All these giants and masters in the photography world who shaped it have been passing away rapidly the past few years. Martin Parr just passed away a couple days ago.There are no younger equivalents of these kinds of people and I find that scary for my medium. And the kinds of institutions, schools, donors, and media outlets that helped all of it exist has been collapsing with no equivalent either. Much art of the mediums photography, film, television, and music is in grave trouble. Photography is the most vulnerable because it has never been a large commercial enterprise on it's own in the way the other mediums are and the art world likes to keep photography at a friendly distance. More people photograph than ever and know less about the use and history of it more than ever. All the work that is being created to not even be properly archived. What a strange and sad time in this arena.

*12.20.2024, still tapping the sign 

It would be really nice and helpful and ever so insightful, if a mainstream publication could do an article of how digital storytelling with images, videos, and social media has created a time of mass radical empathy of regular citizens when it comes to Gaza. Would be so wonderful if a PHOTOGRAPHY or ART publication would care to do so. There is so much talk of the desensitizing of others through social media, and the final conclusion that somehow that's all social media can be when it could obviously go the other way also and it has. The Floyd protests was an example that everyone wants to memory hole cause it only went so far, because consciousness raised and empathy felt can only do so much to the people who hold the gavel over us.

Now we have the protests and outcry against genocide yet I get that is not comforting because it is not political power in the sense of stopping the bombs. However I think it must be acknowledged for the future, one we want for ourselves and the world. I mean for those of us who want good things. For the fascists & capitalists' (and collaborators) and their visions of the future, I hope your projects politically die a thousand humiliating and self defeating deaths. 

It's good to understand that what the powers that be/that are will want/do want to make sure people are stopped in their feelings and empathy. That those who are feeling for Palestinians yet also feel helpless in the horror of witnessing become overwhelmed, disorientated, and in despair, and disgust become burnt out and bitter from all the compassion they felt for others. There is a very evil man who positions himself as a philosophical nazi figurehead whom I won't even bother to say his name but wrote early on about it's not worth caring about the Palestinians and to not concern yourself with that. Though this person is on the far right this attitude is part of a larger project reaching across the political spectrum, to liberals who cry that Israel is one of the only beautiful and honorable democracies in the world, and those who say they are progressive and believe in propaganda that Zionisim is decolonization. 

When you care about a nation state more than a child getting blown up you lost your humanity.  Now you can go find it again but you have to admit it's lost before that, or you won't be able to adequately put it back in place. 

I think I'm cursed to be haunted the rest of my life by artists, especially photographers, mostly photographers honestly, embrace of Generative AI. I'm blessed to have at least done my photography studies years prior. What a curse on us all. And I will always have some hate in my heart for those who smiled and nodded along saying they were contributing to art with it (before these things go bankrupt and use up all the water and become surveillance and mass detention centers).  'What fun! Possibilities! Freedom! The great equalizer!' Asserting they are making important creative work with it, whining you should respect it on par with...No. 

One of the worst things is that likely I am at some point going to be forced to hold this knife and contribute to cutting through the fabric of humanity if I want to eat. Why are humans their own worse enemy? How do people hate other humans so much to have invented such evil? Why do so little see it with such education and supposed enlightenment or sensitivity? These elite freaks and the people they have coerced and brainwashed are going to destroy all our fucking beautiful land and resources, peoples' psyches, societal stability, all for the opportunity for people to view and create the stupidest, mediocre and evil shit you can imagine. And you're fucking applauding it proudly.

I feel like one of a few out here unfortunately who rail against this, have actual fear and rage and yes even some grief over it in the photo world. The cultural gatekeepers and such, and teachers and such, they don't care. They don't at all. They can't see it for what it actually is ironically for being translators, teachers, philosophers of a visual medium. You can't make this stuff up, willing accepting the sci-fi dystopia because they want a gadget to decipher.

