As I work backwards through shoots in August, I place them into my little workspace of task-master lists if they still have outstanding invoices. And then my blog post task scheduler comes alive and tells me to Create a Blog Post for this Apple Wallet Event in Chicago that I took photos for, and so, I do not know how much is under an NDA (I did not sign any). I can post what I shot on my phone, I guess.

Andrew and I flew to Chicago in August for this influencer event. We shot on iPhones. “Shot on iPhone” was the goal, and oh boy, what a bad idea that is (in case Apple reads this: this is merely a bug report/feature request. Or it was all user-error that we problem-solved through, which makes good blog-post plot). I mean, we got the job done. The job was wonderful. The staff were wonderful. Influencers are wonderful. iPhone is wonderful. At the queer wedding (mentioned in the last blog post, but not yet blogged about, for the automatic task scheduler has new demands on me), Andrew and I met an Apple Employee who said, “shot on iPhone? Hm....” and she intuited the experience we went through. Here’s the deal.

I, as a professional photographer, like many (but not all) professional photographers, have specific software to cull my photos. Culling photos means selecting the best ones. So I can shoot a million photos in a day and then only select the ones I like to edit, and only import those into the editing software. The rest basically do not exist. (One time another professional photographer told me to use AI to cull my photos, and I said, “absolutely not,” because so much of what makes a good photographer, to me, is the ability to cull well. I’ve learned this recently. As a tangent to this tangent, I’ve shot for other photographers, who have not invested as much time into practicing culling as others might, and these photogs not only take years to deliver the photos, but include the bad photos and do not include the good ones. I could show you but I will not: I do not want to spread shade. So when the other photographer suggested I use AI, I sat there and said “no,” and he saw me quickly zoom through my pictures, selecting the good ones, and said, “I think you’re faster than AI is,” and I said, “yeah.” The length of time it takes to choose a photo does not make the choice more intentional. The “intention” is just hidden, baked in, buried beneath series of snap-judgements that are intentionally-cultivated.)

So of course I shot a lot of photos at the Apple Influencer Event in Chicago. I wanted the phone to overheat in my hand. And I knew I could cull the bad and blurry ones out. It was no big deal that the employees that contracted me wanted the photos by that night.

So the day went well and I took photos and charged the phone and took more photos. Two rounds of influencer events occurred. And at the end of the day, the Apple Employee in charge said, “we need the phone that we lent you back, so could you transfer the photos before our flight at 5:00?” It was 4:00. Andrew plugged the phone into his computer. And none of the photos loaded. The transfer was too bulky. The phone froze. The computer did not transfer the photos. So we said, “uh oh!” and they said, “ship us the phone when you get back home,” and so we had another day before needing to pawn the phone off the to agency that hired us, so they could cover the cost of shipping the phone. Apple knew the issue. They met us with comprehension and understanding. I spent the afternoon finding techniques for fast file transfers from the iPhone.

So we stayed up late, visiting Betsy’s old apartment (she passed away in December last year). Andrew pointed to one or two apartments in the building. One had no lights on. The other may have had lights on. One of those was her’s. Andrew spoke of how the American Health Care system may have failed her. But she did not take very good care of herself. So her death is complicated: I said it would be just like Betsy to go and die like that (I am not heartless. I am saying this to cope); it was not out of character; and we were shocked at the lack of friends she made in her years in Chicago. Maybe that would have prevented her dying. If she went on more dates, and had someone to care for her...we walked by a gay bar. It was 5 minutes from her apartment. We had gone to a gay bar with a Glee night the night before; Andrew stole my phone and texted my boyfriend at another gay bar about the Chicago Cubs; my boyfriend told us to stay for the drag show, but we did not because we had to be up for the shoot...but this is all to say that options were available to Betsy. I had even pressured her to go on an online date. Once. She was not impressed. And now I wish I could send her Romy to listen to, but she can’t really listen to Romy right now. That’s how things are.

Here is an iPhone photo of Betsy’s apartment building. I got the photo off of my iPhone.

We walked back to the hotel to transfer the photos. And the photos transfered quickly, but only half of them showed up. Which means that some of them transferred infintely slowly. Half the photos showed up and the rest were missing. And each method for grabbing the photos off the phone repeated this result. I wanted to scream (in case Apple is still reading: I have good professional equanimity and did not scream). It was midnight and our flight was at six in the morning. So I transferred the photos again, by getting them into the downloads folder somehow, and waited. I let go and leaned into the wait. And somehow all of the photos appeared, or promised to appear. I double checked through my culling program. Every photo that appeared in the iPhone photos app appeared on the computer as well. That was it: I went to bed.

So on the airplane I culled all of the photos. I edited the ones I took on my camera (oh yes, Apple wanted real camera photos, not-shot-on-iPhone, as well). And I airdropped them on the airplane to Andrew sitting seven or eight or nine rows in front of me. How mystical modern technology is: airdropped on the airplane.

The mysticism of technology, depending on how you define mysticism, appeared in a statement an influencer made. She responded to a new feature of the Apple Wallet, which “splits the bill” according to an image of the receipt: the iPhone camera reads each item in the receipt, puts a list of the items on a screen, and you can select which item in the receipt was yours to pay. The iPhone will add up the total for the items that you have selected, and add, proportionally, tax and tip. And then you can opt to send that total, through Apple Pay, to the person who put their card down and paid for everyone. So the influencer responded to this, saying, “why doesn’t Siri know which items are mine already?” Oh Rachel (this was not her name), how would Siri know that you ate half of the pizza ordered? Do you want it to watch you? Somehow it must know, but that knowledge, like much of technology, is a mystical knowledge: it is a mystery beyond reach, “unknowable” to those who aren’t specialists. “AI,” so people call it, embodies a new form of faith in probability algorithms, a new form of modern mysticism. A faith against reason; a faith against decision.

(There is a 2005 essay about this that I told my pastor about when he began to talk about AI, which I can cite here: Thomas Carlson’s “Modernity and the Mystical: Science, Technology, and the Task of Human Self-Creation,” in James Proctor, ed., Science, Religion, and the Human Experience. Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2005.”)

