| A lot of my older work is in my art archives. Here’s more recent work, in reverse chronological order. | |
 | Stump Diptych (Arial View, Goudy View) An aerial image by any other name is still something upon which one looks down regardless of typeface. (More ...) |
 | Seven Melting Popsicle Tropicals (Triptych) The faux ice sticks provide for better photography through chemicals. (More ...) |
 | Picnic Sometimes a San Francisco picnic is no picnic; it might be a beatnik thing. Or not. (More ...) |
 | Lolita’s Bathroom (sketch) The taqueria’s bathroom provided visual relief from the visual tedium of perfectly aligned pixels. (More ...) |
 | By the Time the Interstellar Marauders Heard the Bowling Ball Thundering Toward Their Hideout It Was Too Late I made the photograph first then had to come up with a silly title for a silly image. Someday I may explore starting with a title and then commissioning myself to make a photograph to go with it. (Someday is the English translation of mañana.) (More ...) |
 | Bucatini no. 15 Tortilla Zia Combining two ancient foods to make an ancient symbol seemed like a good way to make a new ancient photograph. (More ...) |
 | PLY-WOOD (Plywood Deconstructed, Deciphered, and Decoded) When I spotted the large wooded rectangle I didn’t see a sheet of plywood; I saw a blank canvas. (More ...) |
 | Redwood Lightbulb The logic of this photograph is that having a little lightbulb next to a giant redwood makes no sense; it is a sensibly senseless image. (More ...) |
 | Labyrinth Stairs A title that says nothing says it all. (More ...) |
 | Cubist Waters What a delightfully stupid idea! Can beer in a box be far behind? (More ...) |
 | Bucatini no. 15 Satellite in Simulated Lunar Orbit (Sputnik Tribute) The Agenzia Spaziale Italiana mentions Yuri Gagarin on its Internet site, so I thought I’d give bucatini in space a Soviet twist. (More ...) |
 | Ten Unapproved Photographs from Over Twenty Years Ago These images have been in my personal purgatory for decades, which is where they shall probably remain. (More ...) |
 | Ten Hundred Hours (Bucatino no. 15 and Butter Sundial Proof of Concept) Ancient Romans divided the daylight into twelve hours that varied in length depending on the season, so the the current iteration of my bucatini sundial under development only works at ten. Tempus fugit in mysterious ways. (More ...) |
 | Independent Order of Odd Fellows Oceanview Lodge, Number 143 A single eye is visually striking; I wish we had more cyclops in my neck of the woods. (More ...) |
 | THIS IS NOT A PHOTO OPPORT UNITY I enjoyed making photographs that can only be seen through a veil of twenty-six Futura Extra Bold characters. (More ...) |
 | Motionless Bathtub Spider (Diptych) The spider in my bathroom might still be there had I not transplanted it to the urban wilderness. (I don’t kill or shower with spiders.) (More ...) |
 | Bucatino no. 15 Buddha This piece mildly perturbed a Buddhist friend, but I didn’t get a bad review from the Buddha, or any review at all. (More ...) |
 | Intentionally Blank (It’s Not a Dumb Idea) If it’s a dumb idea and it works, then it’s not a dumb idea. (Unless it really is a dumb idea.) (More ...) |
 | Eight Saul’s Delicatessen Matzo Balls Revisited The doughy pseudo-spheres were visually irresistible, but I can’t say the same about their culinary appeal. (More ...) |
 | Bucatini no. 15 Time Lapse (Diptych) Ever since I saw Eadweard Muybridge’s work I feel like I have to make time-lapse photographs now and then, and the Bucatini no. 15 obliged. (More ...) |
 | Crinkled Taters Shroud How often are we not aware when vegetables are trying to communicate with us because we’re oblivious? That was the question going through my mind when I saw the cryptic patterns the spuds left on the parchment paper whilst broiling. Generations yet unborn can figure out what’s going on there; I can’t. (More ...) |
 | Acme Sour Baguette and Bucatini no. 15 Lovely things can happen when wheat meets wheat, as was clearly the case here. (More ...) |
 | Sixteen Frozen Pink Salmon Fillets Entombed in Plastic I’m amazed that these huge fish migrate from the Pacific Ocean to my local market’s freezer. I can’t imagine how, and I don’t want to find out. (More ...) |
 | Bucatini no. 15 and Oak Grafting My botany experiment failed to produce massive strands of pasta, but I’m not disappointed since bucatini is already too thick for my alleged taste. (More ...) |
 | Bucatini no. 15 and Garage Door (Monodiptych) “Monodiptych” may or may not be a new word, but this is certainly a new Bucatini no. 15 photograph. (More ...) |
 | Pseudotsuga Menziesii Detritus on Canvas “Pseudotsuga Menziesii Detritus” has a certain je ne sais quoi that “Douglas Fir Droppings” does not. (More ...) |
 | Lake Cleawox False Horizon Lake Cleawox’s real horizon is invisible given the curvature of the shore and the planet, so I had to create one. (More ...) |
 | Three Black Holes, Flint, Michigan (Triptych) When it comes to black holes, the final score is Calcutta 1-3 Flint. (More ...) |
 | Bucatini no. 15 with Trumpets and Banana I found the Trumpets in an unopened bag in a toilet stall at the Las Vegas airport, the other items were edible. (More ...) |
 | Bucatino no. 15 and Bucatini no. 15 (Diptych) Bucatino is singular and bucatini is plural; grammatically correct pasta is important. (More ...) |
 | Haircut I cut my hair with a single snip every two years or so, that way I avoid chatting with a barber. (More ...) |
 | IF THERE IS SOME THING The are some things I won’t reveal, and this is one or more of them. (More ...) |
 | Intentionally Blank (Claremont Canyon) Negative space becomes positive space with a bit of typography. (More ...) |
 | Claremont Avenue Locomotion (Diptych) Photography is a wonderful tool for producing intentionally misleading documentation. (More ...) |
 | Four Fecund Taters Four examples of life after death. (More ...) |
 | The Death of Charles Shaw (Diptych) A bottle of cheap wine reduced from three dimensions to two with the aid of a steamroller and a camera. (More ...) |
 | Eight Thawing Hot Dogs (Diptych) I’d intended to photograph each frozen tube of meat byproducts separately, but decided that they worked better as an octet. (More ...) |
 | Inseparable Potatoes Two potatoes becoming one; that’s amore! (More ...) |
 | Carpenter Ant Mountain Insects made a mountain out of an anthill, and my camera and I documented it. (More ...) |
 | Sixty-Eight Millimeters Total Sunlight Accumulation I quantified the amount of sunshine using my reliable Geographical Society of America photo scale/focus guide. (More ...) |
 | Athletics Foam Finger Prosthesis (Diptych) The digital size thing taken to an illogical extreme. (More ...) |
