When I realized I was in love with the woman who is now my wife, I told her get on a plane. She was in my apartment in Buffalo a week later.

I am not going to share pictures from that visit, not this time. I’m going to share pictures of the second trip we ever took to see each other, the one where I visited her in Los Angeles, and then I’ll share some more from later on.

During that second trip, the LA trip, we had been in constant communication that summer after our first week-long visit in June. Summer is a wonderful time to fall in love. But I couldn’t afford the plane ticket until she got the first paycheck from her summer internship, and I finally cured my bout of unemployment with a decent marketing commission. These are logistics. The interesting thing, and the reason I share all this, is that when I look back at these pictures, I realize that this was the exchange of the look of love. I was in love with her. She was in love with me. And I was in love with California, which I’d never visited before and which felt bizarre and surreal to me, a totally different experience than I’d expected to have in LA. We had a tourist’s experience, mostly, visiting museums and boardwalks and peeking over the edges of hills. The entire texture of the place was transformed. When you are in love you are never a tourist. The camera does a good job of doubling up the truth of your real location: you are living in your lover’s eye.

In front of LACMA. I was shocked at the scale of California, more than anything else. I was astounded that my wife could drive on the highways. She’s a little on the shorter side, but anyone would be dwarfed by the architecture of LACMA. I have since fallen out of love with a lot of California’s museums. But I love this picture.

The little cottage we had rented, an AirBNB in studio city, was everything I’d hoped a it would be. It was completely private, owned by a little Russian man who later took it offline. I’m sad we can never go back. When I look at these pictures I remember how my wife had added all kinds of little touches to the room before I arrived: flowers, foods in the fridge, little presents, everything prepared. Long-distance romance is not quite like perpetual vacation; you’re not doing vacation things, you are shacked up together. There’s something romantic, even sexy, to me about this–about flying out just to nest in whatever place is convenient.

At the top of the ferris wheel in Santa Monica, I took these. The second one was my favorite picture of my wife for many years. I see that total relaxation, the sense of peace, in her eyes. Does she look young to you? We were 20 and 24, definitely young, but not that young. She looks young to me now because every day I get to see the piercings, tattoos, years of law school and library science study that she’s added to herself since this picture was taken. I think she never really looked that young, if you knew her, though. She once joked that all butch lesbians are basically a practical, resigned 38 once they decide to be butch, and they stay 38 until they hit their 40s. It always cracked me up. So maybe she’s a very puppy-eyed 38 year old butch in this photo. Who’s to say.

At my request , my wife took quite a few pictures of me that weekend, mostly photos to even out the dozens I was snapping of her. She does this thing where whenever I pose for a photo, she’ll keep snapping pictures once I stop posing, once I walk forward and laugh and tell her stoppppp!

This one is kind of like that, I think. I had stopped posing, but this is the picture she wanted to take. When I see it, I feel very beautiful.

This is later picture, speaking of time passing: 2022, four years after the afternoon in Santa Monica. We had a bonfire on the beach in San Francisco with her law school friends; they had just finished bar prep and were enjoying a moment of freedom. Out of all the people in the group photo we took that night–eight people–my wife was the only one to pass the bar exam on the first try.

I remember this night had come at strange time for me: work had been hard. I’d been struggling to figure things out, preoccupied with myself. We had barely had time to be social after moving to San Francisco in 2020 and going into lockdown. But that night it felt like a movie, one of those romantic movies about people graduating from college. I remember seeing her walk away from the bonfire as the moon rose and hoping that, just like in the movies, she’d glance back at me with that look of love. And she did, and here is that picture.

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When I was a young tween, about nine years old, I had a little orange kitten die in a freak accident. My mom was a pre-vet technician at Cornell when she met my dad, and although she gave up her ambitions in the animal medicine field, she instilled a practicality in me about animal mortality that has stayed with me my whole life. I think I’ve mentioned this. She told me that there really is only one way to skin a cat: to just, you know. Skin it. When my kitten died, she wrapped his body in a towel and I felt the life go out of him, and she told me it was OK to be sad, that it’s normal to be sad when something is dying, even if it will be better for the dying thing once it happens. This is a very good lesson to each a nine-year-old: to not push death away, to process the feelings as they happen. The more complex and beloved the creature, the harder it is to do this, to really sit beside something, even if we’re physically there. I think absence is a part of what complicates death for many of us.

There are no postcards of dead cat bodies in this edition of Picture Postcards, of course. Well, I say of course, but I can’t promise what will happen in the future. Maybe I’ll take my greatest photo ever of a cat’s death mask. Probably not, though. Sounds upsetting. What I want to share instead are pictures of now-departed cats, and then some pictures of living cats, my wise little keepers of death. I am curious how you will feel when you see the pictures after reading this. Even though many of us appreciate the quiet spirituality of the cat, online we’re used to seeing cat pictures as little emotional hieroglyphs, memes, funny, charming things. I wrote the above introduction to maybe shake up the tone a little. Here are some cats.

