"What we got here is failure to communicate..."
– Captain, Cool Hand Luke
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 awall) – but more often a passing pinprick of pixels as transitory as it is ubiquitous.
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 serve as fodder for Instagram pretension or the growing beast of artificial intelligence.
The images here are my light drawings, fading essays at the shoulder of the abyss.
-Dave E. Dondero