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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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3 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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I had other plans for today, but I spent the morning catching up on a backlog of emails and found a message from Pie Aerts about his new book project, COIRÓN. So, I decided to share it with you instead. I think you’ll like this.

Clearly, the world is changing quickly and often more disruptively than some of us prefer. Change is the only constant: nothing lasts forever, which makes work like Pie’s so vital. He’s a documentary photographer with a poetic approach to imagemaking, and I know these photographs will resonate with many of you.

Here’s how Pie describes the project:

It’s a meditation on stillness, human resilience, and the inevitable passing of time. A portrait of men living at the edge of the world, pushing through because they must, through silence, endurance, and repetition.

I could say more, but I’ll let Pie do the talking. His Kickstarter video will inspire you. You can learn more about Pie on his website and follow him on Instagram. 

Congratulations on reaching your fundraising goal, Pie! I look forward to seeing the book. Have a great week, everyone. Take care of yourselves and be well.

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Screw You: I’m Not from Texas

by Henry Horenstein

With apologies to Ray Wylie Hubbard and Lyle Lovett

I’m a Yankee, born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which is sixty miles due south of Boston. The state of Texas and the town of New Bedford have at least one thing in common. Oil. Until the mid-19th century, New Bedford was the largest whaling port in the world. In 1841, Herman Melville began an 18-month journey on the whaling ship Acushnet out of New Bedford. He deserted the ship and was captured by cannibals. When free, he wrote Moby Dick. And some say Texas is the wild west!

Whale oil ruled for centuries, making street-lights burn and keeping fireplaces warm. But in 1859, oil was discovered in the ground in Titusville, Pennsylvania. This was way more efficient than sending ships out on the high seas for years, risking life, limb, and profits. Soon people were drilling for oil instead of hunting for whales. Texas and many other places benefited enormously, but New Bedford suffered economic distress.

My fascination with Texas began as a youngster with the TV series, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier. I even sported the coonskin cap that Davy had popularized. No matter that the real Davy was from Tennessee. He died fighting the Mexicans in 1836 at the Alamo, a mission and fort in San Antonio, Texas.

What I did not know was how much of Texas figured into my other great interest. Music. Many of my favorite songs and singers had a Texas connection. As a kid, I listened to and loved story songs—songs that had historical themes, like Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans.” (Johnny died in a car crash in Milano, Texas); flat-out honky-tonk shuffles like Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You”; troubadours like Marty Robbins who sang “EI Paso”; and into my folk music phase, Jerry Jeff Walker, who I photographed on stage just before “Mr. Bojangles” became a hit in 1970. Jerry Jeff wasn’t technically a Texan. He was born in Oneonta, New York. For that matter, Ray Benson, another iconic Texas musician, founded his band Asleep at the Wheel in 1969 in Paw Paw, West Virginia. Ray is from Philadelphia.

Some of these artists are represented in some form in Miles and Miles of Texas.

For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.”

— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charlie, 1962

I think Steinbeck nailed it. Texans identify as Texan. I can’t imagine someone from, say, Illinois asking a stranger if he was an Illinoisan. None of that was the point of my Texas photographs, though, which was best expressed by singer/songwriter Todd Snider in an on-stage monologue about his songs:

“I don’t share them with you because I think they’re smart or because I think you need to know them; I share them with you because they rhyme.”

So, a few years ago, I set out to find my own rhymes—a personal version of Texas, just a photographer/artist looking around and stopping when something struck. Or, someone. I like walking the small towns , having lunch in a diner or dinner in a cafe, and chatting with people who knew damn well that I wasn’t a Texan, but kindly forgave me anyway. I was not trying to make smart photos that people needed to see, but simply to share what I’ve encountered. Rhymes.

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Whatever this book is about, it is not about politics. For that side of things, best to read someone who actually knows what they are writing about. Maybe start with Lawrence Wright’s God Save Texas. Then chase it with Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. All four volumes.