 | Three Seasons of Flint, Michigan If Antonio Lucio Vivaldi had ever gone to Flint, he probably wouldn’t have stayed for all four seasons either. (More ...) |
 | Pi, Flipped Pi, and Pie The correlation between pi and pie examined on the visible spectrum. (More ...) |
 | Swiss Cheese Hole The Swiss cheese made the hole and the hole made the photograph; I was pleased to be there when it happened. (More ...) |
 | Eleven Points of Interest, Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, Three Rivers, New Mexico “Attention deficit disorder” isn’t a disorder; it’s the natural human condition. It’s too much to ask anyone to look at over twenty-one thousand petroglyphs, but viewing eleven highlights in one multipart image is relatively effortless. (More ...) |
 | The Sacramento Mountains and Tularosa Basin, Explained The title transformed the predictable image into a moderately humorous one. (More ...) |
 | White Rice on Styrofoam, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico White and white and white photographs are technically challenging; black and white photographs aren’t. (More ...) |
 | Sixty-Seven Rice Tasteless rice can contribute to a tasty photograph if your aesthetic interests swing that way. (More ...) |
 | Plane Air, New Mexico I don’t know why people go through all the trouble of making plane air paintings when plane air photographs are much more practical. (More ...) |
 | Artist and Canine Public Droppings in Flint, Michigan (Diptych) At least dogs can convincingly use ignorance as an excuse for their public droppings, alleged artists have no defense. (More ...) |
 | Cy Twombly’s Untitled (1971) with OOMPH restored (Modified Court Filing) Whenever I need extra oomph I reach for Future Extra Bold; it works every time. (More ...) |
 | Untitled, Flint, Michigan I think this is the first time I’ve employed the paradox of titling something Untitled. (More ...) |
 | Intentionally Blank (Garden Tent) This is the second installment in a series that I started over two years ago that finally is a series ... of two, to date. (More ...) |
 | Apple, Fig Newton, and Fig, Abandoned “Failure is nothing to get upset about. It's a fairly normal condition; an inevitability in ninety-nine percent of all human undertakings.” |
 | Excellent Culture, Cultural Heritage Any culture that fails to incorporate deep-fried potatoes is destined to fail. (More ...) |
 | Two Conjoined Waffles Flatter Than a Pancake (Diptych, Made With Steamroller Platen) Another foray into infrathin. (More ...) |
 | A Real Line I wish I would have thought of this when Sol LeWitt was still alive instead of doing a posthumous collaboration. (More ...) |
 | Twenty-Four Signs of No Alcohol, Alameda, California The sign forbidding alcohol consumption on the Alameda shore didn’t work. (More ...) |
 | Shower Anemone I haven’t put on a dive tank in over twenty years. I may never go scuba diving again since it’s so much easier to make photographs in the bathroom with a tripod. (More ...) |
 | Park Webster Condominiums Fish The only thing that differentiates this image from a zillion other fishy photographs is that Fiona has an address. (More ...) |
 | Ghost Bird Birds can’t draw, but they can make their mark and leave a memorable impression. (More ...) |
 | National Gallery of Art Test Strips The National Gallery of Art presented a tiny educational placard explaining the importance of measuring light in the context of art. The curators failed to mention anything about overexposure, an omission I was happy to correct. (More ...) |
 | After Duchamp (Diptych) Workers at the Hirschhorn Museum created the best exhibit in the building by replacing the advertised Marcel Duchamp show with their own readymades. (More ...) |
 | Acoustic Research AR-3a Speakers 3A 16237 and 3A 16796 (Diptych) The expensive speakers I once coveted are now buried in a landfill. Life can be like that, and now it is. (More ...) |
 | Red Yellow Black Inversion Color Study Since I called this a “study” I figured that I didn’t have to worry about accurate colors, if there is such a thing. (More ...) |
 | Longway Planetarium and Contrail I was fortunate to accidentally include a jet in the frame when I was making just another planetarium photo, which makes this not just another planetarium photo. (More ...) |
 | Very Large Tumbleweed (stationary) Of course the tumbleweed was stationary; they’re more difficult to photograph when they’re moving than a hyperactive cockroach on methamphetamine. (More ...) |
 | Black Yucca Sock “Put a sock on it” is English colloquial slang (that’s repetitiously redundant, innit?) from a century ago that makes no sense. I put a sock on a yucca plant; at least that makes visual sense. (More ...) |
 | Encantado Loop Gutter Ball Pareidolia is a visual artist’s friend. (More ...) |
 | Distressed Window I can’t tell what’s going on in this photograph; that’s why I like to look at it occasionally. (More ...) |
 | The History of Photography That’s what the history of photography looked like before it was digitized. (More ...) |
 | Three Planar Views of the USS Hornet Photographs of a decommissioned aircraft carrier as a found object. (It’s over two hundred and sixty-five meters long and thus hard to miss.) (More ...) |
 | SCULPTURE The sculpture building is sculpture itself if you want it to be. (More ...) |
 | Original Celebration Held Near This Spot Someone could spend a wonderful life installing brass plaques reading “Original Celebration Held Near This Spot” around the world. I hope someone does. (More ...) |
 | BLOW, Alameda (Quadriptych) I didn’t like the order in which the owners of the bowling alley painted the four large characters on the back of their building so I rearranged them. (More ...) |
 | A Hill of Freeze-Dried Beans This is my polite rebuttal to people who say my work doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. (More ...) |
 | Coconut Oil Lake There are all sorts of lakes, and this is certainly one of them. (More ...) |
 | Five Women of Machu Picchu I don’t know why women travel all the way to Peru to be photographed at Machu Picchu, but they certainly do. (More ...) |
 | Eight Saul’s Delicatessen Matzo Balls Saul’s makes the largest matzo balls I’ve ever seen; I ate them without weighing or measuring them. (More ...) |
 | Feel the Downlike Comfort There’s something about a pillow in a plastic pillowcase, it’s the typography. (More ...) |
 | Seven Swale Mouth Poles (Triptych) About the only things that are better than parallel horizontal lines are parallel vertical lines. (More ...) |
 | Six Claremont Avenue Paving Concerns Six Claremont Avenue Paving Concerns |
 | Golden Gate Bridge Suspension Cables (Triptych) Who’d have ever thought that I’d make photographs—and serious ones, at that—of the Golden Gate Bridge? Not me, that’s who. (More ...) |
