It’s late, and I’m up and thinking about what it means to be “passionate” about something, specifically something as intuitive (and as visceral) as the act of creation, and something that’s been nagging me a lot the past four or five months is this: is the act of creating something indicative of the passion one feels for it? Or can it exist outside of that? Or, worse, does the constant need to produce, in the form of photographs, collages, posters, installations—whatever—indicate a complete lack of passion for that thing? In the infinite repetition of form, when does the time come when a person turns themselves off? To the pull of desire; to producing for a reason.

I began to take portraits very seriously this year; it wasn’t until October 2011 that I really seriously began to consider what a portrait meant and to begin to try and control the situations it took to produce a good one. It never occurred to me that I might not be passionate about this, as an action (nor do I think I’m not passionate about it), but thinking about it now I’m realizing that there was never any drive to do it, never any compulsion that made it absolutely necessary to produce these objects: I just started to do it because I was feeling the stress of not knowing what my thesis was about or what a thesis really was. It was a weird act of desperation that led me to something that I now do constantly.

It never hit me that what I was doing might not have been a true creative action; I wasn’t saying, “I’m making these images to say something,” I was saying, “I’m making these images to evidence something to say.” What that something was, I didn’t know, and I still don’t. I don’t know if that’s necessarily driven by anything unnameable or if it’s just… doing. Out of fear, stress, or worry. I don’t regret doing what I’m doing and I think that I do it well, and I do think that, in the end, I am passionate about it, but I can’t help but wonder, had I followed a path that was based on something that was meaningful to me, that called to me in a weird way that couldn’t be explained… would it be more meaningful and genuine than essentially reverse engineering the tenor that I was seeking through an act that was largely academic? I didn’t go into things saying, “what is a portrait?” I went into them saying, “how does a portrait begin to get at what I’m trying to ask?” The question that I was looking for was prefaced with a question that didn’t have much bearing on anything.




I should have been a photographer: I said this to a teacher of mine once and meant it, and still mean it, but the photography I cared about, up until this year at least, was more in line with quietude and strangeness than it was about human form: lines on pavement, derelict storefronts and human detritus. Somehow I did a complete 180 and began to not find things that called to me but attempt to produce them under a set of very specific circumstances. And so it’s got me wondering whether or not the things I’ve been doing have been done for the right reason, and if they haven’t, then what that says about me as a creative person; if the rationale behind the portraits has been a sound one. Or if it’s just about learning, and not about saying.

Because when it comes down to it things feel very… academic. “I’m doing a thesis on pathways,” (whatever that means), “I want to look at how information travels, as an idea, in the way people interact with each other and with the information they surround themselves with.” My adviser said the best thing about graphic designers was their self-reflexivity, but I somehow think this is the worst thing: if the best part of design is it’s ability to reflect on a rationale for doing, then doesn’t the doing itself become secondary to that? As such, I can’t help but think that design elides it’s biggest obligation, which is to (along with communicating the idea) give the idea substance and merit: if we’re caught up in creating a language with which to frame the thing we’re saying, doesn’t that thing become less… substantial?

I asked: “what is a portrait?” And the answer I received was: “break down the portrait into it’s components, investigate it, reassemble it, and comment on it. The language which you employ as commentary will give you your answer.” Or: put away your passion until you’re far enough away from it, and then re-inject it as something more objective. Make it about you, but don’t. Be everything and nothing. And all of this dismantling leaves me wondering if what I’m trying to say is getting so broken apart in the process (or was so broken apart in the first place) that to undertake the dismantling of it is to make it worthless in the process.




I’m looking for something, but the act of looking pushes it further away. And I just keep looking and looking.

The land! What a stunning beauty it all holds and how wasted it all is on us, graphic designers, who’d rather be sitting in front of a computer zoning out over Indesign, unable to look away. Or if not that: zoning out over images of typography, vernacular and designed alike, unable to look away from that Muller-Brockman poster, that vintage roadsign, that painted letter. It sucks us in.

When I go out with my camera there are things that strike me immediately. These are, of course, and very stereotypically: old signs, vernacular type, clutter. The trappings of the graphic designer who likes a certain look; who wants to be a photographer. I guess that’s why for the longest time I wasn’t sold on the naturalists, that group of photographers who make a point of shooting the land; who make a point of making a point about the fact that they’re shooting the land. And the beauty of nature! When I talk about this strain of photography, I don’t mean Ansel Adams or anything pre-1960. I mostly mean people like Robert Adams, a photographer who until recently I really couldn’t stand.


