I’ve been working on this gay photo project, kind-of on and off, and two days ago I took pictures of Kristopher, who said, in addition to other things (“gay is gay face,” “gay is erotic”), “gay is making your own rules,” before we hooked up, because, for everyone, “gay” has, fundamentally, been “erotic” or “sex,” and so, I’ve shot a lot of bedroom portraits, always looking at objects like Kristopher’s dildo-candle that he won at the Eagle, which, if object and place represent a culture and rules we create, are still centered on sex.

So, the next day, eating tacos for taco tuesday, I texted Kathy, “hey do you want to see the art project I’ve been working on,” and she said, “Yeah!,” so I drove to the community college, where Kathy was helping Jim (an older man who works at the college) hang up portraits for the portraiture class. And I placed my laptop on the table, while I separated fused magnets for Kathy and Jim, and they talked about the portraits. I said, “why are these all pictures of women?” because there were two display cases of portraits of only women, and Jim said, “no there’s one of a guy; they used to come here all the time” and I turned to look, across the hallway, at the very edge of a case, a man dressed in drag. “Uh that’s drag,” I said, and Kathy said, “why do you assume he uses they pronouns,” and I said, “they is ambiguous and neutral, plus drag is she, playing on femininity,” and Jim said, “dudes never like their pictures getting taken,” and I burned a bit on the inside, and told Kathy, “I have over a thousand pictures of gay men on my computer right now,” and showed her the pictures.

“This isn’t you,” said Kathy, and I said, “well it literally is,” and she was like “Blake you’re more conceptual than this,” and I said, “yeah I know these are very literal portraits, and you’re kinda addressing one of the difficulties I’ve had with this project; during the sessions, I’ve turned to these men and said, ‘this is out of my comfort zone because normally I have a working concept, but I feel like that’s really prescriptive for portraits, and I don’t want to reduce your existence to an abstract concept,’ so I’ve been asking these men to do theoretical work, by defining for me, themselves, and the camera, what gay means to them, in an open-ended way, so that I’m not just finding images to support my own definition,” and Kathy said, “I think you need a new mentor for this project because I don’t think these are interesting. They’re not you. They’re not conceptual enough,” and I said, “you’re right,” and then, after Kathy (who is straight) said a lot more, that was not very helpful but incredibly discouraging, I walked away, going to an event to test out an $8,000 camera at Samy’s Camera. I sat in the car, pulled out my phone, and told my friend,

“WHO IS THIS FOR?”

Because the only reviews of this work I’ve gotten from gay men have been, “you’re a great photographer and I love these,” or if I send them, for example, a picture of a foot piercing the sheets and folding the fabric in an anxious and energized angle, they’ll say, “holy shit,” but show that to Kathy and she’ll say, “that’s not very interesting,” and show the picture of a barely-showing cock cage to my mentor, who is a straight man, and he’ll say, “I think that’s a really subtle, tender, and intimate photo, but I’m curious what the blue thing is,” and I’ll say, “that’s his cock cage,” and immediately, although not aesthetically supported, the mentor says, “THAT’S TOO MUCH,” as if the euphemistic, deferred suggestion that gay has something to do with non-normative sex is way off the script. And I told my dad about this gap between gay and straight audiences, and he said, “bridge the gap,” and I said, “all I can do is show them the gap, I can’t bridge it for them,” (I told snooze, differently, that all I should do is put portraits of every person, even the photos from sessions that the professor said had failed, with each subject’s definition of “what is gay,” because snooze said, “if I had seen this when I were younger, this would be really really powerful,”) and the question keeps coming back, always, WHO IS THIS FOR?

While I drove to Samy’s Camera, Taylor said that he’d show up with his wife in a bit, after their Ikea run, and I walked up to a studio setup, surrounded by people who brought their own cameras to an event designed to test a very expensive camera, when the host in a Fuji shirt saw me walk up, and immediately put an $8,000 camera into my hands, asking whether I brought my own memory card (No?? I said), and I saw the studio setup, which was plain to me, without dynamic lighting, and a woman centered against a backdrop as a model, and I rolled my eyes, took the camera, and began shooting pictures of people taking pictures of the model. The host came up to me. “You can tell the model what to do. She’s very obedient,” and I said, “oh, sure,” and I kinda told her to look around, and she defaulted, as if programmed, to sexy-poses, and I said, “you don’t have to do that,” and moved the light, and the host said, “dude I love the shadows where you put the light,” and I said, “thanks.” I walked to the side of the studio, where the model could face me directly, and I said, “I’m sorry but I’m just testing out how this camera looks, and could you do a pose that gives me a bit of depth, like putting your arms out in front of you? Yeah. So, your shirt looks really spooky! It’s October! It’s giving ghost!” and she was like “someone else said that my shirt was very-fall today,” and did this sort of arms-reaching-towards-me pose. From a side profile, against the backdrop, where most people stood, it looked zombie-frankenstein. And so I said, “thank you!” and she smiled, and then, one of these short nerds who brought his own camera ran up and spat out, “DO THAT POSE AGAIN,” but from his angle it looked flat and awkward. I walked up to Taylor’s wife. “Isn’t it weird that all these men are camera nerds, with their own memory cards and own cameras, surrounding this woman and taking pictures of her?” and Taylor’s wife said “I have not been able to stop thinking about that” and I said, “it’s weird. When I was at community college today, most of the portraits they had were of women!” and Taylor said, “this is so creepy,” and I said, “yeah,” and we walked around the store catching up, when a man followed us, asking about how my camera performs for low light events, and I said, “well it’s usually not a big deal,” and then he said, with his $50 camera, “Oh it’s awful for me,” and Taylor, later, said, “remember when that guy tried to tell you what ISO is?” and I said, “oh god.” I do not think, if I were given $10,000 for equipment, that I would ever buy that camera. Our consensual review of this event, altogether, was “that was creepy,” and we all know who it was for: the ones who brought their own memory cards to store away, in their own personal computers, images of this woman, subjected to their gaze and made interesting.

