A handful of people have messaged me today asking if I accept submissions for FlakPhoto publication. The answer, of course, is yes! Please email me anytime.

I regularly feature the photographers, books, and projects that come across my desk here in the newsletter and on Instagram.

Keeping up with correspondence is my Achilles’ heel, but I am always looking, and I love seeing new work. If you’re making something cool, please let me know.

Email is always the best way to reach me: flakphoto@gmail.com

Speaking of submissions: I’m still looking for COLOR pictures, and I’ll be curating a new COLOR series this summer — Stay tuned.

Okay, I hope that clears things up! The sun is shining here in Madison today, and it’s gorgeous outside. Have a terrific weekend, folks. Take care!

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Does anyone else remember Hamburger Eyes?

Last week, I was in San Francisco on a work trip, and, as is typical for me, I spent my free time walking, looking, and making pictures. By chance, I stumbled upon a poster in a bookstore window announcing a retrospective exhibition commemorating 25 years of Hamburger Eyes. Happy accidents like this are so sweet, and as the sun set over the bay, I made my way to the San Francisco Public Library to see the show before it closed for the day.

Ray Potes was a major inspiration for me in my early days as a blogger. Like me, Ray was exploring the internet's possibilities for discovering, curating, and showcasing photography. I was fascinated with digital publishing, but Ray was always committed to the printed page, and he published Hamburger Eyes photo zines at a dizzying pace. We collaborated on a FlakPhoto feature years ago, but lost touch at some point. Such is life, right?

The Continuing Story of Life on Earth: 25 Years of Hamburger Eyes is excellent, and seeing the show was a lovely walk down memory lane. Hamburger Eyes is legendary in some photography circles, and I consider it an institution, so seeing this show in person was a genuine treat.

I managed to grab a beer with Ray on Friday afternoon, which was the first time we had ever met in person after corresponding all those years ago. He’s the real deal: passionate about photography, always creating, and dedicated to promoting the people he believes in. If you are in the Bay Area, I hope you’ll make time to see this show before it closes in September. You won’t regret it.

You can read more about Ray’s work and the exhibition in this LensCulture interview with Jim Casper. Finally, consider buying a copy of Ray’s latest publication, which doubles as the exhibition catalog and features 161 photographers featured over the years. Order HAMBURGER EYES - THE FIRST 25 YEARS.

That’s all for today, folks — thanks for looking. Congratulations, Ray!

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Tell us about yourself. Where are you from, and where do you live now?

I was born in a small village in Devon, UK. I spent the last eight years living in Los Angeles, but I’ve just moved back to Europe and now live in Madrid.

Could you describe your work? What inspired you to pursue filmmaking?

I got into filmmaking because I loved cinema, was fascinated by photojournalism, and noticed that people liked sharing their stories with me. When I was younger, I didn’t feel confident in my writing, so I started making documentaries instead.

I’ve made many different types of films, and now I also write fiction features. What ties my work together is a focus on character-driven storytelling. Someone once called my work very thoughtful. They said it during a commercial shoot and maybe didn’t mean it as a compliment, but that’s how I see the world. If my work shows that, I’m happy with it.

Do you have a particular approach to imagemaking? What’s your style?

My imagemaking is always serving a bigger story. But not a story in the sense of plot — story in the sense of character and what we are feeling. What do the images say about the character and what they are living? What emotional shading can they give?

And what kind of information do the images give that allows us to connect on a deeper level? Do they reveal something the character doesn’t know? Or put them in a context that changes what we know about them? So they aren’t just illustrative, but so that they place you there IN the film.

Because my films focus on people, I think my images are an expressive extension of what it’s like to be with that person. The ideas and texture of their world are a big part of that, and I love building observational details that give us a sense of real, living space.

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Are you working on any projects at the moment?

I always try to have a lot of different things that I’m working on at the same time. When one project gets stuck, switching to another helps me stay excited and energized.

I’m currently in the midst of shooting a feature-length documentary about a group of people around the world trying to decipher the language of birds. It’s about the power of curiosity and empathy and dedicating your life to a state of constant wonder.

I’m writing a fiction feature film that feels more personal than anything I’ve done before, which makes it an interesting challenge. All my films reflect my view of the world, but this one is inspired by our recent move. The idea came from a conversation with a filmmaker friend about my experiences and the time I spent with my daughter processing things. She said, ‘I hope you make a film about child psychology’. It’s not literally autobiographical, but it has so much that I’ve been thinking about — so much of my grappling to stay a caring, functioning human being — that it’s drawing on my life in a very direct way. That’s new to me and both exciting and a bit scary.

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And I’m relaunching my series of short documentaries called Little Scraps of Paper. It’s a set of portraits of artists and where they keep their ideas. We’re shooting new films right now, but we’re still open to suggestions for artists or other creative people to feature — so if you know someone you think would be insightful and a good fit, let me know! The series has always grown from people telling me to check out someone who is special in their eyes.

Oh! We also just released a small book of photographs from my time making the film with Saul Leiter.

How do you stay inspired?

I think there’s inspiration to be found everywhere, but you have to put yourself in a position to be open to it. For me, that means actively seeking out different rhythms to my day that force me to look around.

I get a lot of inspiration from books, films, music, and art. But the more I can experience physically rather than online, the better. I find myself trapped if I spend too much time on my computer or phone — I feel stuck and need to get outside and experience the world. My solution is usually a long walk through areas I don’t necessarily know so well. If I can combine that with a museum or a bookshop, and then sit in a random café and watch people, that fills me up.

