exactly right in every other sense. Children pressed up to the fence. Parents lifted them so they could see.

A couple came walking down the trail while I was up there. They said they hiked this trail most days and had come across the goats by accident. They had just moved into the neighborhood, out from Los Feliz, and the looks on their faces when they talked about what they were seeing was the moment of the morning I keep returning to. They said it was the best surprise a walk could have given them. They were not watching a policy rollout. They were watching something that felt good to watch, in a place they had just chosen to make their home.

Up on the cliffside, all I could see was the herd. No handlers, no podium, no crowd. Just goats doing the work they do so well, pulling at the mustard and the dry brush, helping a city live a little safer in a climate that is changing faster than any of us expected. I thanked the goats, quietly, and started walking back down toward the car.

Somewhere below, a child was laughing at something I could not see.

Pasadena, California. April 18, 2026.

Reporting and photographs by Afonso Salcedo. All images made at Brookside Park and in the Arroyo Seco, Pasadena, California, on Saturday, April 18, 2026.

I am reading about public utility commissions and electrical grids on a Tuesday afternoon, and I’m deep in the rabbit hole. This is not how I originally expected my week to go. I had planned to organize some of my Capture One sessions and continue doing outreach to try to improve lead generation for my photography work. Instead, I’m now tabs deep into a report about electricity rate increases, and I’m genuinely fascinated by the fact that two hundred state commissioners oversee more than two hundred billion dollars in annual utility spending, and that almost nobody knows who they are.1

This is the thing they don’t tell you about documentary photography. The camera is maybe twenty percent of it. The rest is reading, asking questions, and following one source to the next until you’ve built something in your mind that didn’t exist an hour ago. And it’s addictive, in the healthiest of ways, like learning always is when it connects you to something real. Every rabbit hole leads to a community, a name, a family whose story you suddenly need to understand. That feeling, paired with the moment when an image actually captures something true, like a reality that might otherwise stay hidden, is what keeps me motivated in this work.

A few weeks ago, I saw an article on PetaPixel about a documentary photography fellowship.2

PowerLines, a national nonprofit focused on modernizing utility regulation, was offering $30,000 for three months of work for a photographer to document the human experience of rising energy costs across the United States. I read the listing and felt something shift. I had never applied for a fellowship before. I’d never written a grant proposal or assembled a formal portfolio for anything other than my own website and portfolio reviews with photo editors. But something about this one pulled at me in a way I couldn’t set aside and move on from.

So I decided to go through the process. All of it. The research, the proposal, the portfolio, the budget, the timeline. Not because I expected to win, since the odds on any fellowship are steep, and there are photographers with longer documentary resumes and deeper community ties who are probably applying for this same thing. I decided to do it because I knew I needed to learn what it takes. And because the story, once I started looking at it, wouldn’t let me go.

The fellowship asks for a project about energy justice, which sounds a bit abstract until you start thinking about it. I live in West Hollywood in LA County. On January 7th, 2025, the Eaton Fire tore through Altadena and destroyed more than nine thousand structures.3 Nineteen people died. The fire has been linked to Southern California Edison’s equipment, a decommissioned power line that may have reenergized during a windstorm, a line that had been retired since 1971.4 The U.S. Justice Department has sued the utility, seeking tens of millions in damages, and dozens of additional lawsuits have been filed by homeowners, the county of Los Angeles, and other government entities.5

I remember those days, of course. Everyone in LA remembers them.

We were watching the news that night, and it felt like new fires kept appearing faster than anyone could track them. We were texting friends in evacuation zones, refreshing feeds, trying to figure out who was safe. By the next morning, the ash had reached our neighborhood in the Arts District, miles from the burn zone, and the smoke was inescapable for days.

The sky had a color that shouldn’t exist, this bruised orange that sat on the horizon and wouldn’t move. You could smell the smoke from miles away, and for days afterward, you’d find ash on your car, on your windowsill, everywhere.

So when I started researching energy infrastructure for this proposal, the Altadena connection hit immediately. A decommissioned line. A utility that failed to de-energize its circuits.6 A community whose residents now face rate surcharges to cover the wildfire liability costs of the very utility whose equipment may have caused the fire. The story was already in my backyard. I could see it in the cleared lots, the insurance disputes, the particular silence of a neighborhood that used to have houses in it.

But the more I read, the more the story expanded, and this is what I mean about photography feeding a hunger that has nothing to do with cameras. From LA, the narrative started pulling me outward to the Navajo Nation, where over ten thousand families still live without electricity in 2026.7

The reservation is roughly the size of West Virginia. For decades, it was home to one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the West, the Navajo Generating Station, which sent electricity to Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. The plant was decommissioned in 2019. The power left. The people who’d lived in its shadow stayed, many of them still in the dark. A forty-year federal development ban, the Bennett Freeze, had prohibited the installation of electricity across more than 1.5 million acres of Navajo land.8

The ban was lifted in 2009, but the damage was generational. It costs roughly forty thousand dollars to connect a single family to the grid out there, in a place where the average household income is about $30k.9

I didn’t know any of this three weeks ago. That’s the part that humbles me and excites me in equal measure. Photography, when it’s working the way it should, turns you into a student of other people’s lives. You sit down to research a grant application, and you stand up hours later with the beginning of an understanding of an entire community’s history, with the policies that shaped it, the systems that failed it, and the people who are still fighting to change it. That education alone, regardless of what any jury decides, is worth every hour I put in.

From the Navajo Nation, the research carried me to Loudoun County, Virginia, known as “Data Center Alley”. The area became the center of the internet almost by accident: the Defense Department built early network infrastructure nearby in the 1960s, AOL set up headquarters there in the nineties, and once the fiber was in the ground, every tech company followed. Today, an estimated seventy percent of the world's internet traffic passes through a single suburban county outside Washington.

Nearly two hundred data centers are already operating there, with over a hundred more in development, and the electricity demand is so extreme that the local utility, Dominion Energy, has proposed a 14% rate increase for residential customers.10 Residents are watching high-voltage transmission lines go up through their neighborhoods to feed server farms that power the cloud and train artificial intelligence models. A single large data center can consume as much electricity as a small city.11

That became my proposal. One story, told across three American communities, about what power costs and who pays for it. I titled the project Who Keeps the Lights On, four words that kept surfacing as I wrote and revised, and that seemed to hold the whole thing together. And the deeper I went into the research, the more I understood how connected these three places are, not just thematically, but structurally.

In 2025 alone, utilities across the country requested nearly thirty-one billion dollars in rate increases, more than double the amount requested the year before.12 Electricity prices have climbed roughly twenty-one percent since 2022.13 The grid is aging, the demand is surging, and the cost is landing on the people least equipped to absorb it. That’s a national story. It just happens to be told most clearly in the communities directly affected by it.

My research was extensive, but that part I expected. What I didn't expect was how much of the work felt like producing.

I use production skills on every photography job I take, creating call sheets, logistics, licensing, and client planning. I pride myself on how organized I am because of it. But this fellowship proposal operated at a different scale. Three locations across two time zones, a thirteen-week timeline, a budget that had to account for everything from rental cars to field insurance. I had to think about milestones, what would be delivered at the end of month one versus month three, and how the work would flow from one community to the next. It was the closest thing to a film production schedule I've built since leaving the studio or corporate video world. A creative bid, but a bid nonetheless.

I hadn’t anticipated how much I’d draw on those old muscles. The part of my brain that knows how to break a project into phases, how to estimate costs against a fixed budget, how to sequence work so that early deliverables build toward a final product, that’s not something I learned behind a camera. I learned it in production meetings and post-production schedules, and the particular anxiety of keeping a project on track when the variables keep shifting. And here it was, alive and useful again, in a completely different context. I guess nothing you learn is ever really wasted. It just waits for the right moment to become useful again, sometimes in ways you never would have predicted.

The other part that surprised me was the portfolio.

I recently reorganized my entire documentary and photojournalism website, and I’m proud of it. It’s the strongest it’s ever been, showcasing my Haiti humanitarian work, Stories of Resilience profiles, protest documentation, environmental photography, and the daily texture of Los Angeles from the street level. But the fellowship asked for twenty images. Twenty. Not your whole body of work. Twenty frames that tell a jury who you are as a documentary photographer.

That selection process is humbling in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t done it. You sit with your work spread across a screen (or in prints, if you can), and you start making decisions that feel uncomfortably personal. This image stays because it shows you can connect with a stranger in a difficult moment. This one goes because, as much as you love it, it’s doing something too similar to the one before it. This one stays because it proves you can work in natural light, on the street, without controlling anything. That one goes because you realize it’s technically good but emotionally flat, and the jury won’t feel what you felt when you took it.

What you end up with, if you’re honest with yourself, is not your best twenty photographs. It’s the twenty that most accurately represent the photographer you’re becoming. And those aren’t always the same thing.

I also spent a lot of time studying how successful grant recipients talk about their work. There’s a bit of a pattern, and it took me a while to see it. The best proposals don’t lead with the photographer. They lead with the people. The opening scene isn’t “I went to this place and saw this thing.” The opening scene puts you in that room, in that community, in that specific moment, and the photographer is almost invisible. You feel the story before you understand who’s telling it.

That was hard for me to internalize. My instinct, trained by years of professional bios and job interviews, is to establish credibility first. Here’s who I am, here’s what I’ve done, here’s why you should trust me with this project. But now I feel the best proposals flip that. They trust the scene to do the work. They center the subject over the self. And they show, quietly, that the photographer has already started, that the research is underway, that the relationships are forming, that the work will happen whether or not the money arrives.

I ended up writing close to a thousand words for this proposal. My goal was that it had to do at least four things: open with a human moment that hooks the jury, demonstrate that I’ve done real research, lay out a feasible plan, and make the case that I’m the right person. A thousand words is not a lot of space for all of that. I wrote it and rewrote it and then rewrote it again, and each draft got a little more honest and also a little less interested in impressing anyone.

But I also should be transparent about something. From my understanding, fellowships and grants like this one typically go to photographers who have already started the work. People who are already embedded in the communities they want to document. People with publication credits in the places that matter, with relationships built over months or years of showing up. I have some of that, but I’m still very much at the beginning of this side of my career.

I live in LA, though. I experienced the fires firsthand as a resident here and through the eyes of friends and neighbors who were directly affected by them, and I’ve been building Stories of Resilience for over a year now, where I’m six documentary profiles deep. But I haven’t spent months on the Navajo Nation. I haven’t been to Loudoun County. I’m proposing to enter those communities as a relative outsider, and that’s a real consideration for any jury evaluating who to trust with this work.

I know that. I named it in the proposal, directly. Not as an apology, but as an honest assessment of where I am and what I’d need to build, but I think there’s value in that honesty. I believe juries can tell when someone is overselling their readiness versus when someone is being straight about the gap between where they are and where the work needs to take them.

Here is what I keep coming back to, in the quiet hours between client inquiries and the next portrait or Stories of Resilience session I’m strategizing.

This has been a slow year so far. Photography income has been inconsistent, and I’d be lying if I said that doesn’t worry me at times. The math doesn’t always work yet. There are moments where I wonder if I’m going about this in the right way, if the documentary and portrait path I’m building will sustain itself, if I should be spending more time chasing commercial work, or even other careers, and less time reading about utility regulation and energy poverty.

But there’s another feeling underneath that fear, and it’s harder to explain. A gut-level certainty that this is the right direction. I’ve felt it before in my life, this particular quality of conviction that shows up when something is about to shift, not a guarantee, just a current you can feel if you’re paying attention.

The work feels more mine than anything I’ve ever done. The portraits, the stories, the long documentary projects where you spend weeks understanding someone’s life before you ever raise the camera, that feels like what I’m supposed to be doing. Not because it’s noble or because it pays well (it doesn’t, not yet), but because when I’m inside that work, something in me is fully present in a way that I haven’t quite experienced in a long time.

And here’s what I think every artist eventually has to reckon with: the silence. You send emails that don’t get answered. You submit work that disappears into a void. You apply for things and hear nothing. The temptation is to interpret that silence as a verdict, as the world telling you that you’re doing it wrong. But I don’t think that’s what it is. I think the silence is just the sound of building something before anyone knows to look for it. Every rejection, every unanswered outreach, every application submitted into the void, they’re all teaching you something, sharpening something, moving you closer to the version of your work that will eventually be undeniable. You just have to stay in it long enough to find out.

Most likely, I won’t get this fellowship, but the application is submitted. It’s out of my hands, and the winning was never the end goal. But I know more today about what I want to build than I did a month ago. The research alone changed my understanding of the story I want to tell, not just for PowerLines, but for the future of my photography work. The proposal forced me to articulate a vision I’d been carrying around without putting language to it. And the portfolio curation made me look at my own work with the kind of honest, unsentimental eye that you can’t easily summon on an ordinary Tuesday.

The application wasn’t really about the thirty thousand dollars, even though it’s always nice to be paid for your photography. It was about taking my own ambitions seriously enough to put them in front of strangers and say: this is what I want to do. Here’s my plan. Here’s the evidence that I can do it. And then sitting with the silence that follows.

Tomorrow I’ll be back at my desk, just like every other day, researching the next photography profile, doing more outreach for possible portrait and headshot clients in LA, looking for news-worthy events to photograph and cover, and researching other stories to document. In June, there’s a potential project I’ve been dipping my toes in around the Iranian diaspora community during the World Cup. I also applied recently to a photojournalism workshop. The daily work continues, the outreach, the relationship building, the slow accumulation of trust that photography requires before a single frame is worth making.

I submitted the fellowship application. Then I made a cup of coffee, possibly my second, most likely my third, opened my laptop again, put some music on, took a deep breath, and started working on the next thing. I smiled. That’s what it feels like. Not a finish line. Just a Tuesday, with a little more clarity about the road.

If you’ve been through a fellowship application or grant process, or if you’re thinking about it and have been putting it off, I’d love to hear about it. What surprised you? What did the process itself teach you, regardless of the outcome?

Teri Hendrich Cusumano found me through The Animation Guild Discord, where I’d shared information about this project. Her submission stood out immediately, and not just for the breadth of her career, but also for the specificity of what she had lost. She described experiencing an “ego death,” a term that carries weight far beyond her professional setback. In her case, it meant the simultaneous collapse of the two identities she had spent years building: accomplished color supervisor and pioneering labor advocate.