Endless Sky

U turn, spontaneity, as I drove back down to Laguna to meet up with someone housesitting someone. Up a winding hill on a beachy hillside, I entered a gated community of condos, and walked into an art-colony home overlooking the beach during sunset. “Looks like Laguna Beach Abstract Art,” I told him, and he said, “yeah,” as we watched the sunset. “What’s your family like?” he asked. “I’m a triplet,” I said. He talked about his divorced parents and his close relationship with his sister. “She’s my best friend,” he said. “Look at how, in the sky, there are almost folds of clouds,” I said, looking at the ripples of sky backgrounding a paraglider. “I’d get so claustrophobic if I did that,” he said, waving to the paraglider, “I get so claustrophobic up high.” The sun set. The sky’s radiant teal dissolved into a dusky gray. Sliver of moon, cutting into the sky, transformed from white to amber. We sat on the couch, and he leaned over to kiss me, with stiff lips and a closed mouth, on repeat.

So we did some of our business, and I told him to stop. I was sandy from the beach and every touch grated against my skin. “I need to brush this sand off,” and I went to the bathroom to brush it off, but there was infinite sand, and so I said, “I should probably go home,” and he said, “you can use my shower,” and I said, “I don’t really want to shower here,” and he said, “okay then we can hang out for a bit,” and he invited me downstairs to the bedroom, “where there was a shower,” and I said, “you mean your dungeon?” and he did not think that was very funny. So I sat on his bed, downstairs, where he invited the dog too, but told him that I needed to eat. He offered to order something on postmates, and I felt strange about that, so I said, “no I should probably go soon,” and he asked “why?” and I said, “I want to practice dobro–it’s a thing that helps ground me after a long and stressful week,” and he looked so confused, and I said, “it’s a resonator guitar,” and he said, “is that on Beyonce’s new album?” and I said, “you should listen to Lake Mary,” so he pulled up Spotify and saw that Slow Grass was 20 minutes long: “holy fuck,” he said, but played it anyways. I just lay there in his bed, while my breath slowed down and I wondered what he thought. I felt like I was listening to this song for the first time again, imagining it through the lens of another person. And he said, “I have to pee,” and got up to pee, and I sat there on the bed, all-of-a-sudden snapped out of this whole thing, realizing that my life was slipping like sand between my fingers, while he was loudly pissing in the other room, and I waited for him to come back before saying, “I need to go home,” and he was like, “you’re not staying the night?” and I said, “uh no I need to go home,” and he grabbed me and started trying to suck me off and I said, “no I have to go,” and he said, “why?” and I was like “I’m going!” and he tried to grab me, and I pulled him up from the bed, and upstairs, and he was like “am I coming to your house? To meet your family?” and I said, “nope I’ve just gotta go,” and he said, “oh. Aw. well I had a good time,” and I said, “me too,” and sort-of ran to my car, thinking, “I wonder if I just hate people. I’m fine with that,” driving home, thinking that I could give myself two hours before midnight to play the dobro.

The sand came from the couple of hours that I spent on the beach. I arrived right when the housesitting dude left, and sat there listening to a gay man across the beach proclaim to his girly bestie how toxic his ex-boyfriend was. His ex-boyfriend had bought concert tickets for him, and made him dinner, and this gay man on the beach thought it was so inconsiderate, and so awful of the boyfriend, that it became a reason to break up with him. “He only bought me tickets because he had no one else to go with,” this guy said, but then said, without taking a breath, “but my ex said that he bought the tickets for me and planned to go with me the whole time, and that he thought making dinner would be a sweet gesture for the night.” The bestie sat silently on her beach towel, as this homo yelled about his toxic ex. I stood up to swim in the water. I walked by a bluetooth speaker playing cumbias. I walked by a bluetooth speaker with contemporary remixes of 80s pop music. More bluetooth music echoed from across the beach. I jumped into the water.

My mentor for a gay/queer photo project, in a meeting earlier that day, continued to bring up belonging. And as I looked across the gay beach, from my vantage point in the water, I saw men all dressed in speedos together, all laying on beach towels, a few guys alone, a few guys with groups, mostly inundated with pop music at the beach. The only women there were the straight-girl besties to the gay men. And I thought of the relationship between desire, identity, and culture: that gay is a sort-of process of becoming; that no one wakes up one day and immediately becomes a regular at the gay beach, bringing their bluetooth-blasted Beyoncé. All of a sudden the lifeguard yelled at me to go under the waves instead of over them, and I thought I was going over these swells before they were even waves at all.

