They were photographers and writers whose work interested me. People I cared about. People who saw things I didn’t see and made things I couldn’t make. Then they would diminish their own work before anyone else could. It’s okay, but not good enough. I wish I could do what you do. I just take photographs of whatever interests me. There were endless variations, but I heard the same voice underneath them.

I’ve been calling it the ventriloquist.

The inner critic speaks, but the words aren’t entirely its own. They come from people in our past, old decisions we’ve made about ourselves, and rules photographers and writers have repeated so often they sound like laws. Black and white does this. Color does that. You must compose in the frame. You must master exposure. A real photographer would know what this photograph is about. A serious writer wouldn’t write a sentence like that. The ventriloquist is very certain. That’s part of what makes it convincing.

I imagine a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis and trying its wings for the first time. “That isn’t crawling,” the ventriloquist says. “No,” the butterfly says. “I don’t think it is.” The ventriloquist asks what exactly it’s doing. “I’m not sure,” the butterfly says. “But I seem to be moving.”

The caterpillar never wanted to become a butterfly. It was fully a caterpillar until it wasn’t. Then it had to be the next thing fully. Desire never entered into it.

I could hear the ventriloquist speaking through people whose work I admired. Then I heard it in myself. That part was less fun. I like to think I’m enlightened and wise. At the very least, I’ve put a lot of effort into developing convincing explanations for myself. I was sharing my work, taking risks, and encouraging other people to trust what interested them. And I was still holding back.

I believed in the photographs. I just didn’t believe that was enough reason to share them.

I couldn’t come up with a good reason. So one afternoon last week, shortly before I had to leave for work, I started going through my photographs. I nearly made myself late. I didn’t have a project in mind or know what the photographs had in common. I only knew I needed to see what I was withholding. I needed to do it. I needed to do it.

I wound up with thirty five photographs in a folder and called it “Whatever”, because I had nothing better to call it. The name wasn’t a defensive shrug. I had to gather them without naming them, because the moment I gave the folder a real name, I would start editing and choosing. “Whatever” was the only name that didn’t tell me what belonged there.

Until then, each photograph had felt like its own secret room. I could visit it, take comfort in what it meant to me, and leave. Later I would find another photograph and another room. It wasn’t until I gathered them that I realized I had been returning to the same room.

Then I saw the photographs together, and the truth is, I thought they were good. Like, really good. But I can feel myself wanting to qualify that even now. Good for me. Better than I remembered. Not great, obviously, but interesting.

No. I thought they were really good. More than that, I was pleased with the person who made them.

I spend so much time thinking about becoming that I neglect the simple, plain comfort of the present. I think about the photographer I might become, the writer I might become, the person I’m still trying to become. Seeing those thirty five photographs together gave me evidence of the person who’s already here. I’m pleased with who I am and what I’m doing.

Found light on a foggy night.

This isn’t a photograph of an important event. It’s a place I was present enough to see. That’s much harder for me to value than it should be.

I asked myself why I’d kept these photographs back. The honest answer wasn’t modesty or artistic discipline. I wasn’t waiting for the work to mature. I was afraid I’d learn that it didn’t matter.

And then I’d have to stop.

That’s the fear. Not that someone might dislike a photograph. I can survive that.

The fear is that I’ll offer something I believe in to the world and the world will answer with indifference. Then the ventriloquist will use that silence as evidence. See? Stop.

Somewhere along the way, I allowed approval to become permission. If the work is received, I may continue. If it’s ignored, I start doubting what I knew before I shared it.

It’s quite ridiculous when I say it plainly. It’s like, to protect myself from a bruise, I make myself disappear.

I learned that early. My mother could explode over small things and hold a grudge for days. My stepfather could keep me at the kitchen table while he ranted. The birth-father I never knew hid behind a bottle.

Me? I learned to stay quiet, stay out of the way, and keep as much of myself private as I could. Being unseen wasn’t a personality trait. It was a way of getting through the night.

Eventually, the strategy reversed itself. Hiding no longer protects my life. It removes me from it. Even here, writing an essay about being tired of asking permission, I can feel myself wanting to apologize. It sounds touchy feely. It sounds too earnest. The ventriloquist has excellent timing.

But I believe it. Survival now means being myself. Not the improved future version or the version other people approve. This one. The flawed, frightened, messy person who made these photographs and thinks they’re good.

A museum in motion. Unmade repairs.

Most people would walk past this wall. That doesn’t make them wrong. They were going somewhere. I was going somewhere too. But something in it interrupted me, so I stopped. That’s all. Or maybe it isn’t.

The photograph doesn’t prove that the wall matters or that anyone else should care. It proves I was here to notice it. That doesn’t prove my importance. It proves my participation. Rocks exist. People live. To live is to participate in my own existence, or at least to try.

A woman and her exits.

I don’t know what this woman was thinking. That isn’t my story to invent. I’m not even sure I can explain why I stopped. Maybe it was how small she seemed beneath the architecture, the orange scarf against all that blue, or the two EXIT signs pointing toward what appeared to be the same place. I only know that the relationship made me wonder, so I made the photograph.

That’s part of what a photograph can do. It can hold a question without forcing it to become an answer. The photograph is a record of me asking the question, although sometimes I don’t know the question until much later.

The koi photograph began as simple documentation. I was visiting the Autostadt in Wolfsburg, a place devoted to German cars, when I found a koi pond. It surprised me. Koi seemed Japanese, quiet, reflective. They felt out of place among all that German machinery, so I photographed one.

The question came while I was editing. I realized I wanted a place in the world like the koi had. My own private pond where I could simply exist and be left alone. How do I get that?

I thought the pond represented escape. Maybe it does, partly. But I think it represents a manageable world. It has limits, but the limits are visible and somehow useful. I think. I’m not entirely sure. The photograph may still be telling me what the pond means.

A photograph is a manageable world too. The frame creates visible limits. For one moment, the enormous world becomes small enough for me to encounter fully.

When I look at the finished photograph, I feel part of something bigger than myself, and that comforts me. I want to be left alone. I also want to be found. I don’t know how to want both. I only know I do. Another person may see loneliness. They may see a fish. They may decide the photograph is too dark. That doesn’t change what happened between the photograph and me.

This is where I’d been confused. I was sharing my work as if every photograph were an application. May I believe this is good? May I keep going?

Another person can deepen the photograph. They can show me something I missed or ask a question that reveals a door I didn’t know was there. I need that exchange. It has taken my thinking places I couldn’t reach alone. But they can’t decide whether what happened between the photograph and me was real. Making it was one way I participated in my own life. Sharing it makes the record available to someone else.

The koi photograph feels like a memento I’m leaving behind. I’ve moved on from the pond, maybe toward a lake, a river, or an ocean. But the pond remains for whoever comes after me. They’ll have to figure it out for themselves. I don’t have to stand beside the photograph and defend it. I can leave it behind and keep moving. A photograph can remain still because I don’t have to.

That makes me think of the hands people left on cave walls tens of thousands of years ago. I don’t know why someone pressed a hand against stone and blew pigment around it. But when I see the shape of that hand, I hear: I was here. That may not be what the person meant. It’s what the mark begins inside me.

I don’t pretend to understand how that works. I only hope that whatever I leave behind serves as a key for others the way others have been a key for me. A photograph. A sentence. A strange idea discovered at exactly the moment I needed it. The person who made it couldn’t have known which door it would open in me. Most of them will never know it happened.

I only know that can’t happen if I keep the work hidden. I wish I could say creating the folder fixed that. It didn’t. Hearing the ventriloquist isn’t the same as silencing it. I still watch what happens when the work leaves me. I still don’t know whether sharing is an offering, a request, or some mixture of both.

That afternoon, “Whatever” was my way of getting tired of asking, not proof that I’d stopped. Someone may find the work. They may not. It may open something. It may do nothing at all.

But just in case, do it.

So this guy says, Larry took good photos. He liked to tell me, two things make a good photo, geometry and emotion.

Larry was different. I mean, this one time he even built a raft in Canada with a hut on it and lived there for two years. He’d say stuff like, look into things, not just at them. And before you could figure that out, he’d say, you make a photo to keep, but others will share it too.

That was Larry. He didn’t work on things he didn’t care about. Maybe that’s why he took so many photographs close to home. It helped him focus on what mattered.

He had this eye, you know? He saw people struggling against a system. And then he’d find their resilience. It wasn’t always visible, but it was there.

Yeah. That’s Larry. He’s Canadian. He’s a photographer, folk singer, and poet. But his business card only says, Human Being.

(an imagined conversation after the rabbit hole.)

I just needed to make photos that day.

I’m telling you, even the light was exhausted. It was February and I needed to get outside and make photos just to remember being alive.

So I took the tram into Bremen and walked toward the Marktplatz. Near the Bremer Dom there’s a small stone in the ground called the Spuckstein. Local tradition says you spit on it.

It marks the place where Gesche Gottfried’s head rolled after her execution for killing 15 people with arsenic in the early 1800s. She was the last person to be publicly executed in Bremen.

I know. Bleak, right? That was my day and I had nothing to show for it. Then I looked up and saw this bird sitting there. No time to think. Just raise, frame, click.

I got home and kept thinking about the shot, mostly because it was the only thing I had found that day. I liked it, but nothing really, pardon the pun, clicked. Still, I couldn’t delete it. I put it in a folder called “studies” and forgot about it.

Then this morning, a video mentioned Larry Towell. Eighteen seconds out of 44 minutes. That was enough.

