The thing about this shot is it captures what i can’t hold onto: Lindsey and Charlie, backlit against a city that’s just starting to make sense to the kid, or maybe never will.
Every photograph I make carries the weight of every moment that made me capable of seeing this one. Every song that wrecked me, every person who showed me what love actually costs, every book that taught me the world is bigger and meaner and more beautiful than i thought, every time i stood at a window like this and felt small, it’s all there in this frame.
This is what you bring a 4 year old to a window for: to show them the lights bleeding through the fog, to share the terrible gorgeous fact of the world outside. Charlie doesn’t know yet that this moment matters, that Lindsey’s creating memory and meaning.
At first, when you unlock the studio door, when you pull out the brushes or the charcoal or whatever the hell you’re working with that day, it’s packed in there. Every single person you’ve ever known is crammed into that space with you. Your first music teacher who said you had potential but lacked discipline, that pretentious bastard. That friend who makes blockbuster films while you can barely upload a video onto YouTube. The entire art world, the galleries, the collectors, the other artists whose shows you pretend not to care about while secretly wanting to burn their studios down, all of them standing there, judging. And your own ideas about the work, about what you think you’re making, what it’s supposed to say, they’re there too, the loudest motherfuckers in the room.
But you keep showing up. You keep making marks and scraping them off and making them again, because what else are you going to do? This is the gig. And slowly, so slowly you don’t even notice at first, they start to leave. Your teacher walks out. Your friend splits. Even the art world gets bored and wanders off to the next shiny thing. The concept you came in with, the one you were so certain about? It dissolves like it was never there at all.
And then it’s just you. Alone with the mess and the light coming through the window and the quiet, that beautiful, terrifying quiet.
And if you’re very very lucky, if you’ve earned it, if you’ve put in the time and didn’t quit when it got ugly and painful, eventually even you leave. There’s just the work. Nothing else.
And maybe, if the universe is smiling, that’s enough.
Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1932—back when America thought it had figured out what it wanted to be—she got out. Did the expected thing first: BFA from Bowling Green, MFA from UCLA. But then she did what artists who actually give a damn do: she went to Paris in 1966, to Atelier 17, that legendary print studio where Stanley William Hayter had been churning out revolutionaries: Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Phillips. She studied with Philip Guston and Robert Blackburn in New York, soaking up abstract expressionism when it meant something, when it could hurt you, change your state of being.
By 1971, she landed at UC Santa Cruz—not to coast, but to build. She established the printmaking department there. Trained generations of artists who remembered her name, who came back to see her long after they’d graduated because she was the real thing. A true Professor a true Artist. She retired in 1992, but retirement for Kay just meant she could finally create what she wanted, when she wanted.
And what she wanted was the wetlands. Those muddy, misunderstood, criminally overlooked stretches of southern Santa Cruz County that most people drive past without a second thought. She’d haul her easel out there with her painter friends—Mary Warshaw, Marta Gaines—and chase the light. Plein air in most seasons, “though not all weather,” as she’d say, because even Kay had limits.
Her work ended up where it deserved to be: the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Monterey Museum of Art. Museums in France kept her prints. The Triton Museum gave her a posthumous solo show in 2019 because even dead, her work demands attention.
But here’s the thing about Kay: she didn’t just paint the wetlands—she fought for them. Served on the board of Watsonville Wetlands Watch, helped publish their book, got her hands dirty in the actual work of conservation. She understood something most artists miss: you can’t just aestheticize a place and call it love.
You have to show up. You have to protect it. Give more than take.
She was political. Engaged. A deep thinker who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, which today is usually code for “she made people uncomfortable,” which is another way of saying she told the truth, her truth.
Kay Metz died in Santa Cruz in 2018. She was 86. She left behind students who became artists, wetlands that stayed wild, a beautiful 1925 Craftsman Bungalow and Art Studio that my family is privileged to call home, and paintings that understood something fundamental about light and landscape and the spaces in between that most of us never see.
There are moments that crystallize in memory like amber, perfectly preserved, weightless, eternal. This image of mine, caught between heartbeats that yesterday appeared in a SF Chronicle story, holds one of those moments: Adji and Alonzo in their element, light streaming through studio windows like benediction.
