Writing
2026
August
I feel the magic draining from Berlin
July
When good enough isn’t actually enough.
You can’t beat the far-right with more of the same.
February
Honing focus in the eye of the information storm.
You can’t prompt-engineer your way out of a panic.
January
It’s much harder to sketch out something new than to go back to the past.
2025
July
Finding a larger-than-life statue in St. Petersburg.
Every movement has its visual style. Today’s autocrats are generating it with AI.
The inherent problem of muralism: A mural’s got nowhere to run.
Writing that rare sentence that feels exactly right.
January
I can’t do this four more years.
…and platforms aren’t the public, even if they would like to be.
2024
December
Sometimes history is a torpedo.
November
It’s never been easier to get away with hallucinations.
Actually, Trump won’t have to do a whole lot himself.
October
Creating stories and images to match what you already believe.
August
Google’s Reimagine tool makes manipulation so easy that reality itself is at stake.
Pulling the plug on Elon’s toxic network.
May
Why does it feel so viscerally wrong to copy a voice?
Facebook on autopilot.
April
Playing to the worst instincts in the culture wars.
What we’ve lost to authoritarianism, and what we stand to lose if it comes back.
March
Resisting attempts to redefine “ideology” in the culture wars.
Books aren’t just another thing to “get done”.
Ethnically diverse Nazis and our collective contribution.
January
“Dystopia” has lost all meaning.
2023
November
On being too large to understand.
October
Why a global health crisis dragged people into the culture wars.
The logical möbius looks of Albania’s bunkers.
September
Fotografiska as a puzzle piece in the ongoing transformation of Berlin.
How the Fascist Spanish government leveraged memory to sustain its power.
The magic of Uzbek winter melons.
The uses of melancholy in the face of tragedy.
How populists exploited nostalgia for political gain.
The chilling prospect of non-consensual AI pornography.
August
Are there new types of images?
On shifting this blog towards the “digital garden” model
July
Memory can’t be trusted.
Spotting AI aesthetics in real life.
How populists overwhelm the discourse.
Embracing constraints is a good thing.
Telltale signs that an image is generated.
April
From Samsung’s fake moons to a bigger question: What is real photography?
AI isn’t growing into pop culture, it’s making leaps.
March
Remember the Great Cascadia Earthquake of 2001?
Externalities dissolved in water.
When creativity becomes mere prodding.
February
Why AI can’t replace human taste.
What’s lost in the noise of artificial art.
Michael Heizer’s desert kingdom, and assigning meaning to art.
January
Even when Midjourney gets it wrong, the results might still be worthwhile.
Should a camera be connected to the internet?
2022
December
On carving out a space on the web.
The luxury of non-urgent time.
Maybe it’s better to think of history not just a series of events, but as a cascade of decisions.
If it’s convenient, it likely has a dark underbelly.
November
There should really be a plaque on the Ernst Thälmann statue in Berlin.
On Spotify and the surprising allure of being tracked.
Luigi Ghirri on color.
Can a record ever be whole?
October
Can generative writing emulate my style?
Blogging as deliberate, non-algorithmic meaning-making.
Both poetry and photography can transmit unsayable emotion.
Algorithmic recommendations have led to an identical aesthetic, wherever you may travel
September
The allure of repetition, newly relevant in a time of memes.
History through unintended objects.
August
Sharing mediates our own recollections.
What's a canon anyway?
July
Russia's anti-woke branding defines itself purely by opposition.
The sleeper hit nobody knew about.
Algorithmic anxiety is really about exploitative data-driven business models.
Instagram is emblematic of the broader problems with social networks
It had to catch up with me eventually.
When they made Mexican street vendors remove their signs.
Instagram is turning into television.
June
How Germany replaced its collective memory.
On naming oppressive systems.
Berlin’s history is thick.
Can you stop a war from becoming normal?
April
Wrestling with Elon Musk’s free speech absolutism.
The Monument to the Third International was meant to look fake all along.
Communicating with facial hair.