Two words stuck with me, geometry and emotion. So I went looking. And somewhere between his photographs and the 18 seconds I found myself looking at this photograph again.

It’s nothing like what Larry Towell photographs. But to me, it felt like we’re having the same conversation.

Not about what to photograph. About why. About looking closely. About finding something inside the constraints. About making the photograph because you care. About looking into what’s close to home.

I went out because I was overwhelmed by life. I made a photograph of a tiny bird sitting inside a huge geometry of glass and steel. I didn’t know Larry Towell existed. Then months later I encountered his ideas and recognized something in my own forgotten photograph.

I mean, that’s not imitation. It’s discovery. And do you know what? Maybe that’s what I needed to learn.

Sometimes another photographer doesn’t teach you how to make a photograph. They teach you how to see the one you already made.

I often joke that I’m about to turn 60, but my mind thinks I’m about to turn 30 and my body thinks I’m about to turn 90. It averages out. This was a week when I felt my age more than usual. I’d been fighting a bad ear infection for almost three weeks. It affected my hearing, my balance and my energy. By Friday, the bottoms of my feet hurt, my joints were stiff and curling my toes could cause them to cramp.

That’s what happens after five days of work. An eight hour shift, a 45 minute break and two hours commuting by scooter each day. I stretch. I take ibuprofen. I get through it. But some Friday nights, I’m just holding on.

There were other things weighing on me. My health. My job. The uncertainty that comes with being an immigrant working an entry level job. Learning German. Earning citizenship. Getting a driver’s license. Trying to find my place in photography. I’d become so used to the routine that I’d lost track of some of the whys.

Not every day is Sean building a new life in a new country. Sometimes it’s just a regular day and nobody cares. That’s a good thing. It’s how life works.

Still, I felt trapped in my job and stuck with my health. I wasn’t reading as much as I wanted. I wasn’t going out and taking photographs. I knew I needed to change something. I just didn’t have much energy left for changing it. The bell went off at the warehouse at 11:30 Friday night. From there, I normally have about an hour on the scooter before I’m home.

Sammy Hagar was singing “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” as I rode through the dark farm roads around Grasberg. Most of the time, music stays in the background while my brain goes through a gazillion other things. Then something happens and the music fades forward. Your brain notices the connection.

This time, my scooter battery died. It was around one in the morning, and I was four kilometers from home. A rambling man standing beside a dead scooter. The playlist had a sense of humor.

The plan was that if the battery died, I’d call Nici and she’d pick me up. When I called, she was asleep. That was normal. She’d had a long, hard week too.

She could come get me, but the car was too small to hold the scooter. Her first question was what we’d do with it. In my mind, the answer was simple. Leave the tailgate open, let the scooter hang out a little, turn on the hazards and drive home. It was four kilometers. One turn and two straight roads.

But I was tired and irritated. I didn’t want to solve another problem or have a disagreement about it. Never mind, I told her. I just wanted you to know I’ll be home late. I’m walking.

That irritation matters because I didn’t begin the walk in a state of peace or wonder. I began it tired, sore and feeling a little sorry for myself. Worse things have happened to me in my life and adventures. I knew the area. I’d walked much of it before. Besides, I’d been trying to get more steps.

The scooter isn’t one of those little things with handlebars at your waist. It’s a large commuter scooter. When I’m standing beside it, the handlebars reach my chest. I started pushing it with the scooter on my right.

I normally ride along the street at night because it’s smooth and there are very few cars. Riding at 22 kilometers an hour with lights is one thing. Walking down the road while pushing a dead scooter is another. I chose the rough bike path.

The first thing I noticed was that although the battery was dead, the instrument panel was still glowing. When the scooter is switched off, the wheels don’t turn freely. Whoa. Is this even going to work?

It did, but the display was so bright that I couldn’t see the path properly. I positioned my right arm over the speedometer and battery indicator to block the light. The screen was giving me information while taking away my ability to see.

Once I covered it, the world became visible again.

At first, I could see only masses. Huge trees lined the path. There was a difference between their darkness and the lighter gaps between them. That’s the first thing the mind does in darkness. It doesn’t search for beauty. It establishes whether the body is safe. Can I move forward? Can I sense what’s around me? Is there danger, or is it calm?

Once my brain had answered those questions, the trees pulled my eyes upward. Trees are amazing things. I almost think they’re sentient. They have a way of drawing your attention toward the sky. That was when I realized how many stars were above me.

There are very few streetlights along that road. There was no Moon adding its usual brightness to the open farm fields. I’d noticed earlier in the ride that the Moon was missing. A few weeks before, I’d photographed a moonset and shared it on Substack. Now I hadn’t seen the Moon for several nights.

I knew there had to be an explanation. I just didn’t know what it was. So I did what most of us do now. I reached for my phone and asked the easy questions. Where am I? What should I be seeing?

We live with almost unlimited data and information. That doesn’t mean we have knowledge or understanding. I tried explaining where I was, which direction I was walking and what I could see. Eventually, I remembered that I had a compass app.

Around 330 degrees, low in the sky, I could make out four or five stars. Was that part of the Big Dipper? Apparently, it probably was.

That was a small victory. I’d identified one thing, but I still couldn’t make the words and the sky line up. I’d given the tools more data, but the information still hadn’t become understanding. Then I realized I didn’t need it to. You know what? Just enjoy the stars.

I put down the kickstand and stepped away from the scooter. I wanted to be completely untethered. That physical act mattered. Until then, one of my hands had always been connected to the scooter and the problem I was trying to solve. Stepping away didn’t fix anything, but for a moment it released me from having to manage it.

There was no grand revelation. I didn’t suddenly understand the universe. My brain simply recognized that the experience was indescribable. Any attempt to explain it would make it romantic or reduce it to something less than it was.

Sometimes you have to let an experience be the experience. You can’t capture it, contain it or control it. It just is.

I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to connect what’s happening in my mind with what’s happening in my body. Acceptance wasn’t instinctive for me. It was something I had to practice. Over time, I built a circuit inside myself that I could sometimes find and switch on. Standing away from the scooter beneath those stars, I found it.

Then everything was gone.

My health. My job. My status in Germany. Citizenship. The driver’s license. Photography. None of it passed through my mind for even a second.

Where does the flame of a candle go when you put it out? It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s simply gone. The problems weren’t solved. They were still waiting for me. But at that moment, they weren’t present. What mattered was what was in front of me, not what had been there before.

I’m six feet tall and about 85 kilograms. Beneath that canopy of stars, I was literally a speck of dust. I can’t speak for anybody else. I can speak only for myself. That was an empowering thought.

I genuinely felt nothing. Not emptiness. Not despair. Release. My gosh. What a gift my life is. I was so grateful.

Eventually, I had to return to the scooter. I was still several kilometers from home. That’s life, right? However far your mind travels, you eventually return to the physical necessities of being alive on planet Earth. You breathe. You move. You put one foot in front of the other.

I began walking again, managing the scooter, the uneven ground and the changing light. I was pulled back into the smaller world. I don’t want to call it the real world because that isn’t true. Both worlds were real. For a few moments, I’d been able to travel all the way out. Now I was reeling myself back in.

The Wallflowers’ version of “Into the Mystic” came forward from the playlist. Fog was developing close to the ground. That happens often in this part of Germany. Sometimes I ride through it on my way home at night.

If the universe had created a stage production just for me, this would’ve been it. I was tickled.

I stopped and took a photograph with my phone. It was 1:37 in the morning. Headlights burned through the fog on the dark road. The photograph was quick and messy.

I wasn’t trying to make art or preserve some perfect record of what I’d seen. Photography can simply be evidence that I stopped long enough to notice. Sometimes, quick and messy is all you need.

I kept walking. Farther down Meinershauser Straße is one of those unattended roadside stands you see all over Germany. Some sell eggs, vegetables, honey or little crafts. This one sells flowers and plants.

For a long time, I’d told myself that I was going to stop there one day and buy Nici flowers. Nici loves flowers, but not as objects people are supposed to give her. She loves nature. She loves textures and naturally occurring things. Our home is filled with plants, wood and dried flowers. She changes things with the seasons. She knows which local flowers to pick, when to pick them and where to find them.

Being around that part of her is grounding and safe. I bring her flowers sometimes, not because I have to, but because I want to. Because I’m thinking about her.

Stopping at that stand was one of those things I’d promised myself I would do, but it kept getting buried beneath everything else. Then there it was.

The important part of what happened beneath the stars is that the feeling didn’t remain beneath the stars. A few minutes later, it changed what I did.

My steps felt lighter. My body didn’t ache. I wasn’t worried about getting home at a certain time. For once, I had no excuse not to stop. I crossed the street and put down the kickstand.

There was one small bundle of flowers on the table. They cost €2.50. I had a five euro note.

Farther along the table were several potted plants. Under a dim streetlight, with my poor German and a tired brain, I tried to work out their names. One began with Zitronen. That much I understood.

It was Zitronenmelisse. Lemon balm. It also cost €2.50. Perfect.

Now I had to figure out how to pay. A weathered sign explained that the cash box was inside a little hut farther up the driveway. I couldn’t translate all of it, so I took out my phone.

The light was too poor for the camera to translate the sign automatically. I had to type the German into the translator. Then I walked toward the hut.

It felt strangely intimate to walk onto someone else’s property in the middle of the night. The door was locked. There was no cash box outside. Where do I leave the money? Inside the plastic covering the sign? Under one of the plants?