Truth be told, this book isn’t really heavily researched. To make the pictures, I just wandered through the state looking for interesting subject matter. If the subject stuck me as a little humorous or sad, all the better. I like emotion. Humanity. Humor. Of course, Texas—a complex and nuanced place with almost 300,000 square miles and more than 30,000,000 people—has plenty of that. Big cities, tiny towns, and huge ranches and farms, with endless acres all but unpopulated. I had a big job to do.

I drove to many of these places and photographed what I could. Miles and Miles of Texas is a personal nod to Lone Star culture, history, landscape, and most of all the people I met along the way—“some of the friendliest people you’ll ever see.” (“It’s a Texas Thing,” Gary P. Nunn). And while I nodded, I got to eat some tasty barbecue, listen to inspired music, hear some heartfelt and hilarious stories, and drink a lot of cold beer. And most of all, I got to make pictures I like and put them down in this book.

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About the photographer

Henry Horenstein has been a professional photographer, filmmaker, teacher, and author since the 1970s. He studied history at the University of Chicago and earned his BFA and MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he studied with legends Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind.

Henry’s work is collected and exhibited internationally, and he has published over 40 books, including several monographs of his own work, such as Honky Tonk, Histories, Show, Animalia, Humans, Racing Days, Close Relations, and many others.

He has also authored Black & White Photography, Digital Photography, and Beyond Basic Photography, which are used by hundreds of thousands of college, university, high school, and art school students as their introduction to photography. His Shoot What You Love serves both as a memoir and a personal history of photography over the past 50 years.

His recent monographs: Speedway1972, published by Stanley/Barker in 2022, and We Sort of People, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2023. Miles and Miles of Texas was published by Honky Tonk Editions in 2025.

In recent years, Henry has been making films: Preacher, Murray, Spoke, Partners, and Blitto Underground. He is currently in production on Marksville, LA, a film about Cajun Louisiana. He is a professor of photography at RISD and lives in Boston.

Follow him on Instagram at @henryhorenstein.

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One more thing…

If you enjoyed these images, you’ll love this book. Miles and Miles of Texas features nearly 100 photographs Henry made while criss-crossing Texas from 2021 to 2024. The best part is when Henry’s stories accompany his images. He’s an excellent writer, and it’s fun to hear his take on what you’re seeing in each picture. You can order signed copies from Henry’s website. Thanks again, Henry!

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When I first saw this picture, I noticed the fish. They are beautiful creatures, even in black and white. Soon after, though, my eyes were drawn to the ferns, my favorite plants — those ancient rippling shapes are stunning, aren’t they? Today, I glimpsed the summertime legs in the upper left corner. I was too busy ogling ferns and fish to see them the first few times I looked.

Photography is good like that: it rewards repeat viewings.

What exactly is happening here? It’s hard to say. But the mystery is what makes the picture work: it keeps us guessing. The image is by Andrea Modica, one of my favorite photographers. It’s part of Italian Story, her forthcoming book. I know many of you are fans of Andrea’s, so you’re probably already familiar with her work. 

I can't wait to see this new book. You can pre-order a signed copy through April 21. When you have some time, visit Andrea’s website. There are loads of portfolios there, including her masterpiece, Treadwell.

Andrea is on Instagram, too. If that's your thing, you can follow her @andreamodica.photo. She's amazing.

Okay, that's all for today. Is there a photographer you think I should feature here? Please email me anytime. Thanks for looking, and have a great week!

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Hey, friends, it’s been a roller coaster week. My Dad’s in the hospital again — the poor guy can’t seem to catch a break. I guess that’s what happens when you’re late in life, and your old bones are failing.

One day at a time, right?

I’m feeling drained, but I wanted to close the week with something beautiful, and I thought you’d appreciate John Kelly’s Retirement Plan, an animated short film that moved me to tears. I think you’ll like this — watch it today with someone you love.

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I know it’s a little melancholy, but I found it inspiring—and motivating. We’ve got to make the most of our days! You can read more about Kelly’s film, which is nominated for an Academy Award, in The New Yorker, Cartoon Brew, and Short of the Week.

Have a great weekend, folks, and be well!