For me, these days, a good photograph isn’t really about what I see, but what i remember feeling when the shutter clicked. The way morning light cut across the floor. The sound of breathing between movements. The electric quiet that fills a room when artists are completely, utterly present.
Sometimes the universe conspires to put you in exactly the right place, with exactly the right people, at exactly the right moment. You don’t plan for grace, you just try to be ready when it arrives and move on when it’s gone. You let it go. Because that’s the deal, beauty doesn’t owe you anything, least of all permanence.
Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden.
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
I’ve been places. I’ve seen things. I’ve eaten meals that cost more than my first car and stood in front of art that makes you question everything you thought you knew about beauty.
None of it, and I mean none of it, comes close to watching Charlie tear ass through the garden like he’s being chased by something wonderful. That laugh, that pure, unfiltered joy when you’re gaining on him and he knows it and doesn’t care because the game is everything. The way he throws his whole body into running, no technique, no form, just go go go.
You spend your whole life chasing something, the girl, the shot, the moment, the perfect light, the thing that matters. And then your kid is running circles around a shed in the morning light and you realize: this is it. This was always it. The rest was just noise.
I chase him. He squeals. The light is golden. And for maybe thirty seconds, nothing else exists. No deadlines, no declining cities, no art diva bullshit. Just a kid who hasn’t learned yet that the world can be heavy, and a father trying to remember what that felt like.
That’s the whole game right there. Everything else is just killing time until our next run through the garden.
This photography and performance bibliography isn’t a reading list, it’s a goddamn intervention into how we fool ourselves about what it means to witness anything at all. Call it a photography theory bibliography if you need the institutional fig leaf, but this documenting performance bibliography is here to gut the lie of neutral observation.Azoulay opens the whole thing up with this radical proposition that photography isn’t some neutral tech-magic trick but a contract, a civil pact between everyone involved: the photographer, the photographed, the viewer, the whole apparatus. You think you’re just looking at pictures? Wrong. You’re implicated, complicit, responsible. Butler’s three entries hammer this home, speech acts, torture, war, outrage, showing how photography as performance doesn’t just represent violence, it performs it, circulates it, makes it politically operational in ways that should scare the shit out of you.
And Schneider and Taylor? They’re arguing that the real action isn’t in the frozen frame but in the doing, the performing, the embodied memory that a photograph can only ever fail to capture completely. The archive versus the repertoire, one’s the dead storage of colonial knowledge, the other’s the living transmission of what actually happened in bodies and spaces. This is where documentation stops being about preserving and starts being about continuing.
Then McLuhan and Peters drop in to remind you that the medium isn’t just the message, it’s the entire circulatory system through which meaning bleeds out and mutates. Kember and Zylinska push this further, mediation isn’t something that happens to life, it’s how life persists, evolves, refuses fixity. Ritchin’s looking at the digital rupture, what happens after photography eats itself and becomes something else entirely.
The procedural turn, Daston, Galison, Burgin, Bolton, these cats understood that before the image is an image, it’s a series of choices, apparatuses, institutional frameworks. Objectivity isn’t discovered, it’s constructed through elaborate performances of neutrality. Every photograph is already an argument about what counts as evidence, what deserves to be seen, who gets to decide, in this case… me.
Chouliaraki and Sontag bring the ethical hammer down: what does it do to us, this constant diet of suffering at a distance? Sontag’s skeptical of easy empathy, Scarry’s tracking how pain unmakes language and world simultaneously, and Hariman and Lucaites show how certain images become civic totems we use to tell ourselves who we are.
But Barthes, always Barthes, he’s the ghost at this feast, insisting on the punctum, that personal wound, the thing in the photograph that pierces you specifically. Berger’s right there with him, politicizing vision without losing the poetry.
This whole bibliography is asking: what if seeing isn’t passive?
What if every image is a demand, and we’ve been dodging the call?
Documenting Performance Bibliography
Documentation as Iterative Act
Azoulay, Ariella, Rela Mazali, and Ruvik Danieli. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Print.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print.
Butler, Judith. “Photography, War, Outrage.” PMLA 120.3 (2005): 822-827. Print.