The first cat, a cat who is not my own: Nemo, now departed from my grandma and uncle’s home in New Jersey. This was taken in 2012 in December; the room he’s in is a bedroom where I’d sleep during Christmastime once me and my sister were too big to share an air mattress. He was already fading when I took this; I think it was one of his last Christmases. Before him were Ernie and Bitty, one massive and fat and one timid and tabby. Nemo was a big-boned barn cat from central Jersey, but he had a fragility towards the end.

Another portrait of Nemo. When cats come from far outside, from forests and barns, I think they gain a degree of wisdom; even the most pebble-brained outdoor cat has its secrets and mysteries. Nemo, too.

Also in 2012: here is a nameless cat. Simply going by average lifespan, I assume this cat who was an adult 14 years ago is likely no longer with us–though miracles do happen. I remember this day well; I was walking around in my hometown with my camera, hoping for something that felt like autumn beckoning in, and was rewarded with autumnal cats.

And speaking of my hometown. It is time you all see Harry, my finest and most favorite childhood cat. We had quite a few when I was a growing up. They were “indoor-outdoor,” which I now realize wasn’t responsible for either the cats or the local wildlife, but my parents were children of the 70s, and our street didn’t see a lot of cars. Strangely, I remember the feeling of being gripped with fear when we’d leave them outdoors before a weekend trip, because at least once in my childhood, the death of a cat was discovered when they simply didn’t show up after we’d been away. Preventable, I think, but I don’t blame my parents too much. Anyways–Harry lived a very comfortable life, mostly indoors, once they’d adjusted to how to best care for a cat. Here he is on my teenage bed in 2012, in all his tuxedo glory. When I was a very small child, he’d walk with my mom and sister and I to drop me off at the elementary school, which was about a mile’s walk away, meowing the entire time. He had a little white tip on the end of his tail and would wave it around back and forth. My mom told me years later that she’d always have to carry him home, but he insisted on the escort.

Only a few years later, in 2016, he declined quickly. That’s how it happens. He was already an old cat in 2012; I’d had him since elementary school, and I graduated college in 2016. I hated living in the dorm away from him, but he kept me safe and happy for the difficult first two years of staying home for community college. His cataract in one eye looked like a milky full moon. I used to call him my moon man. He was one of the kindest and wisest cats I’ve ever known.

Just a few months later, in December of 2016, Audrey would be in this same bedroom. The cat you have as an adult and the cat you have as a young child are two very different cats, but in other ways, they are exactly the same. Audrey is alive and well, currently. She came to me during a strange week in November, after some friends and I did psychedelics the weekend before the 2016 election, a funny transcendental bookend before a major upheaval. I remember seeing the universe breathe its violet breath in and out for me, and I remember feeling connected to all souls, and I remember knowing I would soon have a cat. And when I returned, there was Audrey, a sometimes stray who I’d been coaxing indoors slowly, finally come to roost.

Already, even in this photo where she’s still a little wild and young, you can maybe see how wise Audrey looks. She is wise. She’s a cat, of course, so she has her moments of hysterical stupidity, but really, I think of her as my trusted familiar and companion in this season of my life.

Of course, a cat is also the thing that makes a lesbian house a lesbian home. Here is me and my wife and a very patient Audrey in 2018, home for the holidays in every sense of the term. She was more enthusiastic when we let her roll around in the discarded wrapping paper.

These days, Audrey is aging. She has arthritis in her hips and back; she is at least a full decade older than she was when I met her, when the vet said she was “about two.” Our kitten Lucy keeps her busy, and she has found a new rhythm, but I know some things will get harder as time goes on. When she goes, I’ll be sad, but not afraid. Here she is in our old apartment in San Francisco. As in the picture, she will haunt the hearth of that home, and every home she has called her own, as is her way. I am lucky to share a life with her.

A very old postcard from a summer at home. July 1, 2014. Twelve whole years ago. The caption originally reads: last night was certainly something new. I suppose it was.

Five years later, December of 2019, here is the same room seen from outside, my childhood home glowing the night before I left for San Francisco.

In San Francisco everything glows. Constant light. The light shapes the whole place from the first beams of sunlight to the streetlights and tunnel lamps running into Chinatown. After we moved away and I kept coming back for work, I would always walk through that tunnel from my hotel in Union Square to city lights books. That place glows too, yellow and red and brown.