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I don’t remember how Deborah Parkin and I met each other. She was part of a portraiture exhibition I curated at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 2013, and we lost touch sometime after that. Last year, we reconnected, and it’s been nice to see her blogging on Substack. Deborah’s black-and-white work always captivated me.

I wasn’t familiar with her Horse series until I read her latest post about creative productivity. Read this when you have time. It’s a lovely way to start the week. You can see more of Deborah’s work on her website and Instagram. Please take a look when you have a moment. I’m sure she’ll appreciate it. Take care!

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The following text was generated by Claude AI and lightly edited for length and clarity. I added links for context, but have not fact-checked every claim for accuracy. I appreciate the ideas explored here. I hope you do, too!

Does the Camera Lie?

The question sounds simple. It isn’t. It cuts to the heart of epistemology—the study of what knowledge is, how we acquire it, and whether we can trust it. Photography occupies a uniquely uncomfortable intersection: it appears to show us the world directly, yet we know it doesn’t. Let’s work through the layers.

The Naive Realist Position: The Camera Doesn’t Lie

The folk theory of photography is roughly this: a camera is a machine. It has no agenda, no emotions, no memory. It records photons that bounced off real surfaces at a real moment in time. In that sense, it seems to have a stronger claim to truth than any human witness, who is fallible, biased, and motivated.

This view has serious philosophical backing. The philosopher Kendall Walton argued that photographs are transparent — that when you look at a photograph of the Eiffel Tower, you are, in a meaningful sense, actually seeing the Eiffel Tower, mediated by a causal chain rather than by someone’s imagination. On this view, the photograph is more akin to a window or a mirror than to a painting. Its connection to reality is mechanical and indexical — the image is causally produced by the thing it depicts. This distinguishes it from, say, a drawing, which is entirely mediated by the artist’s choices.

The philosopher C.S. Peirce’s semiotics is also useful here. He distinguished between symbols (arbitrary signs, like words), icons (signs that resemble what they represent, like diagrams), and indexes (signs caused by what they represent, like smoke caused by fire). A photograph is all three at once, but especially an index — it is physically caused by light reflecting off its subject. That causal link appears to confer a special epistemic status on it.

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The Constructivist Challenge: The Camera Always Lies

But the realist position quickly starts to crack when you examine it. Consider everything a photographer chooses before the shutter clicks:

Framing. Every photograph excludes more than it includes. The frame is a decision — what’s in, what’s out. A photograph of a smiling crowd at a rally is a true image, but if you pull back, there might be protestors fifty feet away. The truth it captures is real but radically incomplete.

The decisive moment. Henri Cartier-Bresson famously described photography as capturing “the decisive moment,” implying that, among the thousands of moments available, one is chosen. A subject captured mid-blink looks foolish; the same person a second later looks thoughtful. Both images are “true.” Neither is the whole truth.

Lighting, angle, lens. A wide-angle lens distorts perspective. A telephoto lens compresses distance, making a crowd look denser than it is. Shooting from below makes a person look powerful; from above, diminished. These are not manipulations in the post-production sense — they are built into the act of taking the photograph.

Context. The philosopher Roland Barthes, in his landmark work Camera Lucida, drew attention to how meaning in a photograph is always partly constructed by its context — the caption, the publication, the viewer’s knowledge. The same image of a man running can mean “fleeing danger” or “winning a race,” depending entirely on the framing outside the image itself.

Barthes also introduced the concept of the punctum — the personal, subjective detail in a photograph that wounds or moves an individual viewer — which emphasizes the deeply subjective nature of photographic meaning, even when the image is ostensibly “objective.”

Susan Sontag, in On Photography, pushed this further, arguing that photographs don’t so much capture reality as create it. The photograph of a famine doesn’t merely document suffering; it constructs a particular narrative of victimhood, passivity, and Western spectatorship. It aestheticizes suffering in ways that can actually distance the viewer from the reality it purports to show — the image substitutes for engagement.

The Indexicality Problem Gets Worse: Digital Photography

The analog photograph had one advantage: the physical process. Silver halide crystals darkened because photons struck them. The connection to reality was literally chemical.

