Mar 26, 2026

I am sitting in a coffee shop, across the way from a massage place, where, many months ago, a woman (hair frizzed, arms gesturing sharply) slammed screamed and pounded on the door. A woman ran up frantically and slammed and screamed until she open-eyed spun around, phone-in-hand, and stomped (stomp stomp stomp, she did) her way into the coffee shop, yelling, phone-in-hand. “Can you give me the number of the massage place across the way?” she commanded (a pastor, yesterday, said “commands help us!”), and the barista shrugged and the crowd of coffee-shop-students gazed up politely. Inquiring eyes. “My daughter,” she said, “I need to get in touch with my daughter!” And the coffee shop barista shrugged. “She’s getting a massage,” but across the street I look now for a sign reading: “prenatal massages.” After spinning from the coffee bar to the door to the bar to the door to the bar to the door, the woman ran outside and pounded on the door of the prenatal massage center, and the barista closed the door to the coffee shop. Back in our bubble. Inquring eyes backed down.

Reading a sentence today, “Photographs connect to a life as experienced, to ‘images, feelings, sentiments, desires and meanings,’” I thought of this crazy lady story. Some people might define photography by its referential power: its suggestion of a life behind its depiciton. I don’t know. Other mediums might do this, but in confined to a documentary genre (field recording, for example: sound art but from something really real). I’m not so sure. And I thought of this story of this woman, because it was real in my mind but also comic, so cartoonish, so unbelievable in a way.

When Barthes, the big photo theorist that people like to believe, was writing things, saying photography = “IT WAS THERE,” he did not have an iPhone in his pocket. Photography was a process. If people talk about the “materiality” of photography, and if that is a trendy thing to talk about today, it is only because photography used to, in fact, seem much more “material” than it is now: film was blank and mysterious, and somehow had an image etched on it, that somehow corresponded to a moment that a photographer “captured.” Or a print was a blank sheet that somehow took on the forms of the film (the film took on the forms of “the world” in front of it), and so, yes, despite the fact that the darkroom paper was blank and empty to begin with, the moment it depicts, through the development process of the darkroom, “WAS THERE.” The more we could mess with it, the more its own fabrication appeared in front of our eyes, the more people doubled-down on its reality. So people asserted.

Now we have iPhones in our pockets, and this relationship between photo and reality is so blatantly natural to us (while also being contested by AI, but nobody I know likes AI). Barthes’ era is gone, and I think that he’s stopped being useful. Maybe I’m too critical, but I’m reading a paper that, holding onto Barthes’ assertion, denies the status of digital photography as “photography.” So I’m not sure: Barthes’ “WAS THERE” is a problem that should have been dealt with already. (I told my darkroom friends that Walter Benjamin, through some extrapolation, suggests that if we see the materiality of photography, we lose the illusion that photography’s reality is really-real. Enough talk about reality).

One way to talk about photography is a medium that has a visual-indexical relationship to an empirical world, I guess. The visual world, in this sense, literally presses-onto a photographic receptical. The world marks a photograph. Then, expanding the senses, there are things that have an auditory-indexical relationship to the world, or an olfactory-indexical relationship to the world, or whatever, and I think, one day, a sort of comparison like that would be good. But the indexical constructs the world as empircal, and honestly, I tell you that story that really did happen, but lacks a sort of indexical quality (it is writing!), and is full of affective qualities, to suggest (this is not controversial) that reality takes different forms. To represent it well: the quote above, with a bit of a “phenomenological” slant, finds value in a life as experienced, and I think this might be photography’s job more than some scientific instrument.

One paper by Jared Ragland, who is a photographer I am sort-of obsessed with, suggests, in an anthropology essay somewhere, that photography constructs identity. So much for photography being this purely empirical object. He worked with addicts, and the addicts used printed-out photography to remind themselves of who they were. Elizabeth Edwards, who writes an article about photography, suggests that other anthropological authors say the same thing. What “was there” for Barthes is “here now” for these viewers: “Photographs are...powerful actants in the social space ‘intertwined with a larger process of maintaining different forms of sociality and personhood.’” Instead of a life behind the photo, “photographs connect to a life” in front of it, somehow: not exclusively through memory of the past, but through the construction of a world in the present.

Finally: photography will always look cartoonish in relationship to the past and the present. It flattens the world and rips time from its course. But a photo might serve an “iconographic” purpose, like an object constructing its on hagiography, “as a relic held in the hand,” but maybe we are so used to the phones in our pockets that photos seems so real (the world appears on the screen!). As long as photos are real, life becomes its own relic.

I think I will buy some drugs to do with Tommy because this is a bit heady for me today.

it’s not really art

Apr 10, 2026