This is all to say, I do not think this influencer would like culling very much at all.

Anyways, that is the blog post. Stay tuned for more, and hire me for photography (email blake.a.williams@live.com).

-Blake

Wellness Together 2026

As part of an automated business strategy, I paid (without my knowledge: it was included in the bundle of programs that I got) for an automatic task scheduler. The task scheduler has prompted me to create blog posts for every shoot that I book. It must be intelligent. And although I do not think that this website is very well-trafficked at all, I will, nonetheless, endeavor to share some images from the 2026 Wellness Together conference that I took photos of, along with (because this is a site foregrounding writing) WORDS.

In preparation for a wedding at the Madonna Inn (which my automatic task scheduler will whip me into blogging about soon), I threw all of my camera gear into Andrew’s car. I needed some of it for the conference that Andrew and I were going to shoot. That conference is the Wellness Together conference. So Andrew carpooled us down to San Diego. He did video for the conference. And we met Elora in the lobby of the hotel across from the San Diego Convention Center, who we hired to be the second-shooter. We unloaded gear in the hotel room. We slept.

I am not sure what the task scheduler requires of me, so I will share a photograph from the next day. A screenshot of a photograph from my Lightroom Catalogue. Look. It is the Reading Rainbow guy. I took a photo of him holding up the children’s book that he published. Libraries are important, he said. He is a library worker. For those of you who do not go to libraries, that means that he works in a library. He says he’s bookish.

So we took pictures all day on Wednesday and all day on Thursday. Andrew and I left after taking a group photo on Friday morning, to drive up to San Luis Obisbo for a queer wedding at the Madonna Inn. Which is besides the point. Here is another image of someone important. She enjoyed when I took pictures of her, and we had a sort of visual, gestural banter that goes on when someone notices the photographer taking their picture, and begins to pose and thanks you for the pictures that you sent them. (This is not one of those photos.)

Here is an image of some guests. They are smiling and walking. What a crazy outfit! The conference did not only include speakers, but also people who heard their speeches. The guests participated in “breakout sessions,” and I am here to tell you about one of the “breakout sessions.” Read about it below the photo.

Elora and I, as part of the job, walked around to different rooms that hosted “breakout sessions,” where a speaker who had specialized knowledge presented their findings with the attendees of the conference. And one of those breakout rooms was run by a man who looked like a surfer. His eyes were slightly jaundiced, and at the entrance to the room was an object that looked like a toaster oven with slots for people’s phones. People, before enterring the room, all put their phones into the toaster-oven-shaped device. And I walked up to, as was my job, take a photograph of this. It was a detail. People like details. People like images of their details. And the man, who looked like a surfer, with slightly jaundiced eyes, sprinted up to me, and said, “what are you doing?!” and I said, “I’m the professional photographer here,” and showed him my badge, and he said, “this is a no phone room, so no photos,” and I thought of how esoteric it is to exist in a room without a phone. “Iconoclastic,” I thought. And I said, “no, don’t worry, I’m with Wellness Together, the people who run this conference,” and he said, “then talk to Melissa or Britney,” and I said, “ok,” and then he explained his whole program to me.

“We give these people film cameras, and they can take pictures of each other on the disposable film cameras, instead of their phones.” I think of how Ocean Vuong, in a recent Oprah Interview (Oprah was not at this conference), talked about the condition of surveillance that young people feel, and that the condition of being surveilled discourages young people from taking creative risks, or even dancing in clubs. And I am not sure whether it matters if the image posted on Instagram is taken on a film camera or on an iPhone camera: surveillance is surveillance is surveillance. At least people notice the camera flash on a disposable film camera. They can see who is taking the image. A phone is more discreet. (I do not think this room was for me, a photographer who thinks about images, but instead for people trying to resist the tide of perpetual algorithmic images: film is a small, incomplete resistance).

And so I walked away, and continued taking photos.

The conference consistently spoke out against AI, especially AI girlfriends for students (“What about AI boyfriends?” I thought. I’m opposed to those as well). And I know that the impulse towards film is an impulse against algorithmically-generated images. I know the impulse towards screenshotting my images in Lightroom, though less robust (maybe?) comes from that same impulse.

Anyways, that is the blog post. Stay tuned for more, and hire me for photography (email blake.a.williams@live.com).

-Blake

Call

I’ve been beginning the process, through work, of a “call.” I work at a church sometimes, although now it is more than just sometimes (I call it “church work”). The pastor wants to “call” me to be a form of a “lay minister.” So I must meet with the Synod. The pastor coached me a bit. “Do not tell them you’re not very religious. And maybe use the word ‘theology’ instead of ‘religion’ when you’re talking about your academic interests. But be honest as well.” The meeting with someone from the Synod is scheduled for next Tuesday. Today is Friday. I have been stressed all week.

Part of this church work, for me, will be to teach people about interpretation of texts. The pastor is leading the study and wants my help. And I am reading a portion of Heidegger’s Being and Time as a way of figuring out how people have intepretted interpretation. Studying things like these be important. So Heidegger says, “Only because the Being of ‘there’ receives its Constitution through understanding and through the character of understanding as projection, only because it is what it becomes (or alternatively, does not become), can it say to itself ‘Become what you are,’ and say this with understanding.” I open my Instagram feed, seeing my more religious friends posting a Bible verse about the Holy Spirit. I have stopped, as of today, calling my job “church work.” I have begun, instead, to call it “work.”

We’re trying--me and the pastor--to rescue lesbians from Cameroon, as part of work. I’ve been finding organizations for the pastor to utilize, so that the lesbians he knows personally (and hopefully the rest of the rainbow alphabet living there too) can escape to a country where being gay is okay.