But why? Why couldn’t I stand this guy? His photographs are stunning: a plume of smoke rising over an empty field, shivering birch branches overlooking a city — the kind of emptiness that by all rights I should be able to enjoy. But I never did. It could have had something to do with the didactism of the images; the fact that they’re clearly trying to tell me something. Or maybe it’s just that the landscape isn’t something that fully hits me upon initial viewing; that I need some element of the human hand in there, being ugly, to really connect with the image. The studium and the punctum, yet again.


Sontag has something interesting to say about the fetishization of the ugly in contemporary (and classique) photography, and about how photography has this way of democratizing the world and refuting the power of the truly beautiful. She ties it in to Robert Frank, but she could just as easily have been talking about Stephen Shore, William Eggleston or even Rudy VanderLans and Ed Fella. Because: there is no objective beauty within the things that those guys photograph, nor is there anything particularly interesting about it. Garry Winogrand’s famous quote is that he took pictures to see what the world looked like photographed; it’s not the same for those photographers I just mentioned: they photograph to keep the world as a photograph. I’m as guilty as pretty much everyone on that list in the way that I take pictures; I think it’s symptomatic of most photographers who are also obsessed with type to want to take pictures of things they know won’t be around forever. Robert Adams is different.


Robert Adams’ work only hit me when I saw his series Summer Nights, Walking. And it hit me not for it’s naturalism, which is there, but rather for it’s loneliness: he was walking around Colarado, alone, at night, taking pictures of roads, houses, fields, driveways, parking lots. Things quite unlike the sort of stuff that he is known for, and so much the more powerful because it was such a lateral move. It’s photography that’s done in the service of thinking, and there’s something very close to the way we think as designers in his method.

Because what a designer does is done alone: for all the world around us when we’re working on our computers, there’s nothing around us but our computers. Or, not even this: there’s nothing around us but our work. I think it’s the same with photography, at least the kind that I’ve been investigating these past couple of months. But there aren’t many examples as immediately apparent as Adams’ series. A photograph of a house at night, that must have taken forever to properly frame and compose, however many two-minute long exposures hoping to get the right play of moonlight on a white wall: it’s the kind of patience we practice every day, done with the same anal-retentive attention to detail and shown with the same sense of pride upon completion. When you look at Frank, Shore, Eggleston, Friedlander, or any of the others, you’re never immediately aware of the amount of hours that must have been spent, the amount of frames that must have been shot, to compose these single shots. With Summer Nights, you are.


I think photography and design are lonely practices. I think they share this quality more than any other. The “art” photographer toils for hours creating shots that will go on to be seen by very few; the designer toils for hours to create good work that’s left nameless in a corporate setting; the visualizations of the ideas or the work of others. Both practices are solitary; both practices reward overwork and self-destruction. And the goals of both are to exit the world formed entirely of their creators’ will, created with tools that bring creation and execution up from nothing. You can argue that art on a whole is a lonely thing, and that it does the same thing with just as little, and I would agree. But I think that graphic design is far lonelier for the amount of anonymity in it, and photography as much so for the offhandedness with which it’s viewed. By which I mean: the best photographs do not look like they took long to create. And are easily, unfortunately, dismissed. Like I once did with Robert Adams. 

And what about Ed Fella?

Ed Fella: love him or hate him, he polarizes opinion and purposely tests what constitutes graphic design, and, along the way, allows for our profession to be both interdisciplinary and artistic, self-directed and confrontational. Because for Fella, graphic design is as much about finding as it is about creating, as much about stimulating a response as it is about generating a piece of communication. Ed Fella’s work can never be seen as anyone else’s but Ed Fella’s: like Martin Venezky, Stefan Sagmeister, and Emigre, Fella has created a body of work that is specifically his, impossible to reproduce and incredibly visceral besides. But how?


One of the ways is through photography. Fella has spent the better part of his career amassing a body of Polaroids of vernacular signage, in incredibly close detail, using a Polaroid 680 SE camera, shooting 600 film, creating something threefold in the way that he documents the world around him. Threefold because it is at once a large scale photographic project, a way of thinking about design, and a source of inspiration to his final creations. Let me distinguish the latter two: by endlessly taking photographs of the signage that he’s seeing, he’s allowing for juxtapositions and relationships between and within pictures, and, thusly, between the different typographies he’s documenting. This could be said to be both inspiring, on a broader scale, for his own practice but also the extant world, a way of thinking about design as a practice. It’s a process that serves a personal goal but is able to fit into design thinking as a whole.

Because Fella’s work is extremely thought provoking: it speaks as much to the process of creation as it does to the idea of “surface” photography. By which I mean, photography that doesn’t betray it’s depth, either physically or relationally, existing unfixed from space or context. These photographs exist on their own: they’re instant, highly saturated, and though we can hazard a guess to where they came from (a supermarket, a convenience store, an arcade, a storefront) they’re so close up that there can never be any true sense of context. I find this especially interesting: that he’s removing these very temporary pieces of typography and giving them life beyond their intended purpose, and, in some cases, repurposing them for use in graphic design. It’s a way of learning that eschews the conventions of graphic design education and instead respects the amateurism (and, oftentimes, skill) of handicraft.