My negative self talk returned. Maybe I should leave and come back another day. Who was I to think I could do this when I didn’t speak the language? What if someone thought I was stealing?

The problems hadn’t disappeared forever. Neither had the old stories I tell myself. But now I could hear them without having to obey them. You know what? I’m going to do this. I can’t be wrong about where my heart is.

There was a beautiful, heavy knocker built into the hut door. I folded the five euro note and placed it beneath the knocker so its weight held the money against the door. The lemon balm went onto the scooter’s floorboard. I carried the flowers in my hand. Then I continued home.

“Times Like These” by Foo Fighters began playing. The song opens with a streetlight burning. Then come the stars and the idea of learning to live again. It all clicked into place.

The music didn’t create the meaning. It gave words to something that was already happening. I’d conquered the German flower stand, survived the dead battery and managed to identify at least part of the Big Dipper.

I have Ulysses tattooed on my arm. I can turn almost any trip home into an odyssey. In reality, I was pushing a scooter four kilometers through Grasberg while carrying flowers.

Still, all the choices I’d made to rebuild my life and move forward in an unusual and difficult way seemed, for that moment, to have paid off. I wasn’t carrying the worry of the week anymore. I was just a content person moving through space and time toward home.

I was alive. Alive. That was the word.

Nothing in my life had been fixed. My ear still hurt. My job was still uncertain. My German hadn’t improved while I was looking at the stars, and my scooter battery was still dead. But those things no longer filled the entire frame.

Maybe that was real gratitude. Not pretending the weight isn’t there. Not reciting the surface level things we’re supposed to appreciate. Just seeing that the weight isn’t everything.

My street is extremely dark. After midnight, the streetlights are switched off. I’ve learned to look for the porch light Nici leaves on for me. Occasionally, it isn’t on, and I get disoriented more quickly than I normally would.

On this night, it was there. As I walked the final few meters, a Vitamin String Quartet version of “I Will Always Love You” began to play.

There was the porch light. Cinematic is the only word I have for it. Almost suspiciously perfect. Journey complete.

I stopped and made one more quick photograph. It was 2:08 in the morning. Ordinarily, arriving home begins another routine. Be quiet. Find my key. Put away the scooter. Plug it in. Unload my backpack. Greet the dog without waking anyone. Collapse into bed.

But this was Friday night. I didn’t have to do it all again the next day.

I was grateful to have been alone for what I’d just experienced. I was also grateful to be returning to the people I love. Normally, I’m the last person home and into bed. Not that night.

Our son was being dropped off after spending the evening with friends. Sushi, our seven year old toy poodle whom I still call my puppy, greeted me happily at the door. All of this woke Nici.

I put the flowers and lemon balm on the kitchen counter while I brought the scooter inside to charge. Go look on the counter, I told her. I’ll put the scooter away.

She came back with a big smile. She was tired. She’d been woken in the middle of the night. She said the flowers were beautiful.

Then we went to bed.

Hung Jury

A Short Play in One Scene

[A photograph of a golden Buddha hangs on a wall in a museum. Wall starts talking.]

WALL
The face is still.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Thanks.

MIND
Wait.

WALL
The eyes sit level. They look neither directly at us nor entirely away. Presence without confrontation.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Calm.

WALL
The gold face advances against the deep green. Gold easily becomes loud, luxurious, decorative. Here, the green quiets it. The statue glows without becoming spectacle.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Peace. Serenity. You get it.

MIND
Don’t relax.

WALL
Peaceful is insufficient. One also finds patience. Distance. Perhaps even sadness.

PHOTOGRAPHER
It’s the Peace Buddha for Europe, a gift from the Dalai Lama. He wants to put one on every continent as a symbol of peace.

WALL
That is the Buddha’s history and purpose.

PHOTOGRAPHER
All of that matters.

WALL
To the Buddha.

MIND
Here it comes.

PHOTOGRAPHER
And to the photograph.

WALL
If that information were present in the photograph, you would not need to supply it.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Easy. We’re having a friendly conversation here.

WALL
Friendly is not synonymous with favorable.

PHOTOGRAPHER
You could’ve just said nice colors.

WALL
That would have been incomplete. The photograph works. It does not work because the Buddha is beautiful or because its history is meaningful. Those qualities belong to the statue.

MIND
Wrong one. Take it down.

PHOTOGRAPHER
I chose the statue, didn’t I?

WALL
You encountered it.

PHOTOGRAPHER
I photographed it.

WALL
You operated a camera.

MIND
Expensive camera. Auto focus. Lots of buttons anyone can press.

PHOTOGRAPHER
I made choices.

WALL
Identify one.

PHOTOGRAPHER
The frame. Where I stood. What I included. What I left out. I centered the face. I got rid of most of the world around it.

WALL
And the green?

PHOTOGRAPHER
It holds the gold without fighting with it.

WALL
You gave the Buddha quiet.

[Silence.]

MIND
Oh. Now we’re taking credit for silence? Geesh.

PHOTOGRAPHER
I gave the Buddha quiet?

WALL
Yes. The intervention is modest, but honest.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Modest? Sounds like an insult, buddy.

WALL
Only when every photograph must establish the photographer’s importance.

MIND
Prove you belong. Go ahead. Prove the others weren’t luck.

PHOTOGRAPHER
I don’t need it to prove anything about me.

WALL
Then your resistance is curious.

PHOTOGRAPHER
I’m not resisting. You’re giving the subject all the credit.

WALL
The subject deserves most of it.

PHOTOGRAPHER
So it’s an ordinary photograph.

WALL
A compelling subject can hide an ordinary photograph.

PHOTOGRAPHER
That wasn’t my question.

WALL
It was the question beneath your question.

PHOTOGRAPHER
You really are a wall.

WALL
And yet you keep asking me to move.

MIND
Make a joke. Change the subject. Take it down.

[PHOTOGRAPHER reaches toward the photograph.]

WALL
Sir, step back. Do not touch the art.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Hey now. It’s my photograph. And I wasn’t touching it.

MIND
Liar.

WALL
The photograph does more than document the statue, but not radically more. You presented it clearly, respectfully, and with restraint. It remains primarily a portrait of a meaningful object.

[PHOTOGRAPHER lowers his hand.]

MIND
Tourist. Amateur. Fraud. Say it was only for fun.

PHOTOGRAPHER
It was my favorite photo from everything I considered for the “Golden” prompt.

WALL
Favorite and best are not the same word.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Yeah, yeah. I know. I didn’t submit this one.

WALL
Why?

PHOTOGRAPHER
I guess because I had a better one.

WALL

Yet you brought me this one.

[PHOTOGRAPHER looks at the photograph instead of WALL.]

PHOTOGRAPHER
This one meant more to me. For years, a print of it hung in my home. I took that print off my own wall and gave it to one of my oldest college friends. He’s always loved my photography.

MIND
Don’t say that. Then it’ll get shredded, disrespected.

WALL
That history does not improve the photograph.

PHOTOGRAPHER
I didn’t say it did.

WALL
It does, however, establish personal value. Would I remember your photograph tomorrow? Or would I remember seeing a golden Buddha?

[Silence.]

PHOTOGRAPHER
Well, would you?

WALL
The evidence is inconclusive.

MIND
No. No no. That means no. Everyone will say no.

PHOTOGRAPHER
But I remembered it, lived with it. Then someone else wanted to live with it too.

WALL
As a personal photograph, it is considerably stronger.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Personal. Not good.

WALL
You continue to treat those words as opposites.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Whatever. You’re the one sorting everything into categories.

WALL
Classification prevents confusion. You submitted the stronger photograph, but kept the Buddha.

MIND
Totally. You hid it. Called hiding “standards”.

PHOTOGRAPHER
I kept it because it mattered to me. Maybe photographs gain weight after I make them. I live with them. They witness part of my life. Then I come back, and something’s changed.

WALL
The photograph?

PHOTOGRAPHER
Sometimes. Mostly me.

MIND
Too old. Too late. Still asking permission.

PHOTOGRAPHER
But I’m trying to learn to let them go, and leave the meaning to others.

WALL
That’s a start.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Sounds to me like you like the photo now.

WALL
You continue to request a verdict.

PHOTOGRAPHER
I came here for …

WALL
Praise.

[MIND snorts.]

PHOTOGRAPHER
I was going to say an honest opinion.

WALL
Of course you were.

PHOTOGRAPHER
I can want both.

WALL
You can. You cannot always have both.

MIND
Needy. Transparent. They can see it.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Fine. Tell me then, Mr. Know-it-all-Wall, what’s my job?

WALL
Determine what you made. Accept responsibility for your choices. Release the result. Keep looking and moving forward,

MIND
Don’t publish this. No judgment if no one sees it.

PHOTOGRAPHER
The Buddha brought its history, beauty, symbolism, and calm. I brought a frame. Then I printed it. I lived with it. Eventually, I gave it away.

WALL
None of those actions converted it into a masterpiece.

MIND
There.

PHOTOGRAPHER
I know you’re right. But they turned it into part of my life.

[Silence.]

MIND
Does that count? It doesn’t count. Does it?

WALL
Then what did the calm feel like before you named it calm?

[PHOTOGRAPHER steps closer.]

MIND
Nothing. Made it up. Take it down.

PHOTOGRAPHER
I don’t know yet.

WALL
Then return.

MIND
No way. Are you kidding me? It’ll look even worse tomorrow.

[Lights begin to dim. PHOTOGRAPHER remains.]