Signs of Life & Hermeneutics

In the past week, I’ve been asked to help teach a course on hermeneutics and epistemology for a group of close-to-dying people at a church. I feel like I may not know what I’m talking about, but they may not either. My grandparents, who are about the age of the church members (one of them is dead), have taken “courses” similar to these, and the pastor at this church is sometimes a bit less skeptical than I am, and so I’m wondering if there’s anything I can say that might be skeptical but provocative and generative. I do not know that much.
So I read Dilthey and Schleiermacher and my former professor David Tabb Stewart and (problematically) Heidegger (who is quoted in the movie Call Me By Your Name, which I watched again last night, by the way), and, also, controversially, added Susan Sontag to the mix (who is what I like to call an “instagram-thinker”) to mark the shift from representation in a text towards the surface “erotics” of a text (or art). And I feel a bit jumbled. I do not think the old people care about this.
Susan Sontag, makes a call, predictably, in her essay Against Interpretation, against interpretation. I do not think she has read Dilthey, who, as far as I know, uses interpretation not as something purely representative, but as a way of differentiating objects of experience. “We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more,” she says. I think some people think that interpretation is cut off from feeling, or from senses or experience, when, for a lot of the hermeneuticians that I seem to be reading, experience is the goal of interpretation. Or, put in a way that might be totally wrong but sounds nice: interpretation takes us from our own experience into the world of others, so that we might see and hear and feel more according to the terms of those whose worlds differ from ours.
And as I’m thinking this, a gay in the coffee shop walks up, and asks me how I’m doing. “Eh, sort of ok,” I say, because I’m in this crisis of teaching hermeneutics at a church, supposedly, and do not know how religious I should be or not be. The coffee shop plays Madonna’s “What It Feels Like for a Girl.” The gay sees my stack of papers, and says, “Schleiermacher?” and I said, “Dilthey today, but Schleiermacher yesterday,” and we talk about teaching, and gay movies like Call Me By Your Name. And suddenly the barista walks in, the barista who is going to seminary right now, who, surprisingly to me and this gay man, is married to a woman and wanting to have a child. The gay man leans in close. “He is obsessed with musical theater,” he said. “You need to tell him what you’re reading. We need to get him out of the closet before he has a child; he has to see that a gay can do what he does.” And I tell him about my friend who has had closeted gay friends for years, who have all gotten married, until they all showed up, without their wives, to San Diego Pride with my friend and his husband, and then they had all confessed to being some sort of gay or bisexual. “Our wives would kill us if they knew what we were doing,” I imagine that they said. “It’s sort of like a Brokeback Mountain situation,” I said, and he said, “it just gets worse as time goes on, prolonging a false marriage.” The gay gets up to leave. “Hey,” he said. “Come to my party. You’ll like the people there. Bring your boyfriend too. It’ll be a good time with interesting people.” And I said, “okay,” and he said, “no seriously come,” and I said, “alright!” and then, “I’ll see you later.”
I have been sitting here waiting for the barista to come from the back. I have no intention of talking about Dithley or Schleiermacher with him, because honestly, I do not know enough about either of them. Nor do they seem very biblical to me. I am trying to fit this sort of philosophical knowledge back into a religious context so that I do not get crucified at a church. “A hairy leather bear,” is how the Queer Bible Commentary describes John the Baptist: maybe that’s worse than secular knowledge. I do not know.

Apr 10, 2026

I am sitting in a coffee shop, the same coffee shop as two weeks ago, at about the same time of day, reading about queer photography. I thought you should know. I wanted you to know.

Mar 26, 2026

I am sitting in a coffee shop, across the way from a massage place, where, many months ago, a woman (hair frizzed, arms gesturing sharply) slammed screamed and pounded on the door. A woman ran up frantically and slammed and screamed until she open-eyed spun around, phone-in-hand, and stomped (stomp stomp stomp, she did) her way into the coffee shop, yelling, phone-in-hand. “Can you give me the number of the massage place across the way?” she commanded (a pastor, yesterday, said “commands help us!”), and the barista shrugged and the crowd of coffee-shop-students gazed up politely. Inquiring eyes. “My daughter,” she said, “I need to get in touch with my daughter!” And the coffee shop barista shrugged. “She’s getting a massage,” but across the street I look now for a sign reading: “prenatal massages.” After spinning from the coffee bar to the door to the bar to the door to the bar to the door, the woman ran outside and pounded on the door of the prenatal massage center, and the barista closed the door to the coffee shop. Back in our bubble. Inquring eyes backed down.

Reading a sentence today, “Photographs connect to a life as experienced, to ‘images, feelings, sentiments, desires and meanings,’” I thought of this crazy lady story. Some people might define photography by its referential power: its suggestion of a life behind its depiciton. I don’t know. Other mediums might do this, but in confined to a documentary genre (field recording, for example: sound art but from something really real). I’m not so sure. And I thought of this story of this woman, because it was real in my mind but also comic, so cartoonish, so unbelievable in a way.

When Barthes, the big photo theorist that people like to believe, was writing things, saying photography = “IT WAS THERE,” he did not have an iPhone in his pocket. Photography was a process. If people talk about the “materiality” of photography, and if that is a trendy thing to talk about today, it is only because photography used to, in fact, seem much more “material” than it is now: film was blank and mysterious, and somehow had an image etched on it, that somehow corresponded to a moment that a photographer “captured.” Or a print was a blank sheet that somehow took on the forms of the film (the film took on the forms of “the world” in front of it), and so, yes, despite the fact that the darkroom paper was blank and empty to begin with, the moment it depicts, through the development process of the darkroom, “WAS THERE.” The more we could mess with it, the more its own fabrication appeared in front of our eyes, the more people doubled-down on its reality. So people asserted.

Now we have iPhones in our pockets, and this relationship between photo and reality is so blatantly natural to us (while also being contested by AI, but nobody I know likes AI). Barthes’ era is gone, and I think that he’s stopped being useful. Maybe I’m too critical, but I’m reading a paper that, holding onto Barthes’ assertion, denies the status of digital photography as “photography.” So I’m not sure: Barthes’ “WAS THERE” is a problem that should have been dealt with already. (I told my darkroom friends that Walter Benjamin, through some extrapolation, suggests that if we see the materiality of photography, we lose the illusion that photography’s reality is really-real. Enough talk about reality).

