Pride 2025
After a final game of kickball, I drove right up to West Hollywood Pride. A boy I had planned to go with cancelled last-minute, and my friends left just as I arrived. So I walked through the street alone, feeling a bit shocked and lonely, up to a club: I had driven all the way up here. Might as well make the most of it.
Bodies and bodies and bodies filled the bar I walked into. I squeezed past gay men making out, almost violently, as they crashed, carefree, into the bodies of those around them. I tried for eye contact, although (knowing that I felt disoriented and alone, and that was hard to shake) I did not expect it to take, and so I found my way to the end of the bar, near the bathrooms, where the room was darker, where the population of bodies had lost its density. I waited in line for a drink, with television screens strobing overhead, filled with images of men.
Familiar images, I thought; many that I had seen before, so that I could almost name the photographer. Images, I thought, of fit men not quite naked, but suggestive, in different gear and clothing designed to keep you looking. All studio-lit, they seemed so unreal to me. The man next to me began to yell, as a man walked up to him, asking about his relationship status, and as I turned around, I took in the span crowd, no longer immersed. I saw no distinction between bodies and images in the room; that these men had so internalized these images that they had become them. “$20,” said the bartender, for the price of my drink. I paid, drank a few sips, looked around the room, and left.
I cannot, from the beginning of Pride Month, stop thinking of the suicide of a popular gay porn star on June first. I cannot stop thinking of the gays that I know, when I asked them what gay means, answered as if their lives mirrored pornography. I cannot stop thinking about the responses to the porn star’s suicide: that porn is an industry with a remarkably high suicide rate (somewhere I read: six times higher than the general population), and I think of the anti-porn campaigns in the city I live in, that I am definitively opposed to.
A few years ago, in a coffee shop run by lesbians and gays, a Christian woman sat, surrounded by her friends, the lesbian owners of the shop, and me. She complained that pornography was ruining her relationship with her boyfriend. “It’s an addiction,” she said, and I thought of my sex therapist friend who argues the opposite. Pornography, according to her, is harmful for those who watch it. And so I spoke up, “pornography plays a large role in gay culture,” I said, “it allows younger gays to recognize who they might become one day, or have a place for their desires.” One of the lesbians nodded. The Christian woman could not understand.
My memory of pride, from the point I left the bar, arranged (as memory does) the bodies of gay men into a pyramid—symbolic, pointing towards that which it cannot reach. I guess this is what happens when bodies pile together. If this is a function of culture, to point towards an immaterial image, then I wondered what happens when that culture, almost unilaterally, becomes the image it strives towards with no remainder, with a certain type of purity and literalism. A way of becoming whole.
None of these thoughts conclude, really, except that I have, somewhere, a copy of A.A. Bronson’s book House of Shame. He speaks of queer rituals, designed to heal shame, which are necessarily “pornographic” (sexual) but also healing; they incorporated sexual references in gay culture, while also placing gays in relationship to their own community and history. He wanted, somewhere else, to place younger gays in relationship to the larger world. The rituals are sex, and they are something more. No life can continue without taking a step towards that “something more.”
Live Mario Kart
Because of the hundreds of food orders (and thus a closed kitchen); because of the lack of water; because of the long lines, dense crowds, thick volume, and overall “overstimulation,” because of an evening of transportation to, in my mind, a pre-pandemic reality, two homosexual men--Jake and Thomas--left a brewery immediately after arriving. And I followed. But all these conditions of their early departure, and unfortunately mine as well, formed through a sort of mass-hype that trended two years ago, and had never, to my knowledge, appeared in the United States, let alone any bar other than the single location hosting it at its initial inception: a Mario Kart tournament. This was not just any Mario Kart tournament. A Mario Kart Tournament scored by a live jazz band, accompanying the game in real time, synchronized to what occured on screen. And if a massive appeal globalized this occurance that once only happened in the UK, then that appeal turned into a hype filling several overflow parking lots that turned, finally, into screams and roars on the last lap, when the live music hit (*click* *click* *click* *click*) double time and first and second place competed closely for the winning title.
It was because of this hype-near-hysteria that the room, before Jake and Thomas arrived, electrified. I stood against a wall, next to others, packed, body to body, equally transfixed by the front screens. And I almost cried. It was almost religious: this intense concentration (from everyone in the room) on four adjacent television screens; this live music, bringing something so digital to reality; the engagement of everyone around. A crowd becoming a massive ‘we.’ We be here for Mario Kart. We be here to see it live.
“A Living Text” is what some people call the Bible, and now, after seeing, with my own eyes, this hungry and parched commitment to Nintendo (hallelujah), I cannot hesitate to call Mario Kart “The Living Game.”