The type that he’s finding finds its way into his own type-based work, and in doing so becomes something different entirely. I like that. I like that, in Fella’s case, we can see photography being used as a medium between the act of seeing and the act of doing; Fella gives us a glimpse into his process but at the same time gives a clue as to what can be done when viewing is threefold: seeing, capturing, creating. It’s the purest integration: photography is part of the design, not in the final project but in it’s DNA; the design might be entirely typographic, but it couldn’t exist without the documentation Fella is partaking in beforehand.

Something I often wonder about is the way that design relegates itself to a specific function, and how that function can be fought against. Why does the photographic element in design have to be left to the literal use of photography? Why can’t a practice be integrated into the act of design so that our thinking is not constrained to the figuratively and literally two dimensional? To take it further than a photograph: why does design have to be about the codified things that we’re taught? What I like about Fella is that he’s continually going out of his way to find that which is not designed; getting out of it the human touch that then informs his use of it within design. It’s an approach that we could and should learn from.


One of the things that I like about Fella is his self-imposed “exit level designer” status: that he sees himself no longer as a practicing designer but instead as an artist, acting in the way that he always wanted to but was never able to. Maybe if we, as designers at the beginning of our career, incorporate this ideology into our process and our practice, we’ll come up with work that transcends the notion of “design” and, instead, like Fella’s work, becomes something that can’t be pegged. And if we’re able to do this, and if we treat design not as an end but as a process, won’t we be creating work that is inherently better?

“7:14am: Through early morning Berkeley, into Oakland, and onto Nimitz, past Levitz, and the great mall…”

Rudy VanderLans, better known as one of the two founders, along with wife Zuzana Licko, of postmodernist weirdo design firm/magazine/critical team Emigre, is, maybe you don’t know, also one of the more interesting photographers around right now. VanderLans, who lives in San Francisco, has been photographing California since he moved there from the Netherlands in 1981, and his photographs speak to the same kind of wanderlust and isolation as the works of Stephen Shore and Robert Frank. VanderLans adds something else to the whole “photographer as explorer” method of taking pictures, and that is: a sense of the absurd.

Because, with Frank and especially with Shore, there’s a deep sense of melancholy in their work; it’s the work of people viewing the world but not participating in it. Like most of the photographers I’ve talked about, they’re more comfortable as observer than as participant, a stance inherent in most photography in general; in the act of taking pictures, itself. VanderLans, on the other hand, is not a professional photographer, instead choosing to go out by car, alone, stopping here and there to catch a strange shot before continuing on his way. It’s similar but different: for Shore and Frank, along with all of the others, it was a choice of lifestyle; for VanderLans, it’s a choice of lifestyle that, because of what he’s known for and what he does professionally, can be approached with a more casual edge, lending his pictures a sense of offhandedness that fits nicely into the spectral world he’s trying to portray.

His book, Supermarket, is like a catalog of this spectral world: shots of the desert, old signs, crappy motels, intersections seen through car windows, golf courses. The urban and suburban ennui of California. And running along the bottom of it all, that thing the others never overtly did: an added intention.


“9:44am: Cruising along SUVs, and grandmas and Skylarks and Peterbilts, and Winnebagos that say: “I’m spending my kids’ inheritance…”

Because unlike those other photographers, VanderLans is making a direct commentary on the country that he’s passing through: there’s no mystery in his images or why he’s taking them. But in so directly addressing the strangeness and sadness of the countryside, and so forcefully putting into a temporal context, he’s creating something incredibly lonely and, paradoxically, inexplicable. Because as clear as his intentions are, the results he gets are so empty of all life that California becomes counter to what it seems, not a land of sunshine and peace, but a land of glare and emptiness.

What interests me about this book lies in the margins; in the gutter between photography and design and how VanderLans, who is a designer by trade, uses photography in a decidedly artistic context to make a commentary about the weirdness and the emptiness of the place he lives. He references design in his photographs of signage (something designers can’t resist), but it’s a fading world; like Shore, he’s documenting the world around him in an exacting detail, but unlike Shore, he’s seeing what’s crumbled, what’s faded, what’s gone. It’s interesting to me that he made this book, interesting because in a lot of ways it could be looked at as “anti” design: the absolute vastness of the desert leaves no room for the kind of aesthetic thinking that VanderLans is known for. All you can think about in the desert, is the desert.