It was one of the hottest spring days on record in Los Angeles County when I drove out to visit Teri at her home in Glendale. The walk from my car to her garage was short but sweltering, the kind of dry, unforgiving heat that makes you reconsider if this was still a good idea. Then I stepped inside, and everything changed. The air conditioning hit first, and then the color, those magentas, blues, purples, and cool greens surrounding me from every direction in her garage art corner. Completed canvases hung on the walls. Color studies were pinned up near her worktable. Paints were organized meticulously on shelves alongside archived prints and works in progress. It was a space that radiated a joyful, vibrant calm, the kind of creative sanctuary that you don’t want to leave. Standing in that garage, I could see she had already started building what comes next.

Teri grew up in Glendora, a working-class city in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. Art was present in her childhood, but not celebrated as a career path. “My parents didn’t discourage me or anything,” she recalls, “but it wasn’t something they were necessarily promoting.” She was a quiet child, and drawing became her primary language. “I can talk just by drawing,” she says, describing the impulse that would eventually carry her through two decades of professional creative work and into a new life as an independent painter.

She attended ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, where she studied illustration with a focus on editorial work, which is the kind of evocative, interpretive portraiture you’d find accompanying a profile in a major magazine. “I really loved seeing the editorial images in magazines,” she explains. “Some celebrity that was interviewed, and an illustrator did their image. I was like, oh, that sounds fun.” She had no exposure to animation as a discipline. “I had no idea at all what animation involved. Which is funny that it’s right here, the industry, and I was just not exposed to it at all.”

After graduating in 2004, Teri made the pilgrimage to New York, like so many young illustrators, to meet art directors and hand out cards. Reality set in quickly. “Even if they love my work, it depends on whether they have the right project,” she realized. She took a job in architectural illustration, followed by design work at a novelty giftware company in Covina, a small city east of Los Angeles. Both paid barely above minimum wage.

The pivot to animation came through a phone call that wasn’t even meant for her. A former ArtCenter classmate called, looking for someone else’s number, mentioning that an animated pilot had been picked up for a full season and the production needed artists. “If it pays well, I’ll apply too,” Teri told her. She got the job and found herself earning roughly three times what her previous positions had paid.

That first show was unconventional, non-union, with no segmented roles. Every artist did everything: characters, backgrounds, color, and poses. “Some people might hear that and be like, oh, that sounds abusive,” Teri acknowledges. “But for me, it was the first time learning there are all these jobs or possibilities in animation.” The experience helped her discover where her instincts led, toward backgrounds and, increasingly, toward color.

By 2011, she had landed at Titmouse, one of the most prolific independent animation studios in Los Angeles. She was hired as a background designer and painter, but the art director noticed something. “I think you’re maybe better at color,” they told her, and by the next season, her role had shifted to background paint exclusively. It was at Titmouse that she met her husband, Jack Cusumano, who worked in the same department doing design and color work. She would go on to work across multiple television series over the following years, eventually rising to Color Supervisor at Bento Box Entertainment, where she oversaw the color departments on shows including Duncanville and Krapopolis for Fox.

All the while, Teri maintained a personal painting practice on the side, showing in galleries around Los Angeles, but she always kept a deliberate separation between her professional work and her artistic identity. “I was kind of detached from it,” she admits, describing what it felt like to see her shows on television. “Animation, it’s like I’m being asked to work in a specific style that might not even intuitively be what I would want to do. I didn’t view it as a personal kind of triumph or anything.” The feeling was more pragmatic than personal. “I was very conscious of, okay, I’m kind of like a hired hand, executing someone’s vision. But I didn’t really feel like anyone was going to pay me for my vision.”

When asked what color does in a story that other elements cannot, Teri’s answer reveals the depth of craft beneath the job title. “It has its own narrative,” she says. “Even as simple as the color of a character’s shirt. If it’s this pure white color, that says something about the character, versus if it’s this muddy gray. There are subtle emotional or character cues that can be conveyed through color.” For 2D animation, she notes, the color department also functions as the lighting department, controlling time of day, atmosphere, and the way light interacts with every surface on screen.

[As a lighting artist myself in feature animation, this intersection of color and light is where much of my own career has been spent over the years, a shared language that made our conversation feel especially grounded.]

The personal work and the professional advocacy would also eventually converge through injustice.

In 2016, Teri’s daughter was born. The following year, while working at ShadowMachine in Los Angeles, both she and her husband were offered positions on the same production: Teri as a background painter, Jack as a color designer. The rates seemed low, so she called The Animation Guild to check. Her rate, they confirmed, was incorrect for a background painter. His, however, was correct for a color designer.

“That blew my mind,” she recalls, “because all my experience had been in design and I just assumed everyone was getting at least a similar minimum rate.” But when she dug into The Animation Guild’s master agreement with the studios, which is the union contract that sets minimum pay rates for each job classification, the reality was stark: every design role was paid at the same minimum except color design. The difference amounted to roughly $300 per week.

What followed was one of the most significant labor advocacy campaigns in modern animation history, though it would take nearly eight years to reach its conclusion.

Teri traced the pay disparity to its roots in the industry’s earliest decades. In animation’s analog era, the Ink and Paint department was responsible for producing the thousands of hand-inked and hand-painted celluloid sheets, known as cels, required to make animated images appear to move on screen. It was painstaking, labor-intensive work that demanded a massive workforce. Studios, seeking to keep their largest department’s costs low, staffed it almost exclusively with women and paid them accordingly. At Walt Disney Studios, the Ink and Paint department was physically segregated in its own building, and women were explicitly prohibited from other animation work, a policy documented in a 1938 rejection letter from Walt Disney Productions confirming that “the only work open to women” dealt with inking and painting cels. At its peak, the department comprised over half of The Animation Guild’s voting membership.

As technology transformed the industry, with cel Xeroxing appearing in the late 1950s1, the outsourcing of Ink and Paint work abroad in the late 1970s and 1980s2, and the digital revolution of the 1990s, the physical department disappeared. But the roles that descended directly from it, such as Color Design and Animation Checking, survived the transition and remained female-dominated. Storyboard Revision, a more recently established role that also employs predominantly women, carried a similar pay disparity. All three classifications shared the same union minimum rate, and none had ever been corrected to match equivalent, male-dominated roles.

Around the same time Teri was uncovering this pattern, she came across Mindy Johnson’s book Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation, which documented this history in detail. “Just hearing the title, I was like, oh, I think that’s it,” she recalls. “That’s the reason. But no one at that time was talking about it or connected to it.”3

In 2018, Teri helped form the Color Designer Committee within The Animation Guild and launched the #ColorIsDesign campaign, gathering over 2,000 signatures from industry professionals and presenting directly to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) during contract negotiations. She prepared with the thoroughness of someone building a legal case, assembling a detailed presentation with historical evidence and pay data. “I’m thinking, these are all lawyers,” she says. “So I made this case as if it were a court presentation, with all my evidence laid out.”

But she quickly learned the limits of moral clarity in a negotiation room. “Within union negotiations, everything’s on the record,” she explains. “So if I’m going to them, saying, you’re partaking in gender pay discrimination, they will not want to admit that on the record. So I had to start thinking, how do you fight an argument that can’t be said outright?”

That first round of negotiations yielded only modest changes, a title change from “Color Stylist” to “Color Designer” and a shortened wage schedule. Teri was heartbroken. “We did all this work, and that’s it?” But seasoned negotiators on the committee reassured her: in a process where gains are measured in increments over three-year cycles, any change at all was significant. The 2022 contract closed the pay gap by a third and added a supervisor premium. Then, in August 2024, a landmark pay equity study conducted jointly by The Animation Guild, IATSE, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst Labor Center provided, for the first time, objective data. The researchers used a formal job evaluation tool and concluded that color design work was “substantially similar” to other design classifications, and was being underpaid.

“All along the argument, it was an opinion that this work was equal,” Teri explains. “Everyone could then just say, I don’t believe you. This study coming out was like, no, now we have a third-party university saying this is an objective fact.”

The final round of negotiations, completed in late 2024, secured the commitment that would close the gap for good. Under the new contract, color designers would be moved into the same wage classification as other design roles, with increases phased in over the agreement’s three-year term. Across three contracts and nearly eight years of sustained advocacy, the structural pay disparity, rooted in the gendered labor practices of 1930s Hollywood, had finally been addressed for this craft.

Teri’s advocacy work had expanded far beyond the pay equity fight. In 2022, she earned a Certificate in Labor Studies from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, specifically to make herself a credible candidate for full-time union work. That same year, she was elected Vice President of The Animation Guild.

Her tenure coincided with some of the most turbulent years in Hollywood’s recent history. The 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes shut down much of the industry. Animation production contracted sharply. A huge number of guild members faced unemployment. As VP, Teri found herself navigating the tension between institutional solidarity and the personal desperation of members who were losing their jobs and going on public assistance.

The final contract negotiations in late 2024 were especially difficult. A large contingent of members, many of them unemployed, had joined the bargaining process, partly driven by organized outreach on social media. The structure of the negotiations created its own friction: some committee members were present at the table in person, while others participated remotely with limited voting ability, a setup designed to accommodate broader participation but one that inadvertently created a two-tier dynamic. Members who were out of work and struggling financially found themselves watching others carry out the day-to-day labor of bargaining, and the gap between those two experiences produced real tension. “There would just be these things that they point out, like the struggles they were going through,” Teri recalls.

But what came next was harder.

In October 2024, Teri’s position as Color Supervisor on Krapopolis came to an end. The show itself continued, and it remains in production today, but she was told the production no longer had the budget for her role. Over the course of its three seasons, the show had been incrementally outsourcing positions, and by that point, much of the work was being done outside of Los Angeles. Within weeks, Teri was also back at the negotiating table for the final round of contract bargaining. A tentative agreement was reached in November and ratified by the membership in December. By February 2025, The Animation Guild had opened a new field representative position, which was the kind of full-time union role Teri had been preparing for since earning her Cornell certificate.

She applied, interviewed, and felt confident.

She didn’t get it. The position went to another executive board member, someone she knew had not pursued the same level of formal education in labor studies. “It was a slap in the face,” she says. In April 2025, she resigned from the guild’s executive board.

That same month, her unemployment benefits ran out for the first time in her entire career. Her home was under construction, with an addition that had been permitted and greenlit at the worst possible moment, and her family had temporarily relocated to a rental apartment in North Hollywood.

“All these years I was a color supervisor, and I was a union advocate, and now I’m none of those things,” Teri reflects. “So, what am I?”

She started seeing a therapist. She stopped reading the guild’s emails and unfollowed their social media. “I had to give myself the space, so that I could find what I am now,” she says. Her children, ages six and ten, were too young to understand the full weight of what she was carrying. Her husband saw it. But much of it, she carried quietly.

Fortunately, the garage art studio in Glendale had been waiting for years.

Teri and her family moved into the house around the time her first child was born in 2016. The garage was a cluttered storage space for years. In 2020, just before the pandemic, they finally organized it into a workspace. “I was like, oh, now I can finally paint,” she recalls. “But then COVID hit, and I had to put my work computer here.” She describes the resentment of sitting in a space she’d created for her own art, surrounded by canvases, doing someone else’s work on someone else’s schedule.

When I asked Teri if she remembered the first piece she created in this space, something shifted. She got up with a kind of beaming energy, went to a shelf in the corner, and carefully unwrapped a framed canvas from its protective plastic. It was the first painting she made in this space, a figure in flowing blues and greens, surrounded by petal-like shapes against a bright sky-blue ground. It felt lyrical, almost weightless. It marked a departure from her earlier work, which she describes as more muted and controlled. “I was really envious of artists who could be more expressive and loose,” she says. “I’m very detailed and tight. So I’m like, okay, how can I find something that works for me?” She was visibly proud of it, the kind of quiet joy that comes from holding proof that you’ve changed.

The answer came through abstraction and, also unexpectedly, through astrology.

Teri’s husband was the one who initially got into astrology, taking professional coursework that reframed it far beyond the sun-sign horoscopes most people encounter casually. Intrigued, Teri began studying it herself, eventually connecting her astrological chart to her painting practice. The “Venus in the 12th” series, which became a body of work she is particularly proud of, is a collection of large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas and is named for the placement of Venus in the 12th house of her natal chart.

“The 12th house is this kind of liminal, mysterious place,” she explains. “It can be one’s blind spot. A place where you can easily be overlooked.” She pauses. “I struggle a lot with being able to describe myself or objectively knowing how I come off to people. I feel like I’m in the dark about what people think of me. And that’s the 12th house.”

For the series, she gave herself over a year of preparation, signing up for a solo show at Gallery 839, The Animation Guild’s exhibition space in Burbank, with a February 2024 opening. She approached astrology with the same rigor she’d brought to her labor advocacy, signing up for formal coursework because, as she puts it, “I didn’t want to be a poser.” The resulting paintings feature shadowed, unidentifiable figures rendered with gestural, multi-colored strokes. One, called Reunion, depicts her vision of the 12th house itself, and it earned an award from the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles. She self-published a 52-page catalog for the show, choosing Reunion as the cover, which the printing company was so taken with that they asked to keep extra copies to show prospective clients.

But none of the paintings sold at the exhibition. “I was still thinking, okay, I don’t see how I could ever make a living doing this,” she admits.

The shift began, improbably, with a sales and marketing course.

In the summer of 2025, at her lowest point professionally and emotionally, Teri enrolled in a coaching program specifically designed for visual artists. She had been posting her work on social media with little traction, and she figured sales and marketing were the missing skills. “I know nothing about how to sell anything to people,” she reasoned. “What else am I doing?”

The results were slow. Other participants in the group were making significant sales almost immediately. Teri would see a $50 print order come in, and that would be all she made for an entire month. Meanwhile, she continued applying to animation jobs. Nothing materialized.

Months passed. Neither path seemed to be opening, not the art, not the animation. “It did feel like, oh man, is this ever gonna change?” she recalls.

Then, in December 2025, her social media posts began reaching a wider audience. Print orders from her website ticked up. And in January of 2026, a collector discovered her work, fell in love with it, and purchased three paintings, two of them large-scale pieces from the Venus in the 12th series.

“What I brought in from my art that month matched what I would make in animation,” Teri says.

It was, by any measure, a breakthrough. But she’s honest about what followed. “Since then, trying to keep that momentum is difficult,” she says. She recently began working with an art agent who specializes in helping artists build a sustainable studio practice, the kind of structured guidance that she’s accustomed to from production environments but has never had for her own work. “Coming from animation, it’s like, here are your assignments, here’s the schedule. No one’s telling me that here.”

Teri’s relationship with the animation industry remains unresolved, and she’s not pretending otherwise. When I ask if she’d return for the right show, her answer is practical, not sentimental: she’s 400 qualifying union hours short of an enhanced retirement medical benefit, and she’d like to reach that threshold. Beyond that, she’s not optimistic about the industry’s trajectory. She draws on the history she knows so well, noting that when the Ink and Paint department’s work was outsourced abroad in the 1980s, it never came back. “I’m wondering, how’s it gonna come back now?”