Representable 1
Here: a short review of works by Sigmar Polke, Mare Nero, thinking with Jean-Luc Nancy…
In “Forbidden Representation,” Jean-Luc Nancy, speaking of the “unrepresentable,” between “impossibility” and “illegitimacy” of representation of the Holocaust, comes to the statement: “The criteria of a representation of Auschwitz can only be found in this demand: that such an opening—interval or wound—not be shown as an object but rather that it be inscribed at the very level of representation, as its very texture, or as the texture of its truth.” Here, Nancy is concerned with the problem of representing absence (an opening), or of representing that which is always outside of representation. Rather than pointing to absence as an object, didactically, and risking “illegitimacy,” Nancy values that an absence be the texture of a work, in order to provide a resistance to representation (a representation that is always already image).
Although his essay concerns the Holocaust, Nancy reminds us that the world of the Holocaust is still our world, and so it is important to be discerning about other events. And because Nancy is concerned not with the event, but with its representation, it might be instructive to turn to photography (lots of representation within this medium)—specifically Sigmar Polke’s Der Bärenkampf (1974).
Polke’s work contains fourteen sequential images from Afghanistan. Two dogs fight with a bear. Two images (3—a man pointing; 7—a man smiling ) are portraits. The final image, closer, contains two men pulling their dogs away from the bear. Many of the shots maintain similar framing, in a way that suggests, cinematically, an event unfolding. But what is notable is that each image is heavily processed: as if something went wrong in the darkroom, as if the images had been water-stained, as if the images had aged and been folded (a feature of Sigmar Polke). Throughout the sequence, the viewer strains to see an animal violence, where figures are rendered small and unintelligible. The images are literally “textured,” in a way that evades their capacity for straight-forward representation.
Because we are so used to seeing images as representative (these “mistakes” as mistakes) that the folds and chemical stains become not objects, but a texture to see through. It would have been possible to represent this event, using photography as description, if only Sigmar Polke “had done better in the darkroom.” But because these “mistakes” are not objects within the image, they communicate something less literal about the event (an experience of struggle in our own perception, just as the dogs struggle the bear…): a sort of violence towards representation that mirrors the violence of the animals depicted. Maybe here, we come closer to Nancy’s wounded texture…
(All of a sudden Nancy’s concern seems questionable, especially his focus on texture, for so many artists work between representation and ambiguity: there is a question, rather than playing on the surface of representation, of what a texture does. For Nancy, it allows a resistance to a ‘final’ or ‘definitive’ work…but it seems that in the case of each work, a reference to absence does something more…)
Like Polke, “Gargaglione and Fucili,” from the artist group Mare Nero, “have each put their mark on the photographs. They have spliced, doodled over, rubbed, and scratched out sections of the images, obscuring and effacing most of the people and much of the landscape that they occupied.” An image of a man with an underexposed face; others with neutral density filters obscuring parts of the photograph, “these images point to the ongoing destruction that has left an estimated five hundred thousand Syrians dead and another six million scattered around the world.” And yet, none, at least none in the article I can view, of these images point to the destruction directly (except some grave markers…). Where Mare Nero works with “memory,” (and later, religion in relationship to memory), it is a memory “absensed” (in Nancy’s terms) from literal representation.
At the same time, none of these “absenses” (in Nancy’s terms) are relegated to the “texture” of the images. Nancy could be if not corrected, then clarified here. There are, in two instances, blocks of shape and tone; another is a choice of tonality; others maintain elements of collage (all of these do texture, but they are not purely textural elements). What they do, more than texture, is displace the objects of the image, achieving Nancy’s goal of resisting a “final” or “definitive” work, and displaying, in a sense, a “wound” to representation.
It might, finally, be important to, beyond texture & contents of compositional (which still, as long as the image bears a representative function, are the “texture” of an image—or the event behind an image), find an instance in which absence is represented through an object “in” the image. So far, absence has not been figured: each instance relies on the propensities of the medium, rather than what the medium depicts. But here, finding absence within the image, we might run into the theoretical limit that Nancy refers to: that to image absence (an absence which, according to Nancy, representation excludes but that which representation is also determined by), is to image something “illegitimately,” risking “reducing representation to a mockery.” For although we may photograph that which is already absent, it will always retain its presence within an image. It is impossible to represent something as unrepresentable…
(I am working, this week, on a funeral slideshow: through images contingent on the memory a person who is now absent. The images are not photographs of absence; their context is absence, and it is through their context that they refer to absense. And I find myself clarifying images, so that these memories, for the friends and family, may be present once again. Yet, it may still be interesting to play with their slideshow.)
Finally, at the same time, Nancy sets up one more boundary. We must also “resist adopting the stance of an idolatrous mysticism of the ineffable.” In response to the “unrepresentable,” and in conjunction with Nancy’s call to texture, that which cannot be depicted must not be dismissed, hands-wiped-clean, as “ineffable.” We can still “eff” around it, using techniques that look like mistakes, that reduce our ability to grasp an image, and to give it a sort of communication (through the surface, through properties intrinsic to the medium and not what it depicts) towards that which is beyond depiction.