One way to talk about photography is a medium that has a visual-indexical relationship to an empirical world, I guess. The visual world, in this sense, literally presses-onto a photographic receptical. The world marks a photograph. Then, expanding the senses, there are things that have an auditory-indexical relationship to the world, or an olfactory-indexical relationship to the world, or whatever, and I think, one day, a sort of comparison like that would be good. But the indexical constructs the world as empircal, and honestly, I tell you that story that really did happen, but lacks a sort of indexical quality (it is writing!), and is full of affective qualities, to suggest (this is not controversial) that reality takes different forms. To represent it well: the quote above, with a bit of a “phenomenological” slant, finds value in a life as experienced, and I think this might be photography’s job more than some scientific instrument.

One paper by Jared Ragland, who is a photographer I am sort-of obsessed with, suggests, in an anthropology essay somewhere, that photography constructs identity. So much for photography being this purely empirical object. He worked with addicts, and the addicts used printed-out photography to remind themselves of who they were. Elizabeth Edwards, who writes an article about photography, suggests that other anthropological authors say the same thing. What “was there” for Barthes is “here now” for these viewers: “Photographs are...powerful actants in the social space ‘intertwined with a larger process of maintaining different forms of sociality and personhood.’” Instead of a life behind the photo, “photographs connect to a life” in front of it, somehow: not exclusively through memory of the past, but through the construction of a world in the present.

Finally: photography will always look cartoonish in relationship to the past and the present. It flattens the world and rips time from its course. But a photo might serve an “iconographic” purpose, like an object constructing its on hagiography, “as a relic held in the hand,” but maybe we are so used to the phones in our pockets that photos seems so real (the world appears on the screen!). As long as photos are real, life becomes its own relic.

I think I will buy some drugs to do with Tommy because this is a bit heady for me today.

Moon

Doty, describing, calls focus to the word “attention,”
So does Dlugos. I’m no poet like them, so attention is not a word for me.

Driving, looking, yesterday I noticed piles filling the roadside,
stacks of chairs lopped onto cardboard and wooden beams,
multiple piles of metal scraps, and
they recurred, over and over they recurred,
punctuating the road across miles,
monuments of junk, as if arranged.

Sometimes, forgetfully, the days pass as daydreams,
as plans, as days and events collected,
captured and pocketed.

I missed the blood moon at 3:00 AM last night. Julie did not miss it.
I spent my time dreaming. I have seen a lunar eclipse many times before.
I wonder about those who stays awake.
I wonder about Julie, watching, losing sleep,
for a moon turned red in a moment, then back.

My roadside sculptures have been hauled.
My commute looks clean.
What will I do when these monuments do not last,
but conjur a little dream?

Update

I have not been writing much, because I feel like I’ve needed to spend time “getting my life together,” which has meant working more hours and staying in bed more, determining my life by what I can afford or not afford. A lot of my little goals (learn lap steel, play music more, do another photo project) are clouded by a bigger project: “afford to live well.” I think of Mary Oliver foraging for her living, writing poetry, and held up as a model for a life-well-lived.

So I woke up to the sound of the rain today. I stayed in bed because my blanket is too big. I pretended to be depressed, although I do not think that I am. I am just a bit lacking in motivation, which is frustrating (although an essay by Felix Gonzalez Torres motivated me, and so I know where to find motivation). I need to print, to get something printed, to work on a project: I need to do something to get started, and I bought a roll of paper to feed into a printer, and plan to buy another. I wonder more than I think now and have lost the focus of a long-term project. I work at a church and get to decide my hours (how many and when, as long as I can justify them, although the service times are not flexible), and so it’s a good gig except that I need to wake up early on Sunday mornings, and it does not pay as much as photography.

I woke up and drove the Geo Tracker today, which, after almost a year of being in the shop, has passed smog and only has some minor work. I drove down the street, as the rain cleared up. The morning light turned sharp and a blue car drove next to me. I thought of how we were both driving blue cars, and inside of the car window I saw my old priest from when I went to Episcopal church. I work at a church now and cannot spend time with the Episcopalians. But I looked over briefly, and he slowed his car down right behind me, and stayed in that position so we could not look at each other, until we both stopped at the stoplight. I looked over. He looked intensely at me, in an ambiguous recognition. And I smiled at him. I wonder if he has his life figured out.

A few years ago, before I worked at a church, I grabbed coffee (him: hot chocolate) with the priest. We wandered around the block, talking about the holocaust. He made it clear that he had no agenda; just an open-ended walk to dream a bit. We were just on a walk talking about the different literature we read, and I think he suggested a graduate school for me to go to, that the Episcopalians would fund. Maybe I would be religious one day, or at least religious like that. Once in a while I open his email newsletters, which quote Annie Dillard or an announcement of a church member dying, or a celebration of the season. I know the priest and his husband watch reality television; I saw them at Orange County Pride last October.

In many ways, I am doing better than I was doing last year. I read and write less, and I think I’m taking life a bit slower now, or closer to heart. I have a lap steel guitar shipping to my house hopefully soon, although I do not know when. Now that I can fit a guitar in my trunk, I want to play ambient music on the dobro for Tommy.

Felix Gonzalez Torres writes an essay that I talked about with the office admin at church. I realized I was out of her depth. He writes about a work titled by Roni Horn entitled Gold Field: a sheet of gold laid onto the floor in an art gallery. It is not a formal exercise, it is not merely “pure formalism,” not some empty purity, a reference to minimalist sculpture, but “A place to dream, to regain energy, to dare.” And I stood talking to the office admin at church, after the pastor mentioned the sociopolitical situation we are in, and how he is becoming more bold talking about “living love” in a world that seems to be full of so much hate. I told the admin that, quoting Gonzalez-Torres, “the act of looking at an object, any object, is transfigured by gender, race, socio-economic class, and sexual orientation,” and all of these categories sort of held a tension with a religious sensibility. The minimalists, who aimed for some abstract objectness, or a “pure object” that could not be conceptualized, seemed to have religious goals to me, by mystifying objects into ineffability. And the categories of gender, race, socio-economic class, and sexual orientation become the opposite of ineffable, because they are often very clear conditions that articulate and determine people’s lives. And the practitioners at church, some of whom are reluctant to face the sociopolitcal landscape we are in, also aim for the divine; the pastor is trying to bring them down to earth when he quotes from their Bible.

