One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it. Dorothea Lange
I descend into Steep Ravine in Mount Tamalpais State Park following Lange’s ghost down the same trail she walked every summer, two weeks annually at those cabins perched where the ravine finally surrenders to the Pacific, where she’d come to strip away the noise and let the coastal light do its work on her vision. This isn’t about capturing beauty, that’s tourist shit, this is about getting low enough into the canyon’s throat where the fog moves like something alive and I understand why she kept returning here, why this particular gash in Tam’s flank mattered, how these redwoods and fern choked corridors and that quality of light filtering through coastal morning became part of her visual vocabulary. Every frame is a kind of pilgrimage or inheritance or both, chasing the same shadows pooling in creek beds she must have seen, the same indifferent march of Douglas firs toward the sea that didn’t care if anyone witnessed them then and doesn’t care now. I’m thinking about that stripped down urgency she talked about, trying to touch what she touched when she spent those summers down here at ravine’s end, living visually in a place that demanded it, where the trail drops hard and the ocean roars up through the trees and I’m not making anything, I’m trying to see what she saw before I go blind, before the fog swallows it all, before tomorrow comes and proves we’re all only ever just touching it, just touching it.
You walk into the Stanfordd.school, this temple of design thinking, this cathedral of sticky notes and whiteboards where tomorrow’s disruptors learn to disrupt, and you’re expecting the usual performance art nonsense. The kind where someone’s going to stand in a corner for three hours or wrap themselves in cellophane while reading Foucault through a bullhorn.
But what actually happened here, what Aleta, John and myself managed to pull off, was we took a bunch of students (not just undergraduates and graduates, but anyone affiliated with the university), force-fed them the good stuff (Bachelard, Lefebvre, Bataille, the heavy hitters who actually understood that space isn’t just empty air between buildings), and then said: okay, now go make something with your hands and bodies and whatever shit you can find. Limited means. Maximum stakes. No safety net.
This is the bastard child of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings and the entire lineage of site-specific work that’s been trying to rescue art from the hermetically sealed gallery, that airless mausoleum where art goes to die of respectability. Since the 60s and 70s, when artists finally said “fuck the white cube” and started making work in garbage dumps, on borders, in the actual world where actual people might accidentally encounter it, there’s been this electric current running through performance: the idea that place matters, that context is content, that the where and the how shape the what.
And the questions, Christ, the questions we’re wrestling with are the right ones, even if they’re phrased in that particular academic dialect that makes your teeth hurt: How is art activism? How is art life? What the hell is the “res publica” anymore when public space has been privatized, sanitized, and surveilled to death?
The class structure itself was smart, Mondays for the big ideas and the theory, Wednesdays for getting your hands dirty, for arguing about what Monday actually meant when you’re standing in a room trying to figure out how to make emptiness speak. Lectures and screenings, sure, but then: teams, projects, the actual making of things that might fail spectacularly.
Because here’s what separates the real thing from the academic exercise: risk. The willingness to fall flate on your face. The moment when theory crashes into practice and you realize that reading about spatial narratives is one thing, but actually creating one, actually manipulating the air and light and psychic weight of a room, is something else entirely.
What you’re looking at in these images, whatever that chocolate-head situation is, that’s the evidence. Students trying to manifest their personal interpretation of space, trying to create communication and exchange with limited means. Maybe it worked. Maybe it was a beautiful disaster. Maybe it was both. But they did it. They took the Bachelard and the Foucault and the Lefebvre and they didn’t just write papers about it, they translated it into something you could walk through, stumble into, experience.
The d.school, for all its design-thinking™ buzzword bullshit, gave them permission to fail interestingly. And we didn’t coddle them. We threw them in the deep end with the theory and said swim. That’s how you learn. Not by talking about space, but by trying to reshape it. Not by reading about place and non-place, but by standing in the actual contested, complicated, messy geography of now and asking: what happens if I do this? Or this? This?
The performances were the moment of truth. When the spatial narratives either sang or fell flat. When months of debate and reading and making either coalesced into something that mattered or evaporated into well-intentioned nothing.
But they showed up. They made the work. They put it in front of people.
Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.
“Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?” – “Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht? Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?” – “Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif.”
“Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir! Gar schöne Spiele spiel’ ich mit dir; Manch’ bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand, Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand.” –
“Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht, Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?” – “Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind; In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind.” –
“Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehn? Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön; Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn, Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein.” –
“Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?” – “Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh’ es genau: Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau. –”
“Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt; Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ ich Gewalt.” – “Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an! Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!” –
Dem Vater grauset’s, er reitet geschwind, Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind, Erreicht den Hof mit Müh’ und Not; In seinen Armen das Kind war tot. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Erlkönig
So here’s Carl Weber and here’s the ocean and here’s a German poem about death snatching up children which is maybe the most on-the-nose metaphor for mentorship ever because isn’t that what the good ones do, the real ones, they snatch you up out of your comfortable bullshit existence and carry you off somewhere strange and necessary and you either die in the process or you become something you never imagined you could be, and either way you’re not the same person who started the ride…
I’m thinking about all the ways I fail the people who matter, not through malice but through the simple stupid fact of being human and scared and convinced I have more time than I do, more chances to get it right, more opportunities to show up and mean it and BE there not just physically there but actually PRESENT in the way that costs something, and Carl was one of those people who was always present, always paying attention, always taking me seriously when I was just some fucked up kid who didn’t know jack about anything but he looked at me like I was already the thing you might become…
What absolutely destroys me about people like Carl? They see the future and they don’t keep it to themselves like some kind of prophecy they’re hoarding, they just tell you straight up: You’re going to have a life in theater. Not maybe, not if you work hard enough, not if the stars align, just: this is what’s going to happen. And you think they’re crazy because you can’t see it, you’re too busy being young and stupid and terrified, but they’ve already watched it play out in their heads, they’ve seen the whole arc, and they’re willing to wait, to watch you flail and struggle and sometimes disappear for years at a time because they know…
Dinners that didn’t happen and performances he never saw and all the ways I wasn’t there when I should have been, when it would have mattered, when he could have known that what he gave me didn’t just disappear into the void but became something, became everything, became the through-line that holds when nothing else does…
Goethe knew something about fathers and sons and the things that take us in the night, but he didn’t write the poem about the ones who show you how to see, how to think, how to take the raw material of being alive and turn it into something that means something, even if what it means is just: I was here, you were here, we saw each other, and that seeing made all the difference.
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.
The lobby at Bing Concert Hall is all soaring glass and clean California geometry, the kind of space that makes you wonder if anyone’s actually allowed to breathe wrong in here.
I’m here to photograph which means I’m basically a voyeur, trying to freeze what shouldn’t be frozen: movement, breath, sculpture, sound, the precise moment when muscle memory becomes something like prayer.
The Japanese have a word for what I’m chasing here: ma. That interval, that negative space between the notes, between the gestures, between the bodies and Will Clift’s sculptures. The silence that gives shape to everything else. In the West, we don’t have a word for this. We just stumble around trying to capture it without knowing what to call it.
The light is impossible and perfect, pouring through those windows like it’s been waiting its whole life for this exact angle. The dancers, Ko Ishikawa (Japanese Mouth Organ), Nao Nishihara (Sound Environment), and the rest, carve through space like they’re making it visible. Like they understand that emptiness isn’t nothing. It’s substance.
I’m just trying not to mess up. Trying to photograph the space between things, which is maybe the most arrogant thing a someone can attempt.
Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by “taking the fat off space“. Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses… Isaac Stern described music as “that little bit between each note – silences which give the form“… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission. Alan Fletcher, The Art of Looking Sideways (Phaidon, 2001) p 370.
Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us. Once we had a country and we thought it fair, Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there: We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now. W. H. Auden, “Refugee Blues”, Selected Poems
An airport terminal turned into an impromptu cathedral of resistance, January 2017, people holding signs like talismans against the machinery of bureaucratic cruelty. I can’t help but invoke Auden, that magnificent bastard who understood that when empires get scared, they start building walls with bodies.
“Yet there’s no place for us, my dear.”
Airports are these weird purgatory zones where everyone’s suspended between somewhere and nowhere, existing in this fluorescent-lit nowhereland that smells like recycled air and desperation. The absurdity of it: the most American space imaginable, this temple to motion and commerce and the illusion of freedom, suddenly becoming the frontline. All those expensive consultants who designed SFO for “passenger experience” and “traffic flow” never imagined it would host a moral reckoning at Gate 48.