Which is where the blur trend comes in. Oh dear God, the BLUR TREND. Maybe it is sufficient to say, instead of a whole rant on the “blur trend,” which is mostly motion blur, (mimicking “authenticity” through “blur,” through either an intentional mistake, or, more realistically, an amount of blur similar to a cinematic blur: life as authentic and storied as a movie), that there are techniques intrinsic to photography that “texture” something. More on that later. Blur marks a limit and boundary of perception, and it is worth, eventually (next post) figuring out whether it can move beyond a vernacular “authenticity.”
Pride 2025
Church staff meeting today, the day after Long Beach Pride. (Yesterday: I was seething a bit, because I just barely missed, because of work, the Pride Parade—I am a glutton for pride parades—and I had to work, which I could have requested off, so I was mad at the church for not being a pride festival, and mad at myself for not requesting the time off…)
Pastor Luther closed the door to the staff meeting. He had been down all of yesterday, and a bit of today. A member of the congregation had sent a letter. Our church is becoming “too progressive,” the member had said. It was not biblical. Its theology was wrong. He did not think that the church would have to speak of “progressive issues” after 2009. (For context: 2009 is when the ELCA decided that gays could, in fact, after decades of debate, be clergy). Of course the pastor had his own disagreements. “I’m not wrong,” the pastor insisted, because, in fact, the church becoming “inclusive” is definitely (in case this was controversial at all) not wrong.
I sat in my seat. Wrong day to wear my new Georges Bataille shirt (I wore it because I knew the pastor would recognize it). Wrong day, when talking about wrong theology in a church. The volunteer director, during a lull in the meeting, looked at me. She asked who Bataille was. I said that he was a writer (for some: not philosophy, not literature, just meaningless ramble). She asked more. “Some say he’s a controversial theorist of religion.” Pastor Luther called him a postmodern lunatic. He’s not wrong about that, but postmodern lunacy might be Bataille’s value. The volunteer director said she would check him out (if I pray for anything right now, it is that she does not accidentally pick up Story of the Eye instead of Theory of Religion). I felt burning a bit, like I was the wrong fit for the job: a person who wears, consistently, pride shirts at a Lutheran church, who also (uh oh!) doesn’t quite believe in the divine in the same way that these people might.
I spent the hour before staff meeting reading Jean-Luc Nancy (somewhere Nancy, I think, says that there is no thinking after Bataille: only thinking with and through him). And Nancy speaks of a sort of homogenization (he does not call it that) that comes through “representation.” There are those that are “outside” of representation; a system of representation that seeks to be “representation without remainder” will exhaust itself and lose its opening to the infinite…
Which is pretty easily and directly applicable to communities. Especially religious communities that claim, in some way, to mediate an opening to the infinite: if they lose an awareness and acceptance of that which is outside of them, then they will suffocate and die.
Two quick reflections. I’ve never felt so strongly that I can never wear my Georges Bataille shirt to church again. I’ve never felt so strongly that I could not wear my pride shirts to church again. I’ve never felt, so reflexively (and maybe it is because I am reflecting now that these feelings are so strong) that I had to change, in order not to scare away a congregation that I work for. That people who are a bit diminished require those around them to shrink too.
During an organ service last night, I stood impatiently. Long Beach Pride day meant that I was eager to get to the festival, or to the bars. And so the beautiful music of the service played, so that the Long Beach chapter of the American Guild of Organists could install new officers. One of the new officers made long and intense eye contact, and I returned it until I needed to click on the computer, and all of a sudden I felt intensely burning and the man left the room and the choir began to sing in words that did not seem to match the slides, singing a routine hymn not so plainly with soaring high notes, and I wondered if I put the wrong lyrics on the screen and felt disoriented, as the man left the room, and I felt like the room became engulfed in an auditory hallucination, because nothing was intelligible anymore--this song was not a hymn, but a cacaphony--and I knew that gaze did wonders to my gut. I drove off quickly to my friend’s house before Pride.
I convinced my straight friend to go to the bars for pride with me (her husband dropped us off). We started on one end of the street, walking down to the bars on the other. Crowds of people, hanging in bars, cheered with loud music. The streets filled with people as we walked. I was so happy. I saw those I know, I hugged some people, I kissed one on the street, one hugged me and picked me up. My friend and I stood under a disco ball. Lights strobed. We drank. We squeezed through crowds. We almost got tattoos (we will one day). And finally, her husband picked us up, bringing cookies and food, and we told him about the man who leaned in to whisper to my friend, but instead kissed, and then licked, her ear. Classic pride story, in my mind. We joked. They went to sleep. I went home, I slept and woke up for the church meeting the next morning.