 | Six Gas Meters, 67 Sprague Street, Dedham, Massachusetts (Sextych) Ynother excuse to use the syllable “sex” in the title. (More ...) |
 | Lonsdale Drive-In South Parking Lot, Lincoln, Rhode Island (Diptych) Drive-Ins are never as exciting as you’d think they’d be, and this one is no exception. (More ...) |
 | Twelve Charles J. Capen School Windows I’m presenting these as a series of twelve photographs, but in the unlikely event I ever print them they’ll probably be a quadriptych and/or an octaptych. (More ...) |
 | The Whiting Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Building On a good day I can find beauty anywhere, even in Flint, Michigan. (More ...) |
 | Five Unwinnable Chess Games I’m a very poor chess player, so I came up with five scenarios that would even foil Jose Raul Capablanca. (More ...) |
 | Unmarked Presidio Grave I can see radar that can see things that I cannot, including buried skeletons. (More ...) |
 | Three Cilantro Taqueria Tortilla Chip Bags Three amigos reincarnated as oleaginous maize transport. (More ...) |
 | The Jams (Kicked Out) I done kicked ’em out, then I done photographed ’em. (More ...) |
 | Ephemeral Weld Now you see it. And now you don’t. (More ...) |
 | Victor’s Confucian Truths Confucius’s lesson revisited from the opposite approach. (More ...) |
 | The Pencil of Nature (Revisited) In Fox Talbot’s original, “The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil.” My piece was aided, in part, with a little help from the artist’s pencil. (More ...) |
 | Dead Mule Gulch A mule that died, a gulch, and an orange mountain(bike). (More ...) |
 | New Mexico Constellation This would have been an f64 photograph eighty years ago, but, given the devaluation of the aperture, I used f8 with satisfactory results. (More ...) |
 | Poke Penetrate Puncture All-encompassing allegorical alliterations allegedly allure. (More ...) |
 | Six Creations of Biblical Proportions Is phi a biblical proportion? I have no idea how many angels dancing on the head of a pin I’d need to ask to get a definitive answer. (More ...) |
 | Snowy Encantado Fence (Sextych) Uh oh; I’m repeating myself. It’s the same fence as a year ago, but with added snow. (More ...) |
 | Snow Patch, Encantado Circle, Santa Fe, New Mexico This can’t be properly displayed on today’s electronic devices, but here it is anyway. (More ...) |
 | The Infernal Condition The text is presented in the form of mathematic formulae; no pixels were used in the creation of this piece. (More ...) |
 | A Five-Kilometer Line from Dildo to Spread Eagle, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada Wacky Canadians did the hard work of naming their cities rather imaginatively; all I had to do was connect the dots, so to speak. (More ...) |
 | Fucking Roads, Austria The roads haven’t changed, but the name has: there’s no more Fucking in Austria. (More ...) |
 | Two Dozen or Twenty-Five Cactus Segments Connected Somewhat Randomly I took four unexceptional photographs, chopped them up to make twenty-four acceptable photographs, the assembled them into one image. As a result, I discarded three unexceptional photographs from my overstocked inventory. (More ...) |
 | Three Painted Desert Diptychs As my late friend Morgan Walker said, it’s aerosol art, not graffiti. (More ...) |
 | Rio Grande Gorge Bridge Overlook, Taos, New Mexico I overlooked the overlook and looked this over instead. (More ...) |
 | Intentionally Blank (Potato) Anything that contains the words “intentionally blank” isn't, including this mislabeled potato. (More ...) |
 | Thirty Used April 2020 Coffee Filters Thirty coffee filters in thirty days suggest caffeine addiction and the associated jittery pleasures. (More ...) |
 | Gratuitous and Pretentious (Diptych) A lot of art I like features gratuitous and pretentious, as does this accurately labeled diptych. (More ...) |
 | Majestic Majestic ain’t what it used to be, but then nothing is. (More ...) |
 | Encantado Fence (Sextych) Making six similar images of a coyote fence with no coyotes may have been just an excuse to use the syllable “sex” in the title. (More ...) |
 | Italian Anchovies on Corn Tortillas (Diptych) Headless old world fish on cooked new world plants, visually if not gastronomically yummy! (More ...) |
 | Channeling Joseph Beuys When a massive piece of felt mysteriously appears on a clothes dryer, is it new work by Joseph Beuys or a mediocre lint filter? (More ...) |
 | Beyond Reasonable Doubt Any image that purports to dispel reasonable doubt clearly hasn’t. (More ...) |
 | Here and There (Diptych) It’s neither here nor there; it’s both. (More ...) |
 | Siuslaw High School (Triptych) This is what I came away with after a visit to one of the west coast’s architectural marvels. (More ...) |
 | Three Rockridge Recipes If you can boil water, then these are the recipes for you. (More ...) |
 | International Exhibition (Thirtieth Anniversary) I exhibited my work at several prestigious museums around the world to fluff up a curriculum vitae I never used. (More ...) |
 | All of My Negatives I boxed up every negative I ever made and shipped them to the Internet Archive where they will be stored forever and never seen again. (More ...) |
 | Burying Twenty Desiccated Banana Peels and Two Ephemeral Columns Bits and bytes are easy to catalog and store, so I buried the physical remnants of Twenty Desiccated Banana Peels and Two Ephemeral Columns. (More ...) |
 | Meat Garden Sausages practically photograph themselves, with predictable results. (More ...) |
 | Cinco Dias en Mayo Documentation of a popular midwestern celebration. (More ...) |
 | Mona Lisa Deconstructed Lots of people keep deconstructing her but she’s still all there, perhaps the closest any human has come to immortality. (More ...) | o
 | This is Photography Victor Landweber showed me what photography is, and this is it.. (More ...) |
 | Paint by Numbers Black Square Painting Ones and zeroes, but without the zeroes. (More ...) |
 | Archival Felix I like proposing projects that are too ambitious for me to ever realize; that saves a lot of work. (More ...) |
 | Metal Sphere (Orbit) I found another object and made yet another image of a found object. (More ...) |
 | Archival Leak The walls suffered for my art; I don’t engage in such clichés. (More ...) |
 | Gem Gem isn’t really a gem unless someone says it is, and I do. (More ...) |
 | On by Woods Evening Stopping a Snowy Now that Felix the Cat and Robert Frost’s most famous poem are in the public domain, I can do anything I want with them so I did. (More ...) |
 | Twenty-Five Nine-Letter Words Two hundred and twenty-five characters uniformly distributed in a pleasing fashion; squares are always pleasingly fashionable. (More ...) |