 This is a little late but the Palestinian journalists bombed on camera because of the suspicion of a "Hamas camera" means that photo world writers are going to finally take what is happening in Gaza seriously and confront it right? What meaning can the writings of the medium be otherwise if this is shoved away? This wasn't hesitated with, with the Abu Ghraib images, why should this be different? 

Rest easy 💔

So many irreplaceable and monumental musical acts have left this mortal plane the past ten years and (nothing even a little bit comparable) no musicians/singers/enigmas exists to fill the absence. Was it the influence of a post WW2 culture and economy that created them, that a Reagan neoliberal world order also killed off eventually? Gen X is the last train of this artistic ecosystem.

I have no idea still why so many cultural critics and gatekeepers of photography are intent on walking this medium off another cliff with Generative AI as they already helped throw our current photo landscape into crisis starting ten years ago giving themselves over vicariously to Facebook/Instagram. All print magazines shuttered and websites and abandoned one of the most interesting and free vehicles, blogs. So many are complicit in this not for nefarious purposes but the neglect. Yet we could learn a lesson and not throw it off course yet again with embracing Generative AI. And you absolutely do not get to say Photoshop is the same thing nor dare compare it to collage or digital art. But this is not what has happened. Now there are institutions and classes and degrees and teachers happy to push this along. All in the name of 'look at this neat trick.'

It's maddening but so many people lap it up with thousands of likes and starry eyed comments (though I do enjoy when regular people in comments on Instagram push back) and 'it's just like when painters were upset about the invention of the camera’? No this is devastating. And I'm not even talking about art here which it is devastating for, nor the environment which it is also devastating for, but even more important and this is a very important part of art is the caring about a semblance of the stability of society and people's collective well being. Is it "fun" to put a tool out into the universe that people can make fake photos and videos of people who didn't do the things that are in the images but no one can tell if it's real or not? Photography is really shattered and it's not because of this disastrous Generative AI tool and social media algorithms, but the people who are the heads of this medium embrace of all of it and demand little or no guardrails. With no second guessing of the disaster they have co-signed in the name of art.

(August 24, 2024) *just gotten worse

Let art live. Let it live in its mistakes, grotesque points, outdatedness. Let art be a mess. Let it be a disaster. Let it be wrong. Let it be ugly, immoral, dreadful, and pointless. Let art be a sea of failures. You will live.

There is a person from another art life many years ago I have been thinking about the past few months since I realized by looking something else up and stumbling upon their name that they have been deeply red pilled. I'm still in complete disbelief how this kind, empathetic, intellectual, creative and well educated person fell into it. I know they would have despised someone like Trump and all the personalities related to him back then. I know that much. Though maybe you only can know so much about a person because they have not fully formed into their final form. I would be horrified if they stay there but they appear happily entrenched, you wouldn't consume those kinds of people if you had any doubts in what you believed in. What felt and feels good what has brought you peace of mind. The fascist merchants who sell anger, fear, and conspiracy are some of these people's saviors. This is the answer they have been waiting forever for. What keeps me up at night helps them sleep. My suspect is the wellness to fascism pipeline had something to do with entangling this person in. Then life with much unknowns, disappointments, and calamities did its thing. 

The other people I've known who have gone down that route I wasn't fully surprised except a handful but this particular person's descent I will always find haunting. If it could happen to them, then who is safe? I was recently reading the Alice Walker essay for an assignment "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self" and in awe of it's power and realizing this person who wrote this dragged themselves into these black holes of conspiracy to never pry their way out of. No one is safe. For many years as a kid I never understood the advice to be careful of the company you keep because of the influence it can have. I thought 'the worst would never happen to me!' How foolish youth is. My friend was not young though and neither was Walker when what occurred to them took form. Many in the population now are treading a lot of conspiracy pooled waters more the last 5 years and certainly more than the last 10 years. The desperation and appetite keeps growing. I observe a lot of spaces where climate denialists,  anti modern science, and anti Covid assholes lurk. LOL themselves to black pill under laughing emojis, and where do these people go in the years ahead, now some are bots but enough aren't. Are they being primed and dormant for now and the next crisis they can scream, threaten and attack those masked or god forbid a pandemic outbreak. The Republicans in our state put in a constitutional amendment to strip the Governor's powers if there was a state of emergency. Of course so few people know except the conservatives and they won.

