BluePhoto

Gay Bar, 1977. From Southern Democratic.

Somewhat out of the… blue, this summer I was asked to participate in a top secret new photography project. All I knew at first that it was to be a new way for photography enthusiasts and collectors to discover worthwhile work, and that it was being spearheaded by some of the most respected names in the business, Bill Shapiro and Andy Blau. The project, dubbed BluePhoto Collective, has since launched, and it’s more than I could’ve hoped for. It is a beautiful resource for discovering high-quality, limited-edition prints from a fantastic group of photographers, all judiciously curated by Shapiro.

The starting roster they have assembled is unreal, and includes all-time greats like Roger Deakins and Cartier-Bresson, personal heroes like Alex Harris, and real life friends, like Clif Wright and Nick Dantzer. It goes without saying that it’s an honor to have even a small place in such excellent company. Here’s how the BluePhoto team describes it:

“…we’ve always understood how hard it is for photographers to get people to see their work. Of course, in the last few years, that’s only become more challenging as photo galleries have closed, Instagram has gone messy, and A.I. imagery has muddied the waters. So we decided to create an easy-to-use, highly curated, beautiful way to connect photographers with people who love pictures.”

The first round of my work available at BluePhoto are photographs dug out of the archives from the past three years. A few are from work I made on the road last summer for Southern Democratic, while the remainder are a mix of reportage and personal work. Jim Kelly of AirMail was kind enough to mention one of my photos by name in his nice writeup about BluePhoto, too!

“…it is as if the very civilization in which I began my work no longer exists at all.”

The past few years have felt like a liminal time in my practice and life. Since beginning work on America is Dead over fifteen years ago, I have spent an immense amount of time in search of small kernels of truth and quality in the detritus of a century of expansion, chaos, beauty. At the outset, I worried about excess and wastefulness, out-of-control cycles of consumption, and the disappearance of originality. I wondered aloud about how we might learn from, or re-inform our misguided, overly technological modernity by considering our more optimistic and human recent past. Over the past five years, though, it is as if the very civilization in which I began my work no longer exists at all. Since 2020, as the social contract has vaporized and bulwark institutions have imploded under the weight of their own uselessness, the things I’ve long searched for have come to seem like obsolete relics of something truly dead, rather than living examples to learn from.

I never actually thought America was dead. And yet, those things that made it singular and worth fighting for may have died without us even noticing. I still have not found a way to decipher this changed world through the camera in a way that feels honest or original, but inclusion in BluePhoto feels like the best reason I’ve had in a long time to keep searching.

Keep an eye out for new work in that space in the near future. Even if my work isn’t your cup of tea, bluephoto.co is very much worth perusing.

A heartfelt thanks to Bill Shapiro for his kindness, insight and for his genuine love for photography.

Visit bluephoto.co

Photographs made on Leica M10-R, Leica Q3 43, Leica Q2, Nikon Zf, and Fujifilm GFX100 II.