 | This Is Not a Photograph This actually is a photograph, yet actually it’s not: go figger. (More ...) |
 | She/Her They/Them He/Him I can’t figure out if sticking little stickers on people to identify their gender identity is funny because it’s stupid or stupid because it’s funny; I haven’t given the nonsense any thought. (More ...) |
 | Rose-Coloured Archival Glasses I tried looking at my home through colored glasses; I was bored after a few seconds. I can see why everyone advises against such a silly practice. (More ...) |
 | Scotch Whisky (from Library Liters) I was invited to make a contribution to a library liters get-together. I brought a liter of cheap whisky to what turned out to be a library leaders conference, but no one complained. (More ...) |
 | Forty-Six Archival Pitabites Tasty bite-sized images, ideal snacks for anyone on a short attention span diet. (More ...) |
 | Two Cups of Archival Salt I made these photographs from a simple recipe I concocted: take two cups of salt, add steamroller, done! (More ...) |
 | Three Internet Archive Decentralized Webs There’s a big hullabaloo about making webs decentralized, but I fail to see what all the hubbub is about; spiders have been doing just that ever since they started keeping time. (More ...) |
 | Buffalo [sic] Burger, Bison Paddock, Golden Gate Park There are no buffaloes and thus no buffalo burgers in this country, but that doesn’t stop perfidious merchants from selling mislabeled meat. (More ...) |
 | Bison, Golden Gate Park I should almost be ashamed of doing something as predictably easy as photographing raw meat, but I'm not. Almost. (More ...) |
 | Five Conservatory Panes I should almost be ashamed of doing something as predictably easy as photographing peeling paint, but I'm not. Almost. (More ...) |
 | A Sharp, Eye-Catching Show (sketch) As anyone who's seen Un Chien Andalou will agree, inserting sharp metal objects into an eyeball is rich in aesthetic possibilities. (More ...) |
 | Five Touching Archival Images Most touching images on the Internet feature kittens (and rightly so!), but I used two different flavors of dots. (More ...) |
 | Tell Me I don’t usually make documentary photos but I just did so generations yet unborn will know what a record hole looks like. (More ...) |
 | Heavy Data They said it couldn’t be done but I did it: I figured out how much pure data weighs. (More ...) |
 | Chopsticks More photographs of things that look the same but aren’t. I don’t like them very much but perhaps someone else will. (More ...) |
 | Twenty-Five Types of Sex in the Internet Archive You can’t go wrong using the word “Sex” in the title, so I didn’t go wrong twenty-five times. (More ...) |
 | Chicken Skin It looks like fish but it tastes like chicken because it is. (More ...) |
 | Melting Pasta Bouquet Pasta, from frozen to flaccid, in three scenic steps. (More ...) |
 | Eleven Pineapple Perspectives Pineapples just beg to be photographed, and I couldn’t and didn’t refuse. (More ...) |
 | Noise After Silence (Diptych) I turned silence into noise. I’m delighted to report that no lawyers were involved; thanks, John! (More ...) |
 | The Elements of Style (Triptych) Omit needless words. Omit needless words. Omit needless words. (More ...) |
 | Four Internet Archive Identification Neutrality Portraits I made a number of identification photographs that can’t really be used to identify anyone; mission accomplished! (More ...) |
 | Six Paintings from the Internet Archive’s Permanent Collection (2017) I know these works are housed in the Archive permanently because that’s where I painted them in an inaccessible location with my high-powered slingshot and paintballs. (More ...) |
 | Ephemeral Anonymous Earthworks Triptych Are these photographs of groundhog sculptures my work, their work, or ours? As the pope asked, “Who am I to judge?” (More ...) |
 | Square Eclipse Having recently challenged myself to make a photograph of a solar eclipse that I like, I abandoned the circle and did just that. (More ...) |
 | P Is For Paint I thought it would be fun and satisfying to run over paintballs with a steamroller, and for once I was right. (It was also artistically satisfying and delightfully messy.) (More ...) |
 | Two Solar Eclipse Triptychs I find solar eclipses to be of little visual or aesthetic interest, as shown in these two triptychs. (More ...) |
 | Seven Chicken Thigh Meat, Bone, and Skin Diptychs Meat and death are almost always of some visual interest. And in this case, I appreciated the disconnect in the title of referencing three things in a diptych. (More ...) |
 | Three Thousand, Five Hundred and Sixty-Two point Six Grams of Russet Potatoes Precisely Proportionate to Phi In the past, I’ve been unsure whether heavily manipulated photographs are a good idea. I still am, even after falling back in phi. (More ...) |
 | Seventy-Eight Seconds of Sonic Cushions Surrounding One Dozen Songs Recorded at Seventy-Eight Revolutions per Minute I think this is the only time in my life I’ve presented an actual audio recording as art. I’m comfortable with the visual translation of the recording, and much less so with the actual audio. (More ...) |
 | Lubricated Towel Abstract black streaks on a white background may have been revolutionary in the last millennium, but these days the idea is something of a cliché. I’d never attempt to consciously recreate something so predictable, but was pleased with the result when I did so accidentally. (More ...) |
 | Eleven Yards of Flint This is another series that didn’t turn out as I’d planned. As is usually the case when this happens, I like the unplanned version better than what I intended. (More ...) |
 | Six Hard Drives Cubed (sketch for Sixteen Hard Drives Cubed) This may be more about language than images or mathematics. I like it because the drives mathematically cubed don’t form anything close to a geometric cube. (More ...) |
 | Sidewalk Squared This is different than anything I’ve done in years or decades, so I have yet to decide if it’s promising, disappointing, or just different. (More ...) |
 | Abandon Ship The visual representation of a ten-second bugle call looks like a boat going under the waves in rough seas, or some other such Rorschachian image. Or maybe not. (More ...) |
 | Seven Fields of San Francisco Nature Photography I was advised that I should explore new fields of nature photography. I did, and determined that I’d received bad advice. (More ...) |
 | Quindici Salvapizza (1:100 Maquette) “Fifteen Pizza Savers” sounds more artistic in Italian, even if I can’t pronounce the title. (More ...) |