It’s Been A Week
It’s been a week where I’ve been head-down blinders-on productive. Productive, but ungrounded, and sort of spinning around, agitated, stretched thin (I printed and submitted to an art show; I got a new camera and some lighting gear and a new tiny printer, and have been figuring out how to store it; I ordered some polaroid sheets that barely exist online (after typing in their name again, they probably do not do what I want them to do—a big disappointment and a project shattered); I began a slow large process of ‘rebranding,’ or just branding at all at first. I booked a few shoots and have had work on top of that—work where I spoke up in the church’s book club and the office administrator, later, asked me where I got my degree, which is somehow a suggestion, in my mind, that I should go to grad school, while the intern wants to send me to A/V training probably because I am too apathetic. All of these are good, but once, I did not quite see my life like this).
If there has been a focus to this week, it has been technology. Technology like a checklist. On what camera I’m using, on how to store it best with all my other gear (how many Pelican cases do I need! Kathy says, while we print, “I LOVE PELICAN CASES!”), on whether polaroid film can ever be infrared (including a long search into thermal-infrared cameras, how they’re used, why they’re used, and a few examples from Zone of Interest and ORA, but not, in fact, Call Me By Your Name), and briefly, getting me out of this mess entirely, the relationship between a technology and representation (an inescapable problem—c.f. “Physical and Material” in The World of Art: The Photograph as Contemporary Art). All this time, in this thinking hole of tedium (a certain circle of hell), like a technical list. The world has been going on around me.
So a few observations. (The only way to get out of that hell of tedium is to observe; there is no prescription out).
I drove home from a Hana Stretton concert last night, after sunset. She performed in the trees, while the sun descended behind her. The clouds held color. She rubbed her hands to keep them warm, while whispering into the microphone, playing acoustic guitar. Her music sounds like a quiet hum. She announced that this was her dream concert. To be among the trees reminded her of home. And at her dream concert, her only goal is to make people feel restful, like napping under the trees. If you find yourself laying down on the floor, closing your eyes…
Of course I thought of my week for a moment. Just a moment. And then I looked at the ground, unfocused my eyes, or just stared while the leaves on the ground in front of me moved in and out, like the earth’s sigh. Sigh. I watched myself let go.
I had told myself by the end of the week that I would be out of that thinking, technological hole (a particularly awful type of thinking). I drove home. Everyone that takes their work seriously should be familiar with the technology of their work. That is a no-brainer. But to be focused on that alone (this is an image-maker’s trap), on the aesthetics of a technique, as if that were enough (and gosh darn people do sure often treat that as enough) is to forget that there is a larger world taking place around us. That representation is more than just a stylization; it can be for our purposes, for our sense of the world and a sense of life.
I’m finding that starting with an idea, or a curiosity about the world, or a particular feeling or perspective, for me, must come before technology (of course these are not so neatly split). A feeling like a nap, a sense of contingency. Photos can come after.
It’s been a while
since I’ve updated this last. So let me just update very quickly.I have not been writing. I’ve been printing, photographing, and working. So the world spins around a bit, and the past week has especially been hectic, productive (in one of those ways where you don’t know what to do with your hands, so you dig in a bit too deep). I play ambient music to ground, but it feels noisy and saturated. Ironically, this entire time, I’ve thought that I cannot watch some of my favorite movies: they are too slow, with too much thinking and feeling, and now I just need to put my head down and be productive (I know this feeling will end; what an awful way to live).
So I think, before rooting out this feeling, that I should attach some images. I should put a timeline onto my weeks, and finally, as we all do, I need perspective.
There are some images I made; the ones on the left (the one of me and Yashuko Bush taken by Snooze) are from my exhibition on March 3rd, of LGBTQ people: gay and queer men. The rest are printed for fun; testing paper and concepts (shitty camera, sequencing, perspectives, how saturated can matted paper go). The triptych was submitted to an art showing. Thinking of putting things for sale.
So March Third until now has been a bit of a blur.
I think of some mystical terms, along a mystical path from a Sufi book I read five years ago. And two notable terms, used as if they were scientific, were “expansion” and “contraction.” These reflected inner states, supposedly. I have no idea what the author meant, so I put the book away five years ago and have not returned to it. But for the past few weeks, after a fever-dream encounter of trying to buy paint chips at a car paint store, I’ve returned to these words. I may be attempting a new reading, but I’ll try to explain...
...how, as an interior state, I felt “contracted,” as if the scope of my life narrowed, as if I could get things done, feeling completely and incontestably like myself, passionate with no foresight, when (as has been the case for the past couple weeks) I focus creatively, not reading much, and not feeling too social. The astrology app says this is normal. Bundle of emotions, and passion, going and going and going. Photographically, this means I can print and print and shoot and shoot, but I might teeter on burning out. I could fall in love, too, by the way.
