The Revolution introduced me to art,
and in turn
art introduced me to the Revolution!
Albert Einstein
Nobody sets out to document the end of the world with a camera. But there I was at Berkeley, at The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) and DataRescueSFBAy hackathon where the word “data” gets thrown around like it still means something pure, something untouchable. Where people who understand that information can just vanish… poof, gone, memory holed into the digital abyss, decided to do something about it before the lights went out for good.
And then Wired Magazine came calling.
Because this wasn’t some twee tech story about disruption or innovation or whatever horseshit they were peddling this quarter. This was real. People hunched over laptops like they were defusing bombs, which, in a sense, they were. Environmental data. Climate research. The kind of shit that makes certain people nervous because it suggests accountability might still be a thing.
The thing about getting work in Wired, and let’s be honest, it’s Wired, not Aperture, is that I’m suddenly part of the spectacle I was documenting. My frames become evidence that this moment matters, that these people in this room doing this unglamorous, essential work are worth noticing. The magazine needed pictures that didn’t just show nerds typing. They needed the exhaustion, the determination, the faint whiff of desperation that comes from knowing you’re racing against willful ignorance armed with subpoena power.