 | Six Dozen Screwed Froot Loops Comprising the Kellogg’s Rainbow I saw the Froot Loops and I wanted them shaded grey. No colors anymore, I did it my way. (More ...) |
 | Storage I didn’t intend this to be a conceptual piece, but, since virtually all my photographs are stored in boxes or on digital media, I suppose it is. (More ...) |
 | Twenty-Three Leftover Dinner Rolls This is the fifth series of twenty-three images I’ve made in the last decade. The choice of that particular prime number was usually by chance rather than design, as was the case here: I only had twenty-three rolls available. (More ...) |
 | Eighteen Specimens of Page Six Hundred and Sixty-Six I found a number of very thick books and used a graphics program to process the numerals 666 from the six hundred and sixty-sixth page of each volume. Not much to it, really. (More ...) |
 | Internet Archive Catometer Were it not for cats, the Internet wouldn’t exist. Despite my protestations to the contrary, there is, “too much of a good thing” does exist, so I designed the Catometer to monitor how many digital cats are currently prowling the tubes. (More ...) |
 | Shrouded Building Most of my photographs are on the conceptual end of the visual spectrum. This one, though, is more on the retinal, qualities that are mostly lost when reduced to relatively few pixels. (More ...) |
 | One Dozen Dirty Socks The most unusual thing about this work is not at all obvious: this is one of the few times in my life when I’ve had an even number of socks. (More ...) |
 | Archival Wall (Patch) Another day, another photograph of a wall patch at the Internet Archive. Oh well, at least it’s completely different than the last eleven wall patches I recently photographed. (More ...) |
 | Eleven Hasty Cement Wall Patches It’s the oldest trick in the photographer’s handbook: photograph someone else’s work (in this case an anonymous plasterer) and take credit for the resulting image. I did that eleven times to make “my” latest work. (More ...) |
 | Miniature Crater Lake It looked a lot more like Crater Lake before I turned the translucent cerulean liquid to black. That’s fine; I'm comfortable with my chromophobia. (More ...) |
 | Rainier Ale: The End of the Line (Unfinished) I bought the last six cans of Rainier Ale I’ll ever see and decided to drink them one friend’s death at a time. At the end of 2016, there’s just one left. (More ...) |
 | Internet Archive Driverless Truck I converted the Internet Archive’s freight truck into a driverless vehicle by leaving it parked in the same spot for over four days. (More ...) |
 | My Biggest Grant of the Millennium I promised to do nothing and got a grant for three dollars and fifty cents to fund it. (More ...) |
 | Above The Really Really Great Room Another dubious case of documenting something with which I had nothing to do and presenting it as my work. (More ...) |
 | My Internet Site, Cemented in Time Some Internet sites are ephemeral, but I cemented mine in time and cement. (More ...) |
 | Internet Archive Audio Underground Tiny speakers that also function as microphones allow me to both broadcast and listen to subterranean sounds. (More ...) |
 | Internet Archive Eruv (sketch) Is it possible to create an eruv inside a building? I’m an artist, not a Talmudic scholar, so I made one anyway. (More ...) |
 | Two Whopper Prints (Diptych, Made With Steamroller Platen) In one of those unhappy aesthetic coincidences, these fast food “hamburgers” both look and smell like vomit. (More ...) |
 | Zip Line (sketch) My creation to get data from one end of the Internet Archive’s Really Really Great Room doesn’t use electricity. (More ...) |
 | Sixty-Nine Dried Peppers Arranged in Twenty-Three Random Ménages à Trois You can’t go wrong with peppers a photographer; just ask Edward Weston. I documented sixty-nine of them just to be safe. (More ...) |
 | The Periodic Table of the Periods I have over one hundred and eighteen typefaces in my library; I used them to make this work informed by not dissimilar tables. (More ...) |
 | ISO12233 I chopped the standard international chart for testing photographic lenses into forty rectangles then rearranged them forty times. I didn’t use any of my too many cameras in making the forty prints. (More ...) |
 | Questioning the King James Bible This is an agnostic look at biblical punctuation, yet it’s bound to offend someone. Hopes springs eternal ... (More ...) |
 | The Room Formerly Known as John Antoinette, of all people, applauded my new piece, The Room Formerly Known as John. She explained that she could go straight to the saloon after work because she’d already been to the Jim. (More ...) |
 | Artist-Approved Point of Interest (sketch) Why is something art? Because I said so. Now the same thing can be said of points of interest, thanks to the labels I created. (More ...) |
 | Black Foam Rectangle Yep, it’s another almost black rectanglish thing. As Karl Valentin said, “It’s all been said already, though not yet by me.” And now it has. (More ...) |
 | The Impact of Big Data Documentation on how big, fast data changed the life of an earthworm. (More ...) |
 | Twenty Desiccated Banana Peels I discovered a desiccated banana on the nether regions of my desk. I quite liked the appearance, so I dried more banana skins until I got bored after my twentieth banana. (More ...) |
 | Five Presidio Block L Doors I can’t remember if the doors were the same size before going into my computer but they are now. (More ...) |
 | Ted Kennedy Memorial Reading Glasses One of the lessons I learned from Ted Kennedy is that one can’t have too many pairs of glasses. (More ...) |
 | Humpty Dumpty Self-plagiarism Aborted It turned out that these photographs I made were actually copies of work I made earlier, so they're labeled as such. (More ...) |
 | Thirty-Seven Pellucid Seaweed Sheets I’m usually pleasantly surprised when I look at something with a camera lens that can see more than my naked eye. It’s like Yogi Berra noted, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” (More ...) |
 | Losers’ Flag Adding one word to the Confederate flag renders it less offensive as well as historically accurate. (More ...) |
 | Geometrically Challenged Shelves These sorts of images have been done before, but not by me. Until now. (More ...) |
 | Two Ephemeral Columns I mantled two columns in the Internet Archive’s Really Really Great Room, saw all that I had made (and it was very good), then dismantled it. (More ...) |
 | Jelly Bean Flavored Easter Grass It’s plastic and thus cannot be either flavored or grass. And yet, there it is! Photography’s good for that sort of thing. (More ...) |
 | Twelve Coupled Archival Chairs I again photographed things that are similar but different. I may be continuing to explore a rich aesthetic vein, or I may just be repeating myself. I like these images; that’s all I need to know. (More ...) |
