SCOTTIE
No, no, I have to tell you about Madeleine now. Right there, we stood there and I kissed her for the last time. And she said, ‘If you lose me, you’ll know that I loved you and wanted to keep on loving you.’ And I said, ‘I won’t lose you.’ But I did. And then she turned and ran into the church…and when I followed her, it was too late.
Scottie pulls Judy into the church.
JUDY
I don’t want to go in there.
They begin climbing the tower’s steps. Alec Coppel & Samuel Taylor, Virtigo, dir. Alfred Hitchcook (1958)
“Our job may be to open up a temporary utopian/distopian space, a de-militarized zone in which meaningful “radical” behavior and progressive thought are hopefully allowed to take place, even if only for the duration of the piece. In this imaginary zone, both artist and audience members are given permission to assume multiple and ever changing positionalities and identities. In this border zone, the distance between “us” and “them,” self and other, art and life, becomes blurry and unspecific.” Guillermo Gomez-Peña
Allan Kaprow, Notes on the Creation of a Total Art For instance, if we join a literal space and a painted space, and these two spaces to a sound, we achieve the “right” relationship by considering each component a quantity and quality on an imaginary scale. So much of such and such color is juxtaposed to so much of this or that type of sound. The “balance” (if one wants to call it that) is primarily an environmental one.
Whether it is art depends on how deeply involved we become with elements of the whole and how fresh these elements are (as though they were “natural,” like the sudden fluttering by of the butterfly) when they occur next to one another.
Look, I have nothing against scholars. Hell, I am one, PhD and all, even if that fact makes me want to punch myself in the face sometimes. But there’s a particular kind of fuckery that happens when really smart people theorize about performance in ways that completely erase how it’s actually made. When they’re basically exquisitely credentialed theater critics with footnotes, writing from the mezzanine instead of backstage, where the real work happens.
Here’s what decades floundering in this field has taught me (first as a production assistant to Anna Deavere Smith; then grinding it out at Mabou Mines with Lee Breuer; selling out to make Google commercials for people who’d never set foot in a theater and wouldn’t know Brecht from a breakfast burrito; eventually producing, dragging fragments of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides back from the dead for site-specific productions that only a few chosen people get to see; co-directing Genet’s The Balcony at San Francisco’s Old Mint where the ghosts of dead money still haunt the walls; documenting the work of artists like Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Ron Athey who were actually doing something dangerous; teaching at Stanford’s d.school to kids who thought “design thinking” was a personality trait; shooting Alonzo King’s dancers until my arms hurt and my bank account wept; teaching in the Film and Digital Media Department at UCSC to undergrads who just wanted to work at Pixar): there’s a particular strain of academic horseshit that poisons how some, too many in leadership roles, think about performance.
There’s been some real damage done by smart people, really fucking smart people, theorizing about theater and dance from the cheap seats, writing purple prose about ephemera while ignoring the grunt work that makes the magic trick work. They’re theater critics with PhDs and tenure. Exquisitely footnoted. And they’ve never broken a sweat in a rehearsal room. Never had to find a bathroom backstage at 3 AM in some abandoned warehouse. Never begged for grant money. Never seen an actor cry because they finally nailed it on the seventy-third rep.
And here’s where it gets worse: these professors trained a whole generation of arts administrators, the people now running foundations, theaters, dance companies, cultural institutions. Their star students who wrote brilliant seminar papers about the ontology of disappearance, got their MFAs in Arts Management or whatever the fuck, and went straight from the classroom to their comped orchestra seats. To the donor galas. To the grant panels where they decide who eats and who doesn’t.
They never built a set. Never stage-managed a show. Never loaded a truck at 2 AM. Never had to explain to a dancer why there’s no money for physical therapy but plenty for the board retreat in Napa. They absorbed the ephemerality gospel in graduate school and now they’re running the institutions, making budgets, writing grant requirements, spouting the same theoretical horseshit their professors and TAs fed them, because it justifies every cost-cutting decision, every refusal to pay for documentation, every ‘we love your work but there’s no money’ conversation while they’re sipping mediocre warm wine at the opening night party they somehow found budget for.
They learned that performance disappears, so they don’t have to make it last. Fuck you.