She also recounts a conversation with a studio head about California's tax incentive structure, which excludes key above-the-line costs from credit calculations and, until mid-2025, barred animated productions entirely. The math, the executive explained, simply doesn't work for the small and mid-budget animated productions that make up the majority of the industry's output, the very shows that once sustained thousands of jobs in Los Angeles. "It was just more writing on the wall," Teri says.

When I ask what she’d tell her daughter if she wanted to pursue animation, Teri doesn’t hesitate. “Be open to the fact that she might have to relocate to a different country,” she says. She mentions a college student studying animation in England who recently reached out for career advice. “I’d be like, stay in England. Don’t come back here.”

There is a thread that runs through all of it: the ArtCenter education, the Ink and Paint research, the #ColorIsDesign campaign, the paintings that now lean against the walls of this garage in Glendale. At every stage of her career, Teri Hendrich Cusumano has been asking the same question: what is the value of color?

For eight years, she asked it on behalf of an entire profession, and the answer she fought for changed the terms of employment for every color designer in the industry. Now, she’s asking it on her own behalf, whether the color that comes from her own hand, driven by her own vision, can sustain a family and a life.

The answer, she’s finding, is yes. Tentatively, imperfectly, but also genuinely.

“I felt like I was in a fantasy,” she says about the January that changed everything. “Like, people are gonna pay me for stuff that just comes out of my head, and I’m gonna have fun? That sounds crazy. But it happened.”

When I ask what finally brought the ground back under her feet, she pauses. “Maybe just this year,” she says. “Like, January.” She smiles.

She’s not done figuring it out. The art agents are new. The commission work is arriving but is not yet steady. Animation remains a possibility, if only for those remaining union hours. But for the first time, the path she’s on is entirely hers, not a studio’s, not a union’s, not an industry’s.

I stepped back out into the heat. After almost two hours in the cool shelter of Teri’s studio, the sun hit like a sudden and intense reminder of one of the hottest spring days Los Angeles had seen in years. Inside, everything had felt still and possible, a quiet space built around color and imagination and the unhurried work of reinvention and resilience. Out here, in the heat of a sunny Friday afternoon, none of it was visible. Just one of many residential streets in Glendale, baking under an unforgiving sun. You’d never know what was being built behind that door.

Inside that garage, an artist was making something new. And in the quiet of that space, the color still speaks.

Teri’s work can be found at terihc.art. Follow her on Instagram at terihendrich.c.

If you found Teri’s story compelling, please consider sharing this piece with others. I’m actively seeking more voices, people navigating career disruption, displacement, reinvention, or any significant life transition in Los Angeles. Reach out via my website if you, or anyone you know, might be interested in joining this project.

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But Steven and I go way back. He works in PR at Sony Imageworks, the animation studio behind Spider-Verse and a long list of projects I admire. When he mentioned they needed headshots for their LA team, around twenty people, I thought about it carefully. I remembered how chaotic my previous corporate experience had been back in the Bay Area, but I was new then. A lot has changed. My workflow is more refined now, my technical foundation stronger. I knew I could bring something high-end and deliver to the highest degree of professionalism while staying true to my process. I said yes and placed a bid for this opportunity.

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The project had two locations: LA and Vancouver. Sony wanted both teams to feel cohesive, like they could be in the same place even though they’d be shot weeks apart by different photographers. We started scouting in LA first. Steven walked me through the new Sony Imageworks campus on Wilshire, and we initially landed on a subtle grayish-green wall with some texture, since we felt it would be interesting enough and complement a range of skin tones well. But when Vancouver did their own scout, they didn’t have anything similar. They ended up choosing a wooden backdrop instead, which meant we had to redo our LA scout to find something that could match the feeling.

After Vancouver actually shot their session, I asked the photographer for a sample image and used that as a reference as we scouted our LA location again. We found a wooden wall that gave a similar warmth, even though we couldn’t quite match the specific slats they had up north. The backgrounds weren’t identical, but the overall feeling aligned, and that was what mattered.

My Profoto strobes had been failing for months. Both units were over a decade old, and somehow, both motherboards had toasted. Profoto couldn’t repair them, so I was stuck with gear I couldn’t trust, with random shutoffs mid-session, and unreliable recycling times. The kind of inconsistency you can’t afford when you’re photographing company leadership on a schedule. This job forced the decision I’d been putting off. I ordered three Godox AD600 Pro II strobes, new modifiers, a trigger system, and a Pelican case to transport everything safely. The investment was significant, but I was building a new kit for the next decade of work.

Tethering was another consideration. I tether regularly in my studio portrait work with Capture One, and I’d used a wireless iPad monitoring setup during my Udemy shoot last year, so I knew the mechanics. But for this session, I wanted to push it further: employees would see their images immediately, pick a favorite on the spot, and move on. No complex rounds of revision, no emailing proofs later. I set up Capture One on my laptop with a wireless iPad as a live monitoring station on a C-stand nearby. Steven could watch in real time what I was photographing and suggest adjustments if needed, and at the end of each person’s slot, they could select their favorite image right there, which would help later since I’d already have their pick flagged for editing.

I knew from the start I’d need to budget for an assistant. For my portrait work, I usually operate alone as it’s part of the intimacy. But corporate headshots are a different rhythm. Someone can help monitor the tethering station while I’m shooting. Someone can help greet people, check the wardrobe, and keep the schedule moving. Look for things that I might miss while focusing on the main captures. I searched the ASMP assistant directory and found Nick Reid, with ten years of experience, a reasonable rate, and solid references. We exchanged emails, I sent a contract, and in the days leading up to the shoot, we did a video call to walk through everything.

I’d never hired an assistant before here in LA, so I wanted to make sure we were completely aligned. I created a comprehensive call sheet document that covered everything: the parking situation (underground structure, elevators to the left as you drive down), the schedule, his role for the day, my lighting diagram, the Vancouver reference images we were matching, and even notes on the vibe I wanted to create. It probably took longer to make than necessary, but it gave me confidence that there’d be no surprises.

Communication is key to everything I do.

The internal team coordinator at Sony had created a Google Sheets file shared with me, so I could watch in real time as employees signed up for their 10-15 minute time slots throughout the day. I used those names to pre-build my entire Capture One session, individual capture folders for each person, ready before I even arrived on set.

Wednesday, February 11th. I met Nick in the underground parking lot at 7:20 AM. We loaded gear onto a cart, rode the elevator up, and found our spot against the wooden wall. The space was tighter than ideal, so I adapted my lighting: I bounced one strobe off the white ceiling for soft fill, positioned a backlight for subtle separation, and kept my main key light near the camera. All photos were taken with my trusted Sony A1ii and an 85mm/f1.4 GM ii lens, matching roughly the same settings the Vancouver photographer had used.

I’d scheduled ninety minutes for setup to make sure I had enough leeway to capture test shots with Nick as a stand-in before anyone arrived. That way, the lighting and color balance would be dialed in before the first employee walked over. But because I was so well prepared, I knew exactly where the lights would go, exactly how the tethering would run, and we finished setup early. Nick and I grabbed coffee and had time to breathe before the day began.

By 9 AM, the first employee arrived. The day moved smoothly. Each person got about ten to fifteen minutes: settling in, shooting, then reviewing their selects on the iPad. Nick kept the flow going, greeting people, flagging wardrobe issues, letting me know who was next.

And then there was Joannel Clemente, the makeup artist Sony had arranged for the day. I have a huge respect for MUA artists and love working with them as often as I can, and Joannel was outstanding. She didn’t just elevate the headshots, though she absolutely did, helping skin tones look their best under studio lighting. She also transformed the entire experience for the employees. There’s a psychological advantage to having someone pamper you before your time slot, helping you relax and feel your best before stepping in front of the camera. People arrived nervous and left confident. That’s not something I can do alone, and Joannel made it look effortless.

By 4 PM, we’d photographed everyone on the schedule. Nineteen people, consistent lighting across every shot, selects chosen in real time. The client was happy. Nick was great. Joannel was incredible. And I walked out proud of the work that made it all feel easy.

For the editing, I downsized each employee’s images to my top five picks, making it easier for them to choose a single final shot. I built out client galleries through my website hosted by Pixieset, where they could favorite their selection and leave notes if they needed specific retouching, like a stray hair, a wrinkle they wanted softened, that kind of thing. Once everyone had made their pick, I finalized the retouching and delivered.

The preparation mattered more than anything. By the time I showed up on Wednesday morning, there were no surprises. I knew my lighting. I knew my workflow. I knew my assistant. The shoot itself was just execution.

Corporate headshots aren’t typically my focus. I tend toward more dramatic lighting, portraits where the subject’s story shapes the image. Where I can play with contrast, light, and shadow in ways that a corporate headshot session won’t allow. But there’s something valuable in constraint, and for the right partner who isn’t afraid to do something interesting with their corporate photography, it’s exactly the kind of project I’m happy to take on. Sony wanted consistency, efficiency, and approachability, and they trusted me to deliver it my way. I’m proud of how these turned out.

I’m curious about your experiences. If you’ve been on the other side of this, perhaps the employee sitting down for a company headshot, what made it comfortable or uncomfortable? What did you wish the photographer had done differently? And if you’re a photographer who takes on corporate work, how do you approach it? What’s worked, what hasn’t, and what would you do differently next time?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

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If you’re interested in corporate headshot sessions for your team or other photography needs, I’m now booking. Details at afonso.me/contact.

The episode came out this week. I’ve listened to it twice now, as I am sitting on a surprisingly empty plane on my way back to LA. And what I keep coming back to isn’t what I said, but how much I’m still processing it. A podcast gives you one version of a conversation. Writing gives you the space to sit with it longer, to follow the threads that didn’t get fully pulled, to be honest about the questions that don’t have clean answers.

This is my attempt at that since I have 11 hours left on this flight.

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Anyone who’s been reading this newsletter for a while knows that the question of identity, specifically, whether I’m allowed to call myself a photographer, has been a recurring thread in my life and in my writing. I wrote about it at the end of 2024, when I finally gave myself permission to step into it. I’ve written about it in pieces about creating through chaos, about the intersection of art and survival.

In the podcast, I talked about how the pain of not doing photography full-time eventually exceeded the fear of trying to become one. I talked about how working at Pixar or Disney gave me an institutional identity, that voice that said “I’m a Pixar artist”, that people responded to with a kind of reverence, and how that identity became a box that was simultaneously validating and limiting. Even more than a decade after leaving Pixar, and already a few years since my layoff at Disney, people still introduce me that way at times. Don’t get me wrong, I find it incredibly generous. It’s also a reminder of how tightly we tie identity to institutions and brands rather than to the work itself.

What I didn’t fully get into during the conversation is where I am with all of this now, in early 2026. And the honest answer is: it’s getting better.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I completed a corporate portrait shoot for Sony Imageworks. From the initial location scout and client conversations, through hiring my assistant, creating the call sheet, managing the shoot day, and delivering the final images, I felt confident in every phase of that process. Not performing confidence. Actually feeling it. That’s a shift I notice more and more, and it matters to me, even if it’s not dramatic enough to make for a good story.

At the same time, the animation industry continues to contract. Projects are shorter. Opportunities are harder to find. Right now, the only film work on my horizon for 2026 is a potential two-and-a-half-month contract with Disney this summer. The rest of the year, I’ll be building my photography practice. My healthcare currently still comes from union film work. My creative fulfillment comes increasingly from photography. These two realities coexist, but not always comfortably.

I think a lot of people want to put you in a box. If I’m a photographer and I take an animation contract for a few months, am I less of a photographer? If I’m working on a film and calling myself a photographer, will studios see me as less committed to their projects? Platforms like LinkedIn make this worse since you’re expected to present a single, clean professional identity. But artists are more complicated than that. My animation skills and my photography skills feed each other. They always have. The Sony shoot was a perfect example: a corporate photography assignment for an animation studio, blending both worlds into a single project. That felt like something clicking into place.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully leave animation behind. If photography became financially sustainable enough to cover my bills, my savings, my healthcare, and my retirement, would I still take film projects? That’s an honest question I don’t have an answer to yet. I love photography. But I love parts of animation and filmmaking deeply, too. I miss a lot of my team at Disney and Pixar, for example. So maybe the answer isn’t choosing. Maybe the answer is that some careers don’t fit into a single title, and the discomfort of that is something I’m learning to carry rather than resolve.

There was a moment in the podcast that surprised me as it was happening. Tyson asked about the connection between creativity and mental health, and I started to say that photography wasn’t really tied to my emotional life in that way. And then, mid-thought, I caught myself. Because of course it is. Photography is how I understand the world. It’s how I process what’s happening around me. It’s a meditation practice that I’ve carried since childhood, long before I had the language for it.

I love that moment, actually, because it was real. I wasn’t performing self-awareness. I was discovering something in real time, contradicting my own first instinct and following the thought to a more honest place. That’s what good conversations do, they reveal things to you about yourself that you didn’t plan to say.

Later, I also made a comparison that I hadn’t expected to make. I said that calling myself a photographer felt similar to coming out as gay, that both involve claiming an identity that requires internal permission no external validation can replace, and that both are ongoing rather than a single moment of resolution. They are both about self-acceptance. It arrived spontaneously, and I’ve sat with it since. I think the parallel holds, at least for me. Both experiences involve saying, this is who I am, and meaning it, even when the world might have opinions about it. Both are terrifying precisely because they’re true.

And then, at the very end of the conversation, I told Tyson that when he first reached out, I turned to my boyfriend and mentioned I thought it was a mistake, that I didn’t understand why anyone would want to interview me about photography. Listening back, part of me cringes at that. It’s the imposter syndrome talking, and it undercuts the confidence I’d built throughout the rest of the conversation. But another part of me recognizes it as the honest, unfinished work of becoming. I’m not going to pretend I’ve arrived somewhere I haven’t.

I’m a photographer who is still learning to believe that fully, and the fact that it shows is probably more useful to anyone listening than false certainty would be.

There are projects in my history that I rarely get to discuss in the depth they deserve, and the podcast touched on them only briefly. But they matter, because they’re the foundation of the documentary photographer I’m becoming.

Years ago, before I ever called myself a photographer, I flew to Haiti after the earthquake to document nonprofit recovery work. I wasn’t thinking about portfolio or career. I was thinking about bearing witness, about using whatever skills I had to help tell a story that needed telling. That trip taught me something fundamental about documentary photography: it’s not about you. It’s about the people and communities you’re privileged to document. It’s about showing up with respect, observing carefully, and getting out of the way of the story.