BLACKOUT

END OF PLAY

---

Curator’s Note
This photograph was absent from the submission for which it was first considered.

Giorgianni’s working notes identify it as his favorite candidate for the weekly prompt “Golden.” He submitted another image, which he judged stronger.

He returned to the Buddha in a separate Note, accompanied by the history of a print that hung in his home until he gave it to a longtime college friend in the United States.

The present play records a further return. What began as an unselected image now carries a history of private display, gift, publication, and reconsideration.

---

The Wednesday Experiment

Choose a photograph or another work of visual art that matters to you but that you cannot judge cleanly.

Maybe it’s something you made. Maybe not. You might love it, dislike it, or keep returning to it for reasons you don’t fully understand.

Begin with the work itself. Spend time with what is actually present.

Imagine it presented in a museum. Let WALL question only what the work can support. If you made it, answer as its maker. Otherwise, answer as its viewer. Let MIND say what pride, loyalty, reputation, memory, taste, or fear is hiding.

These aren’t a checklist. Follow the question that creates pressure for you. Leave the others alone.

• What comes from the materials, and what comes from the choices?

• What meaning is present in the work, and what meaning do you supply from memory, history, reputation, or explanation?

• Where’s the evidence for the feeling you claim the work contains?

• What did the choices add, remove, arrange, reveal, or transform?

• Which decisions about material, form, scale, color, sequence, timing, or restraint matter most?

• What are you responding to in the work itself?

• What changes when you add a name, reputation, history, or explanation?

• Are you defending the work, the memory, your taste, or yourself?

• What does MIND fear someone else will notice?

• What are you hoping another person will confirm?

• Do you value the work publicly, personally, or both?

• What has happened to its meaning since you made it or first encountered it?

For every answer, point to something in the work or admit that the answer comes from outside of it. One source is not any better than any other source. You just need to start to become aware of which one you are using.

The aim isn’t to reach a verdict. It’s to stay until the work gives you a question you can’t answer yet.

If nothing else, ask this: If you couldn’t call the work good or bad, what would you notice?

SG could run your BC. He’s great at it.

That’s Dave talking. My old college roommate. BC means book club. He was telling our friends I should lead another one.

Except I’d pulled the plug on the last one after an argument with him.

Dave and I have been friends for almost forty years. Most of that friendship has been books, beer, and arguments about books over beer.

Back in December, I put together a small group to read The Sun Also Rises. Friends. A good book. Probably beer. Then Dave called me woke.

Okay, this is where he’d interrupt me. He didn’t call me woke. He called something I said woke. Or my assertions woke dogma. Something like that. He thinks the distinction matters. I thought he was splitting hairs.

We’d argued about the word before. I’d told him I didn’t like it. He’d apologized, sort of, then explained why his use of it was academically sound.

Then he used it again.

I deleted the group. I deleted the final exchange too. And you know what? I felt great. Relieved. Finished. The wound was closed.

Dave and I started talking again eventually. We never discussed what happened. We just went around it. Books. Jokes. The occasional photograph of a beer or something one of us knew would annoy the other.

That’s part of the sport with Dave. The hunt. I’ll be reading or walking around somewhere and think, Dave would hate this. Or, this will get a rise out of him. So I send it. He does the same thing to me.

In my head, I sometimes call him my nemesis. It started as a joke because Dave makes me better and occasionally drives me crazy. I bring enthusiasms. Dave brings skepticism. He once described us as my “shifting enthusiasms” meeting his “bougie Midwestern norm core skepticism.”

Yeah. That sounds about right.

But after December, the joke hardened. Dave became the guy who wouldn’t stop using a word I’d asked him not to use. That was the picture I kept.

Then he told our friends I was good at leading book clubs.

He wasn’t reopening anything. He wasn’t making me pay. He was giving me credit for something he thought I did well.

I remember thinking, wow. If he can do that, I can do more.

So I started writing about Dave. First as my nemesis. Then as a tribute. At one point I turned the whole thing into a documentary, which tells you something about how hard I can work to avoid saying one simple thing.

In other words, I’d framed Dave around the wound.

I experiment with crops all the time. I start with the full frame, move the edges, and see what happens. What deserves weight? What relationship becomes visible if I move this edge or that one?

Sometimes the crop works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I have to return to the original because I missed something.

With Dave, I’d removed the way back.

I cropped in on the wound, made the edges permanent, then deleted the original. The picture stopped being about the friendship and everything that went with it. It became about the wound.

Strange thing is, I deleted everything because I wanted the wound gone. Instead, I preserved it. With nothing around it, the wound got all the weight.

What had I cropped out? Well, almost forty years, for starters.

Years ago, when my marriage collapsed, I called Dave. I wasn’t looking for a grand intervention. I was alone in the middle of it and wanted something normal.

He made time. He listened. When we finished, nothing was fixed. But I could move forward.

I’d cropped that out.

I’d cropped out the Turkey Shoot, a Thanksgiving weekend Dave planned for the same group of guys now talking about another book club. He divided the visit into highbrow and lowbrow. He actually called it that. We went to blues clubs. We saw George Wendt in a play called Wild Men. We drank beer. Dave gave the weekend a structure, then let us live inside it.

I carried that home with me.

It became part of the way I write. I want it to feel like you’re sitting on the barstool next to me. We can take the ideas seriously without acting important. We can have a beer, be funny, and not explain the life out of everything.

And that started with Dave.

I’d even cropped out the fact that I think Dave was my first Substack subscriber. Before almost anyone else, he signed up to listen. He never said any of this, but to me that first subscription meant: You matter. You have something to say. I’m willing to listen.

Mostly, it meant I belonged.

And not only with Dave. The book club came from that same group of old friends. The kind of group where probability becomes football, self mockery, Korean groceries, a memoir recommendation, and a bad joke before anyone notices the subject has changed.

They’re my family. The one I chose instead of inherited. They give me acceptance, care, loyalty. Everything about love without using the word.

By ending the group the way I did, I hadn’t only cropped Dave out. I’d cropped myself out of a place where I belonged.

That realization found me on my scooter ride home from work.

It had been a run of moonless nights, and the path was exceptionally dark. Part of my mind watched the pavement and kept the scooter on course. Another part was still working on Dave.

Then the thought raised its hand. It said, “Fuck. I know this move. I learned it from my mother.”

I was a short way from home, but I pulled over anyway. There was a little light from a closed business that leaves its lights on overnight. Kickstand down. Phone out. I made a voice note before the thought could disappear.

Then I put the phone away and finished the ride.

My mother knew how to end things. So did the man who adopted me. When a relationship became painful, the answer was distance. A hard edge. I’d spent years believing I was different because I had reasons for my own cutoffs.

Of course I had reasons. Everyone does.

The question wasn’t whether I’d been hurt. The question was what I chose to do with the hurt.

I chose a frame that gave the wound the weight. I made the decision for everyone else in the group. Then I deleted the evidence that might have complicated my story.

YOU complete a photograph when YOU look at it. I can’t control what you’ll see in this one. Maybe you’ll think Dave was wrong. Maybe you’ll think I overreacted. Maybe both.

But I made the frame. That’s on me.

I began this piece thinking about a nemesis, but I returned to an old friend. So I sent Dave an apology.

He replied:

Accepted. No sweat.

Then he told me how the book club went.

Apparently, rivers are better at mathematics than I am.

This isn’t especially surprising. Most things are.

Still, when an article called Why Are Rivers So Mathematical? appeared in my news feed, I had to read it.

I’m always interested when science turns its attention toward nature. Rivers, especially.

I grew up in the American West, where dryness gives rivers a peculiar amount of responsibility. They are drinking water, irrigation, electricity, politics, recreation, destruction, and the reason some cities are possible at all.

Late in college, my friend Ted and I even discussed becoming river guides. Neither of us knew what to do with our lives. A life spent on rivers seemed as sensible as anything else.

We never went.

But rivers stayed.

The article brought me back to this photograph of the Sacramento River.

I was born in Sacramento. I crossed that river countless times as a child. I played in it, traveled on it, and sat beside it when I needed to think.

When my mother died, she left only one instruction. She didn’t want to be buried. She told me to spread her ashes somewhere I thought she would enjoy.

I chose the Sacramento River.

Under the gold Tower Bridge, I released her a little at a time and watched the river carry her away.

Mathematics could probably describe exactly what happened next.

The photograph came years later, near the end of a road trip with my friend Erik. We had driven to Seattle to visit Dave and were returning to Sacramento. I made this one quickly through the car window.

It wasn’t meant to be a grand photograph. I wanted a bookmark. I knew, while it was happening, that it had been a good trip and that I wanted to remember it.

An experience contains more memories than we can process while living it. They are like expanding foam. What comes out at the time seems small. Only later does it fill the cracks and take up the space you gave it.

I wanted this photograph to hold the place while the rest of the memory expanded.

When I edited it, I found those greens and yellows waiting inside the file.

People like to talk about the light in Paris or California, or wherever they happen to be selling you a holiday. I used to believe Sacramento had its own light because of its geography, agriculture, and the humidity that settles in the valley.

The longer I make photographs, the more I suspect light is special everywhere. You just have to look.

I was beginning to understand the camera as another kind of eye. Its sensor gathers color information differently than my eyes do. I moved sliders around because I wanted to see what else was there.

The river hadn’t looked like this.

But somehow, it had felt like this.

That was where the article caught me. Mathematics could reveal structures hidden inside a river. My camera had done something similar, though not in a way I could calculate or prove.