I left the water, sitting on my towel alone, thinking of how I guess I belong to a sort of gay culture by going to this beach, but I do not really care to belong to it, except by talking about it, not fully convinced by it. A paraglider flew down and touched the water. The desire to belong to others, or an abstract culture, is a placeholder for some other inarticulate desire, in my mind (a desire to be seen, photographers would say). This culture becomes a way of delimiting desire, shaping it, and giving this expansive thing a particular form. Claustrophobic while surrounded by nothing. It’s mostly just relaxing to be on the beach down here.

During my meeting with my mentor John, I showed him a picture of Benjamin in a dress. He asked me how it was to be shooting Benjamin in a dress in public. I said, “oh it was okay, although being outdoors is a bit less intimate than indoors.” And he said, “it’s a lot to ask queer people to take public and out pictures outside,” and I said, “especially when we had a man walk up to us yelling, ‘stop! Stop! Stop!,’ against Benjamin,” and John said, “you don’t see that as a sort of aggression against both of you?” and I said, “Benjamin’s the one wearing the dress…” and John said, “I’m surprised you do not see yourself as a victim too,” and I said, “well only because he ruined the vibe, and it was shocking that it took place in Long Beach,” and John said, “you’d think in 2024 it would be better,” and I thought of how I needed a relaxing day, with no questions about sexuality: what better place than gay beach.

Well there are definitely better places, like at home playing dobro, away from the noise of competing bluetooth speakers, and away from the older men making moves on me, and away from the spontaneous nights with random guys.

The queer photo project, in its first week, was initially an anthropology or typology of gay men’s conception of gay culture. How they responded to the question, “what is gay,” how they moved their bodies, how they dressed, and how they thought about themselves, were all visible artifacts of the world they both constructed for themselves and participated in. John asked for more intimacy than play–more “art” than “lifestyle” photography. John asked that I break past compartmentalization in people’s lives. I sighed.

Sitting in an Urth Cafe, the night before John’s meeting, I sat staring at a room full of hetero couples, screaming children, and one gay man that continued to make eye contact, back and forth. I sat in a crop top. Women and Christian men stared. One woman looked horrified. Of course we go to a culture to belong, I thought; of course it’s difficult for gay men to belong to a hetero-culture, I thought; of course gay men will create a little enclave against the world around them, I thought; of course gay men will be claustrophobic surrounded by endless sky.

Sustainability

I shot photos the other week for a Carbon Sustainability Group’s dinner. Yesterday I saw the social media post that they made. Each of the attendees of the dinner mentioned, in the post, something they want you to do to help the planet. The man from Wells Fargo said that you should take time away from your phone.

“It’s already too late,” a man speaking from a podium said at another one of the group’s events. This one took place in the LA Water District’s headquarters. A collection of educated people and business owners walked around, networking. “So every little bit that we can do helps.” It seemed like a message of panic, which felt like sanity to me.

Which is a bit of how I felt yesterday, taking time away from my phone, driving around Big Bear, looking at the lake. I sweat in my car and looked up different waterfront hikes to cool off. Some were closed because of trash and graffiti; another was closed because so many people parked at the trail that emergency vehicles could not make it through. Too much off-road traffic. One person died of dehydration; another had to be airlifted out; many others mentioned “pack water, and then pack more water, and pack more than double the amount you think you need.” All of that took place in the span of a week. Emergency vehicles stood motionless and trapped. There was nothing they could do. I looked at the lake instead. Algae, perpetually in the “caution” zone, blooms in Big Bear Lake. I drove down the mountain.

The dinner post for this sustainability group: The Walt Disney Company wants you to go to aquariums; a company in the Port of Long Beach wants you to vote for Kamala; and, finally, one member, who got her PhD in legal philosophy, wants you to outlaw ecocide.

Museum Fatigue

Yesterday I went to the Getty with Snooze. After Snooze ran some errands, like getting a copy of his photo ID, we waited in a winding line for security to let us onto a tram. I told him a bit about “museum fatigue,” where people start speed-running through exhibits, with less interest in the galleries towards the end of their visit. One suggestion, according to an article, is that museum staff find ways for visitors to “engage with an exhibit.” So we stood in line where most people around us were pretty quiet, and took the tram up where most people seemed pretty quiet, and walked to a photo exhibition (the one I wanted to see, and had been postponing, and so here we were now).

The first object to look at in the Photography Exhibit was “metal typeface mounted on wood,” with “offset prints.” So much for photography! The exhibit said, “please feel free to take a poster.” Snooze took one. I took one too. And I only saw one other person take one, but then put it back down.