We’ve collectively given up on doing anything about the pandemic.
The human urge to add things, and never to subtract.
How neutral should it be?
March
Voices plucked from a dream.
Sideshadows and backalleys.
Naming an intangible cultural shift makes it more tangible.
Have cameras become too smart?
We need more new terminology.
When different worlds intersect.
February
It’s hard to comprehend the images coming out of Kyiv.
On opting out of the circus.
Sometimes, we can do insane things.
What works individually often fails catastrophically at large.
January
What’s lost when we draw a line.
A camera and a philosophical quest.
2021
December
Experiencing the magic of air travel.
November
When an event turns into a concept.
October
Finding a lost map of the icy continent.
Get into a habit of skipping, and everything becomes optional.
September
São Paulo’s controversial removal of outdoor ads.
The photography manages to surprise every time.
“To consult the rules of composition before making a pictures is a little like consulting the laws of gravitation before going for a walk.”
Westhafen, seen differently.
July
A style, transplanted.
Photos do the opposite of recording something forever.
June
Floating down the river in Geneva.
Clarice Lispector sure didn’t mince words.
“The pandemic is over”
May
The joy of having a virus circulating in your bloodstream.
April
The pandemic as a starting point.
History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Time passes more slowly when a lot is happening.
March
Lessons from reviving a writing platform
Assessing tomorrow’s tech with yesterday’s literature.
The green of time.
Food that’s two degrees of separation from the real thing.
Bolaño writing for non-humans.
February
Playing ‘It’s Winter’ and the appeal of recognizing ourselves in ourselves
Waste, but for what?
When Eberswalder Straße was named after the Bulgarian leader.
January
Sergio Purtell’s “Love’s Labour”
Svetlana Boym’s prescient warning about nostalgia.
Shooting in the arctic and assessing the risks.
Applying product design logic to creativity.
Sometimes it’s best to abstain from the capitalist spectacle.
You’re screwed no matter what you do.
The case for Walker Evans being a time traveler.
The lost pictures of war-torn Berlin from 1945.
2020
December
Testing positive for covid.
Tarkovsky’s encounter with the photo skeptics.
Revolutions rarely change everything anymore.
Speedy Schlichter, in a remarkable portrait.
The future unfolds not through radical breaks but invisible layers
The supposed glory of the Red Army.
Neon lights, a glowing subway, ads everywhere.
Let’s just acknowledge how boring all of this is.
“There are an endless number of human truths.”
November
Disappearing memories, rendered in silver.
When photography was invented by a few people at the same time.
Whatever happened to the International Brigadiers?
A timely book on quarantine's history from Venetian lazarettos to NASA and the CDC
This sounds interesting.
Cycling the length of the Berlin Wall makes it a lot less abstract.
October
Personal interpretation, pictured.
September
The short-lived history of Albania’s monarchy
August
Past, present, future in Wuppertal.
July
Framing means leaving out a lot of reality.
When real life and culture war vocabulary intersect.
…is to stop smoking. Feels like the same is true for writing?
June
The appendicitis doesn’t care about our pandemics.
April
Maybe all it took was a piece of cloth.
The fabric of the everyday is changing.
The perfect metaphor for our protective measures.
“Coincidences and strangers appear from beyond the horizon of the calculable.”
When the news reporting breaks down, what’s left?
Lockdown feels permanent — and outside feels still.
What if this is an excuse _not_ to do things?
As lockdown loosens its grip, rule-bending makes the crisis feel less real not more
So, masks.
Will any of these behaviors stick?
March
The toilet paper is running out.
The pandemic as great harmonizer.
This is starting to feel like a great societal experiment.
Can you really appreciate a crisis through numbers alone?
Did it need a pandemic to get a productivity boost?
More like the “current” “situation” with four quotation marks.
February
Anita Brenner’s volume about Mexican art history nails the country itself.
January
Older films used more silver in emulsion, giving images a luminous depth later films lost
2019
December
One sentence summing up the death of famous people.