Digital photography severs even that. A digital image is a numerical array — a matrix of values assigned by a sensor and processed by algorithms. Every smartphone photograph you’ve ever taken has been processed, sharpened, noise-reduced, color-corrected, and HDR-blended before you even see it on your screen. Apple and Google’s computational photography engines routinely composite multiple exposures into a single image. The “photograph” is already, in a technical sense, a construction.

This is where deepfakes and generative AI become philosophically significant — not because they introduce lying into a previously honest medium, but because they expose the lie that was always there. If a manipulated image is indistinguishable from an unmanipulated one, it reveals that our trust in photographs was never really based on their intrinsic properties. It was based on social convention and the practical difficulty of manipulation.

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What Would It Even Mean to “Tell the Truth”?

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Even if we stipulate a perfectly mechanical, unmanipulated image — no cropping, no filtering, no context — does it tell the truth?

The problem of perspective. Every photograph is taken from somewhere, at some time, through some medium. There is no view from nowhere — what the philosopher Thomas Nagel called “the view from nowhere” — no impossible, neutral, God’s-eye perspective. Any image necessarily encodes a particular vantage point. This isn’t a flaw; it’s a logical necessity. But it means the photograph cannot claim to be “reality.”

The problem of abstraction. Reality is four-dimensional — it unfolds in time, it has depth, it has smell, sound, and texture. A photograph is a two-dimensional static slice. It isn’t that photographs misrepresent time; it’s that they cannot represent time at all. They freeze a moment that, in reality, never existed. The philosopher Henri Bergson argued that our tendency to spatialize time — to treat it as a series of frozen frames — was a fundamental distortion of lived experience. Photography institutionalizes that distortion.

The problem of interpretation. Even if we somehow solved all the above—neutral framing, unmanipulated image, no ambiguous context—the photograph must still be perceived and interpreted by a human mind. And human perception is not passive reception; it is active construction. We bring expectations, schemas, cultural knowledge, and emotional states to every image we see. Two people looking at the same photograph see, in a philosophically meaningful sense, different things.

A Synthesis: The Camera Is an Honest Liar

So where does this leave us? I’d suggest the most defensible position is something like this: The camera is neither simply honest nor simply deceptive. It is a specific kind of truth-telling instrument that operates under constraints so profound that they amount to a form of structural deception—but a deception we can reason about and partially correct for.

The photograph has a genuine indexical relationship to what was in front of the lens at that moment. That is real and meaningful. But it is a relationship between the sensor and a slice of reality — a slice defined by framing, timing, lens, light, processing, and context. The photograph tells the truth about what it captured, not about the world.

The philosopher W.J.T. Mitchell put it well: images are not simply pictures of the world — they are arguments about the world. They don’t describe; they persuade. And persuasion is neither pure truth nor pure lie — it is a selective, interested, partial presentation of evidence.

The most dangerous thing about photographs is not that they lie outright, but that they carry the authority of mechanical objectivity while functioning with the selectivity of rhetoric. We know that words are chosen. We are only beginning to culturally understand that images are, too.

The Bottom Line

Does the camera lie? It depends on what we mean by “lie.” If lying requires intent, the camera cannot lie — it has none. If lying means “not telling the whole truth,” then the camera always lies, structurally, inevitably, as a matter of its very nature as a medium. And if truth means something like “adequate representation of reality,” then the camera tells a particular, partial, perspectival truth — which is, when you think about it, the only kind of truth any of us ever tell.

The question “Does the camera lie?” might ultimately be less interesting than the question it opens up: What do we want from truth, and why did we ever think a machine could give it to us?

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Okay, I’m back. It’s fascinating, no? I love this kind of intellectual wankery, but I know it’s not for everyone. After thanking Claude for its reply, I asked a final question:

Can you show me a photograph that best illustrates a lying camera?

Claude replied:

Great challenge — one image above all others tends to come up in this philosophical conversation: Eddie Adams, “Saigon Execution,” 1968. It won the Pulitzer Prize and helped turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War.

What it shows: South Vietnamese General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in the street. The image is viscerally damning — an act of cold, summary murder, the general’s face utterly composed.