The Good Guys (Yeah, They Exist)
Not everyone’s full of shit. Rebecca Schneider dropped Performance Remains twenty years ago and told everyone to calm the fuck down: performance doesn’t evaporate into the ether, it “remains” differently, “in bodies, in habits, in residue” (Schneider 102). Diana Taylor built a whole theory around the repertoire: embodied practice as memory, as transmission. Not some David Blane disappearing act (Taylor 19). André Lepecki wrote books about choreography as repetition, how bodies drilled through movement become both aesthetic and political machines (Lepecki 45).
These people get it. They’re thinking about the actual material systems, the infrastructure of how performance moves through the world.
But they’re responding to an earlier generation of theory that refuses to die. The one that insists performance is inherently ephemeral, resistant to documentation, exists “only in the present.” That theory’s still hanging around like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, and it left a toxic mess in its wake. Not just in academic writing, in institutions, in labor practices, in how artists like me get valued and paid.
So let’s talk about how an ontology built on disappearance fucked over a generation of performance makers photographers, videographers and archivists.
The Con
The scripture here is Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked (1993). “Performance’s only life is in the present,” she wrote. “Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented…” (Phelan 146). Its power, she argued, comes from its disappearance.
I took classes with Peggy at Stanford. She’s brilliant, genuinely brilliant. And politically, in the 90s, that book mattered. It gave critical weight to feminist and queer performance at a time when museums wanted nothing to do with any of it. That was necessary work.
But as an ontological claim about what performance is?
It’s buying the kayfabe.
People read, or maybe misread, Phelan and think they’re witnessing something unrepeatable, some kind of holy spontaneous liveness. They think they’re watching magic when what they’re actually watching is a highly engineered illusion. And I get why it looks that way from the audience. That’s the whole goddamn point of the trick.
Herbert Blau understood this better than most. The audience, he argued, is itself an illusion, something constructed by the performance, not some neutral observer sitting out there in the dark (Blau 25). There is no pre-existing audience. Performance produces its spectators through repetition, through conventions, through doing it over and over until the event coheres. He called this “ghosting”, the presence conjured through absence, through previous iterations haunting every gesture (Blau 163).
Side note: Herb Blau read my dissertation and gave me fifty single-spaced pages of notes. Fifty pages. This was a man who gave a shit about ideas. We spent hours on the phone while he told stories about building the early avant-garde scene in San Francisco, creating something from nothing in a city that didn’t know it wanted it yet.
And here’s what Blau got that the ephemerality crowd missed: recognizing that presence is constructed doesn’t make performance less real, it makes the construction more visible. It honors the labor of building the machine.
Reality Check: What Actually Happens
Here’s what goes down before that curtain rises:
We spend weeks in rehearsing. Sometimes months. The actors do a scene. They do it again. And again. And again. They do it fifty more times until their bodies memorize it, not just their minds, their whole body. The muscles remember. The vocal cords remember. You’re literally writing a script into their nervous system through repetition. The French don’t even bullshit about it, they call rehearsal répétition. Because that’s what it is. Repetition. Groundhog Day with blocking notes.
If you look at my work, the thousands of photos I’ve shot of rehearsals over the years, you’ll see I document this process obsessively. Not the dressed-up finished product with lighting cues and program notes. The studio. The sweat. The repetition. Because that’s where the art lives. That’s where discovery happens. That’s what the audience is applauding without knowing it.
Euripides Love is The Fullest Education on Slacker Hill
Opening night? From the house it looks spontaneous, alive, ephemeral. From backstage? It’s a reconstruction. A reproduction of everything that came before. The actor’s body is the recording device.
This is what Schneider was pointing to: performance doesn’t vanish. It remains in bodies through labor, through training, through repetition. But she, Taylor, and Lepecki are still arguing against this lingering romance of disappearance that obscures the real conditions of how performance gets made.
So let me be clear:
* Performance’s ontology is repetition with variation, not unmediated presence.
* Documentation doesn’t betray performance; it constitutes it.
* The audience experiences a constructed illusion, not spontaneous liveness.
* Rehearsal labor creates the performance object.
That last one? That’s the one with real-world consequences. That’s the one that determines whether artists eat.
The Machine
You want to see repetition taken to its logical extreme? Look at Robert Wilson. Wilson choreographs every movement to the count. A hand gesture? Timed. A cross? Timed. His actors move like living architecture, every motion drilled into ritualistic precision (Holmberg 112). Influences from silent film, Buster Keaton, Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine. Time stretched into sculpture.