Perfect place for a protest, actually. Because what is a refugee but someone caught in permanent transit? Someone the world has decided exists in the passive voice, to be detained, to be processed, to be denied.
These are people who showed up because something in their gut told them this was the line, this was the moment when you either bear witness or you become complicit through silence.
And Auden knew, back in 1939 with fascism on the march, that the language of exclusion always sounds so reasonable. So necessary. It’s always about “security” and “proper procedures” and “we’re just following orders.” The banality of evil wears a tie and carries a clipboard.
Tech workers and grad students and people who drove from Oakland and strangers who became a temporary “we” because sometimes that’s all you’ve got. The desperate optimism of believing that showing up matters. That bearing witness counts for something. That maybe, just maybe, enough noise in the right place at the right time can gum up the machine.
They weren’t naïve, those people. They knew one protest at one airport wouldn’t topple the executive order. But they understood something deeper: that resistance is also about refusing to let cruelty become normalized. About making it cost something, even if that cost is just discomfort, inconvenience, attention.
The human animal needs its rituals, its moments of collective defiance. We need to gather in the spaces of power, not the halls of power, we’re not allowed there, but the spaces, and make ourselves visible. Make ourselves loud.
Because the alternative is accepting that some people are disposable. That “some are living in mansions, some are living in holes” is just the natural order of things. That “we cannot go there now” is an acceptable answer to give someone whose crime was being born in the wrong zip code on the wrong side of an arbitrary line we call a border.
So here’s the thing about photographing a protest: you’re already lying. The minute you lift that camera, you’re making choices about what matters, what’s worth preserving, what truth, if there is such a thing, you’re selling. It’s a hustle, like everything else. But sometimes it’s a hustle worth committing to.
Oakland, March 2017. The streets are thick with bodies and rage and hope and those hand-lettered signs that always break your heart a little because someone actually sat down the night before or that morning with a Sharpie and poster board and tried to compress their entire fucking worldview into three words. “Nevertheless, she persisted.” “My body, my choice.” “Girls just want to have fun-damental rights.” Some clever, some desperate, all sincere in that way that makes you want to look away and also never stop looking.
I’m moving through the crowd with a camera, which means I’m both there and not there. Participating and not participating. Observer and observed. It’s the photographer’s original sin, the distance required to frame the shot is the same distance that keeps you from fully being in the moment. You’re hunting. Always hunting for that intersection of light and meaning, that face that says everything, that gesture that captures what ten thousand words couldn’t.
There’s a woman in a pink hat, of course there’s a woman in a pink hat, there are thousands of them, an entire sea of them, but this one stops me. Something in her eyes. Not anger, exactly. Determination? Exhaustion? Both? The camera doesn’t care about my uncertainty. Click. Move on.
The sound is what they can’t see in these photographs. The chanting that starts somewhere in the middle of the pack and rolls forward and backward like a wave. The drumming. The car horns from drivers stuck in the gridlock who’ve decided fuck it, we’re with you. The helicopters overhead because of course there are helicopters. Authority never sleeps, even when it’s pretending to.
I keep thinking about other marches, other crowds, other cities where people gathered to shout into the void and hope something shouts back. Selma. Stonewall. Tiananmen. Cairo. This isn’t those places, not yet, maybe not ever. But the principle is the same: when you feel powerless, you mass together to remember you’re not alone. It’s tribal. It’s ancient. It’s maybe the only thing we’re actually good at.
A kid on someone’s shoulders, holding a sign she probably can’t even read yet. What is she learning today? That dissent is possible? That her voice matters? Or just that crowds are loud and her parents are tired and this is what Saturday looks like when democracy feels like it’s circling the drain?
The photographs flatten it all. Make it manageable. Digestible. Here’s a face. Here’s a sign. Here’s a moment of solidarity frozen in time. But they can’t capture the smell of too many people in one place, the shuffling of feet, the way your back starts to ache after two hours of standing, the strange electricity that runs through a crowd when everyone simultaneously realizes: we’re a lot of fucking people.
Oakland‘s always been good at this, resistance, noise, showing up when it matters. Something in the DNA of the place, in the ghosts of the Black Panthers and the port strikes and every other time someone said enough. These streets have seen this before. They’ll see it again.