 | Seventeen Abandoned Green Tea Bags I liked using the word “green” in the title of black and white photographs, especially since the tea bags never were green. (More ...) |
 | Twelve Rainier Ale Cans Approaching Infrathin I’m not sure exactly what Marcel Duchamp meant by “infrathin.” I suspect he didn’t have a precise definition either, but it’s too late to ask. This piece may represent one if not both of the definitions with which I’m familiar. I know with certainty, however, that I enjoyed drinking the ale. (More ...) |
 | Thirteen Allston Way Stripes I‘ve considered painting for years, perhaps decades. Given my unsurpassed ability to procrastinate, I have yet to do so. Instead, I’ve found it efficacious to photograph and take credit for other people’s paintings, in this case the creative work of civil servants in Berkeley, California. (More ...) |
 | Forty-Nine India Ink Drops (and Myriad Incidental Splatters) in Seven Arrays of Seven Drops Nothing could go wrong with a bottle of India ink, an eyedropper, seven sheets of expensive French watercolor paper, and three and a half meters of free gravity. It had to work and did; there was simply no other possibility. (More ...) |
 | Comparing Apples and Oranges I have no idea why some people say that they can’t compare apples and oranges. I had no problem comparing them using a triple beam scale and a tall building. (More ...) |
 | Lily Pond (Painting) I painted a lily pond, but a hundred dollars worth of cheap paint didn’t go very far. (More ...) |
 | Thirteen Cans of Tuna Captured by Gravity Thirteen cans of tuna hurled into space from a height of sixteen meters all plunged to earth; their fishy contents remained intact. (More ...) |
 | Sixteen Defined Conservatory Drive Cavities Sometimes I consider the order in which I present images and sometimes I don’t. These photographs were easy; they’re numbered in the order in which they were made. (More ...) |
 | Fourteen Cheap and Dirty Camera Lenses All my camera lenses are expensive and pristine, hence my fascination with these scratched and cloudy old optics. (More ...) |
 | Forty-Nine No. Sixteen Rubber Bands After escaping squares and circles by working with hexagons, what next? Sixty-five millimeter (no. 16) rubber bands, that's what. (More ...) |
 | Archival Inferno Remnant When fire destroyed the Internet Archive’s San Francisco scanning center, I made two photographs, one for propaganda purposes and the other—this one—personal. (More ...) |
 | Eighteen Coupled Hexagonal Tiles I work a lot with squares and circles, so I enjoyed taking a break from the usual with these hexagonal grids. (More ...) |
 | Heinz 57 I couldn’t go wrong with a steamroller and ketchup, so I didn’t. (More ...) |
 | The Happy Ending (a book on tape) It’s a book, but there’s no paper involved. and it’s on tape, but the tape’s not magnetic. (More ...) |
 | Thirty Archival Toilet Paper Rolls Rolls of toilet paper should be perfectly round, but they’re not. I like looking at things that are different than they appear. (More ...) |
 | Lands End The panels in this series look completely different now. I’m glad I photographed them when I did; that’s one of photography’s raisons d'être. (More ...) |
 | Twenty-One Archival Tape Tears I photographed twenty-one masking tape tears, then posterized them and converted them into vector graphics. (More ...) |
 | Buried Treasure I buried ten million dollars, but no one found it before it self-destructed. (More ...) |
 | Twenty-Two Pudgy Little Fascists For reasons known only to employees of the Kraft Foods [sic] Group, chemical engineers cast the wretched little Kraft Jet-Puffed Gingerbread Mallows in the shape of pudgy little fascists. I photographed twenty-two of them. (More ...) |
 | Harriet, Grave of the Unknown Chicken There are chickens, and there are chickens, and then there are chickens. And then there’s Harriet. This is Harriet. (More ...) |
 | Kittens. When I made my business card, I eliminated all the information the recipient already knew. And so, I ended up with a one-word business card, one more word than I needed. (More ...) |
 | Segment of the Original Internet I obtained a cast iron segment of the original Internet from a trusted, clandestine source who assured me of its impeccable provenance. I donated the piece to the Internet Archive; I have no use for anything that’s no longer functional. (More ...) |
 | Three Presidio Air Intakes I photographed three huge air intakes—what else could they be?—on three different government buildings. Each one was unique, but each one looked like Theodor Seuss Geisel designed it. (More ...) |
 | Earthquake Detector (2012 prototype) It wasn’t what I originally had in mind, but I got tired of procrastinating so I added “(2012 prototype)” to the original title. Does it work? We haven't had an earthquake since I installed it, so I can't be sure. (More ...) |
 | Pinus longaeva Does Not Care Bristlecone pines walked the earth long before Buddha, Ganesha, Jesus, Moses, et al did. Actually, that’s not true. Some of these ancient trees are over four thousand years old, but they never walked anywhere. That’s because trees don’t walk. Trees also don’t have eyes, so I don’t know how much they’ve seen, so this piece is entirely based on conjecture. (More ...) |
 | Forty-Nine Cheerios Cheerios is (are?) a popular factory-made American breakfast cereal. They aren’t really round, but then neither is the letter o in many typefaces. After photographing the little pieces of chemical-laden oats, I manipulated them in my computer to make them rounder than real. (More ...) |
 | Stereo née Mono Lake I was arrogant and stupid to rename California’s Mono Lake based on a couple of my photographs; that’s just the kind of artist I am. (More ...) |
 | Digital Artifacts (Sóror Mariana: peça em I acto) My learned friends at the Internet Archive have scanned every page—including the blank ones—of millions of books. I selected three seemingly blank pages scanned from an old volume, increased the contrast in my computer, and discovered lots of artifacts. The blank pages weren’t really blank after all. (More ...) |
 | Pink Flamingo I have no idea why people wander around with eight-hundred-millimeter lenses in inclement weather and/or swamps photographing birds. Every flavor of bird on the planet has been photographed, and photographed really well at that. When I needed a bird in a photograph, Jimmy Audubon didn’t object when I used one of his. (More ...) |