That practice of training your senses and being alert to the world around you is an important part of who I am and how I work. It’s something I take seriously in a way (while still trying to really enjoy it because it’s the most wonderful way to live).

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Tell us about an artist who has intrigued you recently.

Lately, I’ve been really interested in the paintings of Guim Tió. They have a lot of mystery and a strong sense of place that I find special.

Show us a picture that moved you recently. Tell us about it.

Aaron Huey recently posted an Instagram photo of a scene he captured in Iran in 1999. It shows a young woman kissing her grandmother, almost launching herself forward to do it. He wrote about how the family took him in after finding him among protesters. Beyond the obvious humanizing power of photography like this, the photo’s warmth and familiarity made me think about family, mortality, and how closely they are connected.

Do you like music? What have you been listening to lately?

​​I’m somebody who likes music on almost all the time.

This morning I woke up and put on the new Alexis Taylor album, then I wanted to listen to “Cucurrucucu” by Caetano Veloso, but I couldn’t get the INXS song “Never Tear Us Apart” out of my head, so I had to play it.

Recently, I’ve been loving The New Eves, the soundtrack to Sentimental Value, Dry Cleaning’s last album; the new De La Soul album; and the Nebraska recordings Bruce Springsteen released last year.

I collect photography books. Can you recommend a photobook that you love?

This is a tough question! I love having photography books around me—for reference, for pleasure, and for the sense of possibility they bring.

José Luis Carrillo’s Los Hijos del Ciervo is a beautiful book, with embossed text on the back. And it’s a great size and length. It has a sense of myth and magic, and a framing of the project that makes it feel much more original and authored than a pure documentation of place. It’s about a valley in Spain known as Spanish Siberia, which the Celts once populated. They worshipped the deer deity Cerunnos. And this book is, as José describes it, about “the Sons of the Deer, legitimate descendants of Cerunnos, the styled god, venerated in this region as 'the king of the forest”

The images blend daily ritual, mysticism, and a strong sense of place, which I find really captivating. I’m inspired by any art that weaves mythology into real life — not in a religious sense, but in a way that shows how our rituals, sacred sites, and stories shape who we are today.

Can I also recommend Isadora Kosofsky’s Senior Love Triangle? Such an intimate, powerful bit of storytelling. I’m in awe of how it’s laid out, and also very much inspired by the tenderness within.

Have you read any good books?

I’ve been absolutely loving On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. It’s science fiction in concept, about a woman who slips through time and wakes up to the eighteenth of November every morning.

I’ve just read the third part, and I love the depth and detail she conjures, the realism in an unreal world, and the way she draws you into the story.

She explores this central idea in a way that isn’t driven by plot, but by this deep exploration. The fact that there are seven books in the series shows her commitment to this approach. That depth made me connect with the story in a personal way.

Each book is also manageably short. I spent last summer only reading books under 150 pages, and it was very exciting and liberating.

Finally, show us something cool not related to photography. Surprise us!

I’m really into this simple, yet beautiful and complex, card game called Codex Naturalis. It’s impeccably designed — both aesthetically and as a game. You can take it with you on journeys, and the games are relatively quick. There’s something magical about picking up a game and thinking, ‘This looks incredibly complicated, it will take forever,’ and 30 seconds later, you understand it and are working out strategies.

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About the filmmaker

Tomas Leach is an award-winning filmmaker from the UK. His first feature documentary, In No Great Hurry, about legendary photographer Saul Leiter, was released to critical acclaim. His second, The Lure, which was executive produced by Errol Morris, explored a wild treasure hunt in the Rockies.

He has directed films with gold-winning Olympians and prison baseball teams, exhibited work in galleries around the world, and shot commercials for Adidas, NASA, Ikea, and more.

He writes the Little Scraps of Filmmaking newsletter on Substack. Follow him on Instagram @tomasleach.

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When I think of Amanda Greene, I think of the American South. She lives in Georgia, and her images are dripping with Southern vibes. Some photographers are like that — their work is so uniquely tied to a region that it shapes how you see the place.

I first learned about Amanda’s photography years ago at my buddy Mark’s wedding in Palm Springs. Small world: It turns out she was a friend of his fiancée, Kristina, and I wanted to hear more. One thing led to another, and I ended up meeting Amanda online, like so many photography folks in the FlakPhoto universe. We’ve stayed in touch over the years, and she’s always working on something cool.

Amanda messaged me last week to announce that she was making the leap to Substack and would experiment with a newsletter as part of her MFA studies in narrative nonfiction. Photographers who write are special because they can show and tell, which isn’t always easy. 

I’ve been enjoying Amanda’s dispatches and thought you might, too. If a photographer who writes nonfiction appeals to you, you’ll dig her stuff.

Amanda Greene

Saeed Jones Takes Us To Church

When Saeed Jones walks onto the green-carpeted chancel at First Baptist Church of Decatur I think, “There’s my friend!”, then remind myself that he doesn’t know me from shit. My two oldest friends are on either side of me. Phoebe, who traveled down from Princeton for my birthday, thumbs through a Baptist hymnal, looking for any song that seems familiar…

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24 days ago · 1 like · Amanda Greene

I subscribed to Amanda’s newsletter and was poking around her website again today. It’s a treasure trove of vibrant imagery, a blend of commercial, editorial, documentary, and personal work. There’s a lot to look at — her Elvis series is particularly fun. She’s on Instagram, too; you can follow her at @amandagreenephotographs. 

I’ll leave it there today. If you like what you see, please let me know in the comments. And thanks so much to the nearly six hundred readers who responded to my virtual artist talk poll yesterday. I appreciate the feedback.

