Substrate

“What differentiates masochism from healthy effort is whether something meaningful is on the other side. If you manage to figure that out, and you are in touch with what you really want, learning how to recognize and push through the wince can help you create better patterns.”

“It’s a North Star—what you’re avoiding can tell you exactly where you should go.”

“If a dream follows you around for years and years, even if when you try to bat it away, there’s probably something there.”

“You will learn much more about yourself and the world around you by doing things than by trying to be someone. Watch as the shape and edges of your preferences for life emerge through experience — this is the opposite of lostness.”

“Let everything happen to you: Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

“In either, the undeniable fact is that we are working in a world of more as a result of AI: more content, more noise, more distractions competing for our attention. The challenge is consistent — how do you cut through and create meaning?”

“‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’ — Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility 1935”

“I don’t think ‘art’ is what all photographers strive for, or even need to strive for.

Most war photographers are/were not seeking to make art, for example.

Their work is still significant, because art is not the pinnacle of visual culture.

Visual culture needn't be viewed as a pyramid.”

“But I understand the appeal. The car as freedom. The car as potential. The car as the American Dream. A box of limitless possibility parked right in the driveway. For many, a car is a self-portrait in motion, a symbol of who they are—or who they want to be.”

“A good photograph of a classic car shouldn’t focus on the car alone. It should illuminate the world around it, the time and place it inhabits. A dream car by itself is inert. It must be in dialogue with its surroundings, in a conspiracy with its space.”