One explained the river.

The other did something I couldn’t quite name.

Then I remembered a tree.

I made this during my first month with a mirrorless camera. It was an investment in becoming a photographer. A week or two later, I bought Nici the same camera because she was already the better photographer.

Then we walked outside into winter in northern Germany.

We live near Bremen, in a small village where winter isn’t especially concerned with encouraging new photographers. When Germans learn that I moved here from California, they usually stare at me and ask about the weather. Around here, cold rain and wind have their own word: Schietweer. It means exactly what it sounds like.

Nici and I went walking anyway. I had bought the camera. I had made the leap. Now I had to press the shutter and hope for the best.

The tree was the only thing in the landscape that interested me. When I got home, even that seemed to contain nothing.

But I kept returning to it.

The longer I looked, the more it reminded me of a Japanese woodcut. I knew almost nothing about editing. So I started moving things around.

I didn’t add the colors. I found them in what the camera had already recorded and tried to bring them forward.

It was more important that I play than that I know.

This morning, the tree brought back a poem I had written at least a year before I owned the camera.

Poetry has always mattered to me, though I rarely kept what I wrote. Before photography, I squeezed poems into the cracks of my life. Not a career. Not something I comfortably called art. Just a way to sit with the world and hear my own voice.

I spent much of my life looking down.

I was tall, awkward, and determined not to make eye contact. Looking down was safe. It told people to leave me alone.

It also meant I noticed what was beneath everyone else’s feet.

Leaves have interested me for years. Botanists describe them through stems, veins, edges, shapes, and structures. Entire systems of difference hide beneath the simple word, and still we walk over leaves every day thinking only: leaf.

I wondered what would happen if one fallen leaf wasn’t part of a natural cycle, but the victim of a private tragedy.

I wrote this:

THE FALL

When leaves fall
There’s beauty.
Like watching
Raindrops dance
And swallows play.
Or so I thought
When I saw
A lounging leaf
On concrete.
But leaves don’t fall.
The tree shoves
Her away like
A used lover
Thrown
Over a skyscraper edge
Or an unready child
Plunged
Into deep water.
That fallen,
Mottled,
Lonely leaf,
She deserves respect.
Head bowed,
Some silence,
A quiet questioning.
Now I offer
Momentary grief
When leaves fall.

At least a year later, before I owned the mirrorless camera, I made this photograph with my cell phone while living briefly in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

The name Broken Arrow caught my attention on a map. I visited, returned, then rented a small house almost on impulse. For six months I tried the place on as a possible life.

It did not fit.

One afternoon, walking through the neighborhood, I found this leaf on the concrete. I divided the frame between two surfaces, two textures, and two kinds of order.

I thought it was a brilliant photograph. Nici still considers it one of my best.

Then, as photographs sometimes do, it disappeared into all the others.

Not completely, though.

I later submitted the photograph for display at the Findorffhof, a traditional farmhouse complex used as a gathering place in Grasberg. It was framed and hung on the wall.

The poem was written in Redlands.

The photograph was made in Broken Arrow.

Now the leaf lives in a traditional farmhouse in northern Germany.

Until this morning, I’d never consciously connected the poem with the photograph.

I’d also never connected either of them with the Sacramento River or the winter tree.

None of this was a project. I didn’t begin with a clever idea and gather evidence to support it. The pieces were made years apart, in different places, in different forms. They had been carrying on a conversation without me.

I hadn’t known this was a practice. Something caught my attention. I gave it whatever form I had available. Then, sometimes years later, I found it again.

I’ve always been a verbal person. On every test that divided the world into verbal and math, verbal was where I quietly proved I had value. I became good at using words, and perhaps a little too willing to trust them.

Photography complicated that.

The camera gave me a way to recognize something before I could say what it meant. Sometimes the recognition happened while I pressed the shutter. Sometimes it happened later, while I edited. Sometimes years passed before one photograph found another. Or a poem. Or a science article. Then something finally fit.

Explanation wraps itself around a thing.

Understanding is when the thing finds its shape inside you.

That doesn’t mean the thing is solved. If anything, it may become stranger.

I still don’t know whether I understand the leaf.

But I no longer believe it simply fell.

If someone came to mind while you were reading, send this to them. That is how this publication grows.

I was looking at an old photograph when another one came to mind. They belonged together. I didn't know why, so I went looking for a third. Then a fourth. The yearbook photograph didn't occur to me until much later.

The strange part wasn't that they matched. It was that they'd been waiting for me all this time. That usually means I should leave them alone for a while.

Instead, I made coffee and carried on.

Before I had photographs, I had maps. Grandma gave me a subscription to National Geographic. Every month I'd pull the map from the middle of the magazine, smooth out the folds, and pin it to my bedroom wall.

I couldn't get enough of looking at the world. At least, that's what I thought. Looking back now, those maps were more of a window than the one in my bedroom.

A few years later I graduated high school beneath words carved into the proscenium above the Redlands Bowl, "Without vision a people perish."

I don't remember much about the ceremony. But I remember those maps. Not because they're beautiful, because sometimes they let you become someone you couldn't have become anywhere else.

Redlands, California

Senior Portrait

A conventional American senior portrait employing the familiar visual language of graduation portraiture: direct gaze, formal attire, restrained expression.

I smile every time I read a gallery label like that.

The tie wasn’t mine. Neither was the shirt. Or the jacket.

Frank and my mother divorced when I was eleven. Every time I moved between their houses, they fought. By the time I was thirteen, I'd had enough.

I sat them down and told them I'd spend six months with each of them. It was the grown up thing to do.

My mother told me it was him or her. I kept my plan.

When I went to hug her goodbye, she said, "Get the hell off my property.”, and wouldn’t speak to me again for five years.

Living with Frank didn't save me either.

A week before my eighteenth birthday I walked out of Frank's house with a backpack of books, a basketball under one arm, and a framed photograph of my girlfriend under the other. They were all I could carry that mattered.

That boy couldn't possibly know what happened next. Then again, who does?

By the time another student made this photograph, I was trying to finish high school on my own.

Every senior portrait carries the same promise. The future is yours. It will be perfect. But my imperfect future had already begun.

Stockholm, Sweden

Museum Interior

A silhouetted figure beneath a suspended installation. Color, architecture and scale diminish the individual within the surrounding environment.

That's a perfectly reasonable interpretation. It just isn't where I'd begin. I was at Fotografiska.

I didn't belong there. Photographers were other people. Still, I kept carrying a camera.

There's an entire psychological study hiding in the fact that I wanted to be seen while making myself a silhouette. Fortunately, that isn't this conversation.

Was I practicing photography? Maybe.

What I was really doing was learning to trust the guy holding the camera.

Ashland, Oregon

Roadside Reflection

Reflection, saturated color and commercial signage divide attention between the figure and the surrounding objects, complicating the conventional hierarchy of the self portrait.

I named the van Hank. That tells you enough about the trip. But this one was different.

I caught my reflection in the bathroom at Gil's Brewpub. When I was younger, I’d have chuckled and left.

This time I took out my camera. I played with the composition. I edited it. Then I shared it.

Looking back, I think the photograph saw something before I did. I wasn't trying to prove I was creative. I was simply enjoying being creative.

London, England

Interior with Figure

A monochrome domestic interior. Light, shadow, and an open book suggest quiet self examination.

I don't remember much about my high school graduation, but I do remember lying on my daughter's couch in her East London flat.

It wasn't much of a couch. It was the kind you buy because it's what you can afford and it has to be everything from guest bedroom to clothes hamper.

Which turned out not to matter.

I listened to the neighborhood outside. I watched the late morning light move across the towers of Canary Wharf. And I thought, I feel at home.

Berlin, Germany

Architectural Reflection

Multiple reflections dissolve the boundary between figure and architecture, positioning the individual within a larger historical and civic landscape.

This selfie is different. It’s the Reichstag.

I knew why I made it. I wanted to honor what this country had come to mean to me. Not because it's Germany. Because of who I get to be there.

I admire people who inherit something broken and decide to build anyway.

I've thought about women loading what had been their entire homes into wheelbarrows, blasted and broken brick by blasted and broken brick. About farmers getting up the next morning because the crops still needed tending. About children playing because, whatever the adults had done to the world, they were still children. About the generation that stitched two Germanys back together.

The younger me would have come for the beer and the scenery. But Germany stopped being a guidebook. It became familiar. Comfortable. Ordinary.

I mean that in the best possible way.

It gave me another family. Another chance. Photography.

I had crossed a lot of maps by then. I'd ended up living on one of them. And for once I wasn't trying to disappear.

For a couple of days I couldn't stop thinking about those photographs.

Then I realized they were dispatches: Imagine, Survive,  Trust,  Play,  Belong, and Honor.

They weren't milestones. God knows the actual route between them wasn't that tidy. I've survived things since Redlands. I've failed to trust myself plenty of times since Stockholm. Belonging isn't something you figure out on a couch in London and check off the list.

But there was movement in those words. Not progress exactly. More like reports from wherever I happened to be.

For a while I thought these dispatches were written for grandchildren I may never meet. Maybe just one. If they ever found these photographs, I hope they wouldn't think, Grandpa traveled. Or, Grandpa made photographs. I'd rather they discovered someone who couldn't stop trying to figure himself out. Not because he expected to arrive. Because he couldn't stop asking the next question.

I thought that was the ending.

So naturally, it wasn't.