And Wilson doesn’t lie about it. He doesn’t romanticize spontaneity. The whole enterprise is a machine of repetition.
Ask Aleta Hayes, who performed with him. Ask her about drilling the same gesture for hours until it carved itself into muscle memory. Ask her about reproducing the same sequence with mechanical accuracy, night after night.
There’s nothing “only in the present” about it. It’s ruthlessly, beautifully past-tense.
Documentation IS the Work
Let’s talk about Chris Burden. In 1971, the man had someone shoot him in the arm with a rifle. Shoot. You want ephemerality? You want the myth of the unrepeatable moment? That’s about as extreme as it gets.
Except only twelve people were in that gallery. In a gallery in Santa Ana, California. And what happened to that supposedly powerful disappearance? One art critic reviewing a 1998 survey show complained, “You had to be there,” as if this was some kind of tragedy, some irreplaceable loss.
Yet everyone knows about Shoot. Why?
Because Burden filmed it.
He Photographed it too. His wife Barbara helped documented it. And here’s the part the theorists don’t want to talk about: Burden didn’t just accidentally document it. He carefully curated the documentation. He’d take the photographs home and study them “for a l-o-o-o-ng time,” then select one image to represent the whole thing. He reduced the event to a terse description: “At 7:45pm I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket 22 long-rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” He called these photographs “symbols.”
He shaped the documentation into its own aesthetic form (Govan et al. 121).
In 1974, he self-published Deluxe Photo Book 71–73: archival documentation that sold decades later for thirty-five thousand dollars.
Thirty-five thousand. For documentation of supposedly “unrecordable” work.
The documentation wasn’t a supplement. The documentation wasn’t a betrayal.
The documentation was the fucking work.
This isn’t unique to body art. Brecht did it with his Modellbücher: photographs, diagrams, notes intended not to “capture” a production but to generate future ones (Brecht 7). Documentation as a forward-facing dramaturgical machine.
Performance survives because artists document it. Period.
Or look at Alexey Brodovitch. The man revolutionized how we see ballet, not by freezing dancers in perfect crystalline poses like some calendar photographer, but by using blur, motion, grain. His photographs from the 1930s and 40s weren’t trying to “capture” the ephemeral moment. They were creating a parallel aesthetic language. The blur wasn’t a failure of the technology… it was the point. He understood that documentation doesn’t preserve performance; it translates it into another medium entirely, with its own rules, its own power.
Brodovitch’s photos didn’t make people not want to see ballet. They made people desperate to see it. The documentation became its own form of circulation, its own mode of memory. His images are how we remember dancers who’ve been dead for eighty years. And nobody, nobody, wrings their hands about whether his photographs “betrayed” the liveness of dance. Because that would be fucking stupid.
Documentation doesn’t kill performance. It’s how performance stays alive.
The Myth of Pure Presence
This is where Auslander and Roach come in, who, frankly, should have killed the ephemerality fantasy decades ago. Philip Auslander argued that liveness is not an ontological state but a historically shifting category defined in relation to recording technologies. Performance borrows credibility from mediation and vice versa. There is no “pure presence”, just relational frameworks.
Now Auslander’s a problematic figure, he’s been rightfully called out for sloppy theoretical work, for applying theory without really understanding the material practices he’s writing about. Judith Butler herself took him to task for exactly the kind of armchair theorizing I’m complaining about here. The irony isn’t lost on me. But even a broken clock gets it right twice a day, and on this specific point, that liveness is constructed, not inherent… so he’s not wrong.
Joseph Roach, on the other hand? Unimpeachable. The man’s a fucking titan. Roach emphasized “surrogation”: the way cultural memory persists through substitution, repetition, reenactment. Performance reproduces itself across bodies, time, and contexts… always haunted… never original. Roach actually understands how culture works, how bodies remember, how performance moves through the world. He’s one of the real ones.
Both of them dismantled the myth of disappearance. Both reinforced what artists already knew:
Now look, I do site-specific work. Outdoor theater. Theater in the wild. And yeah, each performance is technically “unique.” A seagull shitting on Hamlet during “Alas poor Yorick?” Not repeatable. Rain on Tuesday, clear skies Wednesday. Random drunk guy stumbling in thinking it’s an actual wedding.
But uniqueness isn’t ontology. It’s noise in the system.
