"What we got here is failure to communicate..."
– Captain, Cool Hand Luke
When the man comes to you
Tells you what you always knew was comin'
You feel it came twice as fast
You always thought the world would last way past you
But now you find
There's nothin' left around you
"Spaceship Orion" The Ozark MountainDaredevils
“Change ain’t lookin’ for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.”
– Al Swearengen, Deadwood
Photography, as we know it, is dead. We just don't realize it yet. Fifty years ago, when I first picked up a camera, it felt to me like I'd found some magical intersection between time, place and culture. Today, a photograph is rarely even a photograph – a printed image you can hold in your hands (or hang on the wall) – but more often a passing pinprick of pixels so ubiquitous as to be nearly without value.
Now a "photo-graph" is no longer "drawing with light" (as was the intent of those two Greek words when first tapped nearly 200 years ago to label this new magic), but simply ones and zeros stacked away in the cloud, viewed rarely or only to poke with a mouse or stylus or to serve as fodder for Instagram pretension or the rapidly growing beast of artificial intelligence.
The images here are my light drawings, fading essays at the shoulder of the abyss.
-Dave Dondero