Photography as a way to get on with the universe

The universe doesn’t care about us. That’s not pessimism; it’s physics. We’re pattern-seeking creatures dropped into a system operating on principles entirely indifferent to human comfort. Entropy increases, complexity spirals, and meaning is something we have to manufacture ourselves becau
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/04/17/photography-as-a-way-to-get-on-with-the-universe/

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The Photographer as Interpreter

Photography has a self-image problem, and it starts with the word “witness.”

The term has circulated in photographic theory long enough to feel like settled truth. Photographers bear witness. They stand at the edge of events, recording what happens with a fidelity that makes them morally adjac
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/04/10/the-photographer-as-interpreter/

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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/

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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/

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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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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/03/06/when-you-stop-treating-photography-as-a-performance-you-can-embrace-your-self-image/

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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/

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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/

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Photography Requires Presence

Photography requires something other arts don’t: you have to be there. A thing happens, a camera records it, but you (or your apparatus) must be positioned in relationship to something real. Without that presence, there is no photography.

This might seem obvious, but it’s actually an important
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/02/06/photography-requires-presence/

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The Hardening Line Away From Pretty Pictures

Out of cycle post. This is something I’ve been noticing and I’ve been trying to articulate for a while. I’m not sure it’s completely clear in my head yet, but here goes nothing.

When I started writing on Substack, I was already moving away from pretty pictures. I’d been getting intereste
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/02/03/the-hardening-line-away-from-pretty-pictures/

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The problem With Infinite Photography

In today’s near infinite storage space, it’s easy to lose track of the photos you take. You stop seeing any of them because there are so many of them. They become wallpaper, a continuous scroll of undifferentiated moments that mean nothing precisely because they were supposed to mean everything
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/01/30/the-problem-with-infinite-photography/

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