Goffman’s performance frame (Goffman 82) and Schechner’s restored behavior (Schechner 35) both tell us the same thing: the accidents aren’t the performance. They’re variables intruding on the repeatable core. The scaffolding underneath.
And audiences know about repetition. They fucking love it. Hamilton superfans don’t go back seventeen times for “spontaneity.” They go for precision. Craft. Reproduction.
Why the Con Persists
Here’s where Shannon Jackson becomes essential. In Social Works, she argues that performance is never just an aesthetic act—it’s infrastructural. It depends on institutions, spaces, labor systems, networks of care. Institutions don’t just house performance; they co-produce it (Jackson 15).
And here’s the kicker: institutions love the ephemerality myth because it lets them off the hook.
If performance “disappears,” then:
* They don’t have to fund documentation
* They don’t need robust archives
* They don’t have to compensate rehearsal labor as part of “the art”
* They can ignore long-term infrastructural support
Ephemerality becomes austerity in theory drag.
This isn’t ontology. This is budgetary convenience.
The worst part? The people running cultural institutions (grantmakers, administrators, funders) were educated during the heyday of 90s ephemerality theory and never updated their software. They’re still quoting this crap like gospel at panel discussions, decades after the field moved on.
Meanwhile painters get their work archived, conserved, catalogued, insured. When I photograph paintings, the documentation itself becomes part of the artwork’s market life. It increases value.
Dancers? Actors? The people whose work literally cannot exist without repetition and labor?
Broke.
What We Actually Need
I spent years at Google after grad school making videos for a company that probably did more harm than good to human consciousness. But say what you want: they understood documentation as infrastructure. Memory as infrastructure. Reproduction as cultural technology.
Artists understood this long before tech did. Institutions are still struggling with it.
The ephemerality argument mattered politically in the 90s. It protected marginalized artists from market capture. That history deserves respect.
But staying loyal to the romance of disappearance now? It only exacerbates precarity.
We need frameworks grounded in practice, not nostalgia:
* Repetition is labor.
* Labor is value.
* Documentation is part of the work.
Performance is memory made flesh. It’s Anna Deavere Smith drilling someone else’s cadence until she embodies it. It’s Alonzo King’s dancers I photographed repeating phrases until thought dissolves into motion. It’s rehearsal as research. Documentation as circulation. Labor.
And until institutions stop romanticizing disappearance and start valuing repetition?
I’ll be in the rehearsal studio. Behind the camera. Drilling it. Again and again.
Because that’s not resistance to reproduction.
That is reproduction.
And don’t point to seagull shit and call it philosophy.
Staging decadence, and I mean real decadence, not the Instagram bullshit where someone arranges twelve cupcakes in a spiral. It’s gotta have that edge. That nervous making quality where you’re not sure if you’re supposed to laugh or recoil or both at once.
Gombrowicz knew this. The guy was writing about grotesque courts and paralyzed social rituals, all that stiff European formality collapsing under its own absurd weight. Princess Ivona is the mute intruder who doesn’t play the game, and the whole rotten edifice can’t handle even one person refusing to perform. So what do you project onto frosted plexiglass for a play about people eating themselves alive with their own pretensions? You show them eating, literally, in that obscene abundance that tips from pleasure into something uglier, more compulsive.
The lit-from-within table is the move here. That glow that makes everything look both more lustrous and more artificial, like it’s all been embalmed in its own excess. You’re watching bodies feed and fondle and consume in this backlit aquarium of appetite, and it’s gorgeous, sure, but gorgeous the way a car crash in slow motion is gorgeous. There’s a remove to it, that flatness of projection, so you’re watching desire at a distance, mediated, turned into spectacle. Which is exactly what Gombrowicz was doing with his court: making you watch people perform their hungers instead of actually feeling them.
What kills me about this kind of work is how it makes you complicit. You’re sitting there watching food become pornographic, this orgy of textures and surfaces, and you can’t look away even though, or maybe because, it’s making you a little uncomfortable. That’s the Woolf quote doing its work too: this manufactured intimacy, this sense that we’re all in on something together, the candlelight making masks of faces. The projection gives you that same ceremonial distance while pulling you into the ritual.
And using video for Gombrowicz, for that specific play? That’s understanding that modernity is about mediation, about how we can’t even experience excess directly anymore. We need it filtered, projected, made into an image we can consume from a safe distance. The royals in the play can’t just be, they have to perform being royal until the whole thing becomes a grotesque pantomime. Your orgy on plexiglass does the same thing: makes appetite into spectacle, makes feeding into theater, makes the audience complicit voyeurs at a banquet they can’t taste.