I asked the admin what it would mean to make a sheet of gold foil and lay it on the ground, borrowing from a heritage of purity, abstraction, and minimalism, but does the opposite: for Gonzales-Torrez, his lover, and Horn, provides a bit of rest and possibility in a world of despair. She said, “huh,” and I said, “maybe the pastor would like to think about this,” and we said, “oh well,” and I left.

If I have no motivation, it is because that sort of project, a minimalism engaged with a very historicized act of looking, is so ambitious to engage with. An act of looking that is a motivation that is not mine yet: it is a long-held commitment, a religion for the non-religious. Maybe I will be religious one day.

Queer Movie List 101

not all of these are “about” gay people but they are “queer” cinema.
Probably included too many here.
Listed in order of what I would show my straight brother to get him familiar with gay male culture.

Weekend (2011)
Paris is Burning (1990)
The Doom Generation (1995)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Happy Together (1997)
The Birdcage (1996)
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
BPM (2017)
But I’m a Cheerleader (1999)
The Phanton Thread (2017)
Carol (2015)
Call Me By Your Name (2017)
God’s Own Country (2017)
Sauvage (2018)
Pain and Glory (2019)
End of the Century (2019)
Mathias y Maxime (2019)
Titane (2021)
Close (2022)
Moonlight (2016)
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Mysterious Skin (2004)
To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)
Queer (2024)
All of Us Strangers (2023)

Soap Box

On Monday I worked from a coffee shop, sitting next to someone I worked at Christian Camp with ten years ago. (It was a place I have scrubbed from my memory as best I can, except telling people that I lived in a “Blaire Witch Project Cabin” for a few months before quitting the camp entirely.) He is getting a masters degree in clinical psychology from a Christian school. We talked for too long and today I am looking at graduate school options.

“I have three roommates,” he said, “and I enjoy the diversity of perspective, because diversity of perspective teaches us more about God.” One of my professors used to say this, as a sort-of way of destabilizing fundamentalist approaches. It’s good, but this person continued talking, which was not so good. “One of my roommates,” he said, “is as conservative as you can get. He listens to Joe Rogan.” And I thought, “oh no,” as he blinked and blinked.

“I’m a centrist,” he said, adding, “I’m the most moderate you can get,” as he described his second roommate. “My next roommate,” he said, “is a celibate gay man,” and I thought, “oh god,” and the third, he said, “is a liberal. I thought he was gay, but he’s just liberal,” he said. “It’s a really diverse group of people.” A celibate gay man, somehow, representing diversity is not what I had anticipated for my morning.

Do you, and I am truly honest to God asking if you can relate to me right now: do you ever sit down and buckle up and wonder where people have put their thinking caps?

He continued. “I think my goal is connection,” he said, “and there are so many ideological differences between people that get in the way of connection that I do not like to tell people who I voted for. Because that gets in the way.” (In a book, Moving Beyond Sectarianism, the author identifies this as a classic upper-middle-class belief, if that means anything.)

The barista called out my cortado at the coffee bar, but it sat for a moment as this man continued.

“I think there are so many ideological connotations that get in the way of connection that it’s more important to just connect with people,” he said, bragging about his centrism. “I want to get as many different perspectives as possible, and not have anyone assume anything about me, and I do not tell people my own beliefs,” and he started to talk about church, saying, “I’ve got a soap box.”

“I used to have a mentor,” he said, “that said that churches are too intellectual. Too much about belief, and studying things to get to that belief, and it’s important to figure out the reasons why people believe something. Because every theology can be pinned down to beliefs” and I said, “do you mean that it’s as if people have to go to seminary before they can actually feel like they’re Christian?” and he said, “exactly,” and I said, “interesting,” because I was talking now. And I said, “you know, there are two things I’m thinking: one is that there’s a reaction to that intellectualism that you notice, or that it’s not exactly the case, or that it’s a popular dichotomy. Because you see these Bethel-type anti-intellectual churches, sort of using that intellectualism as a thing to rally against; and you see the intellectual churches pointing their fingers at the more charismatic or Pentecostal churches, which are comprised of working class people, and both are sort-of demonizing each other as a legitimation of their own church. So it might be a dichotomy to think about rather than to take part of.” And I added my second thing. “Plus,” I said, “I’m interested in this sort of displacement of belief. I guess I learned about it in my religious studies degree, that belief isn’t all that’s happening in a religion. And so here’s an example.”

“I work part time at a Lutheran church. And sometimes I like to take this sort of anthropological lens. So the church had a potluck once during Lent, and someone brought Casserole. Lutheran Casserole, it was called, and I walked up to three older women puzzled. ‘What makes Lutheran Casserole Lutheran?’ I asked, and they said, ‘We have no idea. It’s just Lutheran Casserole.’ And everyone else answered the same way—that Lutheran Casserole is something they’ve just been making for a while, that they did not know why it was what it was, but they know the ingredients and can reproduce it, as if they’ve been habituated into casserole rather than reasoned into casserole. So I’m not sure that churches are intellectual, or rational all the time, as you suggest.” And he said, “well, there are reasons, but people don’t know the reasons,” (apparently he knows the reasons) and that approach seemed to exemplify a clinical psychology perspective, a certain psychological “hermeneutic of suspicion,” at least from a Christian school.

Which, all of a sudden, seemed to ground the conversation. Soap box kicked down, you know, even though he continued to talk about ideological differences. That his celibate gay roommate had ideological differences that were just ideological, and not so important, he even said, and that “affirming/non-affirming” (aka pro/anti-gay relationship) theologies were just ideological. They did not matter; human connection did. What a stupid thing to think so I spoke up.

I looked out the window, feeling myself sweat a bit, because it had been a good, long time since I’ve ever had to engage someone in a conversation about pro-gay theology. I tend to not really care that much anymore: people can either get on board with the LGBTQs or not. And I said, “I think I might have a different perspective,” feeling myself sweat a bit more through my Tin Lizzie shirt. “Because some of the issues you say are not-valuable, or ‘just ideological’ are actually very material and real issues for people. Those people just are not you. Like the celibate gay roommate probably experiences issues that make connection with other gays difficult, and that’s not just ideological: it informs his everyday life.” He saw where I was going.