Most of the glow here is yellow, candlelight or lamplight. Here is a red glow coming from the red bulb in a now-defunct punk house in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was my first time going on a tour in a van with a band, and this was the first stop on the tour, and inside and outside the house punk kids gathered together like clumps of insects, and if you pointed your lens at them for too long they stared back at you with suspicion, so I found a way to shoot between rooms when the bands weren’t playing, because I was curious about the way the whole place glowed red from the inside out.

I have a lot of other glowing pictures. But here’s one last one that I think is interesting. I took it in an antique store here in Atlanta. The slide sorter was in a dark corner of a fancy antique booth, and each little pictured glowed out like a window to another place, as you can see. I remember thinking that this is how I want all of my photos to feel: small and bright and full of their glow, beckoning people closer.

Tonight, after wrapping a long and labor-intensive design project (more on that soon), I opened my Obsidian vault only to realize the file system I’ve built there had been moved to a hard drive. Like the last crumb in a cookie jar, all that was there inside the file navigator was a single, unlinked text document titled History that Disturbs the Present, the start of what I must imagine was an edition of Picture Postcards. It included nothing but a link to the above photo.

Here is what I will tell you about this picture. It was taken in the back room of a sweaty, foggy, beautiful lesbian dive bar on the east side of Buffalo in March of 2017, where a pool table surrounded mirrored walls had been repurposed by yours truly into a glittering exhibition space. The exhibition was titled Black in Time, and was produced by the Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project as a way to re-open and celebrate a living archive. From the ceiling, mounted on board and pressed onto wires, dangled the reproduced photos from the collection of Ari Moore, Ebony Johnson, and Escada Sanders, of their days in Buffalo’s ballroom scene. Hours before, I had run back and forth to Home Depot in my broken-down Volvo station wagon, grabbing red-tinted lightbulbs, rolls of wrapping paper, zip ties, assembling the final scenes frantically.1

I was not surprised to see that first picture in that lonely little document.

I’ve been meaning to revisit the photographs of this event for a long while. This night, when I glued and wired and spotlit and bedazzled that little pool room in the back of Sweets Lounge, was my first time helping to make history come alive in Buffalo. The idea of history that bleeds through the material world and is re-experienced as we absorb it would guide the subsequent years of collaboration I enjoyed with the organization.I will, eventually, write more about what History that Disturbs the Present means to me. But I want to talk about these pictures first, and talk about how they are pictures of pictures.

When I look at these photos I wish I could just cram everything that went into this night, all the complicated exhibition-theory work that my friends and I poured into it, into your heads, so you understand immediately. It’s so boring to talk about it when the pictures are begging you to read them instead. Maybe you can understand, if the photos do their job. The lighting helps. You can see what I was going for, maybe: a haze. Distance, truncated movement, so you have to pause and re-read and grab and get scared by your own reflection in the mirrors that line the pool hall. People had to squint to see everything, but it slowed them down. Good. I had to argue for those red spot bulbs. You can maybe imagine how people moved through these precious pictures of these performers, these drag queens, who boarded Greyhound buses from Buffalo to New York (3am, $12) to attend just one ball, to absorb something, steal a little, ship back north and make it their own. That’s what they did. Well, not all of them. Ari Moore really stayed in Buffalo. She’s a fixture. She went straight for her own contributions to this living archive first, when she arrived. Here she is, finding herself. And below her is a photo of Escada Sanders, one of the queens who did board busses, doing the same.

I struggled with tone as I was writing this post. I’ve found that in the time between 2016 and now, there’s been a kind of cultural accumulation around queer identity, a snowdusting where impression settles over essence. Even, or especially, if we’re queer ourselves, this happens. It happens this way: we glance at something like this, and adjectives parade around in our heads until they’ve stamped out a flatbed of meaning: a black-owned business, a working-class lesbian bar, black drag queens, lesbian allies, white lesbian college students, performance art, queer performance, radical praxis, radical art history, trans black performance. This reaction might be the most profound for those of us between the ages of 28 and 50, especially if we work in the arts, because to us, these parading adjectives would at one time in our lives have been fodder for nonprofits and academic writers, bordering on artspeak. Now they leap out because they have been struck from government databases and public funding grants on the grounds of obscenity. Two poles, two wildly different stakes in the same culture war.

We know this, and the words parade around, and our eyes slide off the pictures, and somehow, we look at this and think we get it.

Out of focus.

Some of the best advice I ever got in college, when I was being taught how to interpret performance art, is that when it comes to performance, you almost certainly do not “get it” the way you think you do. It’s not because those adjectives don’t belong in the frame. But performance, by nature, is time-based. It is an experience you are having. It is not a concept that is delivered to you. It delivers itself and its meaning continuously in real time. That’s what the design of this exhibition was about, I guess. As I mention in my footnotes, the curation and historical work associated with this exhibition was not my brainchild. But the light and the space and the feel of the room, that was me. I am not usually one to take credit for that type of thing, but I can say with confidence the choices I made hours before these pictures were taken were part of the pictures.