November
Truth, but not in certainty
October
How to make art with a prescribed vision.
September
Sugimoto's 1916 kanji typewriter required ingenious mechanical rethinking to handle thousands of characters
Apple's wide-angle iPhone bet will likely reshape photographic aesthetics for a while
What was lost.
Did a Polish photographer get carried away trying to capture every household in the country?
August
Making new connections, forcibly.
June
Bananas require elaborate cold infrastructure to ripen artificially after global shipping while green
The world keeps choosing inferior things over better alternatives, from bananas to keyboards
George Seferis, ladies and gentlemen.
Clarice Lispector wrote the way she wrote because she didn’t sleep.
Cycling Berlin to Prague proves irrational goals are worth completing, flies and all
March
January
Morning coffee among the damage.
2018
November
A chance discovery.
October
When things get easier, they also get harder.
August
Riding the ropeways of Chiatura, Georgia’s impossible mining city.
I traveled to Stockholm to ask photographer Anders Petersen how he takes his photos—and got a some very different answers than I expected.
Forty degrees, ludicrous speeds, cheesy breads.
May
People are drawn to their vocations by nature, not chance
Deep into the East.
Let's give this bikepacking thing a try.
Jūrmala's beaches, according to Wikitravel.
In the 1950s, early color photography was widely scorned. Now it’s the default. What happened?
Photography as an act of organizing the rectangle.
Mexico's colors translate beautifully into black and white photography
April
A fallen balcony leaf in Berlin made an unexpected Sunday photo prop
More precious because it can't be replicated.
It has arrived.
Searching for the grave of Tina Modotti in Mexico City.
Moving forward without looking back is both a loss and a liberation
An ache for places you have never visited
Fuel for my black and white infatuation
Eisenstein and the Day of the Dead
January
Gerda Taro didn’t just help invent one of the world’s most famous photographers. Briefly, she was him.
2017
November
Vitas Luckus was too revolutionary a photographer to be accepted. But his is no ordinary rebel’s story.
September
Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo captured something that cannot be seen.
August
Why a Chilean photographer quit fame in pursuit of mysticism and solitude.
July
What is writing of quality?
June
We like to say that the camera doesn’t lie. But the reality it captures isn’t quite true either.
The poetic image emerges from mental craft, resisting any mechanical or formulaic process
This place is special.
Chasing a brutalist masterpiece.
May
Photography of the presidency shows that Trump cares about optics, not visuals.
Poetry meet imagery.
April
Reconsidering Walter Benjamin.
March
Mexico, in focus.
Tina Modotti's portrait is all the more powerful because we'll know what will happen to her.
If you’re looking for a camera to grow attached to, this could be the one.
February
Anterior future.
January
Stepping away from familiar places.
So long, camera.
Doing the impossible.
Oslo in wintertime.
2016
December
How August Sander’s uncanny images foreshadow the ending of time.
November
Back to Sofia.
The genius of Spectacles — and of simple complexity.
October
Disorder is the universe's inevitable destination.
What the Decisive Moment means for originality.
Bucharest feels gritty and familiar at once.
September
Memorable sentences from Henri Cartier-Bresson, quotation machine.
Visceral modernism.
An ode to the Flickr Commons.
August
Cyanotype's Prussian Blue mirrors Berlin itself.
Could stories be an escape?
Low-flying planes and summer rains.
July
The unease is creeping in.
Loss as a shape.
June
Startup culture's trendy "embrace failure" mantra rings hollow when nobody discusses real, lasting failure.
Photographic lessons from a radical 1920s approach to art.
A city, changing.
The nostalgia is thick.
May
Visiting the Bauhaus in Dessau.
The money has arrived.
Wisdom from John Perry Barlow.
Why looking at the past in color is such an uncanny experience.
I am launching a podcast! It's called Available Light and it is about photography.
April
Chasing bees and photos across the web.
Great writing comunicates emotionally.
North Korea's Kwangmyong is a fully isolated national intranet, making China's firewall look tame.