 | States of Jersey: Twenty-Three Jersey · New Jersey Diptychs I photographed cigarette butts in Jersey, also known as the States of Jersey, the Isle of Jersey, Olde Jersey, et cetera. I was going to do the same thing in New Jersey, but once I arrived in Manhattan I decided that that was close enough to New Jersey, which was visible across the Hudson River. (More ...) |
 | Looking at the Versos of Photographs: Eleven Pictures From the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art What’s on the back of famous works of art and/or photographs? I wondered that for years, but couldn’t find an administraitor at the San Francisco Museum of Modern [sic] Art with whom to coöperate. Peter Galassi of the real Museum of Modern Art in New York approved my project after I wrote to him. And so, I spent Halloween, 2011, photographing the versos of photographs reproduced in John Szarkowski’s seminal book, Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. (More ...) |
 | Nineteen Protected Petabox Photographs This piece about intellectual property is one of my stupider ones. I set up my camera on a tripod at the Internet Archive and made a photograph of some of the organization’s servers. Eighteen other people pressed the shutter release, thus becoming the owners of the photographs they created. I copyrighted the set without acknowledging that the Internet Archive owns the copyright to the appearance of their servers. It’s a dog’s breakfast of conflicts that could feed a pack of lawyers for at least a year. (More ...) |
 | Twenty-Three B Dock Gaps I walk on B Dock to get from shore to my boat. I noticed that the gaps vary in width, so I decided to photograph them. I couldn’t really photograph just the gaps, since they’re virtually black. And so, I photographed the gaps, but left a bit of wood showing on either side to provide scale. (More ...) |
 | Petabyte Apple Server (Prototype) Internet servers are notoriously difficult to create and maintain. That's why I made a server that’s not connected to the Internet; it doesn't even use electricity. (More ...) |
 | The Library of Babel II Borges created The Library of Babel; I created one too, or one II. (More ...) |
 | The Davidian Calendar I concocted my own calendar, which is as worthless as it is pointless, and vice versa. Down with the Gregorian, up with the Davidian! (More ...) |
 | Twenty-Five Kii-Katsuura Corrugated Metal Walls Being in Japan was a good excuse to make f64ish photographs I’d never make in the United States. (More ...) |
 | Two Hundred and Fifty Pieces of Mona Lisa in Ten Reticulations This piece started out as a simple idea that proved difficult—or at least tedious—to execute: make photographs of each of the two hundred and fifty pieces of a Mona Lisa jigsaw puzzle then arrange them in ten grids. I can’t imagine why it never occurred to me that making and processing that many photographs wouldn’t take days. At least the tedium was worth it. (More ...) |
 | Fifty Black and White States This silly piece is based on two definitions of the word state: “the particular condition that someone or something is in at a specific time,” and “a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government.” Silly redux. (More ...) |
 | Thirteen Pacific Horizons Conceptual art is my weakest medium; here’s another example. It’s been two years since my last piece in the vein (vain?), so I may be learning to avoid this type of work. Maybe. (More ...) |
 | The Oldest and Newest Photograph in the World, 20 September 2010 For a third of a second, the oldest preserved photograph (made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826) and the newest photograph in the world (made by me) coexisted in the same image. (More ...) |
 | Fifty-One Trader Jose’s Salted Tortilla Chips Framed by Equilateral Triangles Sometimes I determine the number of photographs in a series arbitrarily. For example, I made seventy-one photographs of Charles Shaw Wine Corks because that's a prime number, as well as my father’s age when he died. For the chips, though, I photographed fifty-one of them because that's how many photogenic ones I found in the bag I bought. (More ...) |
 | Michigan School for the Blind, Michigan School for the Deaf Buelah, my grandmother, worked at the Michigan School for the Deaf. As a young boy, I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a world as silent as a photograph. Later, I wondered if the Michigan School for the Blind was invisible to students there. Several decades later, I finally made a diptych showing both institutions. (More ...) |
 | Agadir/San Francisco Sand Exchange A simple piece: scoop up a couple of kilograms of sand from a San Francisco beach, fly to Morocco, pour it on a beach, and photograph it. Then do the same thing in the other direction. A simple idea, simply executed, perhaps too simply on both cases. (More ...) |
 | Honey Renders a Precision Instrument Inoperative I took a functioning, obsolete camera and poured honey over it, then photographed the gears, shutter, et cetera. Since honey is transparent, the piece was even less successful than usual. (More ...) |
 | Sixty-Four Foil Eyes Another simple premise: photograph sixty-four spherical pieces of stale, Halloween chocolate wrapped in foil imprinted with the image of an eye. Since the resulting photographs weren’t very good, I posterized them in an attempt to hide my lack of technical expertise. (More ...) |
 | Retirement Plan (sketch) I probably shouldn’t publish this piece, it just might give some moron an idea for new legislation. (More ...) |
 | Seventy-One Charles Shaw Wine Corks When asked if I drink Charles Shaw wine because it only costs $1.99 a bottle, I have a simple answer. Yes. I’ve saved hundreds of corks over the years, although I had no plans for them. I’m glad I did; they’re as easy to photograph as the inoffensive wine is to drink. (More ...) |
 | Three Fort Mason Pyramids Just when I thought I was done photographing the parking lots outside my studio, government workers installed asphalt bumps to slow down speeding cars. I don’t know why they did this; I’ve never seen a reckless driver here. Similarly, I don’t know why they painted triangles on them, but I’m grateful that they did. (More ...) |
 | Thirteen Hollywood Swimming Pools Hollywood is a grubby, polluted place with unbreathable air and handsome people with teeth even whiter than the cocaine they inhale. Swimming pools add to the glamor; I made thirteen images of them using satellites a safe distance away. (More ...) |
 | Thirty-One Corncob Horizons I'm rather inefficient when it comes to harvesting corn from the cob. I photographed the remnants of my meal, which turned out to be a pleasing panorama. (More ...) |
 | Sixteen Popcorn Kernels, Popped I’ve been planning on photographing popcorn for years. As usual, turning the idea into images wasn’t of much interest since I knew the photographs would look like puffy, white clouds. And, as usual, the photographs turned out to be unlike anything I’d anticipated. (More ...) |