Expansion is the feeling of looking at clouds. They come. They go. That’s it. Empty.
So I’ve dug into my archive (before last week), printed (last week, this week, etc.) worked and bought another camera, worked and printed and submitted to an art show, and have lost my bearings. It’s a bit Bataillian, unintended, no concept, like life is there and I am living like an unthinking animal--or is it machine--and I’m caught up in this sort of work season.
It’s scary and feels like risk to have the time to think, to conceptualize, to work on a problem, to think bigger than myself. To feel expansive instead of whatever feels blind and intuitive. I feel like I need to listen (hence ambient music) with an open heart and mind.
I listened to Krista Tippet speak to Justin Vernon today, while I was working at church. And it made me realize how silly my church job is. Justin Vernon talked about how he’s come back to the word “God,” as if it’s the only one that encapsulates a certain discourse, or the only way you can talk about the transcendent. It reminds me of what the pastor says, and a certain argument in religious studies. But Justin moved on from that, and both Justin and Krista are vulnerable, and Justin made me wonder about a vulnerability that is not confessional, not linked to wrongness or sadness or badness. A vulnerability, an opening up, to what (why close off in the first place)? Vulnerable to be aspirational, naïve, vulnerable to dream and think of a bigger life. Expansive.
If there is only one thing I remember from this entry, it is that those who are thoughtful must feel. And those who feel must be thoughtful if they are to feel themselves in a world around them. Susan Sontag (I finished one of those books in March...another thing in that blackout season of post-exhibition life) says something similar: thinkers aren’t killers. Thinking is feeling’s mileage, its longevity. Thinking is feeling’s memory.
Gesture
I got done with my final meeting for photo project. At least before the exhibition on Monday. And my professor met because he read my “didactic,” and said, “this is too academic,” and I said, “alright,” and wrote one five minutes before our meeting. I showed it to him, saying, “I need to get things done, so make this fast.” He read my artist statement (“what is gay and how does it land in your body,” I wrote that I asked my photographic subjects…and later…”in the absence of an essentialist theory of sexuality…”) and the professor said it was very good. “You need an elevator speech,” he said. I replied, “that’s easy,” and then said, “it’s a project dealing with gesture as a fundamental, but not stable, marker of sexuality and identity. Sexual identity, here, is constructed.”
And my professor asked, “what’s the title?” and I said, “Gest/Post-ure” because it focuses on how our bodies shape the identities we have, plus it’s a bit of a nod to a certain form of academic terminology, and he said, “oh no I like this question you raise, that one phrase you used earlier, the thing having to do with bodies: oh, there it is, ‘how does that land in your body?’ That should be the title.” I replied, “well that’s sort of terminology you find everywhere…I feel like I’ve heard that phrase…inhabiting bodies, things landing in bodies, things in relationship to bodies…all over the place. It’s cliché,” and he said, “how does that land in your body” (no punctuation) should be your title, and I said, “I already got my title printed,” and he said, “oh never mind never mind, but that should be your subtitle,” and I thought “ick,” and he said, “because when you’re born, right when you’re born, the first thing you do is touch. Touch is the first thing that happens to babies–babies need their mother’s touch” and I thought, “is this the time for this I have to go reprint my artist statement because you said mine sounded like a term paper earlier so I want to go and do that,” and he kept going, “touch is the first thing babies learn, and a baby needs their mother’s touch,” and I thought, “COME ON,” and he said, “and then the baby learns language,” and I thought, “absolutely the fuck not,” and he kept going, “so that a baby learns slowly touch and language, and a baby is constantly learning the world around them. The baby touches, the baby speaks, and the baby learns from their mother. But these things, gestures, this thing you focus on, those aren’t either of those–gesture is something that isn’t speaking nor touching. So…we’re getting into soul territory here,” and I wanted to slam my laptop shut, although he hits on a good point about the ambiguity of gesture, between (in Agamben’s terms) action and signification–here, analogously, touch and speech–and Agamben deals where the “uninitiated” into the critical-theory cult might call “soul” or “freedom.” (This is all retroactive thought.) “And we’re in soul territory here,” and I said, “oh boy,” and he said, “there’s not enough time to get into the soul, but a person who’s different” (what my professor calls gay people) “expresses himself through these ways that are baked in, that he’s born with, that are natural to him,” and I thought, “this is everything my project goes against,” and finally, he said, “so what you really mean, when you say that a sexuality ‘lands in the body,’ is that somehow, before birth, a person’s identity is given to them, it becomes part of their body–what you mean to say is that, by landing in their body–a person, instead of having a sexuality landing in their body, is expressing their sexuality–you’re not showing landing in body, but what they’re expressing, which had to have landed in their body at some point, which is what you’re trying to get at through gesture,” and I thought, “I have to go,” and said, “that’s a long elevator ride,” and he said, “well you already have a speech because you’ve thought of this,” and I said, “yeah,” and I began to think.