We walked to a collage at the back of the exhibit. I turned to Snooze and said something about the materiality of photography represented here, and its history as a scientific (objective?) medium, and he said how one of the objects in the collage was not a photo, but maybe it was based on a photo? It was a rendering, somehow, of a jaw, like an artifact, taken from a screenshot of a computer program. And I said something about how if photos, by definition (a pretty boring literal definition, in my mind) have to do with light, and this model were, maybe originally, based on some sort of light-based capture, then, well, maybe it counts as photography? Isn’t it strange, I said, how these more contemporary photos (very “post-,” I would say), find ways to reference themselves as objects, while the older photos (I pointed behind us, to another wall with old landscapes) trust the medium as kind-of straight-forwardly referential (as far as we know!) and are (almost trying to be) “about” the object they’re depicting? “I like this one,” Snooze said. “This is good,” I said.

A picture of Yosemite stood on our right. The photographer wanted to take a picture of an “untouched landscape,” and I said that he should not have taken a picture.

So we walked into a room where some important early-photo history guy took pictures of indigenous peoples in certain poses. An artist, taking these photos and drawing on them and annotating them, responded by giving more information, context, and really kind-of deflating this idea of a photo-in-itself (art for art’s sake!). In my mind, this is what photography should be—not some straightforward propagandic depiction of ‘reality,’ as if taking a photo of someone, maybe even technically “well,” is the strength of the medium, but instead, some sort of interaction with the “moment” that has been captured. The moment is already mediated. Mediate the moment more.

Speaking of moments, one artist put strips of black, white, and gray on the wall, putting “120 FPS” in the title. I think there were 120 of them. In my mind these were slices of time, or whatever “moments” are supposed to be. I think time is unintelligible when it’s sliced up like that.

On the outside of the room with the annotated photos, a “landscape” photo of a tree came with the caption. Apparently, “untouched” landscapes contained records of the past. In this case, the record (this pretty landscape photo!) depicted in a lynching tree.

Which is when I mention that one of the artists I came to see exhibited: Lieko Shiga. Her work was on the wall. I do not have much to say about her, because I do not really care for the history of “spirit photography.”

Next: a room filled with images of “evidences” of psychiatric conditions and criminals (Snooze needed to grab a replacement driver’s license before arriving to the Getty) contained audio clips that sounded documentarian, official, and incriminating. They were just descriptions, from the part that I heard, though. And I said something about this as Sontagian, or that Foucault would have a party with this portion of the exhibit (maybe he already did) or how some of the artist captions contained things that were Benjaminian, and nobody else was really talking at all throughout the gallery, except one of the workers talking to someone else. I felt really pretentious, because Walter Benjamin is so basic. And so is Sontag. Their theories are relatively superficial, along with, in my mind, most photo theory, because photography is a superficial medium. Was someone falling asleep on the chair?

On the outside, portraits. Like, those old portraits, from the 1800s, older than your grandparents, probably in oval frame, in sepia, that took time and effort. Click the shutter and wait twenty minutes. One caption said that studios allowed “sitters [in the photo] an active role in constructing their identities.” And I said, “well that’s kind-of like a selfie today. I think so many terms that we use to think about photography in the past just apply to social media today. That’s why a lot of photo theory just feels like shrugging, because we’re so inundated with imagery these days that so many people, with their phone in their pockets, could say ‘that’s not so special—I’ve seen better on my Instagram feed.’” On the other hand, “studios provided clothing so subjects could feel like they were living different lives,” and I thought, “that’s not so different to today.”

Next to these were Black portraits—ambrotypes on color-stained glass—so that the images were difficult to see, raising the question of the camera’s racialized gaze. And behind that, a “portrait” “reflecting on issues depicting the Black body” (also dealing with queer desiring…if you follow the implied gazes in the portrait, you can feel it…), where, in a large print of a studio, with the camera facing the mirror, only the subject’s hand, cut off on the very edge of the frame, was visible. A print of another male body hung next to the mirror. I turned to Snooze and said “I can’t imagine a straight person making this.”

Hopefully, by now, although this is our first gallery, you get the sense that there is no museum fatigue going on. I don’t get why people get so exhausted. I think they just need someone to chat with about the art, and kind-of take a stab at it, even if it’s a wild statement like, “what the hell piece of shit is this: a ‘photo’ that darkens, and ultimately dissolves, in the light?” And then all of a sudden, instead of relying on that too-easy answer of photography as this light-object, photography (somehow) becomes a chemical-electrical object, or a print? And we’re back to the beginning: a print with only text began the gallery—as soon as this light-component (but we need light to see in the first place…) is removed, photography gets funky.

So we walked over to “where the photos are supposed to be,” (which is what I told Snooze), to see what one of my old professors (honestly, kind of naïvely, and self-righteously, and, worst, condescendingly) would call “snapshots.” There was an artist collective called “Gemini,” which was not so well-explained by the captions, but the whole process of art-making was documented by a photographer. And so plastered across the walls were candid photos of artists doing their work. “In the 90s,” I told Snooze, but I can’t remember if I told him this earlier (or made this up right now!), “there was a movement in ‘art photography,’ like—photos of artworks, to take on what some call an “unauthored” or “non-art” look, so that people would focus on the art object instead. And so we have these “photos” that are “candids,” and also some of them are literally just glued to the wall—who cares about a frame?—in a way that suggests that the material photo is not important, but the event that it documents is. And I think this is photography’s strength, that we forget the composition and art and maybe the more formal elements that constitute a photo, and put ourselves in the world that the photo is based on.”

