Not cinematic violence. Not the slow motion hero shot nonsense. The real kind. The kind that does not care if you are ready, if your leash is waxed, if your head is right. The kind that has been doing this since before our species figured out how to stand upright and invent despair.
The light, or the lack of it. This is not golden hour, soft focus redemption. This is fluorescent interrogation room light dragged across the surface of the planet. Nothing flattering. Nothing forgiving. Just texture. Just consequence. You can almost hear the wind chewing on the edges of things.
There is a specific kind of person who walks toward weather like this. Not thrill seekers. That combination of words are too cute. It is more like a quiet refusal to stay dry and safe while something enormous is happening five hundred yards out. A stubborn belief that getting worked over by something bigger than you can bring about a form of clarity.
Four Mile Beach is no postcard nonsense. It is a mood swing, a threat, a dare. And these two silhouettes, small, temporary, absolutely replaceable, step forward.
That is the whole story, really. The sky loads the gun. The ocean pulls the trigger. And we, brilliant idiots that we are, keep volunteering to stand in front of it, just to feel something honest hit back.
There’s a moment when the body stops lying to you and starts telling the truth so hard it breaks something open. This is that moment. Yujin, caught in the gnarled throat of Golden Gate Park’s oldest arguments, those trees that have been twisting toward and away from each other for longer than any of us have been failing at love. She’s not performing. She’s confessing.
I pulled this from the archive the way you pull a splinter from under your fingernail. It had been sitting there for years, buried under newer work, shinier work, safer work. But it kept nagging. Some images do that. They refuse to stay filed away. They knock on the walls of the hard drive at three in the morning and demand to be seen again.
Black and white was the only honest choice. Color would have prettified it, made it digestible, something you’d scroll past on your phone between ads for things you don’t need. No. This needed the brutality (or maybe it’s the honesty?) of monochrome, the way it strips the bark and the skin down to the same raw language. Flesh and wood. Sinew and branch. The blur says: you will not freeze this. You will not own this moment. It is already gone.
LINES dancers carry something the rest of us traded away for desk chairs and certainty. This feral intelligence of the body, this refusal to be merely upright. Yujin folds herself into the tree’s architecture like she was always part of the blueprint, like the park was built around her and the concrete came later, an afterthought, an apology.
I rotated the camera or the world did. Doesn’t matter which. I hit the shutter while everything was still unresolved, still spinning, still dangerously beautiful and refusing to explain itself. I didn’t wait for the moment to settle. I knew it never would.
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.
There’s a particular kind of light that only exists in cities that have already seen their best days and don’t give a damn. San Francisco has it. Had it. Whatever. The point is, you stand on Saroyan Place (they renamed it from Adler, because this town can’t stop mythologizing itself) and you look up at that neon and something in your chest does a thing you weren’t prepared for.
Tosca. The sign hangs there like a faded promise from someone who actually meant it. Not ironic. Not curated. Not some silicon millionaire’s idea of “authentic.” This is the real thing rotting beautifully in plain sight, and the Transamerica Pyramid looming behind it like a middle finger from the future, reminding you that money always wins, always builds higher, always casts a longer shadow.
The No Parking sign tells you everything. Four to six in the morning, every day including holidays, street cleaning. The city will scrub the street but it can’t wash away what seeped into these walls, a hundred thousand conversations had by people who are now dead or divorced or both, the jukebox playing opera because someone decided that was the move and nobody argued because it was perfect and inarguable.
This is what a city looks like when it still has a soul but can feel it leaving. The Victorian facades pressed up against each other like drunks holding each other upright at last call. The neon buzzing its one word sermon to nobody in particular.
I don’t photograph a place like this because it’s beautiful. I photograph it because it’s evidence. Proof that something happened here. That people lived without personal brands and content strategies. That a bar could just be a bar, a street could just be a street, and the whole gorgeous mess didn’t need to be anything other than exactly what it was.
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 Charlietear 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.
Look at this. Just look at it. The land splitting open like a wound that never wants to heal, and right there in the gash… calla lilies. White as surrender flags in a war none of us are winning. That’s the whole damn joke, isn’t it? You go looking for the void, you walk down into the throat of something ancient and indifferent, and it hands you flowers.
Big Sur doesn’t care about my feelings. It never did. Henry Miller knew this. Kerouac found out the hard way, weeping into his jug wine in a cabin under the Bixby Bridge while the Pacific shrugged outside. The ocean here isn’t postcard blue. It’s gunmetal. It’s the sound of something enormous turning over in its sleep, and if you’re standing too close when it exhales, well, that’s on you.
What I’ve given you here is the architecture of the thing. Two hills pressing in like bouncers at a door you’re not sure you even want to walk through. The sky doing that thing the sky does in Big Sur, not threatening, exactly, but making it abundantly clear that I am a temporary arrangement of matter and it is not. And those lilies… Glowing like they’ve got their own private arrangement with whatever runs this show. They don’t need sunlight. They don’t need me to admire them. They just stand there, absurdly alive, in all that darkness.
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.