Butler, Judith. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25.6 (2007): 951-966. Print.
Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge, 2011. Print.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print.
Mediation, Circulation, and Relay
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Print.
Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print.
Kember, Sarah, and Joanna Zylinska. Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Print.
Ritchin, Fred. After Photography. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Print.
Burnett, Ron. Cultures of Vision: Images, Media, and the Imaginary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Print.
Photography as Procedure (Not Image)
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. “The Image of Objectivity.” Representations 40 (1992): 81-128. Print.
Bolton, Richard. The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Print.
Alvarado, Manuel, Edward Buscombe, and Richard Collins. Representation and Photography: A Screen Education Reader. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001. Print.
Burnett, David, Robert Pledge, and Jacques Menasche. 44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2009. Print.
Ethical Force Across Time
Chouliaraki, Lilie. The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: SAGE Publications, 2006. Print.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Print.
Sontag, Susan. “Looking at War.” The New Yorker, 9 Dec. 2002, pp. 82-98. Print.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.
Hariman, Robert, and John L. Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Print.
Counter-Positions: Representation, Loss, and Fixity
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print.
Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Print.
Goldberg, Vicki. The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991. Print.
Strauss, David L., and John Berger. Politica Della Fotografia. Milano: Postmedia Books, 2007. Print.
Francis Bacon painted the shit we’re all too chickenshit to admit we feel at 3 AM when the numbness wears off. Those screaming popes aren’t about religion or some art history circle jerk, they’re about power eating itself alive, about the cage we’re all trapped in whether we’re wearing purple vestments or a stained t-shirt.
He took Velázquez’s smug Renaissance prince and ripped his face off to show us what’s underneath all that authority: pure, howling terror. The mouth open like a wound. And Francis Bacon did it fifty times because once wasn’t enough, because the scream doesn’t stop just because you captured it.
He painted meat because we ARE meat, beautiful rotting gorgeous meat, and all our pretensions about the soul and dignity are just curtains we hang to pretend we’re not livestock. Those transparent cages in Francis Bacon’s paintings? That’s the social contract. That’s civilization.
I can see right through the bars but I’m still stuck inside.
Bacon was a sadomasochist, a drunk, a magnificent disaster who somehow channeled all that damage into something that makes me feel less alone in my own damage. His figures writhe and dissolve because that’s what it feels like to be human when the lies are striped away. No redemption, no hope, no bullshit, just the raw fact of existence screaming back at me from a purple void.
Charlie’s first time on a sailboat. Monterey Bay at sunset. Three years old and already braver than his old man.
Here’s something to know when you take your kid out on the water for the first time: you’re terrified. Not of the ocean, I know the ocean, respect it, understand that it doesn’t give a shit about my feelings or my careful planning. I’m terrified of being the father who fucks this up. Who makes him scared of something beautiful. Who ruins the moment by being too cautious or too reckless or too whatever inadequacy I’m carrying around that day.
But there he is. Sunset light turning everything gold and impossible. The wind’s steady, the boat’s heeling just enough to feel alive, and Charlie’s looking out at the water like he’s seeing the world for the first time. Which, in a way, he is. This is his first time understanding that the horizon is not just a line but a promise. That movement can be silent. That wind has power.
Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all. Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman got it: “Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only.” Easy to say when you’re writing poetry, harder when you’ve got a three-year-old who can’t swim yet and his whole life ahead of him and you’re responsible for not being the asshole who traumatizes him before he’s old enough to have real memories.
But here’s the thing: he’s not scared. I’m scared. He’s just… present. Taking it in. The way kids do before we teach them to be afraid of everything, to calculate risk, to worry about all the things that could go wrong instead of just experiencing the thing that’s happening right now.
Monterey Bay at sunset is one of those places that makes you believe in something bigger than yourself, even if you don’t know what that something is. The kelp forests below, the whales that sometimes surface, the cold Pacific water that’s been traveling for thousands of miles just to arrive here, now, at this exact moment when my son is seeing it for the first time.
I’m thinking about all the times I almost didn’t do this. All the reasons not to: too young, too risky, too much could go wrong. All the ways fear masquerades as prudence. All the moments I could have stolen from him by being too careful, too worried, too convinced that my job is to protect him from everything instead of showing him how to navigate it.