I began to think in the car today. I thought my professor, whom I do not know if I will speak to again, made a fundamental, but very representative and understandable misunderstanding. He thought, as many people think, that sexuality, especially if there is a project dealing with sexuality, must be natural, it must be an individual’s fate. And if something is inalterable; if someone is born with a sexuality and cannot change it, then it must be ethical. There’s an apologetic to this sort of thinking. A progressive apologetic. And I thought, “oh,” because, well, I wish sexuality were a choice, I thought, as I drove, stick shift into fifth gear, pedal to the metal, to meet with Ben the barista for my coffee before a shoot today–the same Ben, who, years ago, when we barista’d together, told me gay people were mentally ill and should pray that away.
So I talked to Ben (who has since changed), pulling out Call Me By Your Name, and we talked about jobs, moving into cars, whether corporate life is worth it, and all of the things, and I told him about my exhibition.
Of course sexuality is no choice, I thought, except for the bis, pans, and fluids. But to present sexuality as a choice–as something someone would or would not choose–to present gay as a complex cultural construction, dealing with masculinity, and present these desires as if I had chosen them, and to choose to interact with them continually–waking up each day deciding that gay people are good and worth my time–is what sets gay and queer culture up not as a fate like a sickness, but as a world worth building. A world worth choosing. And as long as people are either on defense–needing to present sexuality as a fact of the world, unalterable, and therefore (somehow), worthy of acceptance–or a short-term offense–gay is natural and biological therefore we are true and right–then, I don’t know, sexuality stays limited and literalist, and we would never get a book (nor movie) like Call Me By Your Name.
The argument behind gesture is that it puts a little bit of freedom into ethics, into so many things we see as determined and set as true. It wiggles ethics. And so this is what I did.
Break
I need a break from images, I think, so I read poetry by Mark Doty. “Sweet Machine” from Sweet Machine, a book where Doty is so himself, coloring description upon thick description, a language of surface glimmering. How many colors can you name? Mark Doty knows more. I take a break from images, but how can this be, except entirely literally, a break? I need a break because I’m constructing a project of pictures in which it is difficult to turn away, to find a rest for your gaze. I want to confront. I do not want the viewer to back away.
In 2003, Kate Bush writes a review of contemporary art photography. She, writing in the early 2000s, notices a trend that makes me check the date of Doty’s book. She notices that against “prohibitions against photographic exploitation of ‘others,’” photographers have returned to “stock subjects of liberal or humanist documentary: the representation of ‘real’ people whose lives have unfolded outside societal norms.” This time, she insists, the return is complex, raising questions about gaze and Otherness implicit in photography, instead of reifying our exoticizing glare.
In Doty’s “Sweet Machine,” we view a (tentatively labelled through another person’s whisper) “Crackhead,” rubbing himself through frantic gestures on a subway platform. Doty notices his baggy jeans, his hands rubbing up and down to his “skinny ass.” A boy exposed: Doty, with a self-conscious stretch of the imagination, calls him “lovely.” Now, onto the streets, Doty views bus advertisements. A model with a skinny torso that could have been the man from the subway becomes an advertisement, plastered all over. He represents “what we’re supposed to want,” and Doty notices how “the imagery aestheticizes.” The link between circulating (marketing, desiring) images of a body and the encounter with the abject finds a place in Doty’s poem.
“One never understands anything from a photograph,” says Susan Sontag. They don’t tell us much about the world. We just, according to her, accept the world as the camera records it. Understanding, instead, comes from contestation.
I think of the contestation my professor gave to my images. They were “too much.” A contestation against understanding, I thought, which is as good as photography gets. “How do you deal with such narrow-minded people?” my friends asked me.
I do not want a viewer to back away (but I speak too much of my own intentions). With time, even the most abject becomes touched with empathy.
Mild Hallucination
If the past few weeks have been a mild hallucination, it is because I have not spent the time to sit down reflect. Not only is Los Angeles on fire right now, but Tiktok, controversially, is about to turn illegal. So, Daniel texts me, I wait for him to pull up, and he pulls out his phone, with a new app Red Note—apparently, also, “little red book.” It’s a new Chinese Tiktok-imitating app. The Americans are flooding the app. “Welcome to our app,” multiple Chinese people say on video, as Daniel shows me his new endless scrolling feed. “This is insane,” I say. “It’s number one on the app store,” and Daniel shows me an app with Chinese characters scrawled on its icon. Half of the text I read is in Chinese. I stop looking, thinking of a video my friend sent me from the Food Network, where viewers count the length of each cut: one-second cuts consistently. Something about attention span, they said.