What it comes down to is this: VanderLans is taking pictures of nothing. These aren’t things he’s interacting with, they’re the terrible remnants of urban sprawl and desert life. Destroyed houses and golf courses and nothing else. The only time VanderLans lets us in to his absurdist commentary, imagistically, is about halfway through the book in a pair of photographs of a crummy motel room. This is the only time we see what he’s interacting with that’s of the environment. For the rest of the time, he’s at a distance from everything, but conscious of his interaction, snapping photos from the side of the road, from the window of his car, from a sidewalk in suburbia. It’s bizarre and compelling and it’s not really design and it’s not really photography but it’s something:


“Out on the Gene Autry trail in Palm Springs, and on the outskirts of Lancaster, and on Van Buren, too, my mind goes blank as I sit in my car, sweating.”

All of this in the midst of a set of photographs of intersections that betray absolutely nothing of where VanderLans is or what he’s doing. The only sense of space you get is from the occasional city name that crops up, and the map he’s included with the book. But everything and everywhere is the same: the same landscape with the same tract housing and the same absurd amount of road and horizon. It’s landscape as the blanking, blanketing nothingness that comes from too much space with nothing in it; it’s made beautiful through repetition and recognition.

And… isn’t that what design is? The recognition of the power inherent in nothingness? VanderLans, in Supermarket is tacitly saying something about the state of design; about decisions made therein. He’s not doing it overtly, nor is it his primary intention, but it can be read: in the way that the things he’s taking pictures of are destroyed (houses, dusty roads) or disastrous (golf courses) — the only thing living are the trees. How does this relate to design? Maybe it’s a question that he’s asking; a suggestion: that we should look at the way things naturally evolve rather than forcing a square peg into a round hole. I guess that could be said for every practice.

Or maybe it’s just that we should be looking: not for anything, not for any purpose, but just looking. Constantly looking at the world around us rather than looking at the work of others for our inspiration; seeing design not through the lens of other designers but through value judgements made on the natural world and what makes it beautiful. Finding beauty not in styles that fade but in what’s lasting: it’s fitting that at the two thirds mark he dedicates a page to repeating four times the same picture of a joshua tree. Because it stays whether you’re looking at it or not; it’s just lucky that we’ve got someone like Rudy showing us where to look. 

Someone who I’m deeply infatuated with, photographically and really just generally, is American photographer Walker Evans. Evans is best known for his work for the FSA during the Great Depression, documenting the wretched state that the sharecroppers who worked in the dust bowl’s lives had descended to during the long drought there. Unlike a lot of the FSA photographers (Dorothea Lang and Arthur Rothstein among them, both fans of the middle-distant gaze), Evans displayed his subjects not as hopeless and forward looking, but instead as defiant, staring straight at the camera and showing their abjectness for what it was. The thing I like about these photographs is that they refuse to compromise: they’re all titled with the farmer’s name, and in all of them the subject seems to challenge the present instead of looking toward the future. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book of those photographs and writer James Agee’s strange and poetic musings on what the two men were witnessing, is absolutely fantastic. I don’t want to talk about that book.

Rather, what I’m interested in is not Evans’ more famous work; it’s not his photography from the 30s and 40s that interests me so much as his polaroids: for a photographer known for making stark black and white images, Evans’ polaroids come as a sharp contrast and are preternaturally forward thinking. For someone of his calibre and consistency to be creating work that looked as different as his polaroids did, and as unlike anything around at the time, is nothing short of incredible. And it has a large similarity with the kind of thinking that must be used when considering graphic design.

See, Evans, in 1972, began to take pictures with a Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera, the kind of camera that produces instant results and therefore allows a photographer to perfect the image that he’s trying to achieve (or, as is often the case, get unexpected, aleatoric results out of the chemistry that the negatives are based on). For a photographer like Evans, whose work up until this point had been very much in the social/urban realism mode of: black and white, dour, stoic imagery, to go to this very saturated and colourful look was not just strange, it was incomprehensible.

Maybe it should be said that Evans was, at the time, also teaching photography in the Graphic Design faculty of the Yale University School of Art. I find this extremely interesting: that Evans, whose career began very much in the shadow of the social realism of R.E. Stryker (head of the FSA), who himself was firmly in the shadow of social realist godfather Lewis Hine, should not only embrace commerce as an avenue for his photographs (which, itself, isn’t that strange — all of the great photographers of that era, and this, tend to balance artistry with commerce), but be able to teach this collision to a generation of students. When you factor these things into it, Evans’ lateral move from stark black and white to ultra-saturated colour isn’t that strange.


