Precipitates
After Occupy and the naming of the 1% showed how financialized life had become, there has been no denying that we’re playing against the house, even if we have a good job with benefits. We can earn enough to get by and might say that we’re getting ahead, but at the same time others generate incredible wealth off our time, our health, our nest eggs and debt alike, and even our clicks. After Trump was inaugurated in 2017, Las Vegas seemed the most earnest place in the country for the way it flaunted abundance without the pretense of delivering on it. I wanted to see it: the small print on the drink deals that eroded the benefit, the clockwork rotation of bartenders and dealers under the CCTV gaze that erased the advantage of human connection, and the backsides and back alleys that prop up the whole charade.

I like juxtaposing images from Las Vegas with some from Zyzzyz, a failed claim to the last word. Both, precipitates of that unquenchable impulse to dispossession.

Threshold
I have for a long time been interested in the supersensible: that which isn’t beyond sense but that part of sense we can’t put a finger on. If we try to articulate it, we succeed only in reducing it to some of its parts: composition, content, color, material. In other words, language fails us and we are left with technicalities.

Photography, founded as it was to reach the dead, oscillates between simulacrum and the spectral, which gives it, perhaps, an advantage in helping to restore what is there that we are inclined to overlook in our ardor for clarity. The supersensible offers what philosopher Jan Potočka called “the opening to a disturbance,” which he says we are meant to let grow in us unreconciled so as to understand that clarity is inextricable from opacity. They are two poles in a tensional field. In quotidian scenes that seem to straddle this threshold, I try to coax the camera into stereo acuity, toward something like reviving the night in the day.