I put on a ten minute song to write this. It’s more difficult to listen to new music than it has been in the past. It’s more difficult to read new writing than it has been in the past. And while the days grow longer and longer, I do not feel like I’m growing. I feel like I’m learning how I will grow when I stop putting it on hold for a few months.
I try to think in photos now. I’m figuring out what a visual language is, but it’s too slippery for my mind. When I read, my mind cannot get a grip anymore. I write about Giorgio Agamben’s Notes on Gesture. I wish I had more time.
Nothing I read online seems real anymore, as if writing were ever real in the first place. It’s a digitally dissociated world screening before my eyes. I think if we could choose to create a fantasy, it would be better than the world we’ve made…
I watched an Instagram Reel yesterday. And a woman asked me which video was AI: the two looked nearly identical. Except in one, the woman had more makeup and her face looked more rigid and less expressive. So I said, “that one is AI,” and no, it was not. I thought it did not matter anymore. If I cannot tell the difference, what does it say about her?
I buy a Ruby Haunt recording online on Bandcamp. I got a trial for Apple Music today, after seeing consistent protests against Spotify. I opened the app. And it felt strange adding streaming music to the same library that my purchased music (which has been with me for so many years, that I regret it’s still around). I do not think trading one streaming service for another is a viable option for artists.
Seeing Apple Music with no music to stream yet is like having the option to opt out of social media before it even starts. Before we were all feed-junkies. It’s like I could go back in time and say, “streaming will only impoverish your listening habits: although streaming introduces breadth and algorithms and exploration to your ears, you will never, ever, listen to a song twice.” I know what I own now. I am content. I wonder about Red Note.
I am slowly going through my old playlists to buy each album, with the songs on them. It forces me to listen. Two days without coffee means an album or two singles. I listen to the Ruby Haunt album I just bought, with the song “Carrie.” On my little FLAC player on my computer that I’m using to type this, I feel a small amount of relief. I cannot share this music. I mean, I could. But I cannot push “share” and have it uploaded to a thousand tiny fractals of feeds. I want to tell my friend about this album. I will tell him tomorrow. We will watch a movie. I want to put my phone away, but it is difficult. I feel better after writing this, the hallucination deferred. Feeling like the more my writing seems like a journal, the more scattered life has become, and that it’s time to stop thinking in images, but to turn back to new music and new writing. My eyes are tired, so I will not edit this.
I tell Daniel that I think my style of writing is difficult for AI to imitate. It’s dense in terms of content. The style is more approachable. And Daniel says, “Chat GPT could do it,” and I get angry. I think I’ve fallen into a sort of despair.
I listen to Ruby Haunt. Life fuller please, I think, and wonder about a sort of digital truncation of experience. I think of Byung-Chul Han’s book on Non-Things (or was it The Scent of Time). Rage is all the rage for him. Rage, as a sort of negative and overwhelming, full energy, for Han, is, well, simply, go watch Fight Club: it’s cathartic, it’s antithetical to the ordering of our late-capitalist digital lives. Rage is probably what the arsonists felt, who started the fires in Los Angeles, walking around with blowtorches and destroying the environment and communities. Pendulum from numbness to rage. I listen to Ruby Haunt, and think I’m exempt.
“These little moments are all that we’ve got,” says Ruby Haunt, in a song that plays as I type this. I wish I could say something about the stars, or the universe, or the world around us; I wish I could think of life much bigger than myself right now. But all I can think of is community with a focused, intentional attention. “I’m trying to read more poetry,” I told Daniel, as he showed me Red Note. “It might be good to be away from the feeds,” I told him. “I used to put my phone away, and I’d be without it for a few days,” I said, “but I’ve gotten away from that practice. I need to get back in the habit.” Which is what I said years ago, before starting the habit.
Photo Galleries
Yesterday, I talked to Kathy. We looked at images. And Kathy talked about how, after wandering through a few galleries, pieces started to look bad. We entered a room at Bergamont Station, which is a cluster of art galleries.
In the room: still lives of fruit, burning. And paintings of houses on tableted arches; an abundance of gold foil; little paintings on what looked like the ends of benches. Almost pueblo-style, it looked religious to me. Kathy shrugged. “It looks intentional,” she said. I noticed the gold foil. “It looks like religious icons,” I said, and then, “the benches are sort of pew-style benches,” and “like a pueblo-mission style, with images of Los Angeles,” and Kathy all of a sudden had an entry point to the work. Everyone else started to interpret. It was an entry point that made the work engaging.