I shoot and shoot and shoot, knowing that most of it won’t matter, that most of these images will get lost in the deluge of everyone else’s images, that the march will be over and Monday will come and then what? But you do it anyway because not doing it feels like surrender. You document because that’s what you have. You bear witness because someone has to.
As the crowd starts to thin, as people peel off toward BART stations and parking garages and whatever comes next. Faces I’ll never see again. Signs that will end up in recycling bins. A day that mattered tremendously and maybe not at all.
Somewhere in these frames I hope there is proof that when things felt darkest, people still showed up. Still made signs. Still believed their presence meant something.
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth. William Faulkner
It’s Inauguration Day, right? Day one of the Trump Era… So naturally everyone’s freaking out, reciting founding values like scripture, as if Thomas Jefferson’s ghost gives two shits about your a cappella group. But that’s not what’s happening in these frames. What’s happening is bodies moving through sacred architecture like they’re trying to shake loose from their own skins, string quartets sawing away at something older than policy or platform, dancers contorting in pews like they’re exorcising every ounce of civic dread through sheer kinetic desperation.
The church itself becomes complicit. Those vaulted ceilings aren’t just witnessing. They’re amplifying. Stone and stained glass converting performance into ritual, sweat into sacrament. This is what community actually looks like when it stops performing “community” and starts combusting into something messier, more necessary.
People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God. Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut nails it. Except these dancers aren’t daydreaming. They’re thrashing through nightmares, transmuting anxiety into movement, using the only honest language left when words have been strip-mined of meaning by endless cable news punditry and social media rage spirals.
I caught the blur, the sweat, the genuine human urgency of bodies refusing to be still while everything outside these walls slides toward chaos.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning. T.S. Eliot,Little Gidding
There’s something pure and merciless about that stop sign planted there on the tracks in Davenport like some bureaucratic punctuation mark that wandered off the highway and decided to make camp where the ocean meets rust and gravel. It’s T.S. Eliot crystallized into eight sides of fading red paint, this monument to endings that won’t shut up about beginnings, standing sentinel over a stretch of nowhere California where the Pacific keeps its eternal appointment with the continent’s frayed edge. The image screams with that particular silence you only get when human infrastructure surrenders to salt air and time, when the whole gorgeous machinery of intention gets weathered down to pure gesture. It’s the kind of picture that makes you stop (pun intended, fuck it) and recognize that every terminus is just another threshold dressed in warning colors, every last word begging for what comes next. The tracks don’t care. The ocean doesn’t care. But that stop sign, man, that beautiful dumb stop sign keeps insisting there’s something worth pausing for, even as everything around it testifies to the futility of standing still.
The first time doesn’t exist in my head, it’s just gone, one of those origin stories you lose in the noise. But there’s your laugh, like gravel and light, cutting through those parties at my parents’ place. There’s me, just a kid, watching some play you’d put together, and you, you, asking what I thought. Not humoring me. Actually giving a shit about the answer.
High school. I’m in some grad student’s production, probably terrible… maybe not, and you corner me afterward. “You’re going to have a life in theater,” you say. Like it’s a fact. Like you’ve already seen it. I tell you you’re out of your goddamn mind. No way. Not happening.
Then there’s the phone call. You need someone to drive your wife to a doctors appointment at the Palo Alto Medical Clinic. So I do. And she introduces me to every single person we pass as her boyfriend. Just chaos and affection and absurdity, all at once. She was awesome.
Your Brecht seminar. That’s where it happened, where I fell hard for the machinery of it all, the gears and pulleys of how stories work, how they move. Grad school meant hours in your office, thousands of stories passing between us like contraband, like secrets, like currency.
The last time you saw me perform, you just grabbed my arm, pulled me close, said it was like watching the ghost of my father. The same stage where you’d directed him decades before, when he was even younger than I was then. Full circle. Generations folding in on themselves.
And then the end, my end: years where I just couldn’t. Too much loss, too little left in the tank. Phone calls every few months. Dinner once a year if we were lucky. I wasn’t there. Not the way I should have been.
Carl Weber. Charlie. You’re in everything I make, everything I’ve done, everything I will do. Past tense, present tense, future conditional, you’re one of the through-linse. One of the things that holds.