The boat heels. Charlie laughs. That’s it. That’s the whole story. A three-year-old laughing because the boat’s tipping and the wind’s blowing and the water’s rushing past and none of the rules that govern his small contained life on land apply out here.
“Reckless O soul, exploring.” Yeah. Reckless. Taking a toddler sailing. Believing that he needs this, needs to feel small against something vast, needs to understand that the world is bigger and stranger and more beautiful than the confines of his bedroom or his backyard. Reckless to think that a father who’s made every mistake possible might somehow get this one thing right.
But the light’s fading now, turning everything purple and pink, and Charlie’s still watching the water, still taking it in, and I’m thinking: this is what I’m supposed to give him. Not safety, safety’s a lie we tell ourselves. But this. Experience. The understanding that the world is worth exploring even when, especially when, you don’t know what you’re doing.
Ruth Escobar looked at a perfectly good theater in São Paulo in 1969 and said, essentially, “fuck this”, then proceeded to destroy it. Not metaphorically. Literally excavated the stage five meters down, erected a cylinder clear up to the fly loft, 20 meters of vertical madness, 86 tons of iron, elevators, cranes, suspended cages, gynecological beds that moved on their own like some dream of Cronenberg doing Genet.
And Victor Garcia , this mad Argentine genius who’d abandoned medical school and architecture, whose family never forgave him for it, who was 35 years old and already burning through his life like a meteor, Garcia understood what needed to happen. He’d grown up in Tucuman province around indigenous Indians, absorbed their magic, their sense of ritual tied to elemental forces. He studied biology and was obsessed with embryonic life, with creation itself. “I don’t know how to live day-to-day,” he said. “Living kills me.” So he lived through theater, the only place where his particular form of existence made sense.
For Jean Genet’s The Balcony, a play about whores and bishops and generals and the revolution happening outside while people fuck and perform power inside a brothel that’s really a house of mirrors where nothing is real and everything is, Garcia understood you can’t put this on a stage and separate the audience from the action because then you’re lying. You’re pretending you’re not complicit, you’re not the voyeur, you’re not IN the brothel yourself.
Victor Garcia’s production of Jean Genet’s The Balcony
Garcia wanted the audience “suspended in a void, with nothing in front of it nor behind it, only precipices.” So he gutted that old São Paulo theater and made you sit on vertiginous balconies wrapped around this 65-foot pierced tunnel of plastic and steel, 86 tons of it, all handmade, artisanal, built from real materials because Garcia rejected anything fake. His collaborator Michel Launay, son of a blacksmith, welded together old hospital beds scavenged from basements in Coimbra, carcasses of wrecked boats found on beaches, sheep bones cleaned from slaughterhouse carcasses, rusted 2CVs transformed into mechanical bulls that bellowed. Nothing from a theatrical supply shop. Everything real, just repurposed, transfigured.
You weren’t watching theater in that space. You were dangling over an abyss watching actors cling to metal ladders, perform on platforms, scramble along the sides like animals driven insane in zoo cages. Garcia, mime and dancer by training, architect by education, anarchist by soul, created movement like a choreographer, but organic, visceral. He didn’t explain himself through language. He communicated through skin, through sensation. He wanted actors who could give everything, professionals or amateurs, didn’t matter as long as they could strip themselves bare and return to an Edenic state. Bodies without civilization. Flesh speaking directly.
And here’s where it gets real: this was 1969, under Brazil’s military dictator General Garrastazu Médici. Nilda Maria, the actress playing Chantal, the character who leaves the brothel to join the revolution, got arrested for actual anti-government activities. Her children were taken away, sent to Public Welfare. Art bleeding into life bleeding into art. Genet himself, who came to São Paulo in July 1970 to see what this wild man Garcia had done, had to petition the governor’s wife for their release.
The man who wrote the play watched actors perform his revolution inside a steel cage while the actual dictatorship disappeared one of his performers. You can’t write that kind of poetry. It just happens.
