A Look Back at Writings Over the Past Three Years

Representing the Unrepresentable: Photographs are conceived of, created, distributed and consumed within technological and business structures that are designed to achieve political impact. Those structures, which are largely invisible to the consumer, shape the viewer experience and it is only by reverse engineering the economies within which the images flow that we can change their political outcomes. (Nine posts.)

Modernism and Esotericism: Modernism is at its root a spiritual event that requires an intellectual response, not an intellectual movement with spiritual implications.

Towards a New Aesthetics of Democracy: In the US we have a picture of democracy as a winner take all event. We need to introduce disappointment and compromise as a key aesthetic ingredient to our depictions of democracy since they are essential to true democratic process in a pluralistic culture.

Photography and the Unconscious Panopticon: Mass media have always been organized in ways that control the flow of information and separate viewers. Now with the advent of social media, users are choosing to seek out media that only reinforces their own perceptions and beliefs. This effectively decreases diversity and variety of opinion and increases idealism. (Four posts.)

Aesthetics of Catastrophe: An analysis of my experience and process shooting in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The Self and the Other: Language shapes the root options available to anyone's perceptions of the world. Communicating across language barriers is incredibly difficult because each language forms a different picture of what the world actually is. We may live on the same planet, but effectively inhabit and believe in different worlds entirely.

Obama, Aesthetics and the Way Forward: A call for a grittier depiction of the presidency in the face of such financial crisis.

Confessions of a Bone Saw Artist: An in-depth analysis of photo retouching and how powerful tools have contributed to an increasing erosion of visual norms in popular culture, especially in the fashion and beauty industries. Editorial publications should publish retouching disclosure statements that detail their internal retouching policies so the viewers can interpret the visuals that they are presented with.

A Brief, Incomplete and Slightly Revisionist, History of the Publishing Crisis: A look at how the magazine world came to rely on advertisers as it's key consumers, and why that business model is failing.

The World in Miniature: An examination of how computer based editing tools are changing the ways we ultimately see and understand photographs.

On John Cage and Seeing the World: Artistic practice can be spiritual practice as well. John Cage sought to break open the performer/audience relationship and point the listener away or through himself and out into the world.