Take care, friends, and have a great week!

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Hey, friends, just a short note today. I want to hear your opinion.

Kristen and I spent the morning discussing social media, its obvious problems, and its limitations for community connection. For many years, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and now Bluesky, Threads, and Substack have provided meaningful opportunities for me to connect with photo folks around the world. But things are changing.

Since I don’t live in one of the world’s photography centers, social media is a significant community hub that connects me with my people — I know many of you can relate. These social platforms still provide some value, yet they worsen every year: clogged with video ads, less focused on photography than ever, and increasingly driven by corporate algorithms with interests of their own.

It’s a bummer, and I’m trying to find alternatives to so much scrolling that might offer the nourishing community connections I used to find on these platforms.

Lately, I’ve been revisiting the idea of organizing a virtual photography event series that brings small groups together to hear artists present their work in an online forum. During the pandemic, virtual events were abundant, but I appreciate that most of us are trying to spend less time on screens, not more.

I can’t tell: has the virtual event ship sailed?

Hosting a curated talk series would be fun for me, and I imagine photographers would appreciate the opportunity to share their work with a new audience. What do you think?

Thanks in advance for sharing your opinion with me. This poll isn’t a perfect science, but it will give me some sense of your enthusiasm for this idea. If you prefer, you can leave me a comment or email me directly with your feedback.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you. Cheers!

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Are you familiar with Art Shay?

Like many photographers, I know Shay’s name but not much about his work. I definitely have more to learn. Luckily, there’s a new documentary about Shay coming soon, and it looks great. Ken Hanson reached out to me the other day with news about the project. Here’s some background:

This film was conceived in 2013. Director/Producer Ken Hanson was researching photographers for a music project when introduced to Art Shay on a Zoom call. “At one point, Art shared his desktop,” Hanson recalls. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought I had a pretty good handle on twentieth-century photography. But I was amazed at the breadth and quality of Art’s work. I immediately thought this guy deserved to be in the pantheon of W. Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Gordon Parks.” That’s when Ken, Jack Davidson, and Dave Myszewski developed a friendship with Art and set out to tell his story.

You can find more about the movie on the Art Shay: An America So Real website. And if you’re near Chicago this week, there’s a special film preview at Gallery VICTOR on Thursday, May 14. The event includes a sneak peek at the film in progress, a signed print auction, and a talk with the filmmakers.

I wish I could be there! RSVP here.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to show the film in Madison when it comes out next year. I’ll leave you with this gift link: Shay’s New York Times obituary is a great place to start if you’re unfamiliar with his work.

Take care, friends, and have a great week!

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Hey friends! Just a bit of seasonal housekeeping.

Could you please reply to let me know you’ve received this message?

Email algorithms can be unpredictable, and if you haven’t opened or replied to a FlakPhoto newsletter lately, we might lose touch.

Your response trains the email gods to deliver future updates straight to your primary inbox — and rescues FlakPhoto from the dreaded spam/promotions folder purgatory.

I’m lining up some new photography features, and I’d hate for you to miss out just because of some technical issues with AI.

Simply hit reply with a quick “Got it!” or drop me a comment below.

Thanks so much, and apologies for the interruption. I appreciate it!

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Well, my allergies are back, and my nose is stuffy, which means it’s Springtime in Madison. I thought I’d do something a little different with this week’s Monday Muse and point you in the direction of a show of spring pictures I curated here a while back.

There is a LOT to look at here — forty photographers picturing the season.

I’ve become a middle-aged guy who makes pictures of flowers, so these photos really inspired me. I hope they inspire you, too. I’d love for more people to see this work, so please share the link with your friends.

See Spring Pictures

That’s all for now. Take care, enjoy the season, and have a great week!

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When I was nine years old, I broke my wrist and missed basketball camp, so I had to find a new summer activity. Photography class wasn’t the only option, but it was the one I chose. In that class, alongside big kids from junior high, I took pictures with my mom’s Instamatic and developed the 126 film in a real-life darkroom. Magic!

A year later, my dad let me commandeer his SLR, and my pictures improved. I was serious enough about this new hobby that Dad built a makeshift darkroom in our laundry closet. A plywood board across the washing machine held developing trays, and a shelf by the water heater held a little Bogen enlarger. I was 10, maybe 11.

Lest we get bogged down in the minutiae of my photographic journey, suffice it to say that photography has been central to my life for as long as I can remember. I’ve been a student of the medium — and a grad student, teacher, and working professional — forever. It’s all I’ve ever known. This peculiar medium is so intertwined with my identity that I genuinely don’t know who I’d be without it.

That long preamble was necessary so that when I tell you I’m tired of equipment and technique, you’ll know I’m not simply too lazy to learn. I’ve studied so much about photography that I find myself back where I started, when the most fun I could think of was pointing and shooting with mom’s Instamatic. After a lifetime studying equipment and technique, I would like to try a different approach to making good photographs. I think I’ve been going about it all wrong.

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The photoblogosphere (like the world of print publishing it replaced) revolves around gear. YouTubers and bloggers and online publications — the places that garner the eyeballs advertisers love — talk about pixel pitch and bit depth and the shape of aperture blades. And sure, those things are important. But I think we may be collectively missing the forest for the trees; I am, at least. It’s easy to get so caught up in the tools that I forget about the work. If my goal is to make something interesting rather than something sharp, I don’t think I can keep focusing on tools and techniques.