March
Possiblity.
It's already here.
February
Antarctica defies imagination.
The joy of the Fuji X100T
What’s important is to not be lonely.
In Berlin, a devilish chapter of history is buried under history itself.
You don't need nice stuff.
January
The similarities between flying and writing.
Photography as a surreal duplicate of reality.
2015
December
Physical books hit differently.
15 highlights from 2015.
Showing one's face.
An experience is more vivid if shared.
Unusually clear London skies made aircraft markings readable from the ground
Ten standout episodes from 2015.
Wait, videoconferening is a thing now?
November
Sleep has turned from a necessity into something worth fixing.
Vertical is winning.
Encountering Valencia.
Spirited away to Mardid.
Bolaño's jet-lag mirrors a waking dreamstate.
Images of the Northern Lights lay the limits of photography brutally bare.
We're back.
October
A district slated for destrution.
Can you talk to the dead?
For years, painters from Holland enjoyed an unfair advantage.
September
Turning into spectators of our own realities.
I may be projecting.
Siberia works differently.
Observations from Moscow
August
Getting laid off over rooftop lunch.
People rarely think about you, so stop worrying about their judgment
Baikal breeze and burning pines.
It takes a while, but you can read it.
Most office work is unnecessary busywork.
Fixed office hours trap creative workers in industrial-age logic that values time over output.
Endings and new beginnigs.
July
Roadside rasperries.
Twitter's #ThisIsACoup showed Europeans uniting across borders to protest Greek austerity in real time
A quick trip to Amsterdam and The Hague
Bright lights, brighter ideas
A walk.
June
Each generation mistakes its own baseline for reality.
Watching opportunitites pass.
Passive sexism.
Why does rain smell the way it does?
Stephen Shore's mental model.
Socialist ambitions amid silence.
May
Summer 2015.
Russian papers about the Mexican World Cup of 86.
April
“In the background an oak tree.”
Empty beaches and homesick Bavarians.
Engineering resourcefulness.
Magnolias in full bloom.
Photographing ruins says more about us than it does about the countries we supposedly picture.
March
February
Yesterday's bias encoded into today's technology.
When other languages have better terminologies.
The sun is out.
Appearances are deceiving.
Little did I know.
Riding Berlin's U7 all the way south.
January
Berlin's Russian embassy preserves Soviet grandeur, Hitler's marble, and a church built on imported Russian soil.
The snow kills all noise.
The glass should be half-full.
Are we just promoting a narrative here?
Puddles and neon lights.
An escape.
2014
December
2014 in 20 photos.
Headphones are underrated.
An underrated social superpower.
And choice may be an illusion.
November
Russian dashcam culture shows how ubiquitous cameras create useful records but don't guarantee accountability
Impressions from Reykjavik
Iceland in November humbled us with winds strong enough to make walking feel like moonwalking
Berlin, hamstrung by 1990s decisions.
Lots of changes to the blog!
October
Sponsored content is everywhere.
A Bolaño passage captures the feeling of the world beginning to shift
What's really new?
Why do some things feel more authentic than others?
Life is footage.
September
Nostalgia of the Dutch kind.
Visiting Lichtenberg’s decommissioned swimming pool for a trip to the past.
Photography creates memories that belong simultaneously to shared experience and private feeling
Turning presence into performance.
Advertising crosses a line when it destroys the very product it claims to support
Cultural anxieties, speed up.
August
Modern stress as a marketed illusion.
July
Trying to discover authentic places is inauthentic in itself.
May
These elections feel different.
April
Mass tourism transforms cities into spectacles.
March
I'm still surprised we got in.
February
A military complex, abandoned.
January
Making some photos ephemeral raises the value of the ones we choose to keep
Connectivty over craftsmanship.
2013
August
Instagram replaces photography’s decisive moment with constant, immediate sharing.
March
Daylight Saving Time's original rationale has long vanished.
2012
August
Seven years on, New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward remains empty.
2011
January
Returning to Sweden in record cold.