And so we walked outside, and talked about prints a bit—that nobody really prints their photos anymore. And it’s strange that a photo used to be “complete” with a print, and now we just take a digital photo and hide it away forever. “Why do we treat this medium as continuous,” I asked Snooze. Darkroom techniques are incredibly different than digital techniques, which are different than me just pulling out my phone and taking a photo. And if a medium is defined by its tools, photography seems to be such a diverse medium, all collapsed into this thing we call “camera,” like an epistemological placeholder for a certain way of connecting an image to the world.

So we walked around looking at old religious statues in the more permanent, less rotating section of the Getty. Jesus Christ himself (sometimes called Jesus H. Christ) was glaring at us from all angles. So we took wide angled pictures of statues, laughing. Snooze said it was sacrilegious. People do treat museums seriously, like a cathedral, like art is out-of-our reach, with a (Benjaminian) “cult value,” walking through solemnly, feeling all morose.

And then we entered the Still Life room, full of Dutch still lives, and I told Snooze, “isn’t it weird how we’ve been immersed in religious imagery up until this point, which is full of depth and narrative and passion, and all of a sudden Still Lives pop up, which are full of color and surface and just objects? Like, some of these have references to death in them, some of them have symbols, I guess, but others are just paintings of flowers, or paintings of lemons, and they’re so full of detail.” I stayed in the still life room for a while, and Snooze moved onto the next room. Mark Doty mentions that Still Lives are a testament to life and intimacy, and I guess I felt that. But there was a Still Life called “Still Life with Dead Birds.” I think the artist forgot about the “life” part of “still life.” I showed it to Snooze. And then we moved on. The museum began to close. It’s hard to have museum fatigue when you’re on a time limit and have to make the most of each object you see. But what do I know. Not all the still lives had a memento mori in them.

So we got in line for the tram back down the hill at sunset and, in this long and winding line that took several tram trips to diminish, only two other people stood with their posters. The line was mostly quiet, except for Snooze and I talking. The tram drove down the hill. The sun had already set under the Los Angeles smog, humid on July 5th. Guitar music played, and we left the tram. I gave Snooze a projector and a sound board, and then drove home.

Prideful 2024

I sit here listening to Marissa Anderson music, which is intimate Americana guitar music. It makes the world feel smaller. It’s Pride, and I see my friends posting their day in West Hollywood, and I see a lot of clone-looking crop-topped twunks all over my Instagram feed, and I miss out because I have to work today (at a church, which, from all accounts, is homophobic, but I spy plenty of queers in that choir), and I’m not sure West Hollywood is my scene. “What is your scene,” my brother asks me, and I sit and think and say, “well, I used to go to ambient concerts.”

When I think of pride season, I reflect on the past couple years steeped in summer-heat pride parades. I had a prideful optimism to be part of “the community,” to consider “gay politics,” and I always love a paraded procession of flag-bearing homos. “Happy pride!” everyone says on the streets. And a year ago, I stood to watch drag queens perform Good Morning Baltimore on a daytime stage, while Andy (he dresses up as a mermaid. I’ve been on a couple dates with him. He’s in a merman Netflix documentary.) walked up to me. “Are you happy?” he asked. What a bold question to ask during pride. “I’m content,” I said. I enjoy my life. It’s relaxed. “That’s good,” he said, and walked away. I don’t think he thought I was happy.

As I walked to my car, sunburned and tired, I met Luke. He dyed his hair neon blue. And he hooked up with me once a few years ago, before shooing me out of his house, because his Calvary Chapel Pastor Parents were coming home soon, and he lived with them. He called me after I left, asking me if I wanted to get Jamba Juice, while I sat at a coffee shop, so I said, “uhhh…not right now.” He asked if I was okay. “Yeah.” We lost touch, until at Pride, he said he sort-of remembered me, and told me that his parents kicked him out when he came out. Then his parents retreated to Texas. He asked for my number while he was high out of his mind, and I walked to my car, out of Orange County and its booming pride stages pulsing with friction and competing beats, to a little Long Beach tea shop.

A dark cozy shop with wooden walls and a desert garden patio sits on Fourth Street. Two communal tables, with some smaller straggling two-seat tables surround a stage, where Danny Paul Grody, a guitarist, will play later that evening. For now, a barista brings me a fruity chamomile tea. The sun sets on the desert patio, inviting a soft glow through the glazed windows into the store. I open a Frank O’Hara poetry book. He praises urbanity and chaos, against an idyllic experience of nature. I’m not convinced. By the time I close the book, music begins.

The guitar is repetitive and hypnotic. It soothes. And I relax with the dim, red lights, thinking that this, too, is prideful (Danny Paul Grody is a gay man, with a husband and a child, posting images of the ocean and his family on Instagram). Happy pride.