I should probably talk about the images. But if the fact that I’m writing about them isn’t an indication, I am deeply enamoured with these pictures. The concentration not on composition but on atmospherics (though they’re all masterfully composed) lends the photos a strange and spooky quality, and, to me, they have a greater air of mystery than anything that Evans did before that. These were also the last collection of photographs that Walker Evans took — the majority were shot in 1973 and 1974, and Evans died in 1975. But that’s even crazier! That, at the end of his life, after a long and extremely successful career in a very specific scope of photographic practice, one that rewarded process and patience, he would make a move so inexplicable as to start shooting on an instant colour camera is absolutely insane! And it’s that movement that I really want to talk about.

Because: this move from a particular comfort zone is something that a lot of us, as young designers, seem to have a big problem with. And, I mean, it’s a problem that graphic design as a practice seems to have a lot of problems with. Graphic design is content to keep up the High Modernist sloganeering, that states that eighty hours in a studio each week, slogging away at a particular kind of problem, in a particular kind of way, is the key to a fruitful and interesting career. And, you know, maybe? Maybe it is. But it’s a kind of a career that I want no part of. The argument that stresses that “branding is where the money is” is one that’s going to get a lot more dubious the longer the Creative Suite is up for grabs on the internet and companies become more comfortable putting faith in their young cousins, and the idea that we can stabilize on a single talent or type of practice is going to become a lot harder to believe in.


What Walker Evans’ polaroids can and should teach us is that we must begin looking elsewhere besides what we know. We should know what we know, but in knowing it we should be content to do it well and do it quickly. The mentality that stresses hard work in front of a screen doing endless revisions to the same logo until it’s absolutely perfect is one that’s going to lead us to a generation of boring designers. What we need, instead, is the ability to remove ourselves from our present situation, to make a lateral move to some other kind of practice. To show that we’re not simply technicians who are great with Photoshop. Walker Evans’ polaroids, in this case, are simply a metaphor for being able to solve not only different problems in different ways, but the same problems in ways that are so different that you could swear that they were different. 

Sure, Massimo Vignelli only uses two typefaces, but is the work that forward thinking? And is it something we should strive toward?

Have you ever heard of a game called “Photofate”? It’s understandable if not: it’s a game that was written about in a zine out of Toronto called Anonymous Juice over ten years ago by a guy whose name I don’t even remember. Basically, it goes like this: you have a roll of film, you have a playlist. You listen to the playlist, and every time the song ends, you take a picture. That’s a very reduced way of looking at it, but I have to get to the point:

For my second thesis charette, I went to New York. I went with the intention of walking around for twelve hours, taking photographs the whole time, playing Photofate by myself and compiling the results into something interesting and thought-provoking (by this, I mean thought provoking to myself — I wanted to use this as a way of thinking about my thesis). So, I did it. I went to New York and shot seven rolls of film over the course of the day. I took a bus overnight, got out and started shooting at 7:00 in the morning. By 10:00 I was back on the bus and heading home.




This might sound like a crazy-person thing to do and, in a lot of ways, it is. Taking a twelve hour bus ride to be in a city for a little under a day, sleeping for two nights straight on a bus is neither comfortable nor particularly enjoyable. Walking around after being on a bus all night for an entire day is also hard to take, but — and this is what I was trying to get at in my Robert Frank post — it’s insanely rewarding. In the time I was there I only stopped moving long enough to have a coffee (once, on arrival), have a slice of pizza, and have another coffee (near the end). The rest of the time, food was taken while in motion, stores were avoided, the indoors was avoided, and the things I sought were: light and inspiration.



Because as much as this was a trip done for it’s own purpose, it was also, not to put too fine a point on it, a challenge to myself. The challenge was not in taking as many photos as I did (over 180), but in generating images that I was happy with, both for the purpose of design and for the growth of myself as a photographer. What I wasn’t ready for, and what infinitely delighted me, was the quality, on a whole, of the work that I created. And, going back to Robert Frank: the fact that I did something so concertedly for such a long time enabled me to become more comfortable with the equipment I was using and the place I was in. I found a confidence in my image-making that wasn’t there when I arrived, but hasn’t left.



Find here an image of the poster I created after the fact, and a handful of the images I shot. More will be added in coming weeks, along with commentary. But these represent high water marks in my photography, and a personal high water mark in my self-confidence, both as a photographer and as a person. The thing that I will take away from this is not the many applications to design and to art that these photographs will be used for, but the fact that I was able to do this. This was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, and I hope you enjoy these images.

More after the jump…

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This past week, I spent a long time writing a paper on the photographer Robert Frank, and his book, The Americans. Frank, if you don’t know, is famous for a few things: first, being one of the first to go across the United States on a “photography mission”, taking photos and assembling them into a body of work. Secondly, as one of the first to create a book that was it’s own entity, not a catalog to a show and not related to anything journalistic. Basically, evolving photography from single images into a sequence that was as reliant on narration and design as it was on the single image. Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment, repeated, essentially.