This moment is a unique watershed in my own personal history as a photographer. For the first time I started to see the photos I would take, the people, the moment, stretching backwards and forwards in time. Not just hours. Years. If I took the right picture, my picture will be the next picture hanging in a mirrored room. This will compose the next chapter.

The results are, I think, good. I like these pictures. But making them was what mattered. I think this is the truth in that kind of thing. In histories like this, ones centered around performances, ones that happened in bars like this that were transformed with craft paper and lightbulbs, you cannot just get it. You cannot just take your picture. Whatever it was will refract and repeat, and it will come back, and the pictures will not begin to cover it, so you have to act it out again, or a version of it.

And, at the end of it all, you take that picture. And it’s still not quite enough.

The last time I wrote, I was exhausted from travel, sitting in a hotel in London. The first night I spent in London I walked as far as I could go and ducked into the first bar that was playing live music. It turned out to be one of those tacky little crooner bars, with musicians who didn’t look a day older than 16, and a singer who I think was also some kind of comedian when he wasn’t dancing around in sequined pants. I remember laughing as it dawned on me what type of performance I was about to see, and then something else, something lighter, floated into the room as well: the distinct feeling that America as a place is very depressed, that the kind of levity and earnestness I felt in this place, even for an absurd or uninteresting type of performer, was still something playful, something brighter than what we had at home. It mattered to me less that the music was bad than it would have somewhere in America. Did that mean that things here were better? Probably not. I took one photo and retreated to my hotel.

As it happened, a dear friend of mine from Los Angeles was working in London that week as well. Before I flew back home we met in a pub and shared a drink and a discussion. She is one of those rare and beautiful things, a concert-going friend who has become more than just that, someone you can talk to when the lights go up after the show, someone who gets it. We have seen a lot of good music together, and I think that shared activity of awed witness has led us to experience other things with a similar sense of mutual intensity. When the pub closed, we decided to walk deeper into some of the winding streets behind us, and as we did, a cat appeared from behind a parked car. Silently, without discussing it, my friend and I both decided to follow the cat, to participate in a kind of feline dérive.

The end of the cat’s piece was clear as anything. We arrived, all of a sudden, at a green door set in against a building. It almost seemed like a novelty–was it a reference to some fantasy book? Someone’s pet project for quirky home restoration?–but in the yellow light of the streetlamps and in the haze of our shared exhaustion, we felt a cycle close. We decided, again silently, that the door was important. And so it was; it became important. It became something around which we could form ideas, an anchor to our memories of this trip. We came to a clearing. I have a picture of the door, and of my friend standing in a night-field of brilliant green.

I’m not a believer in spellwork as such, but I dabble in chaos magic, I suppose. If you’re the kind of person who believes in meaning, and believes that cultural objects and actions hold meaning, the barrier between art and inquisitive living and something more ritual, something akin to chaos magic, is very thin, actually. It’s all quantum, all relational, all interpretation. You make your own realms of ritual; meaning is open; the bonds we break and the bonds we create are where the power lies. I find a lot of my favorite artists also engage with some element of this thought. Grant Morrison, for example, is a well-known student of chaos magic, and I wonder if it’s this part of his life that enabled him to write such strange and compelling comics incorporating ideas of Dadaism, deadly art history, or the deconstructive queer culture of Danny the Street–or if it’s the other way around, that those interests led him to chaos magic.

I doubt it really matters. I mention this only to share a dimension of what these photos mean to me: I could call them anchors or thought-provoking memories, but I could also call them spells and maybe you would understand.

I left London shortly after and immediately traveled to Upstate New York: Buffalo and Syracuse and Rochester, and then home for another 24 hours before I flew to San Francisco, and when I returned I could tell that it would take weeks for everything about that time to shake down into coherence. My hometown of Corning is situated between all these Upstate cities. I know the highways and roads better than I know almost anything; I was there to visit my sister and my best friend, and to hear some music.

One of the finest pieces of music I have ever heard was an experimental composition performed by a clarinet quartet in the great grain elevator of Silo City in Buffalo. Silo City is not a city at all; it is a sprawling industrial park made of concrete and factory floors and rusted steel. The grain elevators have the auditory resonance of brutalist cathedrals. Artists from across the region stage performances there. To support the space, there are now residencies there, a bar, a walking park. The people of Buffalo paddle canoes on the river between the looming structures. I took my sister there during my trip upstate because she’d never been there before. We did not hear any music that day, but I think it was implied. You could imagine it happening there. You could imagine it being beautifully, impossibly loud. I took the photo above before we left. My lens didn’t feel wide enough for any of it.