This year, I am too tired from working to drive up to West Hollywood. So I listen to Marissa Anderson’s (lesbian!) sparse guitar album. For now, a new little pride ritual, outside of the sunbaked heat of the afternoon, apart from the masses of people drinking together, without the club music throbbing overhead, with no bartenders running on a frantic vodka-soda autopilot. Just sweet little music as dusk takes over, falling into my body, belonging not (for now) to some gay clone culture, but, for a moment, to this small world, with the light softening immediately around me. Feeling happy.

Play and Photography

Browsing through the library a few months ago, I picked up a book that had been recommended to me: Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs’ The Great Unreal. According to one of my photo professors, “it’s an ‘All-American’ Road Trip,” and the artists agree: “We dealt with our own preconceptions of the American Road Trip.” The book contains a wonderful play of reality and fiction, which is to say, a play between images that seem “tampered” and ones that we might consider to be more “intact” (or a straight-forward representation of reality). But for Krebs and Onorato, the work is different.

Onorato & Krebs, The Great Unreal. https://tonk.ch/the-great-unreal/

Speaking of their following book, which uses the same road-trip method as The Great Unreal, Onorato & Krebs are clear: “there is no neutral image.” Their work is “not a documentary work,” but “pure invention. It’s a fabricated image. It is a reproduction of how we look, how we perceive, how we understand or misunderstand.” It is the nature of all images, according to them, to be fabricated. They elaborate that the medium’s natural fabrication might have to do with framing or cropping or retouching or choosing which moments to display, and I would add that how light passes through a lens onto a pretty-flat sensor that converts light to electronic signal might introduce another layer of “fabrication” to the mix.

Which is a different layer of “fabrication” that Susan Sontag discusses. For her, photos document an event. And an event, which is a situation worth photographing, is determined by ideologies, so that photography reifies ideology. (Photography also, Sontag suggests by following Walter Benjamin, levels all values, which would undermine any particular ideology.) The camera is the tool that evidences “reality” (or a way of looking at reality): photos provide “pieces of information” that “certify experience.” Sontag uses travel photos as a prime example (in 1973, a relevant critique predating a social-media generation). A trip happened only if it was photographed. And photography, here, takes on the “documentary” role of some sort of tourist (or family-vacation) ideology (like the myth of the American Road Trip), promoting a pathos-like sentiment of nostalgia.

If there is a “natural” relationship between images and fabrication (following Onorato & Krebs), and, at the same time, images are treated as “evidence,” then, as both photographers and consumers of images, we’re perpetually fabricating evidences (wrapped into ideologies guiding our vision) of our own lives. And it is here that I wonder at this paradox: that images both construct and dissolve ideology. Our hands seem tied: just as there is “no neutral image,” there is no image that can escape this tension. Following Onorato & Krebs, the best we can do is play between the poles, between reality and fiction, and between ideology and reference to an experience unframed.

       I went to two photography exhibitions within the past couple months. The first postered the walls with too many low-resolution photos of Italy. The photographer liked Italy. So she used her photography grant money to go to Italy and take street photos. That was the whole idea. They were not very good.

       The second exhibition displayed film photographs of Ireland. I told the people around me that the pictures reminded me of Instagram. They played on some Instagram tropes. Someone else told me that they did not understand the photos; that they all seemed random. The artist said that each photo “testifies beyond the surface of [her] experience,” directly “to the essence of [her] quest for the exploration of herself in the vast expanse landscapes within the context of the world around [her] during [her] travels.” (She also says that these photos speak to the “mundane moments that determine our existence,” and I think, “WHICH IS IT: the mundane surfaces that, by being mundane, suggest surface, or the photos (also purely surface) which (somehow, magically, because you want them to) are supposed to be deep?”). Travel photos, which were travel images of landscapes, somehow suggest self-exploration. I can think of no lazier link from photography to some individualistic, romantic, self-discovery ideology than to present random travel images and expect them to communicate that personal “essence.”

  I have a trip coming up. I plan to bring my camera. And even if I’ve given up on “certifying experience,” I wonder, beyond my intention, which experiences I’ll incidentally certify, or which reality (or unreality) I will, through a play of technology and reality, fabricate. Here are a few question I’m thinking of:

       What makes a travel photo a travel photo (could you take a picture of your hometown as if it were a travel photo?)
       Can there be in image, following Sontag, which is not nostalgic?
       How do images expose or subvert myth? How do they uphold it?

Sweatpants

I drive, a few hours early for a political luncheon, to a nearby coffee shop. Up the road through blocks of white, square buildings, lined up next to and behind each other. I’m dehydrated and wearing sweatpants that look like slacks, while the road slopes up and a white Mercedes tailgates me. I hope for a view at the top. But instead, I pull into a large parking lot on the hill, bounded by more large, rectangular white buildings. No view. Only concrete. I stop my car, set a timer for when I need to leave, and then walk into the shop, light headed.

I sat in a conversation yesterday with other photographers about AI. AI is thirsty, someone said. It chugs water. I thought of California’s water problem, and the “West” with the constant threat of Water Scarcity. And someone else said that it was impossible to differentiate AI from a regular person’s writing, at this point. In fact, what you’re reading right now could be totally artificial. Imagine a robot as a narrator. And I wonder if philosophers in hermeneutics or semiotics anticipated this sort of robot-as-narrator, with their early-day pre-internet words like Cybernet and Cyberspace, thinking about networks through a Chinese room, or Having No Mouth and Must Scream.