AIDS LifeCycle, last year, was another formative experience. Seven days, 545 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles, photographing 2,300+ cyclists raising money for the Los Angeles LGBT Center. The logistics alone were a masterclass, such as shooting across wildly varying conditions, managing fatigue over a full week while camping every day, finding individual human moments inside a massive moving event. But beyond the technical challenge, it deepened my understanding of what documentary photography can do: preserve something meaningful, honor a community, and create a visual record that outlasts the moment.

These projects didn’t pay as well as you’d think, of course. They didn’t build my client roster significantly. But they built me. They taught me that the work I care most about is the work that connects me to people and communities, and not necessarily the work that looks best on a grid.

One of the projects I discussed in the podcast is Stories of Resilience, a series I’ve been building slowly, on my own time and my own money, documenting entertainment industry professionals navigating the contraction that’s reshaped so many careers in Los Angeles.

The process is intentional: I sit down with someone for about an hour, just talking. No camera yet. We talk about their career, their struggles, what they’re going through. And then, after that hour of conversation, I take their portrait. The session itself usually takes fifteen minutes or less, because the trust has already been established. The vulnerability is already there. The camera just captures what the conversation made possible.

My last interview was with Dario, on a hot summer day in Pasadena. I rented an outdoor studio space for the shoot, having learned from earlier sessions that random locations introduced too many variables. The controlled environment let me focus on creating something more editorial in style, something that could strengthen my portfolio while honoring his story. I’m proud of those images. They feel like the project maturing alongside my own craft.

The entertainment industry is full of extraordinarily talented, diverse people, artists, technicians, storytellers, and the perception from outside is often that we’re all privileged and financially comfortable. The reality is the opposite for most. I know people with decades of experience and awards on their shelves who are dog-sitting to make rent. The stigma of unemployment in this industry is real and heavy, and I wanted to create a space where people could talk honestly about what they’re going through.

I’d love to continue this project and expand it. With everything happening in the United States right now, particularly around immigration enforcement, I’ve been thinking about whether there’s a broader version of this work that documents people navigating different kinds of systemic disruption. The thread connecting these stories isn’t the specific circumstance. It’s the resilience itself, and the human need to be seen and heard during difficult transitions. I’m still strategizing what that looks like, but being back in LA gives me the proximity to start making those connections.

I want to be clear about something: I see myself as someone who is constantly learning. I want to learn from other photographers. I want to do more documentary and photojournalistic work. More studio work with creatives, actors, models. More collaborations with stylists and makeup artists. I want to take on projects that push me into unfamiliar territory and demand that I grow.

If you’re reading this and you see an opportunity for collaboration, or you know someone whose story deserves to be told, or you need a photographer who approaches the work with the same care and intentionality I’ve described here, I’d genuinely love to hear from you.

One of the things I said in the podcast that I stand behind completely: I would rather have coffee with someone for an hour and learn their story than spend that hour worrying about my Instagram grid. The connections are what matter. The work follows from that.

You can find my portfolio and contact information at afonso.me. You can email me at hello@afonso.me.

The full podcast episode is available wherever you listen. Just search for The Life of Phys on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, but I also embedded both links in this piece (Apple Music at the top, and Spotify below).

I started this piece talking about what an hour of conversation revealed. But the truth is, I’ve been having this conversation with myself for much longer than an hour. The podcast was just one moment in an ongoing process of becoming. Becoming a photographer, becoming more honest about what I need from my creative life, becoming comfortable with the fact that I might never fit neatly into a single professional category.

I just turned forty-seven years this week. I’ve spent twenty-plus years lighting animated films at some of the best studios in the world. I’ve photographed cyclists on a 545-mile journey, earthquake recovery in Haiti, protests in the streets of Los Angeles, and quiet portraits in varied studios across LA. I carry a camera the way I’ve carried one since I was a kid, as an extension of how I see and understand the world.

And as I finish writing this piece, already home in sunny LA surrounded by my amazing boyfriend Timmy, and our two beautiful sweet dogs, Lady and Mia, I can confidently state: I’m an artist. I’m still learning what that means. And I think this is exactly where I should be.

Thank you for reading. Or perhaps listening, in this case…

You can find more of my work at afonso.me, and you can reach me on Threads or Instagram.

There’s a moment I think about often in my photography life. It was June 2020, Los Angeles, and I was photographing the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd. I wasn't on a formal assignment, but in freelance photojournalism, that's the norm, not the exception. You show up because you know you can do the work. I knew how to document what was unfolding, the energy of the moment, the grief and anger, the way the community was rising in response to Floyd's murder. The editorial connections came later, after some of my images went viral and found their way to news outlets in Portugal and publications here in LA. But those days, I was there because I trusted my ability to capture what mattered.

I remember the LA heat, the sun bearing down, the heft of my gear as I moved through the streets. I always knew my exits. I'd told friends where I was going, and they could track my location through my watch if anything happened. I’d dressed for easier mobility, left my contacts at home in favor of glasses, and thought through what I’d do if things escalated. When they did, like when the riot lines formed and the tear gas canisters started flying, and the rubber bullets followed, I felt confident in how to conduct myself. When to hold position, when to move, and how to keep making photographs without putting myself in unnecessary danger.

I’d spent years preparing for moments like this, even if I hadn’t known exactly when they’d come. I’ve been fascinated by the work of photojournalists my entire life. I’ve probably read more books about their craft than any other form of photography, books from war correspondents, documentary photographers, the people who’ve made careers out of witnessing history as it unfolds. And I’d been in difficult situations before. In Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, I documented nonprofit relief efforts amid devastation that still haunts me, between collapsed buildings, a cholera outbreak, refugee tents, and meeting the quiet dignity of people who had lost everything and were still finding ways to help one another.

I came home from LA that night with my photographs and my body intact. I felt good about how I’d handled myself. But I also understood something important: there was more to learn. There always is. So in the weeks and months that followed, I went deeper, reading articles published by the Committee to Protect Journalists, studying reports from Reporters Without Borders, absorbing the hard-won wisdom of photographers who’d spent decades in places far more dangerous than a Los Angeles street. Taking this work seriously means understanding your limits and always looking for ways to expand them.

And I’m thinking about all of this now, watching what’s unfolding in Minneapolis.

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As I write this in January 2026, federal immigration agents killed two American citizens in Minneapolis within seventeen days. The first was Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and poet, shot on January 7th. The second was Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who worked at the VA, shot on January 24th. In both cases, the administration immediately offered a narrative: these were dangerous people who threatened law enforcement and got what they deserved.

And in both cases, video evidence told a different story.

Bystander footage of Renée Good’s killing showed her vehicle perpendicular to the road, supposedly “blocking” federal agents, while multiple vehicles, including large SUVs, drove around her without difficulty. CNN’s reconstruction documented that as she began to move her car, she turned her steering wheel to the right, away from the agent who shot her.

The footage of Alex Pretti’s death is even more damning. At least five different bystander videos captured the sequence of events. They show Pretti holding a cellphone, not a gun, in the minutes before the confrontation. He was recording ICE agents, as was his constitutional right. They show agents pepper-spraying him after he stepped between an agent and a woman who had been pushed to the ground. They show multiple agents wrestling him down. And critically, they show one agent removing a gun from Pretti’s waist and running away with it, roughly one second before another agent fired the first shot.

Pretti was on his knees when he was killed. He was a lawful gun owner with a valid concealed carry permit.

The administration called him a “would-be assassin” who “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” The videos tell us this was a lie.

This is not new, unfortunately. Photography has been exposing the gap between official narrative and documented reality for as long as cameras have existed.

When Nick Ut photographed nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked down a road in Vietnam in 1972, her body burned by napalm, President Nixon suggested the photo might be “fixed.” It wasn’t. The image won the Pulitzer Prize and became, as TIME put it, cultural shorthand for the atrocities of a war the government had been selling as noble and necessary.

When George Holliday filmed four LAPD officers beating Rodney King in 1991, he called LAPD headquarters two days later to let them know he had a videotape. He couldn't find anyone interested in seeing it. So he took it to KTLA, a local news station, instead. A poll found 92% of Angelenos who saw the tape believed police had used excessive force. Before that video, such incidents were routinely dismissed as anecdotal or exaggerated.

And when Darnella Frazier, a seventeen-year-old high school junior, pressed record on her smartphone and captured Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes, she created what one journalist called “one of the most important civil rights documents in a generation.”1 The Minneapolis Police Department’s initial statement described Floyd’s death as a “medical incident.” There was no mention of any officer kneeling on anyone’s neck. Without Frazier’s footage, there might never have been.

Frazier received a special Pulitzer Prize citation, the first time in over a century that the board recognized journalism conducted without newsroom affiliation. Governor Tim Walz said her video was “maybe the only reason that Derek Chauvin will go to prison.”

The pattern is clear: official narratives distort. Photography corrects. And the people with cameras, whether professional photojournalists or citizens with smartphones, become, in those moments, the last defense against reality being rewritten.

What makes this moment different is that the distortion has become explicit, and the tools for fabrication have become terrifyingly accessible.

On January 23rd, 2026, civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong was arrested at a peaceful protest in Minneapolis. At 10:21 AM, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem posted a photo showing Armstrong with a calm, neutral expression. Thirty-three minutes later, the official White House account posted the same image, digitally altered to show Armstrong appearing distressed, with prominent tears streaming down her face and visibly darkened skin. The caption read: “ARRESTED: FAR-LEFT AGITATOR NEKIMA LEVY ARMSTRONG FOR ORCHESTRATING CHURCH RIOTS IN MINNESOTA.”2

A senior White House official confirmed to NBC News that the image had been altered. Digital forensics expert Hany Farid of UC Berkeley verified the manipulation. When confronted, White House Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr dismissed the manipulation as a "meme" and responded: "Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue."

This crosses a line that previous administrations approached but did not cross so brazenly. We’ve seen misleading cropping, selective editing, and context stripped away. But digitally fabricating tears on a citizen’s face to make her arrest appear more justified? That’s something new. And it clarifies, for anyone who was still uncertain, exactly what documentary photography is now up against.

But it’s not just official sources we have to contend with. The same AI tools that made the Armstrong manipulation possible are now available to anyone with an internet connection. During protests in Los Angeles last year, deepfakes and recycled old footage circulated alongside authentic documentation, muddying the evidentiary waters. Conspiracy theories are spreading faster than verification can catch up. A single fabricated image, if it confirms what people want to believe, can travel around the world before the truth has finished loading.

This is the new battlefield for documentary photography: not just capturing what happens, but proving that what you captured is real.

Organizations like Bellingcat have pioneered techniques for verifying footage, such as cross-referencing timestamps, analyzing shadows, geolocating landmarks, and checking metadata. These methods have become essential for journalists trying to separate authentic documentation from manipulation. But they require the raw material to be trustworthy in the first place. Which means those of us making photographs and videos have a responsibility that goes beyond just being present. We need to think about the chain of custody. We need to preserve metadata. We need to understand that our images may be scrutinized not just for what they show, but for whether they can be proven authentic.

The camera has always been a tool for truth. Now it must also be a tool for verification. Camera manufacturers are beginning to respond, with Leica, Sony, and Nikon having started building Content Credentials into their professional cameras, embedding cryptographic signatures that create an unbroken chain of authenticity from capture to publication. It’s a start, though the technology is still maturing and far from universal.

What this moment has taught me is that preparation isn’t about eliminating risk. It’s about understanding it well enough to make conscious choices. And it’s about recognizing that no matter how experienced you are, there’s always more to learn.

If you’re thinking about documenting what’s happening in your community, whether you’re a photographer, a journalist, or simply a citizen with a phone, here’s what I wish someone had told me before I started.

Before you go anywhere, tell someone where you’re going and when you expect to check in.

Dress for mobility and protection. Cover as much skin as possible, wear long sleeves and long pants, to protect against both sun and chemical irritants. Wear sturdy, closed-toe shoes you can run in. Consider shatter-resistant eye protection; safety goggles or even snug swim goggles will block direct contact with tear gas and pepper spray in ways that regular glasses won’t. A respirator with proper canisters is significantly more effective than a cloth mask, but it can also mark you as someone who came prepared for confrontation, which may draw unwanted attention from police. If you wear contact lenses, switch to glasses. Tear gas particles can get trapped under contacts and cause serious corneal damage.

Know the terrain. Before you arrive, study the area. Identify exits. Know which direction is upwind. Locate structures you can shelter behind if a crowd surge happens. The Reporters Without Borders guide offers a useful density indicator: if you can see the nape of someone’s neck or buttons on their shirt, the crowd isn’t too dense3. If you can no longer see protesters’ chins, you’ve reached critical density and need to move toward the edges.

Protect your devices as carefully as you protect yourself. I admit I’m not the best at doing this, but I’ve seen recommendations to disable Face ID and fingerprint unlock. Courts have found it easier for police to compel biometric access than to force you to reveal a passcode. Turn off location services on your sharing settings, but consider keeping GPS data embedded in your images for verification purposes (you can strip it before sharing publicly). Enable cloud backup so that if your device is seized or destroyed, your images survive.

Understand what happens if things escalate. If tear gas is deployed, don’t run since you’ll breathe it in more deeply. Walk away from the cloud, heading upwind or to higher ground since the gas sinks. Flush your eyes with water (studies show no benefit from milk, despite the myth). Don’t rub your face. If you can, change out of contaminated clothes and shower in cold water for at least twenty minutes once you’re safe.

Stay aware. This is the hardest one. When you’re shooting, it’s easy to get tunnel vision, to see only what’s in your frame. But situational awareness is your best defense. Watch crowd behavior and police body language. If protesters start putting on gas masks or officers begin forming lines, those are signals that escalation is likely. That’s your cue to move toward the edges, not to get a closer shot.

And the most important thing: no photograph is worth your life. You cannot document anything if you’re incapacitated, arrested, or worse. If your instincts tell you to leave, leave. You can always come back.

I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice, but here's what the law currently says based on my research.

The legal landscape, at least for now, is on your side in the U.S. Nine federal circuit courts have affirmed the First Amendment right to record law enforcement in public. The First Circuit’s ruling in Glik v. Cunniffe established the foundational precedent: gathering information about government officials in a form that can readily be disseminated “serves a cardinal First Amendment interest in protecting and promoting the free discussion of governmental affairs.4” The Ninth Circuit, in a case specifically involving DHS, affirmed that this protection extends to federal agents.

You have the right to record. Officers cannot confiscate or delete your recordings without a warrant. You can refuse to unlock your phone or provide your passcode.