One of the most important characteristics we can posses is to have some humbleness. To realize if you truly believe in critical thinking, intellect, love, empathy and commitment to these things that are paramount, you must let go of being so confident in 'No that's not me, that could never be me. I'm better than that. That's them over there.' smugness. I get it. I do but as bell hooks said we all have susceptibility to be co-opted. I think a lot about the terrors and grief I survived and wonder often how am I not the biggest conspiracy theorist. A therapist years ago said she would understand if I was the angriest person alive. For many years I was on fire. I was fortunate to walk out of it with my sense of wellness and sanity. I don't think you necessarily need to filled to the brim with trauma and rage to get sucked into what is basically darkness, a black hole but they have done a lot of studies that can make people much more susceptible. Something changed in their own universe that doesn't make sense anymore, the order of things are realigned and they have no control over it. I don't know what happened to this person. I didn't know them that deep or close enough. Ours was a short but meaningful timespan. I wish I had known. I don't believe they will return. I think this is a familiar story. The last ten years it's been a slow boil from numerous people who feel those they have known have drifted off and come back in a different skeleton. The last five it's been a larger amount, more vitriol, more out of control, more lost souls who were so hungry that fear and anger swallowed their world and all they have known. This is likely a shift that will be around for a generation. We like to believe art can save, artists know, but they are like anyone else. We must live with that humility.

- March 8, 2025. & March 26, * June 12-15, 2025

I am so disturbed all these photographers excited about Generative AI and people trying to hype back up NFTs? Artists can't resist the destruction of the planet and society's well-being if it takes away from a shiny tool they want to do whatever they want with because they believe in individualism and freedom of self-expression at the expense of everyone and everything else. What a rot that has formed among photographers and artists. Bleak for the future.

I feel trapped in an existential and material battle as an artist in this time period. An era in the culture that wants to take artists down swiftly and expect them to put up no resistance or there will be bloodshed of these artists' livelihoods, dreams, hopes, prospects. You know what keeps artists going. The narrative getting shoved and pounded is that artists are inconvenient. As if artists never really meant anything and never have, the machines will take care of that now. Get back to work peasants, climate change debris ain't going to clean itself up. 

Those possibilities presented over ten years ago of the digital landscape are being stomped out I cannot believe how much I let myself miss. Yet once the ruling tech vultures and capitalists saw people were enjoying too much art, interesting thoughts, and connections, they couldn't let that continue. You can't connect ideas, art, and helpful back and forth supporting others out and informing them of ways to make the world better! They have money to make and they demand loyalty to all your time and attention working to make them more money asap. I think a very difficult thing in this moment is while artists have the strength of imagination to intellectually go Battle Royale against this disaster, I don't believe many have the actual willpower to fight fight.

The internet and social media needed to be monetized to death and made unusable and make everyone who inhabits these terrains feel bad and hopeless. There are a couple social media accounts I have that I am able to curate that escape this plight for now. I worry that the right will scorch and whittle away those sections of Instagram they have not infiltrated. The AIDS Memorial page still up is pretty amazing that is allowed with how things are being pushed. It's also more independent, alternative accounts. Like an internet version of those eclectic old thrift, vintage, book, odd and oddity shops that got pushed and gutted for gentrification. Also independent artists and creative people doing their talented thing, cutting past all the doomerism so they can make, live, share and connect. Generative AI is a house of cards but that will take awhile. Tech freaks aren't going to write themselves out of existence and funding.

There was a very good tweet awhile back of mentioning how convenient the machines can get the luxury of writing poetry.