 | Twenty-Nine Madeiran Crosses I photographed the sidewalk when I went to Madeira. It wasn’t a very good reason to travel ten-thousand kilometers, and I don’t recommend that anyone else do so. (More ...) |
 | Seventeen Fort Mason, San Francisco, Painted Rails I’ve always admired the old, steel train rails near my studio; they haven't seen a locomotive in decades. I’ve also appreciated the contrast between the steel and the relative ephemeral parking lot lines painted over them. I made forty-one photographs of them, and, after deleting any that were aesthetically pleasing, ended up with seventeen. (More ...) |
 | Thirty-Six Modest Shrubberies Observed About Decker Island Decker Island is full of modest shrubberies. I photographed thirty-six of the tedious plants, and then experienced a severe lapse in judgment. After almost twenty years of resisting the tawdry siren call of gimmicky computer filters, I finally decided to use the insipid gimmicks. And so, instead of thirty-six bland photographs, I have thirty-six tarted-up bland photographs. (More ...) |
 | Fourteen Oklahoma Highway Intersections Fourteen aerial views of Oklahoma highway intersections, posterized to distinct shades of grey, and presented inside fourteen golden rectangles. As boring as Oklahoma itself. (More ...) |
 | Eighteen Coupled Black Beans (with Stains) I love black beans, so I decided to photograph their inky stains. The beans themselves were so attractive, though, that I decided to leave them in the final images, even though that resulted in photographs that were somewhat less boring than usual. (More ...) |
 | Nine Pieces of Studio China The dictionary and my mother define china as, “a fine white or translucent vitrified ceramic material.” None of the “made in China” objects in my studio fit that description, not even the cheap soup bowl. My mother has her china; I prefer mine. (More ...) |
 | Twenty-Three Cinematic Yosemite Panoramas I told my computer to enlarge some Yosemite photographs I had 22,500 times. My computer dutifully gave me some curious images. It’s pointless to look at these on the Internet since the subtle banding generated by working on a thirty-two-bit image is lost, but the Internet is nothing if not a waste of time. (More ...) |
 | Twenty-One Fort Mason, San Francisco, Parking Lines I remain fascinated with the new parking lot outside my studio; I never imagined painted parking lines could be so intriguing. (More ...) |
 | Twenty-Two Commercial Paint Formulæ Mise en Scènes I selected the titles of sixty-six Kelly-Moore brand paints, added their hexadecimal and cmyk color formulæ, then arranged them in twenty-two triptychs. (More ...) |
 | Two Sketched and Two Painted Arrows Arrows sketched and painted by paving contractors look even better than the idea sounds. (More ...) |
 | Ten Pineapple Rings on Maui A can of Dole pineapple rings contains ten perfectly machined (no other description will do) pineapple slices. Hence the ten photographs of same. I love it when the subject defines the piece. (More ...) |
 | Eight Frequent Colors Eight Frequent Colors may, in fact, be six or seven colors, depending on whether black and/or white are colors. I know next to nothing about color theory, but then a chromophobe wouldn’t, would he? (More ...) |
 | Eleven Chilean Circles Eleven photos of circles I found in Chile. I don’t like them very much; they look like photographs that are supposed to look like good photographs, which makes them not very good photographs. (More ...) |
 | Nine Santiago Apartment Blocks Nine unremarkable buildings with two overlays of distorted maps of Chile. (More ...) |
 | Eight Japanese Views, Thrice Removed I never tire of looking into a dear friend’s eyes. And so, I made several photographs of one of them; now I can look at her eye any time. |
 | Seventeen Manhattan Windows In April 2008, I wandered around Manhattan for a week and ended up making lots of photographs of windows. I selected seventeen of them, and gave the set the obvious title, Seventeen Manhattan Windows. (More ...) |
 | Mount Rainier Ale (sketch) I started to make a model of Mt. Rainier using Rainier Ale cans, but I didn't get very far. That's why it's called a sketch; the title has nothing to do with pencils or charcoal. |
 | Eighty-Four Things About Twelve French Girls It’s really eighty-four things about twelve French women, but “girls” sounded a bit more French, a tad more ooh la la. (More ...) |
 | Fifteen Bowlfuls (filler up, filler up) Why fifteen bowlfuls are represented by fifteen burnt match heads is something I can’t explain without going back to my teenage years. (More ...) |
 | Thirteen Irradiated Wienerwursts Thirteen formerly tubular sausages grotesquely disfigured by irradiation in a microwave oven. (More ...) |
 | Lunar Target A circular plane of undetermined diameter. The area, a one-meter deep layer of perfectly smooth lunar dust, serves as a target for meteors and asteroids, with any impact clearly apparent. (More ...) |
 | Twenty-Two Lunar Features Twenty-two photographs of lunar seas and marshes, made in part as an excuse to cite the original Latin names. (More ...) |
 | Fuckeaters Fuckeaters is a musical ensemble I concocted, complete with music I created and recorded. After recruiting three other musicians, I made a number of recordings working alone in my studio, and posted the songs here: fuckeaters.com. (More ...) |
 | Eleven Popsicle Remnants I made a dozen photographs of melted popsicles, then deleted one to convey an illusion of selection. (More ...) |
 | Seven Frozen Meals Rich in Fat and Salt I made these photographs without a camera by simply putting the frozen “meals” on a flatbed scanner. I originally planned on making more than seven images, but found the alleged food too unpalatable, even for me. (More ...) |
 | Climate Change Documented: Eleven Alaskan Ice Cubes, from 27-31 May, 2007 I photographed ice cubes in Alaska, with the invaluable assistance of Dr. Min D. Rowse from the University of Anchorage. (More ...) |
 | Sugarcubes Cubed After Sol LeWitt died in April 2007, I finally got around to making the sugarcube photographs I’d been planning for years. (More ...) |
| | Twelve San Francisco Hotels I photographed—in San Francisco—each of the twelve red, wooden hotels from my Monopoly game. (More ...) |
| | Nineteen Recordings I Enjoyed as a Teenager I photographed the grooves of individual compositions on my old records that I haven’t played in decades. (More ...) |
 | Therefore I Am I mounted a hundred-dollar bill on a piece of paper above the words, “Therefore I Am.” (More ...) |
| ©2024 David Glenn Rinehart | |
