It's funny how I got so bored of taking pictures that were just 'pretty,' forcing me to learn how to make the camera show things - like light, or movement, or multiple viewpoints - that nobody could actually see.
The meaning of a photograph gets made by whoever is looking, and never quite where you would have bet. For a while that felt like being written out of my own pictures. It turns out to be the whole job: you build the occasion as well as you can and hand it over, and making it for yourself is the only way to make it worth receiving.
The argument about whether AI photography counts is old and boring; the question worth having is where a photograph gets its meaning - and whether a machine that can make meaning too quietly writes the photographer out of the conversation. The same tool points two ways, and what settles which is whether you had something to say before you opened the box.
Every story the camera industry tells is a claim about the picture, and most of them fall apart when you check. The gear that has actually changed anything for me changed how I behave instead, which is the part no product page can show you.
Almost everything we believe about photography arrived without ever being examined: the good light, the sharp frame, the lens that supposedly sees the way we do. What is left when you stop accepting the defaults, and why the shape of a photograph belongs to whoever is making it.
A year of #fotogedanken, distilled into one piece: photography is a practice you do for yourself, in a world that keeps insisting it is for an audience, a platform, or a purchase.