I went back to the photographs. This time I was looking at the boy.

He had walked out of a house one week before his eighteenth birthday carrying a backpack of books, a basketball under one arm, and a framed photograph of his girlfriend under the other because they were all he could carry that mattered. He couldn't possibly know what happened next. Then again, who does? The long gray hair would probably be disappointing too.

For the first time I noticed they weren't traveling forward. They were traveling backward. I was writing to the boy, to tell him what became of us. Every few years I had sent another dispatch. The boy was still standing in that bedroom, staring at maps pinned to the wall, wondering if there was another life somewhere beyond Redlands.

The first dispatch simply said, I made it.

The next one, Trust yourself.

Then, We're laughing again.

Then, You'll know what home feels like when you find it.

The last one didn't need many words. Just this: I found us one. A place where the boy could finally stop standing guard.

I don't know whether the boy ever writes back. I'd like to think he will. I imagine him looking at the photographs for a long time. Then folding the last dispatch. Looking up. Smiling.

And saying, Thanks for looking out for me.

Which turns out to be a strange way to live.

I’ve learned to trust my curiosity. To return to the same place because something about it still nags at me. To get up before sunrise because I don’t want to miss what the light might do. To lie on the floor of a cathedral because that’s where the photograph is. To linger where everyone else keeps walking because if something makes me stop, it’s usually worth paying attention to.

The other day I found myself asking a simple question.

Is this serving the life I’m trying to build?

It’s a question worth asking about anything you devote yourself to. Photography just happens to be the practice that keeps bringing me back to it.

I don’t answer a question like that all at once. I live with it.

I’ve found that you grow by returning to the same questions until you notice something you couldn’t see before.

That’s what happened here.

After sitting with that question for a while,other questions appeared.

The questions never really answered anything. They simply revealed what kept returning.

Then it hit me:

I’m not trying to make interesting photographs. I’m trying to stop walking past my own life.

Somewhere along the way, photography became my invitation to pay attention to my own life.

Meaning isn’t something I add to the world. It’s something I recognize once I stop walking past it.

Every photograph is one small record of the conversation I’ve been having with the world.

Those aren’t answers. They’re simply the things I keep returning to. Maybe they’ll change over the years. I hope they do.

Right now they’ve become my feedback loop. Every so often I return to them to make sure I’m still building the life I meant to build.

So I thought I’d share the questions.

Not because I think they’ll tell you what kind of photographer you are or should be. If they did, this would have been a much shorter essay.

I wonder whether they’ll help you recognize the person you’ve been quietly talking yourself out of becoming.

One suggestion before you begin.

Don’t write. Go for a walk. Sit in the car.

Open the voice recorder on your phone and answer each question out loud for five or ten minutes.

I’ve found that speaking uncovers things that writing often hides. Writing makes me edit myself. Talking helps me hear connections I didn’t know were there.

Here are the ones I’m living with right now.

What are you unable to walk past?

Not what you photograph.

What has become impossible for you to ignore?

Two photographers can stand in front of the same doorway. One sees geometry. The other sees loneliness.

Same doorway.

Different photographer.

When was the last time you made a photograph that surprised you?

This tells you whether you’re collecting evidence or exploring.

Whether you’re repeating yourself or discovering yourself.

Which photograph of yours refuses to leave you alone?

Not your favorite.

Not your best.

The one that keeps returning.

That question usually points toward unfinished business.

What do you hope someone feels before they understand your photograph?

I’ve come to believe that recognition comes before explanation.

If I’ve explained everything, I’ve left the viewer nothing to discover.

What kind of photographs make you jealous?

Not because you want to own them.

Because you wish you’d made them.

Envy has a funny way of pointing toward ambition.

What are you trying to become better at paying attention to?

This isn’t really a photography question.

It’s a life question.

The camera just happens to be the notebook.

If no one could ever see another photograph you made, would you still carry a camera? Why?

Everything seems to collapse into this one.

Identity. Motivation. Love. Need.

I’d love to know where these questions take you.

The storage notification came later. Or earlier. Memory doesn’t care. I opened my photographs. I don’t remember the first one I deleted. I remember the first one I greeted. Hello. It’s been a while. About time, he said. I asked whether he wanted to stay. He asked where I’d been. I didn’t answer. He already knew. Every photograph reveals at least one truth if you talk to it long enough. This one waited until I stopped talking. Then he quietly said I wasn’t keeping him. I was hiding behind him. Not yet. I came back the next morning. Hello. Then the next. Hello. Then the next. One photograph left immediately. Another asked to stay a little longer. One simply smiled as if he had known I’d eventually return. I stopped looking for photographs to keep. I started listening for the ones that had already finished speaking. Goodbye turned out not to be the opposite of love. Holding on wasn’t love. Letting go wasn’t love. Listening was. Workflow. Flow. Idiot.

I’d spent all that time building shelves while the word itself had been trying to tell me what it wanted from the beginning. River. Funny word. Jeremiah says peace becomes one. I hadn’t thought about that verse in years. Strange what memory decides to rescue. Rivers don’t collect. They carry. Shelves wait. Not yet. I kept thinking the first true thing was enough. It never was. The first true thing usually isn’t wrong. It just isn’t finished. It keeps pointing. Somewhere along the way I stopped looking for better answers and started looking for truer ones. Maybe that’s all making anything has ever been. Not saying the first true thing. Staying with it long enough to discover the truer one waiting underneath. Bernhard didn’t give me the room. He simply turned on the light.

He can keep the room. I’m going outside for some fresh air.

(After Bernhard)

What is the opposite of photography?

Earlier, I would have said blindness. Or distraction. Maybe just leaving the camera at home.

Now I’m not so sure.

I’m almost sixty years old. I’ve spent years reading books about photography. I’ve walked thousands of kilometers with a camera over my shoulder. I’ve made prints. Thrown photographs away. Started over more times than I can count.

But there are mornings when I wonder, have I built my life around something I’m simply not very good at?

What if I’ve been wrong about myself all along?

Has photography changed my life? Or have I gotten really good at telling myself that it did?

I’ve never said that out loud before.

Last Friday, after another exhausting week at the fulfillment center, I was riding home through the fields near my village.

The sun had disappeared.

The moon was settling toward the horizon.

Something didn’t fit. I still can’t explain it. There was a disconnect between what I expected to see and what was actually there.

I stopped.

Not because I thought I’d found a photograph. Because I didn’t want to lose whatever was happening.

I made the picture with my phone.

It’s noisy. Unedited. I could tell you everything that’s technically wrong with it.

Instead, it has followed me around all week.

Not because it’s good. Because it feels more honest than some photographs I’ve worked much harder to make.

That bothers me. I keep asking myself why.

I think it scares me because I can’t tell whether I’ve become a better photographer or just forgotten why I picked up a camera.

There was once a stretch of my life when I thought I’d lost the ability to feel much of anything.

Not happiness. Not wonder. Just … distance.

Years later, I don’t know what else to do with the feelings I thought would never come back except make photographs.

I suspect the photographs matter less than the fact that I kept making them. That I keep showing up. That I keep stopping.

Even when it didn’t seem worthwhile.

I suspect it was never about the photographs.

Which brings me back to the question that started this experiment: What is the opposite of photography?

I suspect it isn’t blindness. I suspect it’s the day you stop stopping.

I don’t know if I’m right. I only know I don’t want to find out.

She introduced me to her teenage son, then showed me the flat. It was small and inviting. Everything clean and chosen with care.

She stopped at a closed door.

“I have something to show you.”

Inside was a wingback chair, a rug, a desk, and empty bookshelves. Frames covered the walls. There were a lot of them.

Then I saw Roxy.

Years earlier, I had photographed my Chihuahua sitting on a beach chair someone had made from an old surfboard. She looked like a queen on her throne. Princess Puppy Paws.

Nici had printed that photograph and placed it where I would see it every time I sat down to read.

I stood there for a long moment.

After my second marriage ended, I moved into the spare room of an old friend. Some days it was hard to imagine life becoming recognizable again.

One afternoon a package arrived from San Francisco. It was from Ted, my best friend.

Inside were five books.

On top was a handwritten note.

My advice: Read heavily.

Not long after, I started my first consulting job.

Bob hired me when no one else would. I wanted desperately to prove I belonged. Bob seemed unconcerned with proving anything.

After I turned in a report, he asked me into his office. He told me my writing hadn’t yet caught up with my thinking. Then he said four words.

“Read Minto’s Pyramid Principle.”

He didn’t lend me the book. He didn’t explain it. Back then, that wasn’t easy. I found it anyway.

Years later I read a passage in Ecclesiastes that unsettled me.

The next morning I carried empty boxes into the living room. Four bookcases stood against one wall. I didn’t pause at a single title. One by one, every book disappeared into a box. By lunchtime, the shelves were empty.

When my family asked what I’d done, I simply said, “It’s what needed to be.”

A few years later, everything ended. Not just my marriage. Everything.

The future I thought I was walking toward. The life I thought I had built. The person I thought I was becoming. It was as though the screen had faded to black. I had to invent the next picture.

I couldn’t imagine living inside walls. So I moved into a van.

Every morning began the same way.

I drove to the same coffee shop. I ordered a large iced coffee with sugar-free vanilla. I opened a book.

One morning I finished my book and decided it deserved another reader. I left it on a table as I walked out.

I had one foot inside the van when I heard someone calling behind me.

“Sean! Sean!”

I turned around. The barista was hurrying toward me with the book in her hands.