My friend countered, “well I’ve had difficulties in my life as well. I’m Asian from immigrant parents,” and all of a sudden I got the sense that this was a very strange comparison he was making: that because he’s experienced some material problems, he had the ability to categorize (in his mind, and by his definition) others’ problems as merely ideological. “It seems like ideology is a way for you to abstract other people’s problems,” I said, “like you do not actually have to live them. But they do. And so you’re devaluating people’s problems as ‘ideological,’ in favor of connection, but sometimes I think maybe if you talk about material problems as real life problems that people encounter, instead of avoiding them, then that’s a new area for connection.”

I truly, I am honest to God just bluffing at this point. I don’t know if I believe what I say because I have not had to believe what I say in this area of life for a few years. I just want, as a life goal, to go to gay bar and get a drink, and never have to deal with straight Christians having an opinion on ideology. I came here to write emails for photography clients, and the person next to me is proclaiming “centrism” through his celibate gay roommate as Donald Trump is in office right now sending ICE to be his own little personal Gestapo.

“I think the real issue,” he said, instead of ‘ideology’ apparently, “is loneliness.” I thought of his celibate gay roommate (a particular loneliness issue with ideological or religious roots). “None of the other issues matter as long as people learn to connect.” I thought of how my friend might be lonely because he is actively building a façade to hear about other people’s problems, but never really giving anything of himself. He’s studying clinical psychology. Maybe he was actively distancing himself from authenticity. I’m not sure. But I am sure that if I had sat there and listened and pretended that I did not have any opinions at all, or did not say a thing, then I would not have really put myself out there to either connect or disconnect with this person, and as I think about it more and more, that I’m not sure what he thinks “connection” is.

But I kept going, “you might be interested in what I call the ‘pluralism problem,’” I said. I needed to give him something. He is in grad school. “The pluralism problem is, well, it’s a problem. In order to hear all those different perspectives that, for you, point to God, you know, you have to get everyone in the same room to negotiate their perspectives. At least hypothetically.
So the theoretical problem becomes: how do you set a framework for conversation that does not diminish each perspective, or reduce it to some other thing? Practically, imagine trying to get a trans person in a room with a Trump supporter to talk on the same terms. How could they try to speak to one another rather than speaking past each other? There’s a problem in deciding on the terms of their discussion, trying to understand each other, without scaring the trans person away, or without the Christian feeling disqualified from the conversation entirely. Without the trans person trying to convert the Trump supporter to a different, more inclusive perspective, and without the Trump supporter trying to convert the trans person to their perspective. Because the trans person might believe in a secular Human Rights framework for their conversation, but the Christian might only believe in the Ten Commandments, and so if you try to mediate what they’re saying, or find a common ground between them, or even terms for discussion, you have to decide on something first: are you going to use Human Rights as a way of viewing someone’s full humanity, the Ten Commandments as a way of viewing someone’s full humanity, or some other framework? How would you decide?” And this all went over his head, like the casserole, I think, until I said, “I need to grab my cortado,” and he said, “eat your burrito it’s cold,” while quickly turning towards his laptop, putting his headphones in, and typing quickly. I imagine he was embarrassed. I do not think people normally kick down his soap box.

But if someone is going to interrupt my little day of replying to photography emails, with a long-winded speech, then I will reply back. That’s it.

Some AI Articles:

I am taking a photo class at a community college so that I can use their expensive printers and film scanners. Most of the class is here to utilize this opportunity. But there is one student who is 20 years old, studying to transfer and earn a bachelor’s degree, who sits in the corner of the computer lab. She talks about using Chat GPT, like many young students. “I do not use it for much,” she says, “I just use it to edit my essays to make them sound better. It tells me what to do.” I do not think she knows that that is what her professor is for: to make suggestions for her to improve her writing. I do not think she knows that AI does not “sound” good, honestly. I sit at a computer that is turned off, listening, with a poetry book open. I read.

Yesterday, at church, Julie, the office administrator walked up to me. She knows that I am loudly opposed to using AI for church tasks. And she agrees with me. “AI Music,” she says, “cannot conjure the Holy Spirit.” I told her, “I do not know about that.” I imagined something like the event when Bethel, a megachurch in Redding, California, used Binaural Beats to induce a spiritual experience in its followers. If “AI” could reproduce this technique, then I think it could induce a similar spiritual experience. We could name this reproduction, this copy/pasting (no need to call it intelligence), the Holy Spirit. The divine is what we name it.

My brother clapped his hands in the kitchen when Chat GPT rose in popularity. “We’re encountering the Mind/Body problem again,” he said. I’ve heard over and over that Artificial Intelligence is “soulless,” or “not human:” it is all algorithmic probability from a dataset, and not caused by something uniquely human.

The articles I’ve linked below do not really deal with the issue of AI reproducing a sort of soul, or humanity, or agency. They deal with problems of classification, problems with interpretation, problems with the labor involved in Artificial Intelligence, and other ways of demystifying Artificial Intelligence. If there is not something soulful and ineffable at the core of these algorithms, then these works are a little beginning to make “AI” a bit clearer.

Refugees power Artificial Intelligence through “clickwork”:
https://restofworld.org/2021/refugees-machine-learning-big-tech/

Another article on Clickwork, or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which powers AI training databases:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/15/nyregion/amazon-mechanical-turk.html

A Trevor Paglen interview from Aperture:
https://aperture.org/editorial/trevor-paglen-on-artificial-intelligence-ufos-and-mind-control/

Some quotes:

“The theory of perception underlying so much of AI and computer vision is shockingly bad from a humanities perspective. It’s crucial for people with backgrounds outside the tech industry to look at these systems critically.”

“’Aritificial Intelligence’ doesn’t really mean anything, and it has a lot of ideological associations. It’s a term that lends itself to mystification.”

“We are subject to vastly powerful systems built by people who never seem to question the relationship between representation and reality, pictures and meaning.”