It felt important to take her there. She lives in Rochester now, a mere two hours away from Buffalo. Music has taken me a lot of places, but my sister has only been to three concerts in her life. Two of them happened that weekend in April.

For the next postcard, hello to (who has a wonderful presence here on Substack)– hope I don’t embarrass you with this picture, but I love it so. I have seen Geoff’s band Thursday quite a few times at this point, and I always feel a little silly taking pictures because they often don’t capture what’s so good to me about that band. Every Thursday show I’ve been to is a burning archive of sorts: the musicians, many not of the original lineup, have a way of making each time feel important and unique, as if they’re writing the songs in palimpsest over the last performance, searing through each set, nothing taken for granted. And people in the crowd are there for a ritual too, taking stock of who they were when they first heard this music–some 20 years ago, some yesterday–and letting it move them in time. Geoff is a friend, but when I see him perform, it’s like I’m watching a conduit, watching as the weight of all that meaning is channeled, tossed up to the ceiling, and thrown back out over the crowd who receive it with screams of approval. A very generous style of performance. It’s why I like this photo. Like everything else in this edition of Picture Postcards, it is, maybe, a picture of a spell being cast. You can feel all the meaning coiled up in there, around the microphone. My sister said it was a really good show.

My last postcards are from a roll of film I shot in early June. After a less eventful May, this month suddenly I found myself surrounded by emergencies. Old friends came to me with their relationships in crisis. An elderly woman became paranoid about her stove and begged me to clean it. A neighbor’s cat ran across the street and was struck by a car, and I heard it scream. He was standing there shaking, saying I’m not good at this; I told him I am, and helped him to the emergency vet and held him as he sobbed, as he put the animal down. And then I went home and finished my workday. A few days later, I found myself walking around a familiar neighborhood in Atlanta late at night, and realized I was different. The place was the same. The person taking the picture was not.

I had no plans to process this all in this way, but I’ve been feeling restless lately and I think it started with that trip, like the texture of the events have stuck to me, a silly-putty imprint of yesterday’s news. Maybe this is something we all feel occasionally. The English language doesn’t really have a word for it. And I’m not sure what it is about that fragile barrier between life and death, composure and empathy, that feels so much more intense in the summertime, but I always find myself surrounded by these small emergencies, as if everything is more intense. Maybe it’s because summer crushes me under it. When my well is driest, the only thing that works for me is being kind to people. I feel an increased sense of responsibility to give and give and give.

But then, not all emergencies are a crisis. Their scale vacillates, person to person, each holding their own emergencies against their chest. This photo was taken on a night when I was hearing a friend’s troubles, just letting her vent a bit. I couldn’t help as much as I’d wanted to. But, unrelated to her troubles, she was trying to stop smoking, so I gathered up a mostly-full pack of cigarettes for her and chose one of Shakespeare’s sonnets from a book on my shelf. Spellwork. Each cigarette received a number that referred to a line of the sonnet. Smoke the poem, the whole poem of love and loss, so perfectly made, I said, and maybe by the end of it you will feel a different satisfaction. There was one extra cigarette after our fourteen lines. On it, I wrote in cursive and gave the night a name the color of death, the color of magic, the color of June: deep, deep violet.

Hello from London at 4 in the morning. I can’t sleep, so I’m looking at pictures that make me feel something that resembles the loneliness of being underslept in a hotel far from home. Right now I’m that particular kind of tired that nothing can fill up: so spent but so impossible to recover. A hungry ghost, a vessel for nothing. I always want more of the nothingness when I feel that way; I want to play with it, itch the scab, because despite being uncomfortable it is kind of a rare, intense physical sensation. It’s probably what keeps me awake long after my body is worn out.

Maybe that idea helps explain what I find so beautiful and so important and about this photo I took of a beer store in Allentown, Pennsylvania, last August after a concert. I was with friends, but I often feel an urge to be alone right as the energy of a really good live music experience is still steaming off me. So I went on an only half-necessary beer run, driving out past the obvious gas stations to a little brick building at the edge of a sloping street. I did not intend to take pictures in the store, but when I stepped in I was flooded with recognition of a really singular rust belt type establishment you just can’t get in the south. Wood paneled walls, deep, warmth-hugging walls, a little cave of a place barricaded away from the snow. I spoke to the girl behind the counter; she was friendly and tough, strangely inquisitive: what was Atlanta like? What band was playing? What’s next? I think she was probably asking: what’s anywhere but here like? But I might have been projecting. Right as I was explaining myself a clamor of kids from a college party filed in and all at once it was like a sheet of glass guillotined itself down in front of the counter. All that openness you find in rust belt towns can go away in a moment. But that’s also just retail. I snapped this picture before I walked out the door.