What it doesn’t show — and this is where the camera “lies” — is almost everything that gives the moment meaning. The prisoner, Nguyễn Văn Lém, had allegedly just executed a South Vietnamese officer and his entire family, including children, that same morning. General Loan was operating in the chaos of the Tet Offensive, in a city under sudden attack, with no functioning judicial system available to him.

Adams himself spent the rest of his life tormented by the image. He later wrote that the general “shot the enemy; I shot the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation.” He personally apologized to Loan’s family after the general died.

The photograph is not falsified. Nothing was staged, deceptively cropped, or manipulated. Every pixel is “true.” And yet it produced, in most viewers, a conclusion — this man is a monster — that Adams himself believed was profoundly unjust.

It is perhaps the single most powerful real-world demonstration of every point made in the philosophical discussion: the frozen moment, the missing context, and the indexical authority that masks rhetorical force. The camera told the truth about one-thirtieth of a second, and lied about a man’s entire character.

I found all of this fascinating, and it was good to spend time considering these ideas, especially given the Post-Truth America we are living in today. Of course, there isn’t an easy answer to this question, but I would value your thoughts. Feel free to leave me a comment or drop a note in our subscriber chat. I look forward to hearing from you. 

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One more thing…

If you liked this post, you will enjoy Errol Morris’ 2011 book, Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, which includes an excellent essay about Roger Fenton’s Crimean War photographs. I read it years ago and loved it.

I’ll leave you with this: Lawrence Weschler interviewed Morris about Fenton’s Crimean War photographs for Public Books. I hope this philosophical talk hasn’t been too annoying. Have a great weekend, folks. Take care!

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No ads, no algorithms. It was terrific. Do you remember those days?

Instagram has completely overtaken the photo community, and, for better or worse, it’s the platform most of us use today. IG is problematic for various reasons, but it reliably provides me with daily inspiration and a sense of community. It works.

I was nursing a cold last weekend, so I spent most of Saturday and Sunday in my pajamas, resting, relaxing, and brainstorming. Yesterday, I remembered this idea and thought I’d kick it off today — a weekly feature like the old FlakPhoto blog, a Monday muse, if you will. Just a picture and some links to see more of that photographer's work. Something inspiring to start your week. A launching point for creative discovery. 

I’ll try to make this a Monday morning thing. With so much bad news in the world, starting each week with a picture might brighten your day. What do you think?

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I’ll leave you with this…

I stumbled on Laura McCluskey’s website the other day, and I’ve been looking at this picture all week. It’s so bright and beautiful — I love it. Do you know her work? Creative Boom published a piece about her new book recently. You can see more of Laura’s photography on her website and follow her on Instagram. I’m sure she’ll appreciate your attention. Thanks for looking, folks. Have a great week!

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Hey friends, it’s cold and sunny in Madison today. How’s everybody doing? Just a quick note — something inspiring to kick off the weekend…

I like to highlight photography friends from time to time, and since many of you are print makers, I thought you’d appreciate this. I’ve mentioned my paper addiction before, so you can imagine my delight when I received a handmade package in the post a few weeks ago. Matthew Morrocco kindly shared his first Nature’s Pencil Print Club mailing with me, and I was so touched that I wanted to share it with you here. His 5x7 print was accompanied by this letter:

Dear Patron -

It’s January 1st, and I’m so excited to send you the first iteration of my monthly mail club dedicated to photography.

The art of photography is essential to our world today and yet so undervalued. Print magazines are increasingly downsizing, and galleries hardly show photographs. Still, some new photographs remind us of photography’s resonance as an artform.

In December, Vanity Fair ran a piece about the presidential cabinet that went viral. It was shot by Christopher Anderson, who is mostly known as a war photographer. The layout and structure of these photographs are very similar to a piece from 2002 on George W. Bush’s cabinet, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Many words have been used to describe the 2025 article, ranging from “hit piece” to “glorious.” But above all, the context we must remember when viewing these photographs is that a camera cannot record things that are not there. This is especially pertinent when a subject is responsible for their appearance – makeup, clothing choices, and how recently they went to their injector. Photographers construct images with lights, angles, and framing choices, but the responsibility of how we show up in the world rests squarely on our own shoulders.

