This exhibition is intended to provide a space for contemplating photographs taken in January 2025 in Vienna, Prague, and Zurich. The show’s title is meant to bring to mind the casual nature of the process of getting inspired, and the fluid ways that identity exists in the course of artistic production and demonstration. On the trip, I took 1,500 photos, but the majority were simple photos of paintings I saw at museums. About 300 photos were taken “as a photographer”, i.e. considering the composition, timing, or other aesthetic aspects of the shot. From these, I did seven rounds of cuts, and ended up with the series on view in this show. I considered including more, since I like others too, but limiting things seems more important here. Experiences of art should in my opinion transgress against the information overload of our current hyper-commodified media environment, and exist to brings about contemplation, which can’t be bought or sold.

This brief piece of writing will explain some ideas about the ways that these photographs were taken and presented here, and it’s the goal of this exhibition to influence visitors to explore their own processes of understanding, creating, and expressing images. I have been painting heavily for the last year and a half, and the inspiration to take photos with more artistic intention just developed in the last several months, after reading Foursome by Carolyn Burke, a book about Alfred Steiglitz, Georgia O’keeffe, Paul Strand, and Rebecca Salsbury, which featured a lot of photography stuff. This inspiration ballooned into my motivation to make this show when I traveled to some beautiful cities for the first time.

Why do a physical show of these pictures, instead of sharing them digitally? First, of course, it is nice to create a reason for people to get together – no one’s making new friends in the comments section of a post on social media. Here, people can come together and chat a bit, which seems already more valuable than images on their own. Second, after going to about a dozen museums on my trip, I felt how important it is to have agency in how we are experiencing art, the opportunity to walk away from an image, then walk back to it, to see it from different angles, and so on. I know we can put our fingers on our phones and zoom in and out, but it doesn’t feel natural like moving physically around an object.

Also, there seems like an issue of scale in viewing works digitally. I think most people would agree that when you’re looking at a piece of visual art, there usually feels like a correct distance to be from the object, to take it in fully. We find that distance fluidly, and move in and out of it, but there does seem to be a correct distance, where the visual art is a solid portion of your field of view, but not all of it. I don’t know how these things are measured, but we can estimate that maybe it’s like a fifth or a fourth of your relatively-in-focus field of view that feels right to have the piece of art take up – much more than that and the art is swallowing you up, and much less than that and the art is too far away. This is obviously a big generalization, but the point is: when you’re viewing a work digitally, it’s very likely the work appears as way too small. How close would you have to hold your phone to your face to see these photos at a relatively similar size as they’re viewed now?

It’s not like bigger is inherently better with art, and with these photos I’m not trying to make you feel like you were there, because I don’t think that’s possible. Part of what can make a photo interesting in ways different from actual visual perception is that the flattening and isolation of an image creates geometries and associations that can be missed or unintelligible in the constant flow of actual experience. So I want the images to be big enough that you can see all the details and connect the elements, but not too big to the point that this becomes a challenge again. Hopefully I’ve presented these pictures in a way that lends itself to contemplation. 

Photography seems to create moments of pause in a way unique to the medium, as it involves isolating a frame of stopped time and space, basically. Instead of building an image from the gross material of paint, photography retains an image from captured light. Objective reality forces its way into these photos in ways it doesn’t in my floundering with a paint brush, and it was fun to have my subjective touches be more subtle and nuanced, with so much objective reality to work with. 

Also shown in this exhibit are drawings in ink that I did in a sketchbook while on the trip, at hostels, on trains, or a few at other places. I think it’s interesting to see these in connection to the photographs, since they come from such a different place. Most of the drawings are not based on any actual visual stimuli, and the decision to draw came before the understanding of what the drawing was of. In contrast, with the photographs the decision to capture an image was a response to a specific inspiration from what I was seeing: two cute nutria in a river I walked over headed to a museum, the intimidating front of a building, the shadow of a cop standing alone with a cityscape surrounding, the hilariously long line for an art exhibit people had to pay extra to attend. For me it was a fun change to take photos and create pictures with a defined aim, unlike most of my drawing and painting. And the experience has changed how I look at art generally. Thanks for reading!