If image quality were the primary determinant for great photographs, the list of “greatest photographs ever” would be filled with pictures from this year. In fact, the most exceptional photographs in the history of photography were largely made with equipment and techniques considered rudimentary today. Steichen’s Flatiron building, Capa’s D-Day invasion, and, as I wrote recently on my own Substack, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. It’s surely in the discussion among the greatest photographs ever, and it’s out of focus.

So if image quality isn’t the decider, what is? Hell if I know. I’ve only been studying this stuff for four decades. I’m gonna need more time.

As Andy pointed out via Peter Hoffman, maybe it’s the punctum that matters most. This is as good an answer as I can come up with. What makes a picture great might be any number of things — sometimes it is about masterful technique — but the ones that move me most possess an ethereal combination of emotion and context. I like to think of it as a distinctly human magic that happens when special things come together, impossibly, at just the right moment, and you’re there, ready, with your finger on the button.

If I’ve learned anything from the many world-class photographers I’ve interviewed,1 it’s that they tend to tackle the technical challenges of photography and then move on, focusing their attention on more essential matters. They know equipment and technique are important, but don’t consider them the most important. These things are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

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I recognize that my job as a commercial photographer has also contributed to this technical fatigue. After 30-some years of retouching images in Photoshop, I’ve become desensitized to refinement. I refine my work daily, which may make me less interested in overly polished pictures. When the rough edges get sanded off, I begin to lose interest. It puts some distance between me and the thing that most interests me: a straight photograph.

25 years ago, my graduate thesis was a naive rejection of photography as a documentary medium. In an effort to find a Mondrianesque type of “pure creation,” I hoped to free the medium such that viewers no longer felt the need to see a photograph and ask, “What is it?” It’s a nice idea, and it can be done well (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Christian Schad, Adam Fuss, et al.). Still, in large part, photography’s most interesting power is found in its ability to record the physical world. People love to talk about how photographs lie all the time. But they also tell the truth in a way no other medium can. There’s a reason we hire wedding photographers rather than wedding sketch artists.

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It used to be really difficult to make a technically excellent picture. With that mysterious black box, unforgiving film, the mathematics of bellows compensation, the chemistry of time, temperature, and agitation, making a sharp picture — much less a beautiful one — was a real achievement.

Now my phone makes beautiful, sharp pictures with very little input from me. So it’s harder for me to be impressed by a technique that no longer feels like an achievement. That’s not to say it isn’t beautiful; it just isn’t rare.

Everything’s beautiful, and I still don’t care. I gather I’d better look elsewhere if I’m going to find meaning in my photographs.

My approach to finding what matters, what moves me, is to try to eliminate all the things I’ve determined do not. I’m starting by stripping away refinement, removing even the implication of perfection, eliminating the fussiness of heavy processing and presets. Even meticulous composition can strike me as overly produced. Can’t we just raise the camera to our eye, press the button, and call it a day?

That’s what I’ve been doing on my Instagram for quite some time (inasmuch as I do anything there). The real place to see this work is on my Billstagram. It’s filled with phone photos, mostly straight off the sensor.2 It may be the kind of thing that those in search of perfection wouldn’t give a second thought. But for people like me — or is it just me? — this stuff hits the spot. It’s exactly what I’m looking for. The lightest touch. Permanent seeing.

I take my camera (er, phone) out into the world, look through it, press the button, and call it a day. Open the magic box, let the light in, keep it forever. I think I might be on to something.

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There’s a kind of purity in pointing and shooting. Why mess with it? Why use Photoshop or AI or even presets to “improve” these images? Why spend rent money on a lens that will make my pictures sharper if Migrant Mother is out of focus?

Of course, sharpness and dynamic range have their place. The history of photography is filled with technical achievements that help explain why some photographs have staying power. But if it means I’m spending one minute focused on things that won’t make my work more meaningful, then I don’t want to think about these things at all. I guess that means I’m done with equipment and technique. I’m throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I know. But it might be necessary — not forever, just for now — until I finally learn to make pictures that are meaningfully, lastingly, good. Not sharp, but good.

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About the author

Bill Sawalich is a commercial and editorial portrait photographer in St. Louis. He publishes a newsletter called Art + Math, where he writes about photography and the business of being creative. His work has appeared in publications such as Outdoor Photographer, Digital Photo Pro, and McSweeney’s, and he taught studio photography at the University of Missouri - St. Louis for 11 years. Learn more at sawalich.com.

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Well, no sooner had I touched down in Madison after a wonderful two weeks of hiking in Portugal than I came down with a cold. I’ve been laid up at home all weekend and am still dragging today, so this post will be brief.

Since I’ve been feeling sorry for myself, I decided to lift my spirits by looking at Adam Ekberg’s photography this morning. Do you know his work? Adam is one of my favorite artists, and his pictures always make me smile.

We tend to think about photography as documenting events in the world, but Adam’s images document things he makes happen in the world. Adam's images are whimsical, wonderful happenings. I love them.

Waltz Books published his first monograph, The Life of Small Things, in 2015. The book may be out of print; if you can find a copy, grab it. Adam’s website is a treasure trove of visual goodies — I hope you’ll make some time to explore his work this week.

I’ll leave you with this: interviewed Adam on his podcast earlier this year. You can listen to their conversation and learn more about him here:

George Laufenberg

On the Other Side of Boredom

“I loafe and invite my soul…

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4 months ago · 6 likes · 3 comments · George Laufenberg

Okay, that’s all for now — it’s good to be back! Fingers crossed I’ll kick this cold in a few days. Take care of yourselves, and have a great week!

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Hey, friends, just checking in: How’s everybody doing out there?