The last time I was in the UK was during my honeymoon in Scotland in 2024. My wife was weary after driving us from Edinburgh to Inverness in a single afternoon. As she dozed in our hotel, similar to that night in Allentown, I was seized by a tired restlessness you can only sate with more restlessness, more loneliness. When I go out with my camera intending to take photos, if I’m in that mood, I become a kind of ghost hunter. That loneliness-for-more-loneliness itch leads me to empty houses and softly lit windows that I pretend are the lighthouse beams of other lonely souls. In reality, I have no way of knowing how any of the people behind those windows are feeling. They’re probably quite cozy. The pictures always try to tell a different story, though. The surface of the house becomes a face of loneliness.

I used to hate taking pictures of people. I preferred empty houses. Live music cured me of that. The music photographer’s role gave me permission to be alone in a crowd and figure out all those degrees of distance. There are so many all at the same time. Everyone is caught up in something, and it’s all relational, the performing, the watching, the dancing, the prowling the margins. I don’t take photos of the people who watch at the back, usually. That feels like the wrong kind of loneliness. What I’ve learned is that if you’re a lonely person, and you look around for a reflection at a concert, you can start to see it everywhere. For a few moments, I usually see it onstage until the membrane between band and audience becomes semipermeable. And, somehow, as the energy lifts, you’ll find your fellow ghosts right at the center, cut into the motion of crowds.

I cleaned out an old Dropbox account this morning and was pleasantly surprised to find these photos of a July 4th trip to Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, NY, from 2015. Here, you can see the view of the entire house–it’s really a mansion, now a resort–from one of the high cliffs. Not a difficult hike, even. My dad used to have a running gig there playing in the marching band for the festivities, and as part of his payment, our entire little family got to wander the grounds for the day. The gardens and house are immaculate, historical, gorgeous. It was always too expensive to stay there overnight, so we’d spend the day and evening there, and then sleep at a Super 8 nearby. But for the 10 hours we were there, I got to live out a fantasy of being a very different type of person.

The title of this post is a reference to the blue delphinium that grew on the grounds by a large pagoda or garden trestle. I’d never seen such gorgeous blue and purple flowers in my life until I visited Mohonk. I remember editing these images after our first-ever visit there and being amazed at how unreal the blue looked. Processing or “developing” a digital photograph, contrary to some beliefs, involves just as much magic and discovery as analog photography does. After over a decade of being a photographer I have found there’s an incredible science to what you can and can’t “pull out” of an image. When you’re developing for digital, in RGB color, you learn about light and how color lives inside it. I am less interested in truth and more interested in a kind of inner logic when editing. You can create a story, a feeling.

July and August in upstate New York are deep-blue seasons. The nights are blue. The plants are lush. The undergrowth they emerge from feels old and young at the same time–months before, and in the months following, everything is crushed under the silence of snow. When editing photos of New York summers, I tend to push the color mix for greens far past a natural, warm hue and wring out the blues. It feels right to me. These pictures feel present to me in a way the raw images don’t. What’s strange is that the blue delphinium in the second photo here is barely processed at all. The surrounding colors are simply adjusted to highlight them. Painters know about this: relative hues to create drama. Like a well-planned garden, everything is in a relationship with everything else.

I was amazed to realize I wasn’t shooting raw when I took these photos. I swear I used to know better. Maybe I forgot. Maybe I stored the images badly and lost the files. I took these two photos and tried to process them a bit; you can see the warm wood, the golden light. It used to feel so inviting if you’d just wandered around the garden or hiked all day. I was never sure how to exist in that big house. I was a very temporary guest.

This last image is not from 2015. It’s from 2024, at my wedding. When I designed my bouquet, I made sure to ask for blue delphiniums. It’s very strange: our wedding photographer ghosted us after the day itself, and I ended up having to post-process all the raw images myself. My wife’s suit was a deep emerald, the color of summer in New York. And I got to pull the beauty out of the blue delphiniums again, after all that time.

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Nestled about twenty minutes outside of Buffalo, in the direction of East Aurora and all those other little pastoral towns, is Knox Farm, an open, semi-public stretch of farmland and outbuildings that is now a state park. New York’s state park system is something I took for granted as a young person. It has the second largest number of state parks in the United States, just under California, and by far the largest number of any of the original 13 colonies. Many of then have hand-cut stone steps, buildings, and bridges assembled by the works progress administration.