Photography is the art of life. Photographs hold memories. They remind us of old outfits and hairstyles, momentous occasions, and relatives we’ll never see again. These letters will be dedicated not only to inspiring you to live your life each day with a little bit of magic but to help elucidate the very quotidian art of photography.

The title of my print club, Nature’s Pencil, comes from the first ever published book of photographs, “The Pencil of Nature,” by Henry Fox Talbot, where he discusses the camera’s ability to render nature more accurately than a pencil. Published in 1844, “The Pencil of Nature” was intended to showcase photography’s grandiose possibilities as an artform.

To kick things off, I am sending you a photograph that I made in 2023 when I started learning Ikebana, the ancient art of arranging flowers. Invented in China, and safeguarded from the 7th century until today by the Japanese, ikebana is an artform used to find peace in living with nature. Shot on 4x5 film, this photograph is made with white dahlias from True Love Farms, a 19th-century lithograph from a book on canaries I purchased in London, a cutout from a book on Degas, and a blue gradient background I made myself. As January begins, I thought you might enjoy this delicate little photograph as a reminder of the value art can have in resonating across time.

So welcome to my print club!! My greatest wish is that my work will find its way into the hands of people who care about art and the things they collect, not for their monetary value, but simply because, to them, it is perfect.

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Isn’t that great?

I love promoting creative people and their projects, so I figured I’d give Matthew a boost. I know we all appreciate his commitment to craft, and I can vouch for the print he sent me — it’s quite lovely. Maybe you’ll consider supporting Matthew’s venture with a Nature’s Pencil Print Club subscription. Who doesn’t like getting some mail now and again? It certainly beats more mindless Instagram scrolling.

Thanks again for sharing your work with me, Matthew. I appreciate you!

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Well, it’s freezing cold in Madison today. My weather app said it was -14° when I woke up this morning, and even more awful news has come in from Minneapolis, so we’re feeling low this afternoon. I decided to come upstairs and look at some of the winter pictures folks have sent in over the past few months to lift my spirits.

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Like many of you, I’ve been following the news coming out of Davos this week, and Greenland has obviously been top of mind. Today, I found an email from photographer Freddy Christensen describing a series of drone photographs he made of his homeland, and I thought you might like them. Freddy writes:

I’m Freddy Christensen, a drone photographer born and raised in Qaqortoq, the southern part of Greenland. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the special magic that appears during our dark winter months; the way fleeting daylight softly illuminates the snow-covered landscapes, how the sky meets the icy horizon, and how the colorful houses stand out against the vast snowy backdrop.

Despite the limited daylight, Greenland’s winter is far from dreary. There’s a stillness that accompanies each settlement, yet it’s never empty or lifeless. You’ll see faint glimmers of orange streetlights in the distance, watch boats quietly resting in partially frozen harbors, and feel a sense of calm that’s both peaceful and awe-inspiring. Through my photography, I strive to capture those contrasts: the untouched wilderness paired with the warm, tight-knit spirit of our communities.

I hope that, by sharing these images, people from all around the world can get a glimpse of Greenland’s unique winter charm. You’ll sense both the rugged isolation and the welcoming coziness that define our towns. These photographs are an invitation to explore and connect with the beauty, resilience, and warmth of Greenland’s winter life.

Freddy’s images are serene and beautiful, and they gave me a sense of calm today, which is something, given the state of the world. Below are a few of my favorites.

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I love these pictures and look forward to seeing Greenland in person someday. Freddy doesn’t have a website, but you can follow him @freddychristensen on Instagram to see more of his work. Thanks again for sharing these with us, Freddy. I appreciate it.

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One more thing…

Photographer published a captivating essay about her travels in Greenland on her Substack yesterday. Please make some time to read “A Visual Love Letter to Greenland” today. It’s a lovely piece of writing. You won’t regret it.

Okay, that’s all for today, friends. I hope you’re staying happy and healthy — and warm — wherever you are in the world. Be safe out there and keep your chin up.

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