This someone else said that there’s no point in learning anything anymore, with the internet at your fingertips, and AI doing your thinking for you, and I asked her about Bloom’s Taxo—and then I stopped myself because I didn’t want to be a pretentious asshole—but there are different sorts of metrics for “critical thinking,” and all require a sort-of creative leap and some sort of specificity with a text or a situation or an idea. And it’s incredibly difficult for AI to be able to make these sorts of qualitative and creative comparisons (at least last I checked), or to be specific—telling you what a quote *means* and how we would understand that sort of meaning, or to even have a critical understanding of what makes up a text or a work (but, it’s also difficult and a bit scary for people to do this sort of work too…).

And while this someone else kept wondering what motivates people to learn (I thought of how important it was for me to understand and fight for queer perspectives on Christianity, and that unfolded into a more abstract curiosity that motivates me to learn), one person said that not many people have ever been motivated so much to learn at all, and now it’s just easier for people to pretend to be interesting, so, of course, I thought of a conversation from the other day…

I sat at my computer working, while my brother sat on his computer gaming, with his friends on voice chat. And I did not know the microphone was on, so I started venting to my brother about how I’ve become a bit more jaded about gay men, and how I used to hold this sort-of optimistic idealism for the “gay community” based on gay history and queer theory—that we could all reshape the community in ways that were “healthy” and positively kind to each other (let’s all read Mary Oliver and sing songs around a campfire), rather than reproducing structures of “gay trauma.” And I had to pee, right as my brother’s friend responded. “It’s like this theory I read,” he said, and began talking about queer and racial enclaves, like nations with only one race, and how this was a failure of pluralism, and that gays should do their best to integrate into society, and how it was “extreme” for people to want little enclaves of their own (I asked him what makes something “extreme” and he “well if you plot a bell curve and it’s at the ends of it,” and I said “but how do you get the bell curve?” and he said “you measure it,” and I asked “how?” and he said “that’s not important” and changed the subject, but not before suggesting that all minority opinions, in reference to a bell curve, were “extreme”). And so he hopped between topics (I asked: “don’t you think it’s a bit of a stretch to compare racial and sexual “enclaves”—especially when LGBTQ are often raised in straight households and have to migrate to an enclave, but in your situation, a racial enclave could be entirely self-sustaining and isolated?” and he replied “you have to be charitable, Blake,” and I thought, “That’s not how charity works,” and now, reflecting, I guess he’d be pretty charitable to a computer posturing for thought).

Last night, I video-chatted with my other brother. I told him that I asked the AI for a self-portrait, over text. He said he had asked the AI for a self-portrait the day before, and it gave him an image of a person looking at a mirror. For me, over text, the AI said that it was “in essence” “a network,” and I asked what materials constituted it, and it did not mention water. Our skin shines in our own self-portraits even if our lips are chapped; our language glistens in particular ways that generalized knowledge cannot contain. But the AI, perpetually scraping and perpetually thirsty, operates like a brute that never sweats. It speaks, ignoring its foundation.

Which is all to say that, as I am sitting in these concrete structures, about to shoot images (that medium most transparently constructed of surface) for a political entity that I probably don’t quite agree with, I wear sweatpants that look like slacks as a slight rebellion: as long as I don’t reach my arms too high up, and reveal the drawstring waistband, then these look as formal as it gets, but remain comfortable for me.

Limit

Instrumental music: all surface. A play of surface.
Image: All surface. Give it metaphor; give it meaning; imagine its other.
Image the limit, image the surface. What else is there?

Little concrete gestures, orienting towards things, towards ideas...

If there is the limitless, I cannot figure it.
The universe, they say, expands at 160,000 miles per hour,
(which is apparently just slightly faster than my internet speed!)
and I have a hard time being convinced (I think it shows).



I was reading Jean-Luc Nancy, and telling my professor his attempt to critique the idea of myth, without creating a new mythology. She told me to “ground these ideas,” and I thought that that was the difficulty: to avoid this form of fiction, and to avoid some sort of “autofiguration” of “nature” or “humanity” or “myth itself,” or these stories that attempt to “inaugurate meaning.” How, really, can you critique our propensity for mythologies without creating, in some abstracted sense, a myth of our propensities? What a silly question. I told her I wanted to take pictures of asphalt. How’s that for grounding?
   I thought of Annie Dillard’s use of the word “bathetic” when she visited “Jesus’ birthplace,” where Christianity might be inaugurated. The word means something like anticlimatic or disillusioning. And I think of claims of ideologies and mythologies and limitless worlds and these cheap-shot vocabularies attempting to rip our attention away ourselves, placing our own subjectivities in some larger drama of sin or samsara or divine orders or some cause for T-r-u-t-h. “Have you ever looked at your hand?!” Why not, instead, stare at the asphalt beneath our feet, at this world so boring and so removed from the drama of attention? Give me that drama-free religion of a world so apathetic to our gaze for the limitless. My eye stops on the ground, with no articulation of ideas; only a gesture removed from understanding.

