The Beholder Has Changed
You already know the photograph. Nick Ut took it in 1972 on a road in Vietnam: a girl running, napalm smoke behind her. It may have shortened a war. Not because it was beautifully composed or appeared in the right publication, but because it was real. The girl existed. The road existed. Light bounc
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/03/27/the-beholder-has-changed/
Teaching Photography #1: Starting From Why
My niece is twelve. She loves taking photos with whatever’s in her pocket, but the <a href="https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/01/09/camera-fascination/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">550D I gave her sits mostly untouched in a drawer</a>. Too much camera. Too serious. Too intimid
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/03/22/teaching-photography-1-starting-from-why/
#Photography #IMayBeWrong #Opinion #Teaching #TeachingPhotography
The Evolution of Photographic Meaning
I’ve been thinking about how photographers develop over time. Looking at what I’ve been writing over the last few months, I see contradictions and incoherencies that bother me. So I set out to find the underlying thinking or framework that would unify these ideas.
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/03/20/the-evolution-of-photographic-meaning/
The Two Objects of Photography
There’s a contradiction that’s been nagging at me for years, and I’ve only recently found a way to articulate why it’s a false one. Photography feels, to me, like private work. The observing, the deciding, the moment of capture: all of that happens inside my own consciousness even when I’
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/03/13/the-two-objects-of-photography/
How Photography Works In My Head #5: Finding Your People Through Cognitive Style
Your audience self-selects partly based on shared cognitive architecture. This isn’t about intelligence or sophistication. It’s about whether your mode of thinking and communicating matches theirs closely enough that recognition happens.
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#Photography #IMayBeWrong #opinion #Personal #CognitiveProcessing #Audience
When You Stop Treating Photography As a Performance, You Can Embrace Your Self Image
My mother sometimes jokes that she raised a ghost, because there are barely any photographs of me as a child or teenager. I just hated having my photo taken and I’d find ways to hide to avoid it. When I started photography ca. 2002, I started taking photos of people around me. But I continued to
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How Photography Works In My Head #4: Teaching Photography to Brains That Work Differently
Photography instruction assumes cognitive uniformity. Teachers describe their own process and expect students to replicate it. “Learn to see the light.” “Pre-visualise the image.” “Feel the moment.” These instructions make perfect sense if your brain works like the teacher’s brain, bu
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Live Photography is About Life
I can tell you exactly how I felt standing on a sand dune in Morocco many years ago, watching my wife photograph a sand dune through evening light. I remember the temperature, the angle of the sun, the smell of dust. I remember the specific quality of happiness that comes from being exactly where y
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/02/27/live-photography-is-about-life/
I Stole Every Photograph I’ve Ever Taken
Not legally, though we’ll get to the murky ethics of that. I mean conceptually, technically, aesthetically. Every image I’ve made is somewhere on a spectrum between homage and plagiarism, filtered through techniques I borrowed from photographers who borrowed them from other photographers who bo
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/02/20/i-stole-every-photograph-ive-ever-taken/
The Four Kinds of Photography (And Why Their Collapse Is More Dangerous Than AI)
Photography isn’t one thing anymore. It hasn’t been for a while, but we’re still using the same word for fundamentally different activities, which creates confusion about what’s happening to the medium and why it matters.
There are four distinct categories of photography now, defined by wh
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