We exited the gallery, walking toward another, through an empty parking lot. “I was talking to Agatha,” (who is a photography professor) Kathy said, “and images do not excite me anymore. She said that’s just a part of getting older,” and I said, “I thought the same thing. I almost sold all my camera gear. But the other day, I saw an artist, and his work made me fall in love with photography again.” Kathy said, “well it’s just a part of getting older.” And I wondered whether that was true.
In a class four years ago, I learned about novelty through meditation. Novelty, according to these meditation practitioners, was the first thing to let go of, while we sit and watch our thoughts. We’re attracted to surface, to shine, to chasing after glamour and what seems new to us (which is what photography is great at, especially as marketing). For art, it’s a chase after the original, the provocative, and the authentic. But, as part of this stage in meditation, we will be trapped in our own desire if we are continually drawn to these states of mind. Novelty, like this, is exhausting, keeping you trapped in your own desire—so they say.
We walked through the parking lot towards the fine art photo gallery, looking at pictures of dogs. John Divola on Display made me smile. “Look!” I said. “It’s Divola’s work—I love this.” Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert.
“I’m not familiar with him,” Kathy, the one no longer excited about images said, and I said, “oh he’s big, and I love the movement, and the attention to the chase.” Although so many others can take a photo of a blurry dog—I certainly have—there is a little joy in staring at these prints, with the energy of dogs running. They might not feel difficult nor original, but they have a good energy to them.
We exit to the next room, to the gallery I’ve been looking for. Bryan Schutmaat’s Sons of the Living. And Kathy said, “this looks like Ansel Adams,” and I said, “yeah, a big critique is that these medium/large format desert wanderers all look the same. It’s become a trend. So what differentiates an artist from their genre? How do you transcend the feeling of being just another photo in the same world that others also photograph?”
There is an answer to this, but no one I was with answered. I pointed to some formal decisions, of printing, tonality, and composition that make a work dynamic. The answer, I think, is to look at a work in its own particularity (this might look like Ansel Adams, but what makes it different?), breaking down its elements, and its presentation, and the choices an artist would have to make to present a work. “Look at the tension here,” I told someone, pointing to a light spot at the edge of the frame. “To the way it moves your eye, in contrast to the other edges; the way a fallen pear next to those standing works through repetition and release, adding movement to the frame.” You never graduate from looking at composition, even if it feels naïve to continually point it out. It would be like saying you graduate from language. You must see a work as a language and then it will hit.
We drove to an exhibition of William Eggleston’s dye prints. The images radiated color. And Kathy noted how the composition was technically “bad,” and I pointed to an image I had seen before as an example of what some call anti-composition.
“Everything is composed in one way or another,” I said. “It’s sort of a feature of photography to feel accidental; it’s difficult to do that, maintaining a sense of referentiality, with painting or sculpture.” We looked at an Eggleston print. “Just because an image might not feel balanced properly does not mean that it is not composed. Who determines what proper balance is?” Kathy, at the end, after taking another lap to look at the “formal elements” of the pictures, said, “I feel like I learned how to become a better photographer,” even though we all admitted that Eggleston’s prints felt like an early Instagram the 1970s. The photos transcended that sort of nomination.
I feel like I’m always too late to discovering photographers. Last week, I found Mark Mcknight’s photographs. I stared and stared on a computer screen, so I bought his monograph. I was excited.
I had been asking questions of “what counts as pornography.” I had been asking people about photography outside of the homogenizing image culture of Instagram; or photography outside of chiseled gay male bodies; image culture outside of the same trends I had seen across queer photography. I wondered what a post-Mapplethorpe provocation would be in photography. And I wondered where my own work, on a queer photo project, fit into the history of queer photography. I stumbled onto Mcknight with these questions wandering in my mind. The photos affected me.
A writer from the LA Times, according to Wikipedia, wrote “150 years of the medium at once embraced, absorbed, and reworked.” Which is a way of saying, Mcknight played within his genres, synthesizing and transcending it. No work exists outside history, and the best work embraces it.
To answer my question to Kathy from earlier: treat photography not as a surface to dazzle—that may come on its own—but as an attention to our own curiosity. Photography’s strength is its ability to reference a world (its sticky referential function!); if you are curious about a world, then photography, as a visual language, might articulate an answer.
At the end of the day, Kathy told me that I should get an MFA in art photography, if I choose to go to grad school. And I told her that I’d choose between religious studies and art history, trying to focus on how art shares a structure of religion. It’s a structure where we expect to turn our brain off and just be affected by a work, like walking into a religious service. That somehow art has a power to break beyond the discursive--or at least that’s what we expect from it (think Malevich; think abstract expressionism; think Sonia Delauny). But in reality, all this unmediation; all this desire to be affected (Mark Doty: we sometimes give up our own agency as viewers to try to allow a work to impress upon us) will only make us tired and lose our excitement. We bring an expectation of transcendence without language, and are continually disappointed.