But that’s not the interesting part to me. The interesting part is how empty they are. New York state is simply not as populous as it could be; every city besides the city is a shell of industry. There are tourists, residents, of course, who make use of them. But by and large if you walk through New York’s smaller, less impressive state parks, you are walking like a Ghost. Knox Farm gets busy in the fall, I’m sure, but on the late summer day when this was taken, I only saw a handful of other souls. No park administration, not really. Just myself.

Well, myself and my bicycle. I would shove my bike in the back of my Volvo when I felt restless and bike around parks like this when I could. These photos were taken the summer of 2018, the summer I met my wife, and I was constantly inviting a sense of significance into the moments I wasn’t talking to her, constantly seeking and exploring, traveling, rooting around for beauty. I think that’s part of falling in love, you know? When you’re not together, you create these opportunities to wind yourself up at a distance, until every moment of solitude is stretched taut between you and that person. I kept feeling the pull of it on this trip; I remember that very vividly.

Buffalo and its environs are actually pretty flat, by the way. I come from a valley. I’m used to hills. Maybe it was because of that, or maybe it was because of that push and pull and being in love, but either way I remember seeking something vertical: a height, a vista, a view. In late summer, the breeze seemed to roll up from the hills. I don’t think any of this is really active farmland, just pasture for horses, space for dogs to run. But remember seeing and looking down at things, grinding up the hill on my bicycle.

Eventually I was rewarded with the sight of some of the more beautiful outbuildings that sit on a small hill on one side of the park. The emptiness of the place lends itself to a sense of mystery. I know, logically, that these are not ruins. But there’s something of the ruin in them, isn’t there? It feels unreal that people walk in and out of these places. I’m sure they must. But it all felt so grown over.

On the other side of the hill was the forest. And at the edge of that was one of the prettiest little free libraries I’ve ever come upon. I remember being delighted by this, maybe because, again, my mind was flying all over to other places, and hitching that to a book–a physical souvenir–felt so thrilling.

I’m glad I took this picture. At the very corner you can see a copy of a children’s book, and underneath that, a copy of Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology,” which is the book I eventually went home with. I was already familiar with it. It’s one of my favorite oddballs in American poetry, originally suggested to me by a beloved English teacher, who wrote his Master’s thesis on it. Every poem is a kind of talking epitaph, a chorus of voices from beyond the grave in the graveyard of a single city.

I still have this edition; recently, I lent it to my friend George of the folk act Yankee Roses. I helped with many of the visuals for his most recent album, which is lovely, by the way. George is one of those people who is surrounded in good luck and shared ideas, the kind of friend you think you’re meant to have, and suggesting him books almost feels like a tarot reading. There is so much trust there, so much luck, that I know the choices will attain significance. Now that I’m married, I find that I seek out that same taut serendipity that comes with falling in love in my friendships, especially the creative friendships. I was so surprised to remember that this is where that book came from. I think at the time I must have rifled through book after book, and then chose the familiar one, this worn-down little library edition of something I knew I’d love.

The book is sitting right here on my desk, next to a framed picture of my wife.

Anyways. That’s my story about Knox Farm. I know I haven’t written here in a while, but I found I enjoyed writing this post, and I hope you enjoyed reading it. I think I’ll keep putting these out again. If you liked this, by all means, tell your friends, share it around, subscribe. I have no intense plans to build an audience here, but I do love to share my archive with you all.

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I was in San Francisco last week for a few family engagements, but I’ve returned many times since moving out, and the sky always gets me. Here are a few shots that seem to stick the landing on that painful, clear sky.

My sister-in-law and my wife, gazing out at midday by Ocean Beach. May 2025, for the record. You see what I mean, about the clarity.

Underexposed but still compelling: this picture by the Legion of Honor museum, from August 2022 right before I moved away. I was trying to summon the ghost of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” maybe.

I sometimes think the sky is so blue that its shape gets lost in color; I’ve tried black & white as well, as in this photo from back when I had to drive out to Davis, CA to get my first COVID-19 vaccine. I think the weight of it conveys well here. I’m proud of this picture.

Even at night, that sky is the main attraction; these two photos were taken in 2022 on the night before we moved out of our apartment. I was very sad about it all.

But it’s really at its best during the daytime. I’m in favor of tweaking color out of camera to make things just a bit more surreal; but with San Francisco skies, it’s often more like a nudge. Just an unreal amount of color. This was taken during a rare outing in June of 2021, after we moved out of the Tenderloin. I think the landscape felt really, truly, deeply alien to me. I hope I can keep finding new places to feel that way about; it makes for good pictures.

At Beuhlahland, house in Cameron Mills, NY owned by two artists who invite other artists to make work there, a glorious cobbling-together of outbuildings and materials and scrap metal and Appalachia.