I’ve been mainly offline for the past two weeks, hiking with Kristen in Portugal. We had a blast, walked more than 75 miles, and made a ton of pictures. We’re back home in Madison now, so I wanted to reconnect.

I hope you all are doing well wherever you are in the world.

Unfortunately, severe hailstorms hit our near east side neighborhood last week, so today we’re dealing with the aftermath. Oof. The vacation is definitely over!

I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled photography program, including a new Monday Muse, next week. Thanks, as always, for looking — I appreciate it!

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Sometimes it’s all about slowing down and looking closely.

I started reading Richard Quinney’s For the Time Being: Ethnography of Everyday Life on Sunday, and he caught my eye with a handful of sentences about attention, which many of you know is a hobbyhorse of mine. Richard writes:

We work, we play, we sleep, we love, we walk the streets from place to place — such an ordinary existence. But if we let the ordinary escape our attention and our care, we miss life itself. Much, in other words, depends on the mundane. Any sense of the extraordinary is grounded first of all in ordinary experience. With imagination, the mundane and the sublime are one…The meaning of our existence is in the details of being alive. For the time being is everything.

Doesn’t that about sum it up?

And what could be more mundane, more ordinary than a simple garden snail? Quinney’s insight was timely, because the other day I asked Bobby Beasley if we could show this image of his in the Monday Muse. I don’t know about you, but I find snails delightful and, to be honest, magical. Kristen and I read Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s illness memoir, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, last fall, which might have had something to do with Bobby’s image catching my eye. I asked Bobby what inspired him to make the picture, and he replied:

There is a cooking apple tree at the end of my mum and dad’s garden that grows the most gigantic fruit.

Throughout August, the fruits seem to double in size!

I’ll call past most weeks for a cuppa and if it’s sunny, a nosy round the garden.

Me and my dad will always see how the apples are coming along and earmark ones that look to be monsters in the making.

That week, I was eye-to-eye with a snail, probably doing the same thing.

It’s nice when things connect like this. Something I love about photography is how it helps us to see. I’ve learned to appreciate the quotidian details of the real world by photographing them, and I know many of you can relate. Richard’s essay and Bobby’s image spoke to me today, and I hope they resonate with you. Sometimes it’s good to notice what you notice, especially if it’s something ordinary like a garden snail.

I’m a big fan of Bobby’s work, and I hope you’ll check him out. You can explore his website and follow him on Instagram. He’s got a brilliant eye for color, and his pictures are tons of fun. Take a look when you have time this week. Cheers!

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It’s my birthday today — I’m 48. Time keeps moving, doesn’t it?

I’m feeling good about getting older, and I can’t complain. The world may be a mess, but life in our little corner of the universe is fine. We’re healthy and happy, surrounded by good friends. These are the things that truly matter in life.

Last year, my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, and my sisters and I spent a week in our Wisconsin hometown. My folks still live in the house where we grew up, and my mom occasionally sends me home with little treasures from the past.

A few months ago, she gave me a box of old stuff, and I'm reminded again how powerfully pictures connect us to our memories. I don’t remember posing for this photo, but I do remember loving the grand piano at my Grandma Adams’ house. I had forgotten all about it until I saw this image. Photography really is a time machine.

I also forgot about this: in sixth grade, we were assigned to write an autobiography, and I titled mine “The Life and Times of Andy Adams: April 1, 1978 - Present,” with this photo pasted on the cover. Even at twelve, I was writing with pictures. What a little goofball! Let me tell you, this thing is a riveting read.

At brunch last weekend, we talked about how creativity nourishes us. Publishing FlakPhoto definitely fulfills me, and I’m grateful to write for you here. I’ve been reading about purpose and longevity lately. Today, I’m reflecting on how much I enjoy doing this photo work. It’s meaningful, and it makes me happy.

So, thank you for reading FlakPhoto and sharing your images and ideas with me each week! You all inspire me more than you know, and I really appreciate our connection.

Stay well, friends. I hope you have a wonderful day — Take care!

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Spring is springing here in Madison, which means sunlight and color are returning to our world again. The grass isn’t green just yet, but we know it’s coming. It wasn’t a particularly difficult winter, but I can tell that our spirits have been brighter as we emerge from this latest hibernation. It feels good.

I woke up today with tons of energy and spent some time looking at Bill Armstrong’s book, All A Blur: Photographs from the Infinity Series, this morning. I have been following Bill’s work for years, and I suspect some of you are familiar with his photography. His blurry pictures are a welcome reprieve from so much high—definition imagery. I’ve written about “slow looking” before, and seeing with patience isn’t always easy.

Much of the time, we expect photography to teach us something about the world. The camera describes what it sees with precision and accuracy, even if it occasionally lies. But sometimes clarity is overrated, and it’s encouraging to remember that photography can do more than document. Staring into Bill’s abstracted color fields is calming and meditative. Here’s how he describes his work:

My unique process of appropriating images and subjecting them to a series of manipulations—photocopying, cutting, painting, re-photographing—transforms the originals and gives them a new meaning in a new context. Extreme blurring makes the edges within the collages disappear, so the photographs appear to be seamless, integrated images.

This sleight of hand allows me to conjure a mysterious tromp l'oeil world that hovers between the real and the fantastic. It is a world just beyond our grasp, where place may be suggested, but is never defined, and where the identity of the amorphous figures remains in question. It is a world that might exist in memory, in dreams, or, perhaps, in a parallel universe yet unvisited.

The nature of visual perception intrigues me: how the eye continually tries to resolve these images, but is unable to do so, and how that is unsettling. And I am drawn to the idea that we can believe something is real while knowing it is illusory; that the experience of visual confusion, when the psyche is momentarily derailed, is what frees us to respond emotionally.