Trevor Paglen’s project “Excavating AI,” focusing on machine learning and classification in databases, rather than the generative stuff:
https://excavating.ai

He pokes at ImageNet and some problems with classification, like physiognomy (it’s back!), problems of interpretation in images (he cites W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Paperback ed, while also noting that there are “HUNDREDS OF SCHOLARLY BOOKS IN THIS CATEGORY.” I think of Paul Ricoeur for imagination and interpretation in general.), and other things.

AI and the American Smile:
https://medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-and-the-american-smile-76d23a0fbfaf

“It was as if the AI had cast 21st century Americans to put on different costumes and play the various cultures of the world. Which, of course, it had.”

On some “dangers” of Large Language Models
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922

“We have identified a wide variety of costs and risks...environmental costs...financial costs...opportunity costs...and substantial harms, including stereotyping, denigration, increases in extremist ideology, and wrongful arrest.”

Anyways, this is a list of links, mostly for me to keep track of. I will update as I find more.

October Update

It’s a busy few months. Hello, world, again: hello photography.

I scrolled through my Instagram today. A black and white blurry picture appeared on my feed. A man leaning against a rail, backdropped by a city skyline, bare-chested and relaxed, stood posed, looking down to the left. I swiped right and the next photo showed the exact same moment, unblurred. No change in body, no change in facial expression, no change in framing at all: a man frozen in two of the same photos. A post-processing blur, or the fact of a photo re-fabricated, crossed my mind and stuck, like an offense. I think, now, about photography.

I’ve been taking pictures along the lines of a documentary project. One is a picture from a point and shoot camera designed to hang off a keychain. The image quality from keychain camera is nearly unintelligible in good conditions; entirely abstract in bad conditions; and in many cases its photos do not, without knowing what they are beforehand, easily refer to the world. So, one picture for the project, in the sequence of three pictures, is a cluster of pixels from the keychain camera. And that’s all it is. That’s all it reads to be: squares printed too large. The next two images, arranged in sequence, are the “same,” with progressively higher quality from different cameras, so that you can see that the form of pixels from the first keychain camera image resemble the others. That this is all a similar moment reaching different technologies, and even the boxy picture of ambiguous pixel-art forms is still a photograph.

The blurry photo of a posed man from Instagram offended me because it is a violation of the “indexical” quality of photography, or its ability to point to a world. Although it maintains its reference to reality, the physical “impression” that it carries, the medium’s mark from being a photograph, is misconstrued. The photo was not blurry; the light did not hit the sensor that way; the look was achieved in post-production. The picture showed its manipulated hand. But the blurry pixel art from the keychain camera does not perform the same action, despite not resembling a photograph, because its “indexical” quality is intact: it looks like a photo from a particular camera. The world reaches it, and we, through the photograph, somehow have access to that world.

As I drove, I began to think of this sort of sanctity or purity in photography. That by maintaining integrity of the light-as-it-hit-the-sensor; or the light-as-it-hit-the-film; we are allowing the world to reach the photo. We allow the world out-there to reach our own. To take that and distort it is a difficult thing to bear: one man, I heard once, called it “insincere.” Whether something (without other photos to compare it to) is truly a photograph may be out of our reach, but I am beginning to believe that a photo’s indexicality is what makes it so precious: indexicality is, for me right now, the most photographic quality of photography.

I just watched a video on Rinko Kawauichi. She wants to find something beautiful in the world. As a way of thinking about what she wants to see, or why she’s living, she takes up photography. Photography has to do with existence; photography has to do with life.

I like to imagine that life reaches her through the camera. She edits her photos expressively, for color (I imagine). But her editing is only in order to express the life that reaches her.

I am reading more or less these days; I am looking at photos. I am taking either more or less photos: life has been a bit of a haze. If I want to work with photos, I must let them speak for themselves (I told someone the other day that I must become a photographic minimalist, like Uta Barth). “The best thinking about the medium comes from photographers taking photographs,” someone said once, somewhere, I paraphrase (probably from a Queer Photography book). I am reading Mark Sealy’s Decolonizing the Camera, which I should have read years ago. I should attach some images.

Two Pieces I Wish I Had Run Into Earlier:

Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture by Rosemary Hennessy:

https://www-jstor-org.occ.idm.oclc.org/stable/pdf/1354421.pdf

Queer Spirits by AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs

(I ordered it here: https://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=2079&menu=0)

The first piece, an article from the 90s, critiques queerness as a commodified identity. A fetishized identity (a stable identity, unaffected by power/class relationships), for Hennessy, is one that is aestheticized, and then commodified. Queer identity becomes one that “retains the structure of commodity exchange.” Queer identity, therefore, can become aestheticized through consumer choices. Hennessy would not like “rainbow capitalism:” an “artful life” would exclude the working class, she says, and calls for a view of lesbians, gays, and queers “who are manual workers, sex workers, unemployed, and imprisoned.” By calling for this, Hennessy complicates queer identity: not merely constituted by desire and its object, but by the socio/cultural/class relationships that determine “lifestyle” in the first place.
I believe that queer photography in the late 90s and 2000s answered Hennessy’s article quite well. Nan Goldin, Ryan McGinley, Dash Snow. Although not necessarily queer, I think of Gillian Wearing, Boris Mikhalov, or Santiago Sierra, who photograph people on the margins. Or, turning back to the queers, think of Catherine Opie, Jess T. Dugan, or Lorenzo Triburgo.

The second book, published in June 2011, follows five “Invocations” to conjur queer and marginalized spirits, and enact a secret group ritual. The book is esoteric, with belated (or completely absent) documentation of these rituals. An invocation is performed. A vow is performed. The rituals, Bronson says elsewhere, heal.
I have not finished the book; I am in the middle of it. But here, we find a construction of queer identity that (while aestheticized, especially presented in an Art Book, which Hennessy seems to mistrust) escapes a commodity-capitalism determination (a true Marxist might suggest that this spiritual practice conceals class and labor relationships, but no one is a true Marxist). No shopping malls here, nor forms of literal and photographic representation of the rituals (keeping them esoteric, and thus, uncommodifiable): just a “declaration of the brotherhood of the anus.” An attempt for that community to bond, and reach towards its own fragmented ancestry...a queerness expanding its identity beyond a commodity culture.