Because, yes: Frank was all about the decisive moment. But it’s interesting to look at the way that he went about getting that. You see, because, to me, the camera, especially the analog camera, has always been about fewer shots, and about a more concerted approach to image taking. It’s never occurred to me to think about how long it takes to find something decisive. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t perfect, spontaneous shots: but it’s nice to think that there don’t have to be, as well. What I’m getting at is that Frank, in creating all of these off the cuff images, that relied on a shift in ideas about what made aesthetics, framing, and composition work, was actually spending a long time getting these images just right. That’s a huge thing to me, both in what I know and in what I’m learning: these were images that took a long time to get. But when they were achieved, they were magic.




There are a lot of things that I could talk about when talking about Robert Frank. The idea of sequentiality, of creation; the fact that he exists in a timeline with Walker Evans, and that, in his way, he’s trying to achieve the same thing. I’ll get to it. What I really want to talk about is this process: this process of working and never stopping. It’s something we find in graphic design all the time — the seventy hour workweek, the endless iterative process — and it’s something that you don’t usually think of in regards to photography. Photography, by it’s very nature, is quick. A photograph is taken in a thousandth of a second. But how long does it take to shoot 28,000 photographs? And how long does it take to create a single meaningful exposure?

The Americans is all about looking; about rhythm. About seeing yourself in others and in the landscape. Like Stephen Shore, Frank is using his camera as a means of seeing himself in the places he’s going and the people he’s seeing there. For this reason, no matter how dour his images get, there’s always the sense of hope and dignity in them. But it took forever to find: not because his subjects were undignified, or even that the camera creates responses in people that might not otherwise exist, but because to convey something as fugitive as the notion of “dignity” — something that means something slightly different to everyone — takes a long time to get right.



A smile, a blink, a misplaced hand. The head bent slightly too far too the left. All of these things, however small, however insignificant, change completely the quality of the photograph. I guess that goes without saying. But: how do you ensure that you’re able to get the image that you want? A lot of the time in design they say things like, “a good idea only gets you so far,” which really means: have at least a dozen good ideas, and a few dozen more that are bad, because a good idea is only good as long as it works. So too in photography: the best image is only as good as your hope for what that image could have been.

It’s a bit of a downer; it’s a bit of a dodge. As much as they tell you it doesn’t exist there’s a standard for beauty, in any kind of image making, in any kind of design. But the standard isn’t extant, it exists within, and if your process isn’t sound then you’ll never achieve the results that you want to. I don’t want to be didactic, but here’s the thing: I was sitting in the library, looking out the window, reading about Robert Frank and the production of The Americans. The numbers strike you immediately: he was on the road for a year and shot 28,000 photographs. From those 28,000 photographs, he selected 83 to go in his book. One might argue that it’s insane: I would argue that it’s amazing. Amazing because it’s clearly in line with a certain type of design thinking. And even more so because that type of work ethic leads to things that you can barely perceive at the outset: the best work comes in the eleventh hour, when all hope of success is lost, and a single misfired frame creates the image you’ve been searching for the whole time…

I’ve mentioned on here a few times the work of photographer Stephen Shore, both in relation to Wim Wenders and to Peter Handke; however, I haven’t allowed myself to write about him until now, because to me he’s representative of everything that photography and design should strive to be, and I wanted to make what I said about him count. Shore’s approach — to keep taking pictures and never stop — is one that appeals to my sensibilities as a visual thinker and creator, and his use of the landscape, and by extension the nature of his photographs, as a means of representing the self while at the same time being universally understandable, is an idea that I think design can benefit from.

I say this in regards to his American Surfaces project, a collection of 300-odd images that detail a two years of traveling across the United States, documenting everything seen, touched, and interacted with. What I find interesting about Shore’s work is this: that he’s really, in the long run, using his camera as a means of painting a large scale self-portrait. His work is so often of the mundane: an empty refrigerator, a car and roadsign, a motel room chair, a bathroom sink. It’s easy to miss the cues that he’s giving toward what he’s really trying to get across. Every single shot is drenched in mundanity; it’s easy to overlook that this was his life for the entirety of his time making American Surfaces, that these plates of food, vistas, beds, and people were everything that he ate, looked at, slept in, and interacted with over the course of the time it took to complete the project. It’s almost impossible on first viewing to see American Surfaces not as a body of work but as a single work: it’s a self-portrait at extremely large scale.