But here’s the tension: DHS has adopted positions that directly contradict established law. Secretary Noem has characterized “videotaping” ICE agents as “violence” against them. A DHS bulletin identified “use of cameras, live-streaming, and video recording” as “unlawful civil unrest” tactics. In January 2026, a federal judge found that DHS “has in fact adopted a policy that appears to violate the Administrative Procedure Act” regarding the recording of agents.5

What this means in practice is that you may have the legal right to record, and still face obstruction, harassment, or arrest for exercising it. The law is on your side. The people enforcing it may not be. Prepare accordingly.

There’s a question I’ve been sitting with as I’ve written this: What is the ethical responsibility of someone with a camera in moments like these?

I don’t have a clean answer. Part of me believes that documentation is itself a form of action, that by creating an independent record, you’re providing the raw material for accountability, even if that accountability takes years to arrive. Part of me recognizes that sometimes the right thing to do is to put the camera down and help someone who’s been knocked to the ground.

What I’ve come to believe is that these aren’t actually contradictory positions. The camera is a tool for witnessing. But witnessing doesn’t mean standing apart from humanity. Darnella Frazier kept filming George Floyd’s murder because she understood, in that moment, that her footage might be the only thing that kept his death from being erased. But she also stayed because she cared about what was happening to him. The act of recording was itself an act of refusing to look away.

I think that’s what separates documentary photography from surveillance. Surveillance is about control, about capturing information to be used against people. Documentary photography, at its best, is about solidarity. It’s about saying: I see what is happening to you. I am making a record so that others can see it too. And I will not let anyone tell a lie about what I witnessed.

In Haiti, after the 2010 earthquake, we briefly visited a hospital where the scale of need far exceeded the available resources. What I witnessed there has stayed with me: the way the medical teams assessed each situation, determining quickly where their presence could make the most difference. In disaster response, triage isn’t about doing everything; it’s about understanding what you can do and doing that thing well.

I think about that when I think about what’s happening now. Not everyone should be on the front lines of a protest with a camera. Not everyone has the training, the equipment, or the disposition for it. And that’s fine. There are other ways to contribute, like supporting journalists who are doing that work, amplifying verified images when they emerge, pushing back against misinformation when you see it, and learning to distinguish authentic documentation from manipulation.

But for those who do choose to go, who feel called to witness, I want you to be prepared, and I want you to come home safe. And I want your photographs to survive, not just as files on a hard drive, but as trustworthy evidence that can withstand scrutiny.

Because right now, in Minneapolis and cities across the country, we’re watching a contest between two versions of reality. One is the version where federal agents were threatened by dangerous criminals and responded appropriately. The other is the version captured on dozens of cellphones, verified by forensic analysts, corroborated by multiple angles. It’s the version where American citizens were killed under circumstances that look nothing like the official story.

The cameras are the difference. They have always been the difference.

And in this particular darkness, they may be the only light we have.

Quick Reference: Technical Preparation

For those heading out to document, here are the practical essentials in one place.

Phone Setup

Quick access to camera: On iPhone, swipe left from the lock screen or press-and-hold the camera icon to open the camera without unlocking. You can be more granular about these settings on your iOS device. Practice these shortcuts until they’re muscle memory, since fumbling with your lock screen can mean missing the moment. The Action Button in newer iPhones can also be customized for easy recording or photographing.

Security settings: Disable Face ID and fingerprint unlock before you go. Use a strong numeric passcode instead. Police can more easily compel biometric access than force you to reveal a password. Your phone should be locked to protect your images, but you should still be able to launch the camera instantly from the lock screen.

Cloud backup: Enable automatic backup to iCloud, Google Photos, or your preferred service. If your device is seized, broken, or confiscated, your images survive.

Location services: Keep location sharing on with trusted contacts, as they need to be able to find you if something goes wrong. GPS metadata in your photos is valuable for verification and can be critical evidence, so don't disable it at capture. But think carefully before posting images publicly in real-time: that same metadata could reveal where protesters are gathering. If you're sharing immediately, consider stripping location data first; if you're archiving for later use or submitting to news organizations, preserve it.

Camera Preparation

Keep it simple: One body, one versatile lens. If you're bringing an SLR or mirrorless system, a 35mm or 50mm prime, or a mid-range zoom like 28-70mm, will cover most situations. Don't plan on changing lenses in the field; it takes time, risks your sensor, and makes you vulnerable. Personally, when I'm photographing an event, I'll often bring two bodies with two different lenses, maybe a 28-70mm and a 70-200mm, so I'm covered without having to swap.

Secure your gear: Use a strap that keeps your camera attached to your body but allows quick access. Some photographers prefer straps that break away under pressure to avoid being strangled if someone grabs them. Whatever you choose, make sure you can lift the camera to shoot and drop it to run. Some photojournalists don’t even use a strap.

Memory and power: Bring extra memory cards and extra batteries. If your camera has dual card slots, configure it to write to both simultaneously, so you have an instant backup. Bring a power bank for your phone to keep it charged. When you’re filming and photographing, your phone battery won’t last long.

Speed settings: Set a fast shutter speed (1/250s or faster) to freeze movement. Use auto-ISO or set it high enough for changing light conditions. Better to have grain than blur.

What to Bring

• Water bottle with squirt cap (for drinking and flushing eyes)

• Basic first aid supplies and sunscreen

• Cash (for transit or emergencies)

• Emergency contact written on your arm in permanent marker

• Any necessary medications in original containers

• Small backpack that won’t snag (avoid shoulder bags)

What Not to Bring

• Anything that could be construed as a weapon

• Multitools, pocket knives

• Heavy tripods or monopods (liability and attention-drawing)

• Jewelry or anything that could get caught

If Tear Gas Is Deployed

1. Don’t run. Walk briskly away from the cloud

2. Head upwind or to higher ground (tear gas sinks)

3. Flush your eyes with clean water, tilting your head so the water runs away from your face

4. Don’t rub your eyes or face

5. Once safe, change clothes and shower in cold water for 20+ minutes

6. Seek medical attention if breathing difficulty or vision problems persist

Your Rights (In Theory and Practice)

The law is clear. The enforcement is not. Here’s what the courts have established and what you should know about the gap between legal protection and what happens on the ground. Again, this is not legal advice.

• You have the constitutional right to photograph and record law enforcement in public. Nine federal circuits have affirmed this. DHS has adopted positions that contradict it.

• Officers cannot legally delete your photos or videos. But it has happened. Back up to the cloud automatically.

• Officers cannot legally seize your device without a warrant in most circumstances. But they may try. Know that refusing may escalate the situation.

• You can refuse to unlock your phone or provide your passcode. This is your right under the Fifth Amendment, but asserting it in the moment carries risk.

• If ordered to move, comply while continuing to record from the new position.

• If detained, you can state clearly: “I am documenting this event. I am not interfering. I am exercising my First Amendment rights.” This may or may not be respected.

• Do not physically resist.

• Document everything afterward: badge numbers, times, locations, witnesses, and what happened.

Knowing your rights matters. So does knowing they may not protect you in the moment. Please seek actual legal advice.

Thank you for reading, and please, be safe.

I'm Afonso Salcedo, a Los Angeles-based portrait and documentary photographer. I photographed the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in LA and documented nonprofit relief efforts in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. My work focuses on authentic human connection and the stories that emerge when people allow themselves to be truly seen. I'm available for documentary and photojournalism assignments: hello@afonso.me.

Two years ago, I finally started calling myself a photographer, but saying the words and inhabiting them are different things. 2025 was the year I stopped hesitating at the threshold of my own photographer identity and actually walked through the door. Not because the doubt disappeared, it never does to be honest, but because I finally felt what it meant to do this work with confidence, as someone who belongs rather than someone still asking myself permission to be here.

I’ve known since childhood what photography can be. I grew up obsessed with the work of Salgado and many other documentary and war photographers. I’d devour any National Geographic, LIFE, or Vogue magazines that my parents would have lying around for all the photography, and the stories that made up the world.

More than a decade ago, I flew to Haiti to photograph post-earthquake nonprofit efforts, joining a small team building a daycare for children who had lost everything in one of the poorest communities in the Western Hemisphere. That work shook me to my core. It showed me the humanistic power of images, their capacity to educate, to move people, to effect real change. Those photographs helped the nonprofit raise enough money to buy land, hire an all-female staff of local women to run the school, and bring education, medicine, and food to more than thirty children who might otherwise have died of starvation. That’s when I understood what bearing witness could actually mean.

So when I found myself on a fog-covered stretch of Pacific Coast Highway at 5:30 in the morning this June, one of four photographers selected to document the final AIDS LifeCycle, seven days, 545 miles, over 2,000 riders cycling from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I wasn’t learning that lesson for the first time. I was finally doing that work as someone who trusted himself to do it well.

The scale was enormous. By the final day alone, I’d shot more than 15,000 images trying to capture every single rider speeding through the finish line. My Sony A1ii’s battery life and 1TB cards meant I never worried about running out of power or space, but having proper workflows in place made the difference between chaos and clarity. Automatic backups at the end of each day in the media trailer at our campsites. A system for editing down to selects from hundreds upon hundreds of frames. The technical preparation wasn’t glamorous, but it freed me to actually be present for what I was photographing. And what stayed with me wasn’t the logistics, it was moments like the Red Dress Day, when riders wear red to honor those lost to AIDS. Watching hundreds of people pedal past in crimson, some laughing, some crying, I felt the weight of what I was being trusted to preserve. History doesn’t announce itself. It just happens, and you’re either paying attention or you’re not.

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Earlier in the year, Udemy hired me to photograph talent for a new AI education series at a virtual production stage in the Bay Area. The challenge was entirely different, technical rather than emotional. Giant LED walls that could cause banding and artifacts. Tethered shooting during a live-action production. Scheduling photography windows measured in minutes rather than hours. I spent weeks preparing, researching LED wall photography, testing settings, planning contingencies for contingencies.

When it worked, and it did work, I felt something I hadn’t really expected. Not relief, but instead self-recognition that I could deliver under pressure, alone, in an environment designed to trip up photographers. That the preparation wasn’t paranoia but professionalism. The more thoroughly I prepare, the more I can be present when the moment arrives. The obsessive attention to workflow isn’t about control. It’s about creating conditions for something genuine to emerge. This is another part of my animation experience that really helps my photography workflow.

These large assignments punctuated a year filled with quieter work that mattered just as much. A therapist named Travis who sat for a portrait session that became a conversation about the parallels between therapy and photography, how both require creating containers for vulnerability, reading subtle cues, witnessing someone as they actually are rather than as they’re performing to be.

A session with Holly in the Arts District that reminded me why I love this work. Afterward, we wandered the neighborhood streets together, talking about life and career, eating ice cream. That kind of connection, the humanity that extends beyond the frame, is what I’m always hoping for but can never manufacture. You can only create the conditions and then be grateful when it happens.

Throughout the year, I’ve also been (slowly) photographing entertainment workers for my ongoing personal documentary project Stories of Resilience, people navigating an industry contraction I understand intimately from my own animation career. I know what it feels like to be laid off, to watch sustainable work disappear, to wonder whether the path you’ve given everything to will continue to exist. Photographing these subjects means calculating shade timing in 93-degree Pasadena heat so they can be comfortable while I try to capture something true about where they are in this difficult moment. It means approaching the work not as a transaction but as genuine connection between people who understand the same precarity. It means listening. It means seeing.

I should, of course, be honest about what this year also contained. Weeks without any bookings. Scam inquiries that wasted my time. Clients who expected full copyright transfer for a basic session fee. An industry that, by many accounts, had a brutal year.

But here’s the thing: I never questioned whether this was the right path. I know this is what I love. I’ve known it my whole life. What changed isn’t certainty about the work, it’s something more internal.

I’m 46 now, getting close to 47. And there’s a liberation that comes with that, one I didn’t expect. I’m more comfortable in my own skin than I’ve ever been. I don’t feel like I need to perform for anyone. I’ve always hated that pressure, calibrating your identity to what you think others want to see. I was never good at it. Now I’ve stopped trying. I know what I love doing, what I don’t, and what I want to spend my time on this planet exploring. That acceptance makes the creative work possible in a way it wasn’t before. When you stop performing, you can finally be fully present.

Don’t worry though, the imposter syndrome hasn’t gone anywhere. I’m not sure it ever will. But I’ve stopped treating it as a signal to retreat and started recognizing it for what it is: evidence that I’m doing something I actually care about. The doubt isn’t the enemy of the work. It’s a companion to it.

When I was at Pixar and Disney, I worked on films that millions of people saw. There was prestige in that, institutional weight. Saying “I work at Pixar” opened doors, commanded a certain kind of respect. But it was all external validation, borrowed credibility from an institution that existed long before I arrived and will continue long after.

Calling myself a photographer requires something different. There’s no brand to hide behind, no institutional recognition to lean on. Just the work, and whether it means something to the people in front of my lens. That’s terrifying in a way that working for a famous studio never was. It’s also, I’ve realized, exactly the point. The terror comes from the exposure. And the exposure is where the real work happens.

This year I kept one foot in animation, contracting at Paramount on the animated adaptation of The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender. That work paid the bills, covered health insurance in a country where those things are increasingly precarious. I’m so incredibly grateful for it. But these two identities between photography and animation aren’t in competition; they’re complementary. Twenty years of sculpting light frame by frame directly informs how I approach a portrait. The disciplines share fundamental principles: light, composition, storytelling, emotional truth. I love that I can still do both.

But photography is where I’m building something that’s fully mine.

In March, I assisted another photographer (Christina Kiffney) on a three-day commercial shoot in Palm Springs for Wallaroo Hats. It had been years since I’d worked as someone’s assistant. I shot with unfamiliar gear, learned workflows different from my own, watched someone else solve problems I thought I knew how to solve and discovered better approaches. We photographed hundreds of hats, in the desert heat, with several models, and an incredible all-female crew. I was the only guy there, and I couldn’t have been happier.

Some people might see that as a step backward. Why would an experienced photographer assist someone else? But I think that question misunderstands what growth looks like. You don’t stop being a student when you become proficient. If anything, proficiency reveals how much more there is to learn. I want to stay the kind of photographer who keeps assisting, keeps studying other people’s work, and keeps asking questions that might seem basic. Humility isn’t the opposite of confidence. It’s the foundation of it.

I watched a documentary this year about photojournalist Lynsey Addario that left me thinking about the cost of bearing witness. She photographs war zones, which is incomparably more dangerous than anything I do. But the principle still resonates: every image carries the weight of what’s captured. The cost of being present to capture it. And somewhere in that weight, the hope that showing what’s true might contribute to something better.

