The simplest thing to do— snapshots from life and their accumulation in personal albums, an almost intuitive response of modern individuality to photography becoming commonplace. Drives essential to industrial consumerism entail the eventuality of techniques for ever more simply and convincingly parceling out images from the immediacy of visual experience for our retention and exchange. From the camera phone, art’s reward is an unprecedented spontaneity of image, the immensity of its diversity and potential application to life.
Sending a just captured image of a sunset or some-such-thing, my friend says it was “like a postcard.” Thinking about the discursive situation of social media and photography, the postcard format felt due renewed investigation under contemporary conditions. After many attempts I came upon a method and standard for my own iteration on this old foundation of the medium, using thick paper stock and the significant, if presently unremarkable power of a desktop inkjet printer.
Could there be a more perfect approximation to a theory of art as sublimation than composing daily life into pictures? Perhaps this is a simple and reflexive desire for control over life’s course, a naive maybe even indulgent use, but then there is no better ground to argue for the truth of process and becoming then from the awkward margin between life and art. So inclination holds sway, pruning my reality is not only to steady myself against the passage of time, but to enhance its fruiting and flavor, make a note, have a laugh, and generally gauge my own reaction.
Today, Art’s conceit is gone—that conceit is everywhere. I want to work in the moment without judgement, stay ruthless in the edit, and still maintain a generosity towards the specious images who only remain as a formal element for the flow. I’ll even chance the occasional image whose charm is totally imperceptible because it doesn’t exist except to me, and you will discount it undoubtedly. A photograph is always a commodity, but, more so than any art, this type of close at hand, personally observational, vernacular image is made entirely for our own most individual of purposes.
7.2026