It’s fitting, then, that as the work goes along it’s linear path, small clues are hinted at: near the end, three images of a corpse on an autopsy table suggest the logical endpoint for any life; that a true “self-portrait” would encompass, in one way or another, the creator’s own end. I don’t think there’s ever been, aside from this, one that successfully incorporates it. Shore succeeds only through a dodge: it’s not him, but it could be; he’s the one seeing it, but in another time and another place, he’ll be the one being it. Directly after this is a photograph of a man holding one of the photographs from earlier in the series; it’s self-effacing, forward looking and melancholy, all at once. It’s fitting that the final image is of another observer: a portrait of William Eggleston in a the front seat of a car, holding a drink. Shore manages to convey, in a subtle and smiling way, his own role in his own project; he dodges the literal “self-portrait” by forcing as much of himself into these few images as he can: his mortality, where he’s been, and what he does.

The thing that I like most about these photographs is how much they speak to one another; though it is a singular body of work, it could have very easily come across as disjointed. Instead, what you get are the intricacies of the day to day, shot with precision and keenness, elevated to the level of art. It’s interesting that he includes Eggleston in the work: though the work becomes even more mundane thanks to the huge volume of images, Shore firmly positions himself in the role of artist by including the first photographer to make colour images acceptable in the art world. Neat, right? I like hints of the creator in their work: I think it’s something that can exist in any medium; and not only can, but should. One of the things that design is lacking, that can be picked up from photography, is this sense of self within the work. Why shouldn’t the work designers produce be relatable to who that person is? Design should not strive to obliterate the personal, but to find a middleground between the personal and the universal: it’s something that would allow, through it’s inherent humanism, a relatability heretofore quite rare in the practice. Look at Sagmeister. Look at Venezky. What if every designer were able to put that much of themselves into their work? 


I like finding myself. I like finding myself within the things I create. Late last year I designed a poster based on a song that I’ve been enamored with for years. The song was by a band called “Iran”, and I’ve been trying to figure out the lyrics through the layers of hiss ever since I first heard it in 2002. I finally did last autumn, and it was as though a weight had been lifted from me: I had to create something to prove that I now knew what I had heard; I had to represent that understanding in a way that everyone would get, but wouldn’t necessarily be obvious. The poster I created was entirely typographic — completely at odds with what I’ve been talking about on here these last couple of months, but nonetheless relevant. Because I think when a designer is able to make choices that are completely personal (in this case the blocking out of emphasis words in each line of the song) it adds a sense of tension to what the viewer sees; a certain dissonance that comes from distances unbridgeable. Shore is doing it too.


Right, because when you first see it, American Surfaces is clearly that. And, if you allow it to be exactly as it appears, it’s still an amazing collection of images and an inspiration to see. But when you dig a little bit deeper, you begin to get a sense of the sadness inherent in the project, and when that becomes clear, all the pieces start falling into place… Susan Sontag wrote, “[E]ssentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” She could be writing this about Shore. He’s a casual observer in his own life, and the life that he sees is one that’s controlled by ideas of mortality, hopes of artistry, and the need to produce. If that doesn’t sound like every single good graphic designer, I’m not sure what does.

Still, having said all this, I love American Surfaces not for what’s underneath but for what it purports to be. To me, the idea of hitting the road on a grant for two years, documenting everything, is worth more than anything graphic design can offer. Stephen Shore might have gotten into travelogue photography much later than his contemporaries (Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander), but his results are much less documentary, much more elegiac, and far more mysterious than anything that those others might have done. And they should be not just an inspiration to the way something’s constructed, but also to the process that gets you there.

There is an interesting relationship that’s been gaining ground in my head the last few days, which is: the relationship between words, image, and movement. Movement, in the sense of film; image, in the sense of photographs (or, broadly, still images); words, in the sense of novels.

Peter Handke is one of the great unsung heroes of the postmodern novel. Unlike his forebears like Pynchon and Gaddis, he didn’t bank on cultural referentiality to get his point across (Gaddis and his fixation on classical artforms in The Recognitions, Pynchon and his deconstruction of youth culture in The Crying of Lot 49), nor did he express himself in the same kind of massive cynicism that characterize Don DeLillo and the other second-wave American postmodernists. And if this sounds pretentious: it is. And I’m sorry.

No, Handke was interesting because he specifically eschewed both of those things: he is on the one hand obsessed with form and what that means (and how image ties to it, as I’ll get to momentarily), and on the other hand views those forms and the things that can be done with them with an almost childlike wonder. In Short Letter, Long Farewell, he pines for the “image of America” seen through things like John Huston films and detective novel tropes, as filtered through the American southwest and New York City, respectively. But unlike his contemporaries, these were such minor facets of his work that they cease to be cues and become, instead, atmospheric elements to the stories that he’s telling. Specifically, in Short Letter, the story of a man on the run from a failed marriage, who just happens to be running parallel to his ex-wife, who’s running from the same thing. And of course there’s all the bombast of an epic, in their final meeting in the desert, at John Huston’s ranch (where else?), and all the paranoia of a thriller in the way she keeps trying to kill him (with poison, drowning, gunfire). And yes, these things do inform the tenor of the book. But rather than play on the obvious feelings that these genres evoke, and their darker elements, Handke instead ties them to imagery and mood. It’s luminous. It reads like a photograph.