Lanterns flying that night at Beulahland.

Beaver Island, Buffalo, NY. I had a car and a job and not much else; in July I’d drive out half an hour right from work and swim in the lake, which is really a slow-flow around the island. The light there was perfect. I miss swimming in lakes.

The light by Beaver Island.

Ryan in the hammock. We were roommates for a year and a half; I’m not sure what happened to him. We lost touch. I have lost touch with a lot of people from that time in my life.

I found these photos and immediately knew I wanted to send them to you. We’d moved into this apartment in San Francisco in June, two months before these were taken. I think we sometimes forget how little everyone knew about COVID-19 for the first few months of the pandemic. We were just totally floating, totally isolated.

I hadn’t seen my family in 8 months–they were all in New York; I wouldn’t see any of them for another year. And somehow in all of that, I turned 26. We got a cake. Red velvet. Pretty good.

And I blew out the candles; all 26 of them, for an audience of –who? I was not online a lot at this time. I think we were all anxious about social media; I think for a second everything finally broke in that regard. I also think this was the last time I’ve had a cake with an age-accurate number of candles on it.

This apartment was tiny. We were broke all the time, stressed all the time. I took almost no photos of it, even though it was beautiful. I took even fewer photos of myself.

But I’m glad I have this one. I think it tells you what you need to know better than the (not very good) posed photos I took later. My wife got me that pendant I’m wearing from a not-officially-open jewelry store that would close its doors forever a few months later. I was in the middle of becoming something else, just like the rest of the world.

I got my driver’s license in early 2017, age 22, years later than most of my friends. The first time I drove a car by myself, I was visiting my parents and realized I could simply take my mom’s old Honda out for a spin. It was bizarre how anticlimactic it was, really. Overcast day, shitty little sedan, the weird beauty of meeting a missed milestone like an old friend.

What’s funny is that I didn’t drive anywhere in particular, the way a teenager drives. I felt like a hoarded dog that isn’t sure how to play in grass. I just ended up going places I’d gone before, as a little kid, like the Dairy Barn, which has this acrid, horrible milk-product smell around it. It’s nostalgic to me now.

Mostly what I did that day was drive down roads my parents had only ever driven past. I have always been obsessed with knowing all of a place. In fifth grade I made a pact to sneak into every part of my elementary school building before I left for middle school, so I could know the whole place. With a car, I could complete my exploration of all the nooks and crannies of my hometown and its environs.

The antique store we had no reason to stop at. It was fine. But I got to step inside. It started to dawn on me I could do that.

I could stop by one of the million old buildings off the old farm roads, some burnt-out husks, most abandoned.

And, with my camera and my getaway car, I could finally take a look inside.

–A

This was my second-ever time in Los Angeles; I’d visit my girlfriend (now my wife) there when I could. The photos don’t make much sense to me now.

Isa, by the deli.

You see these views a lot in California. I got used to them after living there for a few years; you can tell in these pictures that the novelty hadn’t worn off yet. A totally alien landscape.

It rained for most of the trip. Our AirBNB was a tiny shed behind an artist’s home, I can’t recall what neighborhood–maybe Eagle Rock.

The drive-in. I crashed my car the next day; go figure.

Spencer Crest Nature Center, where my family walks. We’d go for a walk if we had something we disagreed on, or just for the pleasure of it.

A fat cloud above the fields in Corning, off one of the highways, I believe.

A neighbor’s house. One of those that I think I heard stories about as a kid: witches? Someone bad? I wonder how houses get those reputations. I’m sure whoever lived here was just fine.

The bathroom at Kilowatt Bar.

The Beacon Grand Hotel, in hot red. I always stay there if I’m traveling for work because it’s a short walk from City Lights.

The lead singer of the group Holy Water, who I chatted with after their set–I didn’t know their music beforehand. Nice guy. We talked about aging parents and sobriety and the city.

The Roxie, a very good movie theater. One of those places you hope is open forever.

I still plan on doing this, but I realized as I pulled sets of pictures off their old hosting sites for printing that I had the opportunity maybe send them out digitally, too. This Substack, which I’m calling Picture Postcards, is my attempt to revive some of these photos for a new audience.

Every post (which will happen about once a week, sometimes more, sometimes less) will be pretty minimal, pretty image-centric. You’ll see the place, the date, and the pictures, and a little context–enough writing to fit on the back of a postcard, ha ha. Maybe I’ll do more eventually–maybe not. I have heard, generally, that people like these photos, and that they’d be sad if I just deleted them forever. So I’m letting them live here instead. If you’re a new reader or fan or internet-person, welcome; if you’re an old head, welcome back. I hope you like what I send you.

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