More to come...I need to finish the Queer Spirits book. But it is giving me joy for now, and I thought it might be worth noting these two pieces, and putting them in a sort of conversation.

Labyrinth

I sit in a library with three photobooks next to me. It’s always a gamble to read photo books at the library, especially with pages unpaginated, because some people like to slip a page into their pocket. You never know if you’ve got a gap toothed book (the same goes for whatever makes up history…oh well).

The first, Royal Road Test. The classic from 1971. Three men work their way to the desert to throw a typewriter out of a car. This was art back then. Edward Ruscha, Mason Williams, and Patrick Blackwell set this all up, and there’s not much to it. The book is short. You could read it if you could find it.

Anyways, the first photograph is one of the typewriter (“Royal (Model ‘X’) Typewriter,” it says). I believe this is the main character. And afterwards, we get introductions to the men, and then the window from which the typewriter was thrown, and then, finally (this must have been profound in 1970), documentary-ish images of the wreck of a typewriter smashed against the ground. The final image is cute: the wreck of the typewriter on the ground, next to the shadows of the three men. One man’s shadow shows him holding the camera.

Short and sweet: we never see the event of throwing the typewriter out of the car. We only see its evidence. So the book might be making a statement about an event and its trace, or it might also be making a statement about evidence and documentary photography (asking us to take something so silly seriously).

Next book in front of me: A Close Brush With Reality by Bart Parker. I skim it. I think he’s making a statement about photographs being not quite real. I like an image of a claw demolishing a building because it reminds me of the Mark Doty poem “Demolition.”

Finally, David Hockney’s book Cameraworks contains sort of panoramic-printed photography. Instead of a single image constituting a portrait of a person, Hockney takes many images close-up, and collages them into one large portrait. It is pleasing to look at, reminding me, too, of panorama mode on my iPhone, especially when my iPhone’s algorithm becomes choppy.

A while ago, Kathy mentioned an approach to photography that was outdated (“photography is different now,” she said, “than it was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s”) . And I have books in front of me with images from the 1970s and 1980s, so I see, in front of me, this “outdated” approach, which, in my mind, is not so outdated at all. In front of me are challenges to what some may call “straight” photography: that an image transparently depicts reality, with little-to-no bias that cannot be accounted for (ironically, in a different meaning of this word, I wanted my queer exhibition to be all “straight” photography to leave the question of representation intact). In front of me, however: photography is poked at through sequence and an almost parody of documentary styles (Royal Road Test), through (pretty didactically) its questioning of itself and reality, with accompanying text (A Close Brush with Reality), and, finally, through an attention to the material through which an image is shown (Cameraworks). If these techniques feel dated, it is only because our perception of the medium has shifted (we no longer see documentary photography like Royal Road Test; we no longer see the styles used by A Close Brush with Reality; we no longer see prints or polaroids to the extent that Cameraworks displays them). If our perception of the medium has shifted, it is only because representation—this capacity for photography (the image depicted, its material, its style) to correspond to and say something about our world—is sort of unstable. The world shifts; technology, with its figurative power, does too.

I wanted to put these all down as bullet points, because this is nothing too crazy (walking through this knowledge like a preset labyrinth), but here we be.

Life in Art

There’s a crisis I have when I meet someone new sometimes, laying in bed and close together. I see my life slipping away, thinking that I could be making something instead, or reading and writing and critiquing, or working on a project, or anything else: let’s go outside and make something real. My heart rate speeds up, and I start to squirm, not with an anxiety but with a dissatisfaction, a desire for a bigger world than one falling asleep to trash television. If I am going to be with someone, let us build a world bigger than ourselves…

In her article “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture,” written in the 90s, Rosemary Hennessy takes issue with the commodification of LGBTQ identities. Somehow, for her, the commodification of the subject corresponds with the stylization of a life, which, ultimately, becomes a stylization taking place in consumer choices. (“Buy more and better clothes! Become a stylish gay!” epitomizes this issue). And yet this stylization has an intellectual lineage (according to Hennessy): Foucault tells us “we have to create ourselves as a work of art,” and Nietzche tells us to “give style to one’s character—a great and rare art.” I’m not sure two people is enough to establish a lineage, but nonetheless, for Hennessy, this attitude is similar to queer theory’s “notion of identity as self-fashioning.” Queer theory is her territory, so she takes up critique. An attitude of stylizing one’s character is an attitude that formed from the Baudrillardian “regime of the simulation;” an aestheticization that conceals social relations, allowing us to only see life that is also “artful or stylish.” Consumer choices, rather than moral codes or rules (which is, in my mind, a naïve way for her to put it) dictate an individual’s subjectivity. A postmodern self emerges in, for Hennessy, the conflation of art and life. And the conflation of art and life, again, for Hennessy, leads to a subjectivity determined by consumer choices.

Well I do not think Hennessy knows much about the stylization of a life. Hennessy’s stylization is one of mere consumption (has she ever produced style?).

The other day, I walked around with someone I had known, and we flirted with the idea of building something consistent, and I walked along, thinking. Staying up late laying in bed doing nothing but watching music videos is not a sort of life I enjoy, and I do not think my brain is broken for stating this. It’s a consumption of media that creates the postmodern consumer of the screen (think of you: reading this on the screen!). I continued to think, walking. And I thought of my camera in the car, and the world began to align and make some sense: if anything, I could make this sort of life with another person into a bit of an art, and then it would be worth it in any sort of scheme of things.

It's an art practice that might almost be religious: totalizing, consuming, demanding as a god, but it is also, unlike commodification or consumer choices, what makes me me. Maybe I am a too postmodern of a subject: art instead of religion. But I believe that to make something of a life in front of me is not totally to commodify it with style, but instead to primarily give life a sort of coherence and articulation. This is where my sense of agency lies. Maybe life risks becoming part of the “regime of simulation,” but this is the problem (or a feature) of all mediums with any sort of figuration.

Anyways, to end: Mojave 3’s “My Life in Art” is on the playlist today.

it’s not really art

Apple Event in Chicago 2026