And Genet, who was nobody’s easy mark, who spent his life understanding that power is always a performance and revolution is always suspect, called this the best production of his text. The definitive one. An international reference for Genet studies. Peter Brook, who saw Garcia’s Yerma, called it “one of the greatest masterpieces he’d ever seen.” From a production that ran for 20 months, won 13 critics’ awards, and was completely, absolutely impossible to transfer anywhere else.
The thing that kills me, is that Garcia was this “citizen of oblivion,” as the writer Florence Delay called him when he died in 1982 at 48. He passed like a meteor. He hated theater tradition, hated its codes and fakery and the whole pretense of “craft”, he was an “organized anarchist,” a master of stagecraft who used his mastery to destroy convention. He worked from what he called a “secret alchemy,” loved geometry but hated rationality, created cosmic chaos that somehow organized itself.
This thing in São Paulo existed only in that moment, in that city, under that dictatorship, with those specific bodies in that specific space. Commercially unfeasible. Logistically insane. So only São Paulo saw it. Only those people, suspended over those precipices, got to experience what some Iranian professor later called “the Sistine Chapel of Theatre” when he saw the film, a film that a few private collectors guarded jealously for years… left invisible and hardly known.
Célia Helena, Jofre Soares, Ney Latorraca, Nilda Maria, and Garcia’s core collaborators, the French actress Michèle Oppenot, the Spanish powerhouse Nuria Espert who gave herself to his enterprises “with the energy of a Pasionaria”, all those actors didn’t just perform IN this structure, they became part of the architecture of transgression itself. Moving through those 20 vertical meters like human prayer, like obscenity made sacred or sacredness made obscene, which is the same thing in Genet’s universe.
Garcia wanted to mount The Balcony in France but couldn’t find a space at least 30 meters high. Many of his projects aborted, The Screens, François Villon, The Golem, a French Balcony. It took him seven years to mount Gilgamesh. He died planning Lorca’s The Public and Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan. He burned through his own life the way he burned through stages and convention and the patience of funding bodies who never quite understood what this Argentine exile, who felt himself stateless, a citizen of the world or of nowhere, was trying to build.
This is what happens when someone decides that the conventions aren’t just wrong, they’re offensive. When craft meets obsession meets a fundamental unwillingness to compromise with comfort. You destroy 86 tons of theater to build 86 tons of truth, even if that truth only exists for a few months in one city under a dictatorship that’s arresting your actors. Even if it kills you.
The audience sitting on those walkways probably didn’t know if they were safe. Good. Safety is the enemy of this kind of art. You’re supposed to feel like you might fall into the machinery, into the mirror, into the brothel, into the void itself. That’s the point.
And then it was gone. All that metal, all that vision, dismantled. Unrepeatable. Perfect.
I met Ruth Escobar many years later, when I was touring Brazil with Mabou Mines doing Gospel at Colonus and Hajj. By then she was a legend, a politician, a cultural leader who’d helped orchestrate Mabou Mines’ invitation. But more than that: she was the woman who’d had the audacity and the resources and the sheer fucking nerve to let Garcia destroy her theater. Who understood that some art requires destruction first.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is spitting poetry, and Wendy Whelan is doing things with her body that make you question every lazy decision you’ve ever made. Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. Because when everything’s burning down, when the whole damn country is doom-scrolling itself into oblivion, when families aren’t talking and everyone’s pre-unfriending half their social media contacts, this is when we gather in a concert hall to watch swans and elephants and kangaroos rendered in flesh and verse.
The irony isn’t lost on me. It never is.
I’m trying to capture something. Something that might matter when we look back at this moment, this strange liminal space between one version of America and whatever fresh hell or hope was coming next. I’m watching bodies communicate what words had long since failed to convey. Grace under pressure. Discipline. The small miracle of humans doing something difficult and beautiful just because they can.
Stanford’s intelligentsia filling the seats, stealing an hour or so from their electoral anxiety to watch art do what art does, remind us we’re more than our worst impulses, our Twitter feeds, our red-or-blue team jerseys.
The performers don’t mention the elephant in the room. They embody elephants instead. Smart. Honest. The only sane response, really.
Carnival of the Animals Wendy Whelan, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Francesca Harper October 27, 202 Stanford Live Bing Concert Hall