“You forgot this.”

I smiled. Thanked her. Took the book. Drove away. Later that day, I left it somewhere else.

After that, it became a habit. Inside every book I left a note.

“Not lost. Just found. I hope you read me.”

I never waited to see who picked one up.

After seeing Roxy, I looked a second time. Only this time more slowly.

My photographs covered the walls.

Years of paying attention looked back at me.

For the first time, they all belonged to the same place.

And so did I.

It wasn’t the skyline. It wasn’t even the houseboats themselves. It was the way they sat beneath a modern high-rise, with a small lifeboat named Swan tucked quietly between them.

I took out my phone and made a photograph.

For weeks afterward, I kept coming back to it.

Sometimes I’d adjust a slider. Sometimes I’d undo everything and start over. Most of what I tried made it worse.

Then one evening, I stopped.

It still wasn’t a perfect photograph. But it had become a perfect memory of what I’d seen.

I remember sitting there longer than I normally would. I smiled and leaned back.

I lived with that photograph for weeks, not mentioning it to anyone, before I finally ordered a print.

A few days later, a package arrived.

Like every package, it attracted a little attention. Everyone was curious until they saw what was inside.

And that was that.

The print came with a simple frame. For days it leaned against the wall in the corner of my bedroom, on my side of the bed.

Every morning I’d see it. Every night I’d see it. Each time I walked past it, I found myself looking a little longer.

Until one afternoon, I went downstairs to the garage, found a hammer and a nail, and walked back through the house with them in my hand.

Everyone was home. No one paid attention.

I hung the photograph on the wall just outside our bedroom door.

Then I waited.

Nothing happened. No one suddenly saw what I saw. No one told me I’d made something worth hanging. The house was exactly the same as it had been ten minutes earlier.

Except that every time I walked through that doorway, there it was.

And every time, I smiled.

This Week’s Experiment

That photograph leaned against the wall for days.

Finished. Framed. Waiting.

I’ve started to wonder how many parts of our lives do the same.

This week, don’t try to change anything. Just spend a few days with one question:

What in my life is still leaning against the wall?

You don’t have to answer it. Just notice what comes to mind.

A straight handrail descended into the scene, leading the eye toward two people standing beside the Elbe. Architecture and human life would meet inside a single composition.

Then I looked at the back of the camera. It didn’t work.

The handrail didn’t lead into the photograph. It dominated it. I had been so pleased with the idea that I never stopped to ask whether the photograph agreed.

Most failed photographs disappear within seconds. This one didn’t.

I knew it wasn’t the photograph I thought I’d made, but I also knew there was something there. I just didn’t know what it was.

So I left it alone.

For more than two months.

When I returned to it, I wasn’t trying to rescue the photograph. I was trying to understand why I hadn’t deleted it.

That turned out to be a much better question.

At first I kept trying to save the handrail. Surely there was a crop that would make it work. Surely there was some version of the photograph I remembered making.

There wasn’t.

The more I worked, the more obvious it became that I wasn’t trying to improve the photograph. I was trying to protect my first impression of it.

The handrail wasn’t helping the photograph. It was helping my memory.

That realization changed everything.

I remembered why I thought I had pressed the shutter. The photograph revealed why I actually had. Once I stopped arguing with it, the friction disappeared.

The people had always been the center of the photograph. The handrail had simply become more important in my memory than it ever was in the frame.

As it faded, something else quietly appeared.

The river.

Not because I edited it differently. Because I finally noticed it.

The Elbe had been there from the beginning. Not as a backdrop, but as the quiet force holding the scene together. The two people weren’t simply standing beside it. They were living beside it, as thousands of people do every day.

Nothing in the photograph had changed. I had.

For a long time I believed a photograph was finished when I pressed the shutter.

I don’t think that anymore.

I think pressing the shutter finishes one conversation and begins another.

The first conversation is with the world. The second is with yourself.

That second conversation has very little to do with editing. It has everything to do with understanding.

Every photograph is an accumulation of who we are when we press the shutter. What I hadn’t appreciated before is that the accumulation doesn’t stop there.

Life continues. We build experience and learn things.

Then, weeks, months, or years later, we return to the same photograph carrying all of it with us.

Looking back, I don’t think the hardest part was recognizing that the handrail didn’t work.

The hardest part was letting go of the photograph I wanted long enough to discover the photograph I had.

The friction came from insisting those two photographs were the same.

They weren’t.

The photograph wasn’t waiting to be edited. It was waiting to be understood.

It takes humility to let the photograph correct your memory.

Over time, those quotations gradually became essays of my own.

Lately I’ve found myself drawn somewhere between the two.

Poetry has always felt closely related to photography, not because either explains the world, but because both ask us to pay attention.

I’m calling this occasional series Earned Observations.

Each piece begins with a photograph. What follows isn’t an explanation. It’s simply what remained after I put the camera away.

Nothing more.

How to Stand on Sand

(Earned observations. Nothing more.)

We built the tower to save lives.

We built the poles for games.

We built nothing for the sky.

Remove your shoes.

Feet down.

Toes in.

Do not hurry toward the horizon.

The horizon has never hurried toward you.

Survival is sacred.

We mistake repetition for a promise.

Stand still.

The ordinary asks no permission.

Gulls will argue.

Surf will erase your footprints.

The sky will not notice your absence.

Leave before you understand it.

If you can explain it,

you stayed too long inside yourself.

Was I happy?

Was I glad he was a boy?

Of course I was.

But the truth is, I knew almost nothing about what had just happened to me. I had become a father, but I had no idea what kind of father I would become.

Then my second son arrived thirteen months later. Same parents. Same house. Almost the same age. They couldn’t have been more different.

Then my daughter was born. By then, I thought I understood children.

I didn’t.

Each child made the others easier to see. Not because I was comparing their value. Comparison revealed their character. Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t only learning who they were. I was learning who I was becoming.

One child showed me that I was a father. Three children showed me what kind of father I was becoming.

Last weekend, two photographs did something similar.

I came home feeling pretty good about the weekend. I’d slowed down. Taken fewer photographs. Worked with more intention. Corrected what I thought had been holding me back.

I had learned a lot. I just wasn’t sure I’d said anything.

The weekend had changed me. I wasn’t sure it had changed the photographs.

Then I put two of them beside each other. I expected to see progress.

Instead, I just sat there.

For a few moments I wasn’t thinking about composition, editing, or lenses.

I was angry.

Not because the photographs were bad. Because they weren’t.

I was angry because I had done everything I knew to do, and somehow I still ended up with photographs that left me almost nothing to feel.

The next morning I remembered Clarence H. White.

For a long time, I’d assumed he was simply teaching photographers how to critique their work. Now I think he was teaching us something much deeper.

When I look at one photograph, I usually ask a simple question: Do I like it?

Looking at two photographs, I found myself asking a different one: What do these say about me?

Then something unexpected happened.

The photographs weren’t showing me my mistakes.

They were showing me assumptions I’d never thought to question. One showed me that I still confuse saying more with saying something important. The other showed me that I’m only beginning to trust simplicity.

Then came the sentence I didn’t want to admit.

The photographs weren’t on trial. I was.

I sat with that for a long time.

Then another thought quietly followed.

Maybe I’d been asking my photographs to answer a question they were never meant to answer.

From that moment on, I stopped asking them to prove something. I started asking them to teach me something.

This week’s experiment

Choose two photographs you’ve made recently.

Put them beside each other.

Don’t decide which one is better.

Instead, ask yourself:

• What surprised me?

• What assumptions do these photographs reveal?

• What am I trying to prove?

• What might these photographs teach me if I stopped defending them?

Don’t answer too quickly. Stay curious a little longer than feels comfortable.

Leave the photographs where they are.

Come back tomorrow. See what changes.

Maybe the real gift of comparison isn’t better photographs. Maybe it’s that, for a moment, it lets us stop trying to prove ourselves.

One photograph can’t tell you whether you belong.

Two photographs can’t either.

But together, they might remind you that they were never supposed to.

They were only ever meant to teach you what comes next.

“I still love your work,” she said. Then she smiled. “But it’s different.”

That was it. No lecture. No criticism. Just an observation.

That’s a very German thing to do. State what seems obvious, smile, and move on with your day.

But I couldn’t move on, because she was right.

Before Nici fell in love with me, she fell in love with my photographs. We met on Instagram. A California boy. A German girl. Long before we exchanged wedding vows, we exchanged photographs.

She used to tell me, “I can always tell when it’s one of yours.”

Not because they were technically better. They weren’t. Most were made with an old iPhone. They were simple, sometimes almost too simple. But they stayed with her long after she’d put her phone away.

Over the past year, I’d worked hard to become a better photographer. I learned Lightroom after years of editing on my phone. I started reading my way through what has become a self imposed MFA in photography. I studied composition, sequencing, printing, and the history of the medium.

I became more knowledgeable. I assumed I was becoming a better photographer. But those aren’t always the same thing.

Later that day, determined to get to the bottom of what she’d seen, I opened a memory card I hadn’t touched in more than a year. It came from what our family still calls Our World Tour.

Six months after we were married, Nici and I packed her teenage son, her mother, Sushi (our adopted toy poodle from China), and ourselves into an aging Volkswagen Caddy and drove through Europe for three weeks. Eight countries later we returned home, and I had more than 2,400 RAW photographs waiting for me.

Life happened. The card sat untouched.

Until now.

Within a minute, one photograph stopped me. It wasn’t a famous building. It wasn’t in the old town.