If all of this sounds intriguing, you should really explore Bill’s work. All a Blur is a beautiful printed doorstop of a book, featuring more than 300 images across as many pages. It is an epic work that begs repeat readings.

You see more of Bill’s photography here and on the CLAMP website. Finally, if you’re on Instagram, you can follow Bill @billarmstrongphoto. I know he’ll appreciate the audience.

I hope you are well today, friends. Take care of yourselves, and have a great week!

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Tell us about yourself. Where are you from, and where do you live now?

I was born in Donetsk, Ukraine, and moved to NYC with my family when I was eleven. That was 1991, and I’ve been in New York City ever since, currently living in the East Village.

Could you describe your photography? What inspired you to pursue this art form?

A lot of my work is a visual extension of my social psychology studies, and has been described as cultural anthropology. I am drawn to repeating themes of group behavior, subcultures, social masks, self-presentation, and the idea of leisure.

As a child, I used to draw, paint, and write poetry, and dreamt of becoming an artist. But for a family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, that wasn’t an option. My mom encouraged me to become either a doctor or a lawyer, and I’m using “encourage” as a euphemism. For my undergrad, I went to NYU to pursue my mom’s dream of me becoming a doctor, and I graduated with degrees in pre-med and psychology.

As graduation loomed closer, I became crippled with anxiety and took the Medical College Admission Test with the same excitement as if I were committing myself to prison. That year, I picked up my first camera and started photographing obsessively. A few years later, I told my parents I had decided to become a photographer. It took a long time for them to come to terms with that.

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Do you have a particular approach to imagemaking? What’s your style?

The hardest thing is to get away from myself and see things differently, so I like to keep experimenting and shifting my style to avoid repeating the same photo over and over. I get obsessed with techniques and ideas and pursue them until I get good and/or bored. But whether I use strobes or continuous lighting, experimental techniques or straight documentary, my work always skews to the dramatic.

Are you working on any projects at the moment?

A lot of my recent editorial work revolves around portraiture, both remote and on location. You can read about some of these shoots in my newsletter: How I Photographed 50 Remote Portraits Of Workers Fired by the Trump Administration For The Atlantic and Favorite Portraits of Women I Took in 2025.

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How do you stay inspired?

Music, film, art, and anything and everything that I am curious about at the moment. I like going down rabbit holes and getting good at new skills, which keeps me rigorous and inspired and translates to my work (right now, I am deep into a coffee obsession, learning various ways to brew it). My partner is a magician, so I have been incorporating magic techniques and theories into my portraiture. And just for fun, I have Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards.

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Tell us about an artist who intrigues you.

Denis Villeneuve’s eerie infra-red scene in Dune 2 hasn’t left my mind since I saw it and has been inspiring me to experiment with new aesthetics. I am also obsessed with The Avalanches, an Australian group of musicians who are masters of the musical genre Plunderphonics. Plunderphonics takes traditional sampling and elevates it to mind-blowing heights. The Avalanches sift through thousands of old records, gathering the tiniest of fragments and combining them into something entirely different and original, an electronic musical tapestry.

Show us a picture that moved you recently. Tell us about it.

Nadav Kander’s portrait of Rebecca Ferguson for New York Magazine stopped me in my tracks when I first saw it. The strange color palette, slight motion blur, and Rebecca’s chilling gaze all come together to achieve a stark emotional resonance.

Do you like music? What have you been listening to lately?

My love language is music and playlists. John Cusack in High Fidelity is my spirit animal. I have one mega-playlist that I’ve been building for years and that I put on whenever I am too lazy to look for new things, or when guests come over. It can work both as foreground and background, so the tracks have to be like Goldilocks, just right – neither too fast, too slow, nor too harsh. Some artists in it are Roxy Music, Bad Bunny, Broadcast, Cocteau Twins, Tyler, the Creator, The Avalanches, James Blake, and Nicolas Jaar. It’s called Pandora’s Box, and it’s on Spotify.

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I collect photography books. Can you recommend a photobook that you love?

​​Jo Ann Callis, Other Rooms, is an obscure favorite.

This book uses traces and hints of playful debauchery to tease through an exploration of sex and the nude body. The flagrant sexuality present in some of the images is tempered by their meticulous construction, which does make them just a tiny bit artsy, but not contrived. I was surprised to find out that these images were photographed in the 1970s, because the work feels so fresh and modern.

Also, anything by fashion photographer Guy Bourdin.

Have you read any good books?

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano has been my favorite read of the past few years. It is set in Mexico City and follows the lives of local poets in a complex and wildly inventive narrative. It is funny, emotional, raunchy, and brilliant.

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About the photographer

Dina Litovsky is a Ukrainian-born documentary and portrait photographer based in New York City since 1991. Her work draws on visual sociology to examine subcultures and leisure in contemporary culture, often focusing on power, spectacle, and the social choreography of public life.

Litovsky holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from New York University and an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts. Her images have appeared in publications such as National Geographic, TIME, The New Yorker, GQ, New York Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine.

Litovsky also writes a Substack newsletter, In the Flash, where she explores visual culture, editorial photography processes, and industry insights.

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My birthday's next week, and like clockwork, I find myself looking back and reflecting on how things used to be. I’m not exactly sure when, but sometime in the last decade, my beard shifted from red to mostly white, and it’s always a shock when I see that fresh-faced young man looking back at me in the picture. I remember that guy, but I don’t look like him anymore.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and I’m definitely addicted to it. That’s why pictures like this always affect me: they remind us of a simpler time when things weren’t broken like they are now. Of course, that’s an illusion: the world has always been a dark place; I just didn’t see it that way. Some photographs are so downright idyllic they don’t feel real.