@KarlreMarks

Humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint 

is not the future I wanted 

The artist Paul McCarthy (not the Beatle Paul McCartney) was interviewed a couple months back about his process and he talked about how he is the first person he thinks of when he is making something otherwise he wouldn't be making art he'd be making entertainment. That struck a deep chord in me. Not only because I thought 'man you are singing my song' but how much people interact with art in the last decade has felt like a customer on demand exchange that I have been observing uncomfortably online. The entitlement is astounding.

'You have to entertain and please me and if you don't I will not only complain but I will go to you personally through social media and/or company/label/management site/account/email and demand you cater to me. You can’t run I’m your audience. You can’t hide I own you because I indulge your work and I call the shots around here.' 

It's insidious and it seems to get worse over time. Like I'm sorry you didn't like the experience or the feelings of what happened during or after you consumed an artistic output but that's a well known possible side effect. There is so much rage about, people even petition at times. It must be a nightmare working in TV or in comics where this is the most prevalent and especially sci-fi and fantasy genres. Just write some fan fiction and leave artists alone they don't have to answer to you. If it were me I would say you can criticize all you want and rip it to shreds but get the fuck out of my house with your demands to cater. Not that I’m being asked or anyone has been knocking on my door, maybe that gives me this perspective because my house has been so quiet. I’ve never made art with anyone else in mind at the end of the day and that will always win out at the end of the day.

I don't know how as photographers we are suppose to make sense of the world anymore. Our placement, intentions, feelings of purpose and hopes engulfed by the new surveillance way of living. It feels like capitalism is trying to erase us while desperate for what we provide. Though that sounds like I'm trying to say photographers have more importance than other people. I don't mean that and I never would. Now almost everyone can have the ability to take pictures and yet the capitalists wants to steal our capability to examine the world through creativity and sharing memories, info, and communication with one another. I feel that for all people who want to make images whether they see themselves or want to be artists, the capitalists want to take authorship from us. 

They have turned photography as a weapon to be used against one another from state surveillance to your next door neighbor. To wander into paranoia territory feeling it's like they saw the internet as a way to lure a mass amount of people to giving themselves over and not merely owning them eventually but stripping them away as if they didn't mean anything ultimately. With tools like the current AI stealing people's image and likeness for their own gains, but I don't see a high amount of money to be made with this as an economic model. I believe it's to make people feel there is not much meaning and to desensitize them and get them to accept terrible things inflicted on them. They will accept into being custodians in the elites's company towns or work at the Evangelical mega churches vacation resorts in the off season. That's a better way to look at this AI disaster. Is that too paranoid? How is anyone suppose to feel that much different?

  Photography, it's crazy how the photo world is divorced from speaking of the photography being utilized in what is going on in Gaza and that being on social media as well. We are liars and cowards of our craft if we ignore the function and role of photography in the first genocide of the 21st century we see unfolding on our screens. 

 I guess at the rate of technology we must combine video in many conversations about photography as well. Though they are different mediums of functioning yet they are both visual communication tools for the private, sharing of the personal, selling of the personal, and political.

We not only see through these technologies but hear the horror of what Palestinians are facing. I hope that punctures at least some people's hearts and headspace though it doesn't seem to get to the right ones with the power. Because those in power are reenforced and nurtured that they must be divorced in certain contexts. 

Politics before people, political games before human lives. Corporations over people living out to be full human beings. Profits over what mental, psychological, emotional potential and comfort we could have in our everyday lives. People tell you it's not possible, to go back to work because the boss of their boss of their boss believe people are disposable and need to serve the man.

When I try to imagine the horror of people in Gaza it's only a flash, it's an evil that can't be reached through the screen. What is the complicity of merely bearing witness? There is no real guidelines to all this in the context of viewing this on social media. Is it a question that can be answered truthfully and given easy guidance on? 

Though there are plenty of assholes reactionary to liberal and say you're being too sensitive and virtue signaling consuming a form of torture porn war trauma being hypocritical, but it's like people are dying fuck off with that. We know where some of you will likely be with a fascist regime slowly unfolding into place (it's actually happening now under Biden in the red states and the states who are not fully red but are controlled by red congress houses and governors) you'll be drinking Starbucks disaffected.