It was a single wall on a quiet side street in an ordinary neighborhood of Bratislava.

Nobody else stopped. Yet standing there, I might as well have been standing in front of a great painting.

I couldn’t have told you why. Not yet.

Only after I’d stopped did the wall slowly introduce itself. A cabinet. Peeling plaster. Layers of paint. Exposed brick. Repairs. Faded colors.

Standing there, I wasn’t looking for a photograph. I was looking at a place I didn’t want to forget. The photograph became a placeholder for everything else I experienced there. The stillness. The slow walk through an unfamiliar neighborhood. The quiet satisfaction of stopping for reasons I couldn’t explain.

When I finally sat down with the photograph, I wasn’t trying to make it better. I was trying to understand why I’d stopped.

I spent a long time with it.

Each time I reached for a slider, I stopped and asked myself the same question: Why did I stop?

The cabinet became quieter. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t why I’d stopped.

The blues in the graffiti drifted back into the wall. The textures softened until they belonged to something larger.

Little by little, the photograph started remembering what I remembered.

Then I realized I wasn’t creating a better photograph. I was creating a home for a memory.

When an honored guest comes to stay, you don’t change who they are.

You make the bed. You cook breakfast. You offer them the best chair in the house. You quietly create a place where they can simply be themselves.

That was my job. Not to improve the memory. To welcome it back.

Her words came back to me. “I can always tell when it’s one of yours.”

Looking at that wall, I finally understood. She wasn’t recognizing my editing. Or my compositions. She was recognizing what made me stop.

I’d spent a year learning how to make stronger photographs. Somewhere along the way, I’d become so focused on making photographs that I’d stopped paying attention to the experiences that made me reach for the camera in the first place.

Learning matters. Technique matters. History matters. I’d gladly spend another year studying all of them. But none of them can tell me where to stop walking. Only experience can do that.

I closed Lightroom and called Nici into the room. She stood behind me for a while without saying anything. Then she smiled.

“You are an artist, Schatzi.”

Go looking for affection.

Leave your camera in your bag until you notice yourself slowing down. Maybe it’s a building you’ve walked past a hundred times. A café where you always relax. The way evening light falls across your kitchen table. A bus stop that reminds you of someone.

The subject doesn’t matter. The feeling does.

When you finally take a photograph, ask yourself one question before you press the shutter:

If this scene disappeared tomorrow, would I miss it?

If the answer is no, keep walking. If the answer is yes, make exactly one photograph.

When you edit it, don’t ask how dramatic it can become. Ask whether the finished photograph feels the way the moment felt.

When you’re done, compare it with one of your recent “successful” photographs.

Which one feels more like you?

For most of my adult life, I thought he had figured something out that I hadn’t. He always seemed to know exactly who he was. I was still trying to figure life out.

Then life changed. He lost his job. The future was uncertain. During our conversation he asked me a question I’ll never forget.

“What do I do with my time?”

We both loved stories. Growing up, we even had a saying: Hedonism. Debauchery. Live to tell the tale.

So I did what I’d always done. I told him stories about the photography projects that had quietly filled my life since moving to Germany.

At the time, I thought I was simply telling him what I’d been doing.

There is a nine hour time difference between California and Germany, so by the time we hung up it was late. Our conversation stayed with me that evening and into the next morning as I went for a walk.

Somewhere during that walk, I realized I hadn’t really been talking about photography.

My friend didn’t need my projects.

He needed one of his own.

Maybe we all do.

It took me another day or two to understand why the conversation wouldn’t leave me.

I’d been answering his question for years without ever giving it a name.

I realized I needed a project.

When I was younger, life always supplied the next assignment. School. Career. Family. There was always something asking for my attention.

Then, almost without noticing, those assignments began to disappear.

For me, the answer arrived disguised as a photography project.

I decided to build a tabletop portfolio for my children. The constraint was simple. If they had one box of photographs after I was gone, what would I want them to know about their father?

I couldn’t afford to make working prints, so the portfolio lived on my laptop and phone. For days I moved photographs in and out of the sequence, then changed my mind and started again.

At first, I chose the photographs that impressed me most.

Then one photograph kept making its way back.

The basketball hoop.

Every time I removed it, something felt untrue.

It wasn’t my most artistic photograph. It wasn’t my most technically accomplished. But it carried pieces of my own story. Redlands. Basketball. The way color shapes how I see the world.

Without realizing it, I had stopped asking which photographs other photographers would admire.

I was asking which photographs told the truth.

That’s when I understood something I hadn’t expected.

It was okay to be me.

Not the photographer I thought I should become.

The one I already was.

I thought I was making something for my children.

Instead, I was making something for their father.

Only later did I realize I wasn’t the first person to discover this. The photographers I admired kept returning to ordinary subjects. Not because the subjects were extraordinary, but because they stayed with them long enough for meaning to emerge.

Projects are strange that way.

We think we’re making something.

Sometimes we are.

But the better ones quietly make us, too.

If my friend asked me the same question today, I’d tell him to write again.

Not because the world needs another book about San Francisco.

Because he’s spent twenty years walking neighborhoods only he can describe.

I’d want him to write it for the same reason I built that portfolio.

Not to leave something behind.

To discover what was waiting ahead.

Maybe your project won’t look anything like mine.

I hope it doesn’t.

I hope it’s unmistakably yours.

Here in Germany, I often hear a phrase that has come to mean more to me than I ever expected.

Einfach machen.

Get on with it.

I’ve noticed something about photography.

Most of us change everything at once. We choose a different lens, a different location, a different subject, a different edit, then wonder why we aren’t learning very much.

Scientists don’t work that way.

They change one thing. Then they observe what happens.

I think photographers should do the same.

So every Wednesday, we’ll run one small experiment. Not to make better photographs, but to better understand how we see.

The camera isn’t the experiment. You are.

Each experiment follows the same four steps.

I think…

What do you expect will happen?

I’ll try…

Change one thing. Leave everything else alone.

I noticed…

What actually happened? Not what you hoped would happen, but what actually did happen.

I learned…

What will you carry into your next walk with a camera?

Some experiments will produce photographs you love. Some won’t.

Good.

An experiment that surprises you is often more valuable than one that confirms what you already believed.

Wednesday Experiment

Observe Without Naming

I think…

If I stop naming things, I’ll begin noticing relationships I’ve been overlooking.

I’ll try…

For the next thirty minutes, every time you catch yourself saying, “That’s a…”

Don’t finish the sentence.

Instead ask yourself:

• What is it doing?

• How does it relate to everything around it?

• What would I notice if I didn’t know its name?

Photograph whatever genuinely catches your attention.

Don’t force it.

Just notice what changes.

I noticed…

When you’re finished, resist the urge to judge the photographs.

Instead, ask yourself:

• Did I notice something I normally overlook?

• Did I make photographs I wouldn’t usually make?

• When did this begin to feel difficult?

I learned…

Finish these three sentences.

I expected…

Instead…

Next time…

One minute of honest reflection is worth more than ten minutes of scrolling through your photographs.

Join the experiment

If you decide to try this experiment, I’d love to hear what happened.

Not your favorite photograph. Your biggest surprise.

Leave a comment using these three prompts:

I expected…

Instead…

Next time…

Then read a few of the other comments.

The goal isn’t to agree with each other. It’s to discover how differently people experience the same experiment.

I have a feeling those conversations will become just as interesting as the photographs themselves.

Until next Wednesday, stay curious.

I was about to empty my reject pile.

Delete it forever.

Before I clicked, I gave the photographs one last look.

I was scrolling through them, comfortably recalling each one. Where I had been. What I’d seen. Why it hadn’t worked.

It felt like reciting my multiplication tables.

Then, almost at the end, I stopped.

There was a photograph I didn’t remember.

I opened it.

It was nothing more than the silhouette of a tree against an evening sky.

I stared at it for what felt like an entire afternoon, though it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes.

What the heck? You don’t belong here.

I kept scrolling.

At the very end of the folder, it happened again.

A concrete stairwell.

Two photographs.

Both in the wrong place.

Looking at them now, I realize I wasn’t interested in either subject.

I was following the moment light revealed the lines.

I didn’t know it then, but that’s what I’ve been following ever since.

For years I thought I was learning photography.

Now I wonder if I was learning to recognize something.

Every now and then, the world arranges itself in a way that interrupts the endless conversation in my head.

Nothing is solved.

The future is still uncertain.

The past is still the past.

But for one quiet exhale, I stop trying to solve my life.

The camera doesn’t create those moments.

The photograph isn’t the event.

The event happened a fraction of a second before I pressed the shutter.

The photograph is simply the evidence that I was there when it did.

It took me a long time to understand what those photographs were preserving.

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t photographing where I wanted to go.

I was photographing who I became when I got there.

The destination was never the place.

It was the version of myself that only existed there.

Maybe that’s why those two photographs stopped me.

Not because they were good.

Because they recognized me before I recognized myself.

I think we all have a reject pile.

Sometimes it’s photographs.

Sometimes it’s a book we weren’t ready to read.

A dream we quietly abandoned.

An idea we dismissed.

A version of ourselves we decided didn’t matter.

Every now and then, the world arranges its light and lines in such a way that, for one quiet exhale, I stop trying to solve my life.

Nothing has changed.

Except me.

Maybe that’s why I keep making photographs.

Not because I’m afraid I’ll forget what I saw.

Because I’m afraid I’ll forget who I was when I saw it.