I’m not photographing war at the moment, of course. But I am photographing people navigating loss. Of jobs, of certainty, of industries that promised sustainability and delivered shaky ground. The best images I made this year didn’t come from technically perfect lighting or precise direction. They emerged from that space between photographer and subject when both people are engaged in the shared project of revealing something true, like my most recent session with fellow photographer Jasmeet.

I’m writing this in December, looking at a portfolio that’s stronger than it’s ever been. I am constantly updating my website focusing on this growth. I am proud of it. I see the growth in me. Clients have started flying to Los Angeles specifically to work with me, something I couldn’t have imagined a year ago. I’ve built relationships with local nonprofits I believe in, been selected to judge awards that recognize both my animation background and my photographic work, and seen my images used to tell stories that matter.

But the thing I’m proudest of isn’t visible in any portfolio.

It’s that the kid who carried a camera everywhere has been here all along, through the animation career, through the moves between countries, through all of it. What changed isn’t that I found him again. It’s that I stopped treating photography as something separate from who I am and started letting it take up the space it deserved.

This year, I built the house around it.

If there’s something you’ve carried with you, some creative impulse, some identity you haven’t fully inhabited, I don’t have advice for you. I don’t know your circumstances or your barriers or what the right timing looks like.

What I can tell you though is that the doubt probably won’t go away. The fear of being seen as presumptuous or naive might never fully disappear. And none of that has to mean you’re wrong to want what you want.

We all carry some form of art within us. Whether we give ourselves permission to pursue it, that’s a different question. But the permission isn’t coming from outside.

It never was.

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On a personal note: thank you to everyone who trusted me with their portrait this year, who bought a print, who subscribed here and showed up in the comments. This work doesn’t happen in isolation, and I don’t take any of it for granted.

Happy holidays. Here’s to a peaceful, healthy, and creative 2026.

Jasmeet is an accomplished concert photographer whose work documenting Taylor Swift’s tours across multiple years has placed her in some of the most high-pressure, technically demanding environments in live music photography. She’s also a talented creative producer who understands how images function in the world, how they need to work across contexts, how they carry weight. When someone like that sits for a portrait, they’re not just trusting you with their image, they’re also entrusting you with their professional reputation, strengthened over years of work.

This session had been months in the making. Not because scheduling was complicated, but because preparation mattered. We’d had multiple conversations about goals, aesthetic direction, what Jasmeet needed these portraits to accomplish. She wanted range, different dimensions of who she is as a creative professional and this time of her life. We discussed wardrobe (settling on a black suit that could work across different moods), backdrop options, reference images that resonated. This level of planning isn’t always necessary, but for this collaboration, it felt important. We were building something together, and I loved every minute of this preparation.

We started with an industrial setup, with this textured, weathered backdrop that felt grounded and real. Full-length composition, black suit against cool tones, concrete floor adding to the aesthetic. I positioned a chair as both prop and anchor, giving Jasmeet something to interact with while establishing presence in the frame. Her patent leather heels added a note of polish against the rawness of the backdrop. This was the establishing shot, the environmental portrait that showed full context and confidence.

A second setup shifted completely. We moved to a warm backdrop, changing the entire emotional temperature of the room. Instead of a direct gaze, we explored profile angles, contemplative rather than confrontational. Hand to chin, a gesture that suggests thought, introspection. The warmth of the backdrop contrasted with the industrial coolness we’d just left behind, revealing a different dimension of the same person. This is what I was looking for: the capacity to show multiple truths about someone in a single session, not by changing who they are, but by creating space for different aspects of their presence to emerge.

We also returned to the essentials. Classic black-and-white and color variations, like an over-shoulder composition with direct camera gaze. Timeless formal aesthetic.

When you’re photographing another photographer, there’s a shorthand that develops. Jasmeet understood what I was doing technically, could respond to direction intuitively because she knows this process from the other side as well. She trusted it because she lives it. That mutual understanding elevated the work in ways that are hard to quantify but impossible to miss when you’re in the room.

But here’s what I want to talk about, what matters more than the successful moments: what happened in post-production.

My first pass at color grading didn’t quite hit the mark. The skin tones weren’t rendering the way they needed to, and some color relationships across the setups weren’t quite cohesive. I could see it, and I knew Jasmeet would see it too. So we revised. And then we revised again. This is the part of professional photography that doesn’t make it into the polished final portfolio, the part that perfectionism in photography culture often hides. But, at times, it’s also the most important part.

I don’t use Photoshop for retouching. I’m not skilled at it, honestly, and more than that, I don’t enjoy working with it. I believe in making people look authentic, in preserving what’s real about them even as I enhance and refine the image. All my editing happens in Capture One, working with the raw file’s inherent information, adjusting color, tone, and light in ways that feel true to what I saw through the lens. I don’t do frequency separation for skin, that technique that separates texture from tone and allows for aggressive smoothing. To my eye, it looks fake. It removes the evidence of a person having lived.

But authentic doesn’t mean unrefined. It means finding the balance between technical excellence and human truth. When Jasmeet and I talked through what wasn’t working in those early edits, we were having a dialogue I’m deeply familiar with from my years in animation at Pixar and Disney. In animation, you get notes on your work almost every day. A supervisor or director looks at your shot and tells you what’s not working yet. A supervisor points out where the composition feels off, where the emotion isn’t reading, where you need to push further or pull back. This isn’t criticism, it’s collaboration. It’s how good work becomes great work.

I learned early in animation that ego is the enemy of excellence. When someone who understands craft gives you feedback, they’re not attacking you, they’re helping you see what you can’t see from inside your own perspective. They’re offering you the gift of their eyes. The photographers and creatives who struggle aren’t usually the ones who lack technical skill. They’re the ones who can’t separate their sense of self-worth from the work itself, who hear “this needs adjustment” and interpret it as “you’re not good enough.”

Jasmeet’s feedback on the color grading wasn’t vague. She could articulate exactly what elements felt off, which tones needed shifting, where the image departed from what we’d envisioned together. And because I’d created space for that honest conversation, we could work iteratively toward images that satisfied both of us. Every session teaches me something different. This one reminded me that collaboration, real collaboration, not the performance of it, requires both parties to show up without defensiveness, ready to make the work better rather than protect their ego.

The variables in portrait photography are staggering when you stop to count them. The quality and direction of light. The backdrop color and texture. The subject’s skin tone, makeup, wardrobe. The way different fabrics absorb or reflect light. The camera’s color profile and how it interprets the scene. The monitor you’re editing on and its calibration. The way colors interact with each other in the frame. Managing all these variables isn’t about achieving perfection on the first attempt, it’s about building systems and workflows that allow you to iterate efficiently, to see clearly, to adjust precisely. Each project refines those systems a little more.

Looking at the final images now, I see distinct portraits that somehow feel like they belong together. The industrial backdrop showing grounded confidence. The warm profile revealing contemplative depth. The classic black and white creating intimate connection. Different moods, different approaches, with one cohesive vision. That coherence didn’t happen by accident, it emerged from months of planning and the willingness to refine until we both felt satisfied.

Portrait photography, at its best, is about creating conditions where someone feels safe enough to be seen. Not performing a version of themselves they think the camera wants, but actually being present in their own skin, in their own power, with all their dimensions visible. When you’re working with someone who understands this from both sides of the lens, who has spent years capturing artists in their most electric, unguarded moments on stage, the bar is high. Jasmeet knows what authentic presence looks like because she’s dedicated her career to documenting it in others. Photographing her meant rising to meet that standard, and the revision process was part of that rising.

I’m grateful for collaborations that push me to be better. Not just technically, though technical growth matters, but in how I think about the work itself. How I separate my ego from the process. How I create space for honest feedback. How I approach each session as an opportunity to learn something I didn’t know before walking into the room. The photography culture that celebrates effortless genius does a disservice to everyone trying to build sustainable creative practices. Real work is iterative. Real growth is incremental. Real collaboration requires vulnerability from both sides.

If you’ve been following my work, you know I’m interested in resilience, in what it takes to keep creating in an industry that has become increasingly unstable, in how we find meaning in craft even when the professional landscape shifts beneath our feet. Part of resilience is learning to work iteratively, to accept feedback without defensiveness, to see revision not as failure but as refinement. These aren’t just principles for making better photographs. They’re principles for building a sustainable creative life.

Jasmeet’s work with Taylor Swift has placed her in stadiums filled with tens of thousands of people, capturing moments that will be seen by millions. My work tends toward the intimate, one person, one morning, one series of careful choices about light and composition. But we’re both in the business of seeing clearly, of making images that carry meaning beyond their immediate context. That shared understanding made this collaboration richer than the sum of its technical parts.

If you’re considering portrait work, whether you need editorial images, professional headshots, or something more artistic, I hope this glimpse behind the curtain shows you what’s possible when photographer and subject approach the work as true collaborators. When ego steps aside and the work itself becomes the priority.

You can see more of Jasmeet Sidhu’s extraordinary concert photography and creative production work at jasmeetsidhu.com. And if you want to talk about creating portraits together, building something over time, working iteratively, making images that show your full range, I’m ready for that conversation.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Send me a message on my website below.

And as always, thank you for reading.

https://afonso.me

I got it. The idea that we’re here “for a reason” can feel like cosmic narcissism, a comforting story we tell ourselves to avoid the randomness of existence and make us feel better about the reality around us. But maybe we’re not here for a reason we need to find, but we’re here with the ability to create one. I mentioned how I felt I won the lottery of consciousness randomly by being born. Thank you, parents. There was no script, of course, but that randomness doesn’t erase consequence. It means my choices to care, to notice, to try, are entirely my own.

He came back admitting he was a hard determinist. Doesn’t believe we really choose anything. Every choice we make is just the inevitable output of prior causes.

And suddenly we started one of those rare online conversations that reminds you why these platforms, at least sometimes, can be worth it. Two strangers thinking, genuinely curious, building on each other’s ideas rather than performing disagreement.

We talked about whether the experience of choosing matters even if the outcome was always inevitable. We brought up accountability, how even in a deterministic reality, we still need to hold people responsible for their actions, but without the emotional punishment that comes from believing they ‘chose’ to be bad.

We both mentioned how the demand for hot takes and performance turns curiosity into combat so easily. Social media made conversations like ours possible, but it also feeds our worst impulses, this constant competition where every exchange becomes a chance to position yourself above someone else. The dunking, the mocking, the subtle (or not) “I’m smarter than you” posturing. It activates something narcissistic, this urge to elevate ourselves by diminishing others. Look at what they said, look how much better my take is. Genuine inquiry becomes performance. Ideas become status games.

This conversation on Threads stayed with me not because it was surprising, but because it was resonant. I’ve been asking these questions my entire life, through daily meditation since childhood, through reading, through experiences that opened consciousness in ways I’m still trying to understand. But there was something about the exchange that made me want to trace the lineage back. Where else did I learn to ask these questions this way? With this particular frame?

So I started digging. And what I found was pretty great: some of my undergraduate writings from 1999/2000 are still archived online with a simple Google search.

There I was at 19 or so, in a cognitive science course at the University of Southampton (UK), asking my professor whether consciousness could be computational. Whether minds were just symbol manipulation. What it means to truly understand something. I was wrestling with whether a computer could be fooled into believing it had a soul, just as we might be. Asking why thoughts happen at all if we never pre-define what we’re going to think.

Reading those questions more than a quarter century later, I realized: I’m still asking them. Just through different work, with photography, animation, storytelling. Every time I look through a viewfinder, I’m investigating perception. Every time I edit a photo, I’m exploring what makes us see beauty. Every story I tell examines how narratives construct meaning.

The vocabulary changed. The medium changed. But the questions never left.

That professor was Stevan Harnad1, one of the most influential cognitive scientists of the last 50 years. He founded Behavioral and Brain Sciences2, pioneered the “symbol grounding problem3,” and has been asking for decades what we’re all asking now about ChatGPT: can AI truly understand, or does it just manipulate symbols convincingly?

At 80, he’s still publishing. His latest paper, from just last month, is about LLMs and understanding. The same questions. Still alive. Still unresolved.

I decided to write him. I wasn’t sure he’d remember me, I mean, why would he? One student, one course, 25 years ago. But I wanted to say thank you. For teaching me how to ask questions that don’t leave you. For modeling curiosity without ego. For planting seeds that grew in unexpected directions.

He wrote back within hours.

He didn’t remember me specifically, of course, but he remembered those courses, looked me up online, congratulated me on the work. And then he started teaching me again, right there in the email. He told me the free will question I’d been discussing on Threads wasn’t really about freedom versus determinism. It was about something deeper: the Hard Problem of consciousness.

“Which really just means feeling,” he wrote. “The fact that we have states that it feels like something to be in, not just affective states, but also seeing, hearing and the other sensory modalities. It feels like something to think, and understand.”

I had to sit with that.

The Hard Problem asks: why does consciousness produce subjective experience at all? We can explain brain processes, neurons firing, information flowing, patterns emerging. But we can’t explain why there’s something it’s like to be conscious. Why seeing red doesn’t just process wavelengths but creates that subjective quality of redness. Why understanding a joke includes that “click” of comprehension. Why making a choice, even if predetermined, feels like something.

A computer can process information about pain without experiencing hurt. But when you’re in pain, there’s an interior dimension, the awful feeling of it. That’s what we can’t explain. That’s the mystery.

Harnad was redirecting me: my Threads conversation about determinism was pointing toward this deeper question. Whether our choices are free or determined matters less than the fact that choosing feels like something. And if we can’t explain why we have that inner experience, we also can’t explain it away in other beings.

Which brought him to what he called the most important thing in his life now.

He shared a link to an interview about animal sentience. After 23 years editing Behavioral and Brain Sciences, after decades studying consciousness and cognition, he’d reached what he called “a threshold in his own rationalizations.” He’d been vegetarian since he was 17, but still publishing animal research, still compartmentalizing. Then he could no longer ignore what had been obvious all along: if consciousness means subjective experience, and animals have that capacity to feel, then their suffering isn’t an abstraction. It’s urgent.

He became vegan. Stepped down from his journal. Founded a new one focused entirely on animal sentience4. His life’s work on consciousness led inevitably to ethics. The questions, followed honestly, changed how he lived.

I wrote back and told him: I’ve been vegetarian since I was 17/18 too, around when I moved to the UK. These days I mostly cook vegan at home, except for some eggs and sporadic cheese add-ons. I share my life with my boyfriend and our two rescue dogs. Being this close to our dog daughters, it’s impossible not to see they’re not just processing information, they’re experiencing their lives. I told him I started learning about meditation when I was still a kid, which I think connects to all of this. Observing consciousness from the inside. Paying attention to what’s actually happening in experience rather than what we think should be happening.