May 9, 2024 - 3:44pm

Do you realize how much artists have lost their way in the culture when the man who rapped “Thrift Shop” has more moral courage on Palestine than 90% of mainstream-well known artists out there? He's one of the very very very few vocal and consistently vocal out there. Like one of the most political creative mediums is in a crisis (but many have said for the last almost decade) if the top of the game people Kendrick Lamar and Drake are having a pants pull down contest right now. Rap is not even music in my rotation of pop culture knowledge and what I curate in my day to day listening, but even I know this is pretty insane and surreal. Respect to Macklemore because so many artists have truly lost their way.  

AI Photography, Palestine, art ego, complicity, it all haunts heavily

As AI haunts my mind and I struggle against the rage and frustration that stirs at not merely the new reality, not merely toward the ruling class tech vultures ready to destroy art at all costs, but my fellow photographers and the photo world people for embracing it. The only people who push back are the people in the comment sections. The art world in the larger scope I'm not surprised. Photographers you think would know better but no they actually seem to be less critically thinking on this issue because they're caught up in art theory approaches and philosophical magical fantasies. 

We don't get to do whatever we want because we are artists. We owe the world to be more than solely acting on our own desires to play around in the creative inspired bubbles we move about in. We don't get to make whatever we want at any cost. The world is more than the artist's playground. Some of us could be humbled more than clapping for the technical feats and dreaming about this tool/weapon. 

To the artists who love to act like they play and exist on the perimeters outside of society, we are all here and stuck together, sorry to break it to you. Maybe that's why some don't take us artists too seriously and some even think of us suspiciously.

Many artists like to think of themselves as especially in tune and sensitive people. Uniquely in touch with the world and can provide guidance into understanding it better. A kind of saviorism and martyrdom. Artists overall would be better to come down off the soapboxes we are enticed by. You don't have to give up shows, awards, or interviews, but the idea that it makes some superior in the intellectual and sensitive sense is demonstrably false. Inflated and fawned over egos are never helpful to artists and art as a whole.

To another point, these characteristics lead many of these artists and photographers to see current AI technologies as their god given right to use anyway they like. As well as keep their silence on Palestine lip locked as to not offend potential donors and collectors who believe in a superiority of certain people’s human rights over another group of people. It's amusing to act like this is not what this is about when it comes to Israel versus Palestine. The positioning of a colonial power formally claiming their people matter more.

People don't want to say out loud the obvious in their support of Israel over Palestinians. They believe Israeli and Jewish people who support Israel matter more than Palestinians. They don't see them on an equal footing, they don't see them as human. They see Palestinians as inconveniences. To some others Palestinians are completely invisible. It’s Gaza a strip of land to them not a people. Rubble not bodies. Infrastructure and buildings, not families and history vanquished.

This is what supremacy over others is, this is colonization and dehumanization. Is this so difficult to grasp? Well the above opinion may soon become illegal with overwhelming support of Democrats in congress. Though I heard Nadler pushed back but we’ll see.

Artists can't claim to speak to a universal human condition displayed in their work if they're silent on these issues. A technology that can upend society for most people for the worst including art, because even if you don't care about human society as a whole as an artist you should care about art. The first genocide of the 21st century paid and proudly supported by our government should also be on your radar and alarm if you spent years fearing and speaking up about the maniac who could very well slide back into office. 

May 4-6, 2024

Maybe as artists we shouldn't be bestowed as having special moral authority and wisdom to speak to the human condition, human rights and abuses. That we have the key to reach into the depths of the soul to shake its moral barometer. Speak the truth to power, show society the ugliness that underlies it all by holding up mirrors if so many in the art world and photo world can stay almost dead silent on the first genocide of the 21st century in high definition screened and screamed streaming on our phones 24/7.