(I’m getting back into it, ordering my stories from the past couple of months. Stay tuned.)

Mailing List

Comprehensive (a few years ago) in island hopping, I toured on the rippling surface above, they say, “folding and faulting geography,” across a coastal divide. It was a tour to arrive at the shore of each of California’s Channel Islands. Or all of the accessible ones. San Nicolas and San Clemente Islands mark an opposition, as active sites of the Navy’s Weapon’s Training, to the rest: Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, Anacapa, and Catalina Islands. The former two military islands raise difficulties of access (at least if you’re not in the Navy). And, finally, Santa Barbara Island is often closed for an 11-month-long Brown Pelican breeding season, and for those who rely on the Park Service Ferry, inaccessible. A storm nine years ago bashed its dock beyond repair, so that, during that one month of the year when Pelicans aren’t fucking and raising their children, you can sail your own boat and swim your way to its shores. And, that Navy-claimed San Clemente Island sometimes hosts fishing trips and, as long as the military is not actively shooting at you, allows you to step on shore. So, speaking of inaccessibility, only San Nicolas Island, with no National Park Service Ferry, nor public access, remains out of reach.

The photographer Trevor Paglen agrees with this assessment. He’s a photographer who shoots telescopically, concerned with space out of reach. An astrophotography telescope, to image and explore distant regions of space, attaches to his camera. If he zoomed far enough he might hit the limit of our vision. How far can you see before objects begin to blur and break down? He agrees with this assessment when he zooms in at dusk to a brown-orange horizon blocked by a small dark mound. Three images, ambiguously out of focus, render a murky San Nicolas Island, like large accidental exposure. Its form is barely distinguished from the black ocean beneath its shores. The images are difficult to read, so Paglen comes in, at the end of his book, saying that he’s “interested in the limits of the visible world,” and relationships like imaging and knowing. Through his book depicting (or not) places we cannot get to, Palgen pokes at fuzziness and murky boundaries, using words like “epistemological,” “empiricism and imagination” to try to help us imagine our knowledge and unknowledge, and what we can and cannot know. Which is a lot for a photo to bear.

Paglen’s series of images become abstractions, pointing, through their concrete names, to real-life-places as stand-ins for the unknown, and for what we might never know. (Would it be a surprise if I told you Paglen earned a degree in Religious Studies?) At least, “unknowing” might be how it seems to our coastline perception. A blurry photo becomes (paired with Paglen’s ponderings!) an approximation of a world just out of reach from where we stand on the sands of our mainland beaches. We could stand here mystified.

And, inland, to the sands with no beaches, near the Mojave Desert’s Kelso Dunes, Andrew and I worked to take pictures and videos of volunteers. Neon vests dotted the shrubby landscape as members of the Wilderness Volunteers pulled up invasive mustard plants hiding in the wrong desert. I wandered around until one woman, bending down to tear up a bundle of the bad plant, paused, exclaiming a desire to swap her hat for one stitched with WV. She took it off, looked at it, and showed it to me. “Another great volunteer organization,” she said. The hat said “Channel Islands Restoration.” She took a look at my hat as I took her photo. “Oh! The Channel Islands! Have you gone recently?” I told her that I had gone to all the islands you could get to with the National Park Service Ferry a few years ago. She said she had worked with the Restoration and had gone to one of the islands. “Oh, Santa Cruz Island? I know they’re doing restoration work there.” No, she said. San Nicolas Island. Invited through a mailing list. “The Navy flew us out!”

Where a thinker like Paglen images a limit, a woman in the desert proclaims a different testimony. While Paglen’s images mystify what they claim not to capture, this woman proclaims no mystery: only a reference to a mailing list. A mailing list! Someone tell Trevor! And one day, unlike Trevor, I might actually do something about this silly little unknowing and fly, with people who pull up weeds for fun, to the island. Paglen might be good at aestheticizing mystery to the point of belief, but, this woman, unlike Paglen, needs no mystery. She has a hat to prove it.

Easter 2024

I do not want to think about Easter. I’m tired, drinking chamomile tea in a Turkish coffee shop. A woman with two grand-daughters walks through the door, festively. She dragged her teal-Easter-dressed and cat-eared grand-daughters through the coffee shop, each with a fuzzy Easter basket, proclaiming “Happy Easter!” to the people working on their laptops. One of the girls offered me a chocolate. I took it. “Thank you!”
Today, at the church I work at, the sermon drew attention to the truncated ending of the Gospel of Mark (considered by scholars to be the earliest written gospel), where the witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection made no proclamation. They stood silently in fear, refusing to tell anyone. No proclamation according to Mark (who, by assigning proclamation of Jesus’ status as the Son of Man or Messiah to demons and Pilate, while Jesus constantly hushes his disciples about that title, seems to be averse to that identity for Jesus...). So I imagine how paradoxical it is that the event of Jesus’ resurrection transformed from a silent refusal into a proclaiming text. And then, I imagine (hypothetically, imperfect) Christianity, like Judaism, as a faith with no evangelism. No chocolates from no children.

it’s not really art