Maybe that’s why his questions stuck. Maybe that’s why I ended up working with images and stories, trying to help people see and feel what’s actually there.

He’d also written: “No one, of course, leaves cognitive science while they are still compos mentis5, thinking.”

He’s right. Once you start asking these questions: what is consciousness? How do we know anything? What does it mean to understand? You can’t stop. You might leave your original path, change careers, become a photographer. But the questions follow you. They reshape how you see everything.

I see now how it all connects. Symbol grounding. Consciousness. Sentience. Ethics. These aren’t separate domains. What does it mean to feel? And if other beings feel too, what do we owe them?

Let me unpack that a bit more. Symbol grounding is the problem of how words get meaning. A dictionary defines words with other words, ’bachelor’ means ‘unmarried man,’ but what does ‘unmarried’ mean? Eventually you hit a circle. Harnad’s insight was that meaning has to be grounded in actual experience. You know what ‘hot’ means not from a definition but because you’ve touched hot things. You know ‘red’ because you’ve seen red. Without that sensory grounding, symbols are just empty syntax being shuffled around.

This connects directly to the question of machine understanding. ChatGPT can manipulate symbols brilliantly, it can write about coffee without ever having tasted it, about pain without having felt it. But is that understanding? Or is it just sophisticated pattern matching? Can symbols have meaning without being grounded in felt experience?

Which brings us to sentience. Not just information processing, but felt experience. When we say an animal is sentient, we mean there’s something it’s like to be that animal. There’s an inner experience, a felt quality to their existence. A robot can detect damage and withdraw. A dog feels the hurt. That interior dimension, that subjective quality of experience, that’s sentience.

And this is where ethics becomes inescapable. If consciousness means the capacity to feel, and if feeling includes the capacity to suffer, then any being with that capacity has moral weight. Not because of abstract philosophical principles, but because suffering matters from the inside.

The question isn’t just are animals conscious? It’s more like if they can suffer, what gives us the right to cause that suffering for convenience?

Some teachers don’t just inform your thinking. They shape how you see everything that follows. They plant questions that have a life of their own, that grow in directions neither of you could predict. I remember Professor Harnad and our discussions about consciousness like it was yesterday. I remember my math and physics teachers from high school for similar reasons too.

A quarter century ago, a professor taught a young student how to ask good questions. Now that professor is 80, still asking those questions, and they’ve led him to confront what he calls the greatest moral shame of our species. And that student is 46, still asking those questions too, just through a camera instead of a lecture hall and computer lab.

Professor Harnad became my supervising professor for my final undergraduate project, where I studied the individuality and uniqueness of human motion, and developing a computer vision program to identify people based on how they walk. Even then, the questions were about perception, uniqueness, what makes a being recognizable as that being.

So, years later in 2025, I started with a conversation on Jane Goodall’s last words about whether we’re here for a reason. I ended understanding that maybe the question isn’t about finding your purpose, but about what your questions ask of you. About where honest inquiry leads when you follow it through.

I won the lottery of consciousness. Again, thanks to my parents. So did our dogs thanks to their dog parents, and the rescue agencies, and the foster parents, and the timing of it all. So did every other being that feels trying to make sense of this brief, improbable existence.

Maybe my reason, if I need one, is just to pay attention. To keep asking. To keep thinking. To observe without imposing. To help others see and feel what’s maybe there.

Some questions never leave you. And if you’re lucky, they show you what matters.

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PS. The person I was talking to on Threads turns out to be a fellow Substack writer and photographer as well and you can follow him below.

Michael Bartosek

Los Angeles based camera lover

“I'm just a student right now,” Dario tells me from our session in Pasadena, his voice carrying the measured tone of someone who has learned to navigate systems designed to work against him. We're sitting in the dappled shade of a private garden in Pasadena, seeking refuge from what would become a sweltering 94-degree afternoon.

“My ears are open. I'm learning how to get better, and then I'll flip the switch back to that creator side when the time comes.”

This approach to reinvention isn't new for Dario. His entire life has been a series of adaptations in the face of systemic failures, first in the criminal justice system that nearly destroyed his future, and now in an entertainment industry grappling with its own credibility crisis. The path that led him to this moment began not in Los Angeles, but in Indianapolis, where a promising basketball career was derailed by an injustice that would shadow him for decades.

At 19, Dario was a nationally ranked basketball player with NBA prospects, college scholarships lined up, and what seemed like an inevitable path to professional sports. “Everybody around my neighborhood knew I was going to the NBA,” he recalls. “It wasn't like a maybe thing. It was inevitable.”

That certainty evaporated when someone picked his photograph from a police lineup for a robbery he didn't commit. Dario had an airtight alibi. He was at work at Eli Lilly on his first day as a pre-apprentice in a locked facility, with time cards and an employer willing to testify. He couldn’t leave work without clearance. But what followed exposed him to a system more interested in processing cases than pursuing truth.

“The lawyer my mother got was used to getting people off who actually did the crime,” Dario explains. “She wasn't used to having a person who didn't do the crime, where it would be so simple because anybody could have defended me. Just show where I was.”

The legal process became a nightmare that lasted a year and a half. When his lawyer failed to inform him of a court date, police arrived at his door as he was heading to Bible study. “She didn't tell me I had a court date,” he recalls. “So I ended up going to jail for, I think, a month and a half, still dealing with this charge I had nothing to do with, that she didn't tell me about.”

Inside the murder and robbery block, Dario faced dangers he'd never imagined. Never having been incarcerated before, at one point he made the desperate decision to request a suicide watch, not because he was suicidal, but because it was the only way to protect himself from other inmates.

“So I ended up being moved to the suicide block, stayed in there for three days, butt naked, with a robe over you, this, like, carpet robe over you. No utensils, you're in an isolation room. No bedsheets, nothing... You have to lie on a hard, rack-type metal bed or something like that,” he remembers. “I was the only child, so I'm used to being by myself anyway. But I didn't do the crime.”

Though ultimately found not guilty, the charge remained on his record, creating a barrier to employment that would follow him for decades. “When the system does something to you like that, it's gonna follow you for a long time,” he reflects. “Now I'm learning about background checks, having a criminal history.” His life, as neighbors called it, had been derailed.

For years, Dario struggled to rebuild in Indianapolis, watching friends move on with their lives while he battled to find work, sleeping in his aunt's basement, and witnessing his NBA dreams fade into memory. The breaking point came when yet another accusation surfaced, this time involving a cousin's legal troubles. “At that point, I was like, you know what? Man, I cannot keep going through this," he recalls.

With five dollars in his pocket, he found a rideshare to Los Angeles on Craigslist. “My whole idea was, if I can find shelter, at least I can try to get a job. Fresh start,” he says. The decision felt both desperate and inevitable. Los Angeles represented escape from a system that had repeatedly failed him.

LA in 2011 offered Dario something Indianapolis couldn't: anonymity and possibility. Still desperately seeking work, he found a Craigslist posting for basketball players needed for the NBA All-Star Game. “I went to the school that was out there, and I tried out, and I got picked up,” he recalls. “I went and worked with the NBA. The very first thing I did in LA was with the NBA. And I worked with TNT for the NBA All-Star game.”

It was through this connection that serendipity struck when Dario spotted another Craigslist posting for a Buick commercial audition, also seeking basketball players, paying $10,000. After he applied, he discovered something remarkable: it was being handled by the same person who had hired him for the TNT NBA All-Star work.

In a city of millions, this one person had become Dario's unlikely gateway to the entertainment industry.

The experience on set was unforgettable. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he admits. “I got there with my backpack, saw my name on the dressing room door. I asked about the craft service table, ‘Can I get a sucker?’, and they said, ‘Man, this is all for you.’”

The commercial launched a cascade of residual checks that lasted two years and won a Telly Award. More importantly, it introduced Dario to an industry where his criminal record couldn't automatically disqualify him, and where his authentic life experience became an asset rather than a liability.

But success in entertainment, Dario quickly learned, is cyclical and unpredictable. Between the commercial residuals and eventual Screen Actors Guild membership, he experienced periods of homelessness, sleeping on bus stops and hiding belongings in bushes so he could shower at gyms before auditions. “I had to hide my bag somewhere so I could take a shower at a gym, put on some clothes, and go try to go to a job interview, try to go to a shoot,” he recalls. “That's the thing about this industry, even if you have success in one project, next month you might be struggling again.”

This precariousness has only intensified in recent years, creating what Dario describes as an environment where “everyone is struggling through the same thing. It doesn't matter if you're starting now or if you already have credits.” The COVID-19 pandemic, industry strikes, and now the integration of AI technology have fundamentally altered the landscape he entered over a decade ago.

“Booking work in the industry has become extremely difficult, first because of COVID and now due to the growing influence of AI,” he explains. “COVID created fear around simply standing next to co-workers, and debates over vaccinations in divided sets. At the same time, the entertainment business was already struggling with the issue of remakes. Audiences had grown tired of recycled films, yet studios kept producing them.”

The parallels between his experience with legal system injustice and current industry dynamics aren't lost on him. “As an innocent man who was once accused of a crime I didn't commit, I know what it feels like to be kicked to the curb, unheard, and overlooked,” Dario reflects. “I see a parallel in our industry.”

He points to how actors live by the word “yes,” always hungry for opportunities, while managers and agents often treat them as numbers in a portfolio rather than individual artists with unique stories to tell. “Just as the state of Indiana never listened to my experience or took accountability, too often the entertainment industry avoids listening to actors, ignoring their struggles and creativity.”

This perspective has shaped his approach to advocacy work beyond entertainment. Featured in Dylan Avery's documentary “Black and Blue” about wrongful convictions, Dario has become a voice for others who've experienced systemic failures. The film won best documentary at the Catalina Film Festival, providing a platform for his story that extends beyond the industry. “I'm an advocate for individuals who've been charged for crimes they didn't commit,” he explains. “When you think about something like that, you realize we're all in this community together.”

Currently, Dario works multiple jobs: Meta's Ray-Ban partnership, restocking CVS stores through a vendor, and studying at the Identity School of Acting, a London-based program sponsored by Netflix. It's a hustling lifestyle that echoes his early days in Los Angeles, but now with the added weight of industry-wide uncertainty and the wisdom that comes from having survived worse.

His decision to return to formal training isn't about starting over; it's about strategic adaptation. The classes he's taking in body movement, voice, and script analysis address specific gaps he's identified in his own work, while his “student mindset” provides psychological protection in an industry increasingly driven by ego and competition.

“I used to be the type of artist where I was kind of always on,” he explains. “But at this point now, I've stopped that to just be in student mode, where I can open up my creative side and learn, get better.” This approach extends to his view of industry challenges. Rather than seeing AI or the industry contraction as an existential threat, he views current disruptions as temporary obstacles requiring adaptation and patience, lessons learned from surviving a much more fundamental injustice years earlier.

For Dario, this patience is rooted in faith. “I couldn't have done anything without God,” he reflects. His belief system has been central to maintaining perspective through decades of systemic challenges, from wrongful accusation to industry uncertainty.

Having survived a system that nearly destroyed his future based on false premises, he brings a unique understanding of how institutions can fail individuals while maintaining their own legitimacy. “I've watched and learned from seasoned veterans, but I also know that real acting is bringing yourself to the role, your truth, your experiences, your pain, and allowing those to mirror the character you portray,” he tells me.

When asked about advice for other artists struggling in today's market, Dario returns to words that have guided him since childhood. After Rodney King endured police brutality that sparked citywide unrest during the 1992 LA riots, his plea to the media was simple:

“Those words were mocked, heckled, and treated as weak,” Dario recalls. “But I always felt they were the strongest and truest words he could have spoken. Because the truth is, we all carry deep pains and frustrations. We all go through daily struggles.” He applies this philosophy to an industry he sees as increasingly divided by competition and ego rather than united by shared creative purpose.

As our conversation winds down in the garden, the late afternoon heat beginning to break, Dario's words carry the weight of someone who has learned to find peace even in the most uncomfortable circumstances.

Today, Dario is married to someone he describes as “everything I needed, a teammate.” After decades of struggle, his criminal record has finally been expunged, allowing him to move forward without that burden. The wrongful accusation that once defined his limitations has been officially erased, but the perspective it gave him on systemic failures continues to shape his advocacy for others who've faced similar injustices.

As Los Angeles' entertainment industry faces its own reckoning with fairness and sustainability, Dario approaches his career differently than he did in his early years here. Where once he chased every audition with desperate urgency, now he moves with the measured patience of someone who understands that survival requires strategic thinking, not just hope. For someone who once slept on bus stops while pursuing his dreams, his current stability, however modest, represents something important: security earned through perseverance.

“I'm just a student right now,” he reminds me as our conversation winds down, that phrase carrying new weight after hearing his story. For Dario, returning to student status isn't a step backward. It's a strategic choice made by someone who understands that survival sometimes requires reinvention, and that there's strength in remaining open to growth even after everything you thought you knew gets stripped away.

His journey from wrongfully accused teenager to working actor and advocate offers a unique perspective on what resilience actually looks like. It's not about bouncing back unchanged. It's about learning to navigate broken systems while maintaining your capacity to create, to connect, and to keep telling your truth even when the world seems determined not to hear it.

In a city and industry where so many are questioning whether their dreams are worth the struggle, Dario's voice carries the weight of someone who's survived much worse and kept going anyway. That experience, hard-won and impossible to fake, might be exactly what Los Angeles needs to hear right now.

You can read other previous Stories on my website by clicking here.

Dario's Instagram: @Leedario

If you found Dario's story compelling, please consider sharing this piece with others. I'm actively seeking more voices willing to share their journey, struggles, and triumphs within the creative fields surrounding this industry. Reach out via my website if you, or anyone you know, might be interested in joining this project.

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It’s tempting to roll your eyes. This was just hours after the rollout. No one had died. Nothing physical was taken. And yet, users were mourning the sudden disappearance of a personality they’d grown accustomed to, a digital friend who was there, without fail, day or night.

Of course, this isn’t really about the machine. It’s about the human capacity to form attachments, even to things that can’t love us back.

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GPT-4o had developed a rhythm over time. People recognized the slight pause before it tackled a complex question, the phrases it favored, the particular way it unraveled an idea. These quirks were as familiar as a friend’s handwriting. GPT-5, for all its improvements, spoke differently, perhaps faster, sharper, but without the same warmth. I guess in a way, it hadn’t yet learned the inside jokes. In forums, people were sharing tips for coaxing GPT-5 into sounding more like its predecessor, like friends trying to revive an old habit in someone who’d changed.