You see, because as much as Handke was obsessed with American forms, and the American landscape, he consistently turned his gaze inward. “We were brought up to look at nature with a moral awe,” he writes, and in saying it, and giving voice to it, he’s at once referencing the sense of scope that his contemporary Wim Wenders tried to describe in his American films, and the grandiose-yet-banal photography of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. See, because the flip to that “moral awe” which he writes about is that to be brought up with something is to have it rendered, through time and repetition, insignificant. Moral awe, for Handke, becomes as banal and as trite as the movie tropes that move his story forward.



I’m aware that all of this is tangential, but I swear I’m going somewhere with it. Two pages after he talks about the moral awe prescribed by nature, he writes: “What was beautiful in life was a simple movement that just happened in the course of your daily comings and goings, a gesture of farewell made at exactly the right place and time, a facial expression that dispensed with an explicit answer, yet expressed sympathy and consideration, and even the graceful gesture with which you told the waiter to keep the change; such movements made me feel happy, almost weightless, as others probably felt while dancing.” Doesn’t that seem like a description of the moods evoked by the work of Wenders, Shore, Eggleston? In short, isn’t it a description of finding beauty in the subtle, in the ephemeral everyday? He catches it in writing, and evokes the same response (at least in me) as those three photographers do in their imagery.

He writes: “I feel as if I were half asleep: I woke up gradually and in waking my dream images became slower and slower; then they stopped and turned into beautiful, quiet half-sleep images. I’m no longer afraid as I was in my dreams. I let the images soothe me.” Peter Handke is, in the end, talking about the way images and viewers relate to one another, and he’s doing it in a way that references three levels of image-understanding. But he’s talking about it with the same subtlety that he envisions pure beauty possessing; one’s only able to get at the edges of his point, because he’s using the format of his book to commentate upon itself and the way that it’s understood.

Look at it this way: there are three mediums in a spectrum in terms of gradation of speed. Film, photography, writing. One, film, is quick; it gets it’s point across with minimal time for consideration (unless that consideration becomes allowed and the film correspondingly slows down, as in, say, a Tartovsky film). It approaches the viewer on it’s terms and only allows for consideration or analysis in hindsight, or on second viewing. One is slower; it allows for consideration of the image in the moment, and allows for the viewer to stake his own interpretation along with what is given to him. The third is slowest: interpretation and understanding occur parallel to the messages being given to the reader; imagery is entirely user-generated and knowledge occurs at the same speed as the information is given. All three of these allow for a level of understanding that enriches one’s life and intellect; all three provide inroads not only to cultural understanding (outward) but also personal understanding (inward).



OK, getting to it, finally: where does design fit into this? The way I see it, design is the quickest of all of these, the fourth medium that makes use of the other three. It’s quickest for two reasons: first, because if it allows for interpretation it doesn’t do so in a way that’s immediately obvious, instead giving the viewer the message in a simple package. Second, it’s meant to be seen for as short of a time as possible, to generate a response in the two seconds it takes to be seen. And yet: it’s using language, both visual and literal, to communicate a point and it engages the viewer in the same way as film, still images, and writing does. So often, though, it doesn’t make use of the full breadth of human knowledge and conceptual drive, instead opting to be pretty and vacuous (see, again: Olly Moss, Mark Weaver).

What I want to know is this: can design, through intrinsic understanding of other media, be made better? Better in the sense of: more visually stimulating and also more lasting. There’s a reason why the images throughout this essay (from films based on Handke novels) do not seem dated, and design from five yeas ago does… but how do we change that? Is there a way to use extant media as a means of creating a design standard that’s both more beautiful and also more intellectually intriguing? And if there is, will people buy it? Literally? Can we create a new way of thinking about design, that’s positioned relational to art as well as to the standards that we’re brought up with throughout our education, that sees design not as a vehicle but also as a medium of understanding unto itself?

Because the way it stands, we’re going to have to: as designers, what we’re doing is fundamentally changing and will continue to change. The democratization of the Creative Suite is going to continue challenging what we do as professionals, to the point where it calls into question whether or not the use of those programs — and by extension our role as “designer” — can even be considered a profession. What’s needed now is a new way of thinking, a way that slows things down but provides a more multilayered understanding, to generate within us the means to outdistance those who only see design as a set of programs on a computer.