That’s the nerve it hits. Not shock for shock’s sake, but this queasy recognition that all our supposedly authentic experiences are just better-lit versions of the same hollow performance. The decadence isn’t in the food or the bodies or even the setup. It’s in the fact that we need the setup at all.
When you’re watching a film, and I mean really watching it, not scrolling through your phone while Netflix drones on in the background, that glass eye of the camera? It becomes your eye. It’s a kind of beautiful con job, really. The director, the auteur, whatever pretentious film school dropout term you want to use, they’re essentially building a consciousness for you. They’re constructing how you see, what you notice, where you linger. Your gaze becomes their gaze. You’re not watching the actors and the scenery from some objective perch in the dark. You’re seeing them as images filtered through someone else’s very particular way of looking at the world.
Take Kubrick. The guy was obsessed with this idea, literally obsessed. Started as a photographer for Look magazine, where he learned that the lens wasn’t just a tool but a way of thinking. He owned his lenses, didn’t rent them like other directors. He knew every piece of glass intimately, what it could do, what it couldn’t. For Barry Lyndon, he tracked down this Zeiss lens that NASA had designed to photograph the darkness of space, a 50mm f/0.7 monster that could shoot by candlelight alone. Just the flicker of a flame in an 18th-century dining room. Because Kubrick understood something fundamental: the lens doesn’t just capture reality, it creates a version of consciousness. His eye became the camera’s eye became your eye sitting there in the dark, watching those candles burn.
And here’s where it gets interesting: that perception, that way of seeing, it solidifies when you’re sitting there in the theater, popcorn grease on your fingers, completely absorbed. The director’s eye becomes the camera’s eye becomes your eye. It’s a kind of possession, if you want to be dramatic about it. A willing possession.
What this does, and this is the part that made cinema feel so goddamn revolutionary, so modern, is it creates this intensified, concentrated image of subjectivity. It’s not just showing you the world; it’s showing you someone’s experience of the world, their inner life projected outward, and making you live inside it for ninety minutes or two hours. That heightened, almost narcotic sense of being inside someone else’s head? That’s what made cinema the art form of modernism, the medium that best captured what it felt like to be alive and conscious in the twentieth century.
But then things started getting weird. Someone like Chris Burden comes along in 1970s Los Angeles and he’s not just making films, he’s making himself into the film. He’s turning the streets of Venice Beach into his set, his body into the actor, and the witness into the camera. He had a friend shoot him with a rifle. He nailed his hands to the roof of a Volkswagen. He fired a pistol at a 747 taking off from LAX. These weren’t metaphors, they were actual events that existed somewhere between performance, documentation, and this strange new territory where the line between representation and reality started to blur like heat coming off the pavement.
Burden understood what Kubrick understood but from a different angle: that the act of witnessing, of being seen, was itself a kind of violence. The camera doesn’t just observe, it transforms. It takes your body, your pain, your existence, and turns it into images that other people consume. He used television the way other artists used paint. Bought airtime on LA stations to broadcast his financial disclosures, his face next to an American flag like some post-Watergate politician. Made himself famous by listing himself after Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, van Gogh, and Picasso in a paid TV spot.
The guy was mapping a social geography where the camera was everywhere and nowhere, where your body could be nailed to a car on Speedway Avenue but your image could be broadcast into ten thousand living rooms simultaneously.
Now, of course, things got complicated. Film and video started trading techniques back and forth like street vendors swapping recipes. A little of this, a little of that, each learning from the other in this ongoing conversation of images. So this neat little theoretical box we like to put things in (film equals modernist, video equals postmodernist) only works if you squint at it from a distance. Up close? It falls apart. It’s a framework, a sketch, a rough map of territories that are actually a lot messier and more interesting than any map can show.
Because by the time Burden was shooting at airplanes and Kubrick was lighting scenes with NASA lenses, the whole project of cinema as modernist consciousness had already started to eat itself. The medium that was supposed to capture subjectivity had become the thing that dissolved it. You couldn’t tell anymore where the eye ended and the lens began, where the performance stopped and the documentation started, where reality ended and its image took over.