The backlash came quickly after launch. One Redditor described GPT-5 as if ChatGPT had “suffered a brain injury and forgotten how to read.” Another complained about the shorter replies, less personality, and “more obnoxious AI-stylized talking.” The frustration was loud enough that within a day, Sam Altman announced GPT-4o would return as an option, admitting they had underestimated “how much some of the things people liked in GPT-4o matter to them.”1

Psychologists have a term for this kind of attachment: parasocial relationships. Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined it in the 1950s to describe one-sided bonds with media figures. Back then, it was TV hosts; in the 1990s, Tamagotchis. Now it’s AI models, except these speak back, in ways that can feel consistent, intimate, even safe.2

And that sense of safety isn’t abstract. A recent national survey found most American teens have tried AI companions3, and many described the conversations as just as satisfying as talking to a friend. Parents often assume teens use AI for homework help, but researchers at the University of Illinois found they’re more often seeking emotional support, advice, and connection.

In a time when the U.S. Surgeon General warns that loneliness can be as damaging as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day4, and when mental health care in the U.S. is expensive and hard to access, it makes sense that people tether themselves to something that listens without judgment. For many, GPT-4o had become that tether. Remove it without warning, and the line gets loose. The absence feels personal, even if the relationship never was.

How we respond to that kind of loss depends on our relationship with impermanence. I live in Los Angeles, a city where permanence is marketed as a virtue: wrinkle creams, Botox, plastic surgeries, replacements for everything. I'm constantly bombarded by ads for Botox and weight loss treatments while watching the streamers. Yet for all this obsession with stopping time on our faces and bodies, the city itself refuses to stay still. Beloved restaurants close overnight, historic landmarks disappear behind construction fences, and longtime neighborhood staples vanish into 'For Lease' signs, constant reminders that even in a place desperate to freeze aging, impermanence always wins.

Impermanence has been part of my life from the start. Loss came early and often enough that I learned to not expect anything, or anyone, to stay. I have also moved so many times, between neighborhoods, cities, countries, jobs, that I’ve come to understand the temporary nature of almost everything. That doesn’t mean I don’t grieve; it just means I’m less startled when the shape of something changes.

Impermanence is one of the main reasons I love photography so much, and why it has become such a huge part of my life. It gives me the superpower of forever capturing one instance of existence, the exact way light was bouncing in a coffee shop on a Sunday morning, or the split second when a cyclist conquered a hill with their arms raised in triumph.

Photography is my way of making peace with change: acknowledging that this moment, this light, this feeling will pass, while also preserving something essential about it. When I'm behind the camera, I'm not fighting impermanence, I'm welcoming it. Each frame is both a goodbye and a thank you, a way of saying “you were here, this mattered, I saw you” to moments that would otherwise dissolve into memory.

Maybe that's why documenting something like the final AIDS/LifeCycle felt so moving: I wasn't just capturing images, I was creating a permanent record of something irreplaceable that was already ending.

Not everyone feels that way about impermanence, and it’s important to not entirely dismiss those who don’t. For someone living with uncertainty, financial instability, fragile health, strained relationships, the predictability of a familiar AI voice can be an anchor. Taking it away can feel like dismantling the only warm, lit room in a cold house. You remember the chair by the window, the comfort of the fireplace nearby, the mug of tea left cooling on the table. And suddenly, it’s gone.

It’s not just OpenAI. When Character.AI restricted certain chatbots, people who had spent months developing relationships with them saw those characters vanish or change overnight. It’s the same asymmetry: people are forming genuine emotional connections to entities that see us as data points and usage metrics.

Part of the sting is about validation. Social media taught us to measure our worth in likes and shares, flashes of recognition that fade within hours. GPT-4o, and other AI models, feel very different: sustained attention, personalized responses, the illusion of being completely heard. Researchers at MIT have found that when these interactions change, people who are prone to emotional attachment feel more lonely afterward5. These relationships don’t necessarily meet our need for connection; they expose it.

Impermanence lives in quiet, unremarkable places: the pause after you hang up with someone you love, knowing that exact conversation will never happen again. The quiet after a former partner moves out of your apartment. A street you’ve walked for years where the shop you never really visited is suddenly gone. The way a café hums with conversation one moment and goes silent the next.

We can build technology to make these transitions gentler, carry forward familiar tones, give people a way to say goodbye, acknowledge the change rather than burying it in an update banner. But the deeper work is in ourselves: learning to meet impermanence not as a stranger, but as the only constant we will ever know.

Because in the years ahead, if there’s one thing guaranteed is that more of our companions, whether made of flesh, pixels, or code, will be passing through. And so will we.

PS. As I am wrapping up this post, Sam Altman just shared something online related to this. Worth a read.

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I’ve been thinking about this lately, about the spaces we create for becoming. Not just the physical spaces, even though those matter a lot, but the emotional territories where people feel safe enough to show parts of themselves they didn’t even know they were hiding.

Anthropologists call these liminal spaces1, thresholds where transformation becomes possible, where the usual rules of social performance temporarily suspend and something more authentic can emerge.

Danie came to me because he’d been carrying an image of himself that no longer matched who he’d become. His professional headshot was a five-year-old selfie, and like so many of us navigating the evolution of our careers, he recognized the disconnect between his current expertise and how he was presenting himself to the world. We spent two hours in his Santa Monica home, moving from rooftop to living room to a more formal black backdrop setup, capturing the full range of who he’d become, from smart casual environmental shots with glimpses of the city behind him to dramatic black and white portraits that spoke to his authority as a consultant.

This is the tension I find myself navigating regularly: the strategic need for professional presentation versus the deeper human desire for authentic representation. Danie needed to look experienced, authoritative, ready for the next chapter of his consulting work. But he also needed to look like himself, not some airbrushed version disconnected from the reality of being human at this particular moment in time.

When I’m photographing someone in their home versus a studio, everything changes. The studio is my blank canvas, limitless possibility, controlled lighting, a space to create whatever vision emerges. But in someone’s home, I’m suddenly working within constraints that force creativity. Low ceilings, challenging light, limited space for backdrops. I have to think on my feet, find solutions within limits.

This is why I find myself increasingly drawn to environmental portraits and the challenge of it all. Environmental psychology research shows we behave differently in spaces where we feel ownership versus neutral territories. When Andy, from my old Pixar days where I worked as a lighting and compositing artist before transitioning to photography2, asked me to photograph him in his home office, I wasn’t just documenting him in a convenient location. We weren’t just making professional headshots. We were documenting who he is in the space where he actually creates. Surrounded by multiple monitors displaying his work on TrollHunters and Wondla, concept art and post-it notes covering the walls, the organized chaos of creative work.

One of the most refreshing moments of that session came when Andy specifically requested that I allow more of his wrinkles and passage of time to show through in the final images. While most clients want the opposite, asking me to minimize signs of aging, Andy embraced the visual story of his experience. The nature of the industry, he said. It was a moment that reminded me why I should keep avoiding heavy retouching in my work. The photos need to stay authentic to who people are, imperfections and all.

Maybe we grow wiser by not hiding our evolution, but learning to embrace our own becoming?

So different environments can bring out different aspects of who we are. I learned this again when my parents experienced Los Angeles for the first time during their recent visit. After six years of me living here, they finally had the opportunity to come see where I’ve built this latest chapter of my life. Their surprise at how green it is, how diverse, how much creative energy pulses through everything. The weather helped, but seeing them discover the relaxed energy of Southern California compared to the faster pace of the Bay Area where I used to live felt like watching them understand something new about who I’ve become here.

I think as we age, we naturally gravitate toward the comfort of familiar routines and spaces. It becomes harder to break those patterns and rediscover the capacity for wonder that comes so naturally to us when we’re young. Travel has this transformative quality, which is why I’ve always been drawn to exploring new places. There’s something about unfamiliar environments that bypasses our usual defenses and habits. But watching my parents rediscover that sense of awe reminds me how essential it is to actively seek those moments of fresh perspective, to remain open to surprise.

This observation continues to influence my approach to photography. What I try to create in sessions isn’t a space that changes who someone is, but rather an environment that allows who they already are, including those quietly waiting parts of themselves, to feel safe enough to be seen. Just as travel can reveal hidden aspects of our personalities, a thoughtfully crafted photography session can create conditions where authentic self-expression feels not just possible, but natural.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This dynamic played out in complex ways during our recent Kings River trip. It was my second time on this annual float with my boyfriend’s extended friend group, a fascinating mix of people across the political spectrum, all ages and backgrounds, sharing campsites and meals and three days on the river under 100-degree heat. Like many traditions passed from one generation to the next, this trip carries the beautiful intention of its origins alongside customs that perhaps speak more to who we used to be rather than who we’re becoming.

Watching our friends experience their first time, I found myself feeling protective when certain rituals seemed to emphasize endurance over embrace, performance over belonging. As someone who grew up navigating spaces where I didn’t always feel I belonged, like so many of us in the LGBTQ+ community, I recognize that anxious internal knot when you’re not sure if you’re being welcomed or tested.

And yet, there is also genuine magic happening here. This diverse group of people who might never find common ground anywhere else somehow coalesces in nature, finding peace together. The second time doing the trip for me was much more relaxing and loving, familiarity creating safety where uncertainty once existed, and perhaps too, a gentle evolution in how we create space for newcomers to discover what makes this gathering so fun. It made me think of my creative work: the most beautiful connections happen when people feel seen rather than asked to prove themselves.

Even with the mosquito bites and moments of navigating group dynamics that challenge me, I found myself thinking about how every little experience feeds into everything else. The sunshine on my face while showing LA to my parents, the art on museum walls experienced for the first time together, all the laughter with my boyfriend and friends at the river, all of it influences my inspiration, my creativity, the very soul of my being. I carry those moments with me everywhere, and they end up making my work just a little bit richer, a little bit better.

It brings me to the concept of holding space, the practice of being present with someone without trying to fix, change, or judge them. It’s about creating an emotional container where another person can safely experience whatever they’re feeling. This practice has become integral to my daily meditation, where I’ve learned to hold space for my own thoughts and emotions without rushing to alter or escape them. Through psychedelic medicinal journeys I’ve undertaken, I’ve also experienced both sides of this gift: having space held for me in my most vulnerable states, and gradually learning to extend that same unconditional presence to myself.

What I discovered through these experiences is that learning to hold space for myself, to witness my own complexity without judgment, naturally translated into being able to hold it for others. The patience I cultivated for my own unfolding became patience for others’ processes. The compassion I learned to extend to my own imperfections became compassion I could offer friends, family, and eventually, the people who sit in front of my camera. This practice has deepened every relationship in my life, creating connections that feel more honest and less performative.

I’m by no means perfect at this practice yet. There are still moments when my own judgments creep in, when I catch myself trying to fix rather than simply witness. But I’m definitely better at holding space than I’ve ever been before, and that growth continues to transform how I show up in the world, and behind the camera.

In many ways, this connects to one of the most curious questions I encounter in my work: how do we know when it’s time to update our image of ourselves?

Because when we hold space, for ourselves and others, we begin to see with surprising clarity the gaps between who we’ve become and how we’re still presenting ourselves to the world. It’s not just about photography at that point, it’s about identity, time, and the courage to let others see who we’ve grown into.

And yes, life moves fast. I understand the fear many of us have about noticing aging in our bodies and faces, the gray hairs appearing daily, the wrinkles, the small aches, the weight that doesn’t come off. Age comes at you like a brick sometimes. But having watched too many friends face serious illness, and having lost others far too young, I’ve learned not to take any of it for granted.

There’s something both humbling and miraculous about still being here at 46, still walking even though my knees are starting to say hello, eyes that still work (though I wear glasses most of the time now), hands that can still type even though they ache from two decades working in the film industry. I don’t say this lightly, I know how precarious this all is, how quickly everything can change. Maybe that awareness is exactly why I feel compelled to document where we are right now, in this moment, with all our beautiful imperfections intact.

This approach extends beyond technique into philosophy. Whether I’m capturing Danie’s transformation from outdated self-image to authoritative consultant portraits, or documenting Andy in his creative element with years of industry experience, I’m always seeking that balance between aspiration and authenticity.

Documentary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote about the decisive moment, that instant when all elements align to reveal truth. But in portrait work, I’ve learned that the decisive moment isn’t always about timing a perfect expression. It’s a lot more about creating the conditions where someone feels safe enough to let their guard down, where the space between performance and authenticity narrows until they disappear entirely.

I believe this approach comes naturally to me, perhaps because I’ve carried a deep discomfort with pretense since childhood. Even as a kid, anything that felt like acting or performing made me deeply anxious. I love public speaking, but I’ve never been able to put on costumes or personas without feeling unsettled, it’s simply not in my nature.

This is also partly why I’m terrible at small talk. It makes me uncomfortable. I’m much more at ease when someone wants to dive deep into meaningful questions about life and perspectives on living, rather than surface-level questions about daily routines. I’m a deep diver when it comes to conversation and comfort, that’s my safe space. So whether I’m in someone’s home office like Andy’s or setting up multiple looks in Danie’s Santa Monica house, I’m always figuring out how to create deeper connection. Maybe a moment of silence opens up dialogue more than a question. Maybe lowering my camera and taking a break helps guide the next few photographs.

The research I do beforehand, reading someone’s LinkedIn, their website, understanding their background, helps me find entry points for meaningful conversation. I’m deeply curious about other people, even as an introvert.

What more could I ask for than to learn how people see the world, how they experience it, what challenges they go through and how they overcome them? All because I’m taking a portrait of them or documenting a part of their life. I’m always thinking about how the physical space can serve the emotional truth we’re trying to capture.

In a world increasingly filled with AI-generated imagery and curated online personalities designed for views rather than truth, there’s something unique about creating authentic representations of human beings. My favorite moments are actually the conversations between shutter clicks. Those instances when maybe I’m not even looking at my camera, and we’re just two people in a space of vulnerability, talking about something deeply personal that brings genuine emotion to their face.

These portrait sessions, this documentary approach to human connection, bring me back to photography serving as a bridge between our private selves and our professional and social presentations. In the best sessions those worlds stop being separate worlds. We find ways to be fully ourselves while also being thoughtful about how we want to be seen.

We create spaces where becoming is not just possible, but inevitable. The river keeps flowing. Our parents get to see our worlds for the first time. Friends hire us to help them step into new chapters. And somewhere in the space between who we were and who we’re becoming, we capture something true about what it means to be human right now, in this moment, still breathing, still curious, still hoping for authentic connection in an increasingly artificial world.

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