That’s certainly the case in this image by Jeff Dworsky, which is moody, elegiac, and beautiful. The photo is from Sealskin, a book Dworsky published with Charcoal Press in 2024. I’ve been meaning to write about it for months because it’s an extraordinary work — parts photography, folktale, memoir, and myth — and it’s printed beautifully. If you like this picture, you’ll love this book.

Sealskin’s first edition sold out a while back, and I just learned that a new edition is in the works. Dworsky’s Kodachrome images are gorgeous, and the book’s backstory might break your heart. You can see more of these images in Blake Andrews’ excellent Photo-eye review.

Sometimes photography books are puzzles, and this one will lead you down some rabbit holes. Sealskin’s second edition is available for pre-order, and the book ships in May. This might sell out again, so move quickly if it feels like your thing.

Does photography make you nostalgic? Let me know what you think. Take care of yourselves, friends, and have a great week!

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We have been expecting a big snow in Wisconsin for the past few days. Today, we woke up to enormous piles of the stuff outside our bedroom window. It’s always thrilling when a blizzard comes through — a reminder of how inconsequential we are in the face of the wildness of the world’s natural elements. And of course, snow is endlessly beautiful, at least to me. What I love most about all that white is how it seems to quiet the noisy world around us. Do you know what I mean?

I had another picture in mind for today’s Muse, but given the circumstances, I thought it would be nice to reflect on the season by looking at an image from Elizabeth Sanjuan’s Silent Snow series. She published a book of these photographs last fall. They are beautiful, meditative images that embody the vibe of my world today.

If you like this work, you should buy Elizabeth’s book. Here’s some background:

Over the last 7 years, Elizabeth Sanjuan has spent many weeks in Hokkaido in the depths of winter, and “Silent Snow” reveals the symbolism and symmetry of this quiet landscape. As a seeker of mystery and lover of solitude, Sanjuan immediately felt an intimate connection to the quietude of this land, with its watery blues and gentle, enveloping grays. “Silent Snow” urges one to pause, to explore, as Elizabeth does, the lessons of the single tree: strength in solitude and the will to withstand any storm.

Silent Snow is available from Daylight Books. You can learn more about Elizabeth’s photography by exploring her website. And if you’re on Instagram, you can find her @elizabethsanjuanphotography — She’ll appreciate it.

Thanks, as always, for looking, friends. Stay warm and have a great week!

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I’m in Los Angeles on a work trip this week, so I’ve been soaking up some Vitamin D as another snowstorm approaches Madison. I know sometimes less is more, but I felt compelled to send a note today, and I thought I’d leave you with something meaty to think about as we head into the weekend.

So many of you commented on Peter Hoffman’s essay on punctum, artificial intelligence, and photography last week that I wanted to flag it again for those who missed it. There are some terrific comments, so make some time to read those, too. Y’all are so thoughtful — I really appreciate that.

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One of those comments led me to this excellent discussion between two giants of visual culture, John Berger and Susan Sontag, and I wanted to make sure more of you saw it. Their conversation was featured as an episode of Voices, a 1983 televised “forum for debate about issues in the arts and the life of the mind.”

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts. Let me know what you think in the comments. Have a great weekend, folks, and take care!

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My Dad’s been in and out of the hospital a lot lately, so I’ve been reading about death, aging, and dying in recent weeks. I know it sounds dark, but I’ve been finding it helpful to focus on the passage of time and what it means to embrace the finitude and quality of our lives. I read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, and I finished Donald Hall’s Essays After Eighty the other day, and I highly recommend them both. It helps to think about what our lives might look like years from now — easier said than done, I know.

Amid all of this, I came across a wonderful picture by photographer Hannah Yoon, who has become a favorite blogger of mine over the past year. She made this image earlier this month for her grandmother’s 100th birthday. On the surface, it’s a family snapshot celebrating this important event, but when you slow down and look closely, it’s a rich tapestry of colorful characters, with multiple stories unfolding within the frame. Hannah’s picture is about people and relationships, and, above all, the connections among family members. In her latest post, she writes about community and the Korean concept of Jeong:

Jeong (정) represents deep, unspoken emotional bonds, collective warmth, and long-term attachment developed over time between people, places, or objects. Jeong is commonly experienced through sharing, mutual care, and selfless actions. Jeong de-centers each person and focuses on the collective experience.

These days — especially now, with so much terrible stuff happening around the world — each of us can use more Jeong in our lives. The bonds of close friends and family are good for our minds, bodies, and overall health. These relationships nurture our spirits, and we shouldn’t take them for granted. It’s obvious stuff, but easy to forget.

I hope you’ll read Hannah’s post this week and check out her newsletter, Notes from Hannah Yoon. You can learn more about her on her website and follow her on Instagram — she shows photography there @hannahloveyoon.

Thanks again for sharing your work with me, Hannah! Take care of yourselves this week, friends, and be well. Cheers!

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In 1980, French theorist Roland Barthes published Camera Lucida, and since then, very few graduate students in photography have escaped its presence. I was never assigned this book, but it still feels like essential reading — and even essential re-reading. Its only real rivals, in terms of required theoretical texts for the “serious photographer man,” might be Walter Benjamin’s 90-year-old essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, or Susan Sontag’s 1977 book, an affectionate lashing of the medium called On Photography.