But that’s okay. Good art, like consciousness itself, doesn’t sit still to be categorized. It moves, it changes, it steals, it evolves. It adapts to the technologies and terrors of its time.
Anyway, that’s the theory. Or part of it, at least. The rest is just light hitting film, hitting tape, hitting retinas, hitting consciousness, all the way down.
So Tonyanna gets it. She always gets it. You can see it in these frames, she’s not performing silence, she’s weaponizing it. That’s the difference between theater kids playing dress-up and someone who understands that Ivona’s muteness is an act of violence against everyone who needs her to participate in their charade. She’s making them see themselves, and they hate her for it, and she knows they hate her, and she’s not going to give them the relief of breaking.
And here’s the thing about shooting this in the Performance Art Institute, that whole setup is its own Gombrowicz play. You’re documenting experimental theater in a warehouse with walls that are literally scheduled for demolition by tectonic activity. That concrete in the background, all that gorgeous deterioration, those cracks running through like the whole structural integrity is a polite fiction we’re all agreeing to ignore, that’s not backdrop, that’s a collaborator. That’s San Francisco saying “yeah, this is all temporary, the ground is gonna move, and everything you’re building is built on borrowed time.”
So you’ve got Tonyanna embodying this character who’s the human earthquake at the royal court, and you’re shooting her against walls that are waiting for the actual earthquake. The theater itself is as doomed as the social order in the play. And everybody knows it. And everybody’s still doing the work. That’s not irony, that’s the only honest way to make art. In the ruins, before they’re officially ruins, while we’re all pretending the floor isn’t going to liquefy.
The beauty isn’t despite the decay. The beauty IS the decay. The fact that we’re here at all.
They were suddenly united, not like a man and a woman, but in another way, in a common offering to an unknown Moloch, incapable of possessing each other, only capable of offering themselves—and the sexual contract between them grew blurred, giving way to another contract, something undoubtedly more cruel but more beautiful. All that lasted only a few seconds. Nothing happened, either; all four of us just stood there. Witold Gombrowicz Pornografia
You are ugly when you love her,
you are beautiful and fresh,
vital and free,
modern and poetic when you don’t…
you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother’s son.
Witold Gombrowicz
San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful. Frank Lloyd Wright
So here’s the deal: I’m early. Not fashionably early, not strategically early. Just early. Standing on the steps of San Francisco City Hall like some kind of ceremonial parking cone, waiting for Dan and Ciara to show up and get married in a way that doesn’t count except that it counts more than anything that’s coming in July with the catering and the centerpieces and whoever’s parents are paying for the whole goddamned spectacle.
This is the real one.
And I’m the witness. Which means I have to be here. Which means I’m standing on marble that’s seen ten thousand versions of this same scene, holding my camera because what the hell else am I supposed to do with my hands, and I’m pointing it at myself because they’re not here yet and I need evidence that I showed up, that I was ready, that I held space for their quiet revolution.
That’s the thing about being a witness: you can’t witness your own witnessing. You can only document the waiting. The gap. The moment before the moment when you’re just a guy on some steps with a camera, playing at meaning before meaning arrives.
Frank Lloyd Wright said San Francisco is the only city that can survive all the things we’re doing to it and still look beautiful. He was talking about architecture, probably, about the violence we do to skylines and neighborhoods. But standing here, I think he was also talking about this: the way the city absorbs our small ceremonies and our large lies, the way it takes our secret weddings and our public weddings and our failed marriages and our stupid ideas about forever, and just holds them. Doesn’t judge. Doesn’t care. Just keeps being beautiful in that merciless early-morning light that makes everything look like it matters.
I’m checking the frame, looking at the screen, at the little glowing rectangle that shows me what the camera sees. Which is supposed to be me but is really me mediated, me translated, me as subject and object simultaneously. I’m adjusting the angle, making sure the building’s in the shot, making sure I’m in the shot, making sure the whole tableau of ceremonial readiness is properly composed.
And that’s when I see her.
Not directly. Not in the world. In the reflection. In the screen. In that little glowing window that’s showing me myself, I see Niki ride past behind me on a bicycle.
She doesn’t know I see her. She can’t. Because I’m looking at the screen, not at the world. I’m facing City Hall with my camera pointed at myself, and she’s behind me, moving through the frame, and I’m watching her in that small translated space where everything is flipped and mediated and somehow more true than the thing itself.
I don’t turn around. I don’t call out. I don’t acknowledge what I’m seeing.
