When I first dove into photography, I had what I call “Virtual Mentors”: Willy Ronis, David Hurn, Jim Marshall, Jill Freedman, Elliott Erwitt, Jill Furmanovsky, Fan Ho, Yuka Fuji, Yul Brynner, Bill Brandt, Allen Ginsberg. Just to name a few.
From them, I started noticing something that mattered more than subject matter. Certain photographs carried a feeling that stayed with me, separate from whatever was happening in the frame.
For the past decade, I’ve had this photograph in my head that I keep trying to make. It’s not really a photograph, at least not in the traditional sense. It’s more about how it feels.
Not a subject, a state.
A tone.
A vibe.
How it should feel once it exists.
I keep coming back to film because it’s the only way I’ve found to get there. It’s slower. It’s frustrating. It’s expensive. But it gives me something I can’t get digitally. Film makes a moment feel less constructed and more uncovered, like everything I’m looking for is already there and my job is simply to pay attention. (This is one of the reasons why I rarely shoot in studios anymore.)
I once read about Plato using the words εἶδος (form, appearance) and ἰδέα (idea) interchangeably. Not “ideas” the way we mean them now, but something’s essence. Not the Fender in my hands, but bass-guitar-ness itself. The thing underneath the thing. Kind of like the way Michelangelo talked about sculpture, where the figure already exists in the stone and the work is removing everything that doesn’t belong to it.
These photographs are the moments where I feel like I stuck the landing. Less about what’s in the frame and more about whether the image carries the same weight it had in my head.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes talks about studium and punctum. What we recognize in a photograph, and what unexpectedly hits us. The unmade images that keep me obsessed tend to live somewhere between the two.
I’m not chasing perfection. I’m chasing something more like… alignment. Maybe something closer to A440. A way of tuning my eye so I can recognize those rare moments when I see them, and capture them in a way that doesn’t take me out of it.
When that happens, a photograph feels less like something I made and more like something I finally found.
These photographs are the ones that made me say, “Yeah, that’s the shit I’m talking about!”