I’ve tended to struggle with critical theory as a photographer. It leaves me both fascinated and dismayed. The problem might be in the name of the discipline. Namely, that when it comes to photography, the theory tends to be overwhelmingly critical. Read enough of it, and it’s hard not to feel as if everything you want to create has been prematurely recognized as problematic. It seems as if every facet of the medium has been attacked and discredited, and that the best thing to do — if a photographer does not want to be complicit in a sort of runaway train of exploitative consumer capitalism (and who does?) — is to disown the pursuit altogether and retreat to an outhouse in the woods. Yes, an outhouse. No, not a cabin.

In the past, after reading Sontag, I’ve wondered whether the most ethical path forward is to put down my cameras, even though I've never wanted to do anything else with my professional life (other than skateboard, but ankles and dreams die hard). This, despite the fact that I do and still believe that photography can be a force for good. After some soul searching, one may realize that theories are only that. In the case of photography, it feels like they often theorize against. But we photographers have a responsibility to try to present better theories for.

And it’s not just me. In 2008, Susie Linfield, in a Boston Review piece titled "Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?” explicitly named the problem. A cultural theorist broadly defending the medium still feels uncommon. I expect to revisit her at some point.

This brings me to Roland Barthes.

Camera Lucida stands out for its personal nature. Barthes wrote the book while mourning his mother, as a way to better understand her through the photographs she left behind. The book has a more appreciative, curious, and, at times, bewildered tone towards photography.

To Barthes, a memorable photograph will contain a detail, often small and initially unassuming, and sometimes, to my reading, even incidental, that will break through to the viewer in a particular and wholly subjective way. This detail might be something the photographer does not even notice when making the image, or, if they do, they may not intend for it to be noticed in depth. In the photographer’s mind, it is ancillary.

Barthes calls this detail the punctum, and for me, it is what completes the journey of the photograph, which is to say, from its creation to its recognition by a spectator. The punctum is the sound that must be heard for the tree in the forest to have really fallen. A picture with no punctum is essentially visual noise. It’s never really noticed by a viewer and therefore never really valued. If a picture is never really valued by anyone, its total value is arguably negligible, right? What good is a brilliant book never read by anyone, anywhere?

Barthes’ concept is distinctly personal — it is something beyond and separate from the generally accepted meaning of an image (what he calls the Studium). Besides being personal, Barthes’ punctum seems to be orthogonal to ideas of taste or quality — the traits that seem to be so widely esteemed in criticism. I think this should be notable to any photographer who has had the idea of craft battered into them so hard that it is impossible to see value in a photograph that doesn’t look like a technical achievement.1

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For example, in the image above, Wandering Violinist, Abony, 1921, by André Kertész, Barthes finds his punctum in, of all things, the dirt:

”Now what I see, by means of this ‘thinking eye’ which makes me add something to the photograph, is the dirt road; its texture gives me the certainty of being in Central Europe; I perceive the referent (here, the photograph really transcends itself; is this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?), I recognize, with my whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my long-ago travels in Hungary and Romania.”

Why am I bringing up this concept now?

Anyone who knows me understands that, at this point, I tend to look askance at AI technology in most forms. However, I am particularly interested in defending real photography2, especially now when I believe it will be eventually replaced by computer-generated pixel trash heaps of advertising and propaganda, or, in common parlance, slop.

In Barthes, we can find language applicable to today’s situations. I’ve never seen, and can’t imagine ever seeing, an AI-generated image with a punctum. It seems impossible, given how the image is created. That said, an AI-generated image can still have curious, even enticing details — details that evoke emotion or bring up a long-forgotten memory. It’s also possible for an AI image to be interesting (though unlikely) or beautiful (often in the most superficial, least meaningful ways, like the red shell of a Skittle). However, the way AI images are made makes a punctum impossible because they aren’t rooted in anything real. To identify the punctum in a photograph, as Barthes suggests, is a human response to an image with genuine human3 — or at least organic — traits.

In a generated image, no matter how real it appears, the source of intriguing details will always, at its most compelling, be a flaw in the machine process. It’s possible that the punctum could exist in a well-crafted AI-generated image presented as a photograph to a viewer unaware of the image's origin. But does this matter? What happens when they (or I) discover the provenance? The connection to the image through the punctum disappears. At best, the punctum is a fleeting cloud on the ground, a thick fog that leaves one confused and half-seeing, then half-depressed and disappointed for a moment.

The reading of the picture is then obvious: compared to the representation of the physical world, the AI-generated picture leaves me cold. And after that, even a little dead inside, left to wonder what sort of humanistic purpose this image can even serve? No matter what it looks like, it means nothing more than visual static. This impossibility of a punctum isn’t because the image is a lie (many photographs can be said to lie). It’s because the image's origin is non-human. The image's genesis is born of a dehumanizing process.

A flaw in the machine, a curious visual aberration, seven toes on a baby, for example, is about as good as it gets. Any curiosity quickly proves misplaced. The picture loses any novelty and meaning whatsoever as soon as its provenance is known. No matter how it looks, it will always be, should always be, read the same way. It has no connection to anything out in the world. It had no real human intention behind it, and no, I don’t think prompts guiding a machine on what to spit out can count as such. The AI image that looks like a photograph is inherently deceitful; it has nothing good to say to me, to us.

I will close with Barthes again, who draws a direct line between the photographed subject and the resulting image. It’s worth noting that he is referring specifically to black-and-white film and silver prints, and I do think that, with digital technology, the connection he notes is somewhat eroded. Still, I feel the point stands when comparing a photograph to another visual image:

“The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here.”

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About the author

Peter Hoffman is a freelance photographer in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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