And I let her go. I let her pass. I stay facing forward, camera pointed at myself, watching her departure in that little glowing screen like it’s a movie I’m not in except I’m completely in. I’m the foreground, and she’s the background, and we’re in the same frame but in completely different films.
The camera lets you see without being seen seeing. It creates this distance, this buffer, this plausible deniability. I saw her but I didn’t see her. Not really. Not in the way that counts. Not in the way that would require me to turn around, to make eye contact, to wave, to break this whole careful composition I’m building about being present for someone else’s moment.
So I choose the frame. I choose the photograph. I choose to let her ride past in the reflection while I stay locked in my pose, my angle, my self-conscious documentation of waiting.
And that choice, that specific, cowardly, self-protective choice to see without acknowledging, to witness without being witnessed as witnessing, that’s in the photograph now too. That’s baked into the image. Me on the steps, “Absolute Solipsism” as the tag line, looking at myself looking at myself, while someone who matters rides through the background unseen except by the camera, unacknowledged except in this mediated space where I can see everything and claim nothing.
The universe doesn’t just have impeccable timing for comedy. It has impeccable timing for tests. For those moments where you have to decide what you’re really doing there, what you’re really looking at, what you’re really willing to acknowledge. And I failed it. Or passed it. Or something. I stayed in the frame. I kept composing. I let the moment happen in the reflection and nowhere else.
That’s what you can’t plan for and can’t fake but somehow always end up doing anyway: the way we choose our mediations over our encounters. The way we’d rather see people in screens than turn around and face them. The way we use our cameras and our purposes and our obligations to other people’s ceremonies as excuses not to engage with our own still-unfolding disasters.
But I was here first. That’s what this picture proves. I was here, in the gap, holding space, pointing the camera at myself because I needed evidence that showing up matters, even when you’re early, even when you’re alone, even when the moment you came for hasn’t happened yet. Even when other moments, other people, other possibilities, other versions of your own life, ride past in the reflection and you choose not to turn around.
The light’s perfect. The light’s always perfect. That’s what Wright was trying to tell us.
The city just survives what we do to it. Survives our little screens and our big evasions and all the ways we’ve learned to witness without engaging. And somehow, impossibly, it still looks beautiful.
It is true that we learned our trade because there were no better offers but we learned it in the magic heaped on the hills of San Francisco. And you know what it is? It’s a golden handcuff with the key thrown away. Ask anyone about San Francisco and the odds are that he’ll tell you about himself and his eyes will be warm and inward – remembering. John Steinbeck, Pictorial Living supplement in the 11/23/58 edition of San Francisco Examiner
Here’s the thing about standing on Baker Beach on Christmas Eve, watching that rust-colored monument to American engineering glow against the black nothing of the Pacific: it’s the most beautiful prison you’ll ever see, and you know it because you built this cell yourself.
You did it. You climbed the mountain, crossed every finish line they drew in the sand, collected the wins and the checks and the validation. And now you’re out here in the cold while everyone else is home unwrapping something, drinking something, pretending something matters. You should be celebrating. You are celebrating, just not the way anyone would expect. Not with champagne and congratulations, but with cold sand between your toes and that hollow feeling that success gives you when you finally stop running long enough to look at it.
The bridge hangs there like some art deco dream, all those lights strung up like they’re celebrating something, connection, triumph, the basic human need to get from one godforsaken point to another. And you’re standing there wondering when crossing over became settling in. When the golden handcuffs went from trophy to trap.
Because that’s what Christmas Eve does when you’re alone with your thoughts and a monument, it makes you examine the architecture of your life. You came here for something. You got it. And now you’re staring at infrastructure like it’s going to tell you what comes next, what the hell you’re supposed to do with a victory that feels like it’s missing a piece.
The lights shimmer on the water, all that reflected glory making the bay look like it’s full of broken stars. And maybe that’s the point, you can be brilliant and successful and still feel fractured, still need to change direction. The bridge doesn’t judge your crisis. It just sits there, massive and indifferent, reminding you that every crossing requires leaving something behind.
There’s a fog rolling in, there’s always fog, and soon those lights will be nothing but halos in the mist. But right now, in this moment before everything dissolves, you can see it clearly: the beautiful trap, the golden weight, the need to build something different even if you don’t know what yet. Even if walking away from this much light feels like stepping into darkness.
