We’re Sending Our Photos to a Vegas Casino

You’re a painter. You come home after a long day at work, and you decompress by taking a
brush to canvas. You’ve been working on an oversized piece for weeks, and you’re finally
almost done. Art is never really finished, but you eventually decide that it’s ready for primetime.

Before you can step back and really absorb it, or let it sit and cook for a bit in your dreams, a
man in a suit comes in, picks up the painting and takes it away to a gallery.

One day, you decide you want to see your new piece displayed with all your other pieces that
have been carried off to the gallery, and maybe even see what your friends have been working
on. So you go to the gallery, and you’re confused. What you see is more like a casino; flashing neon lights, people running up to you from kiosks asking you try out their shower lamp or try on beige workout wear, street preachers screaming with veins popping out of their heads as they wave some book in your face, tables of people vigorously arguing and debating about anything from socialism to Pokemon, and finally, you come to unassuming wooden door with a small handmade sign that says “GALLERY”. You walk in.

The room is pitch black. The lights are motion sensitive, so stages of lights begin to turn on as you walk in, and they just keep going...and going...and going.

The walls of this aircraft hanger-esque room are covered with paintings, edge to edge, as high and you can crane your neck. When they ran out of wall space, they just started piling the pieces up. Canvases upon canvases, leaned up and stacked, organized by size and color and subject matter. Your painting had red in it, so you decide to check that section first. 

The red section looks closer than it is, you end up walking for what feels like a mile. By the time you get there, you’re daunted and give up on trying to sift through the piles and piles of paintings. You go home, and to decompress, you pick up your brush and start working on something else.

And no, this is not a passage from a dystopian novel about a future where art has been made
illegal and hidden away as to not break the hyperreality created in order to keep a society
pacified. This is how we’ve built art in the present day. We have somehow, before we even realized it, been hanging our artwork in a Vegas casino.

The Vegas casino is social media.

And photographers, we have been on the front lines of this. Since the digitalization of
photography, it’s a rare event to even get the chance to touch or feel our work, let alone absorb
it before it hangs in its appropriate category in the casino airplane hanger.

For all the money spent on cameras and gear and camping equipment for vision quests in
Joshua Tree and rental car insurance for the car we’re driving 100 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats, it’s pretty crazy that we would be comfortable with throwing our photos of a lifetime into a pile of Little Caesar’s ads and leaked images from the set of Avengers Doomsday.

So what do we do about it? I’ve seen Ocean’s Eleven, even with a team of highly trained
individuals, you’re not going to take down a business that is scientifically designed to grab
people’s attention and separate them from their hard earned cash. And even if you do, Andy
Garcia will come back to get his revenge in Ocean’s Twelve. The casino isn’t going away.

First, we have to see the casino for what it is. Once we do that, it gets harder and harder to
keep throwing our work into it. If you start spending too much time thinking about how to break through the noise of corporate ad spend in order to get your work seen, just so people can see your street photos from NYC, it starts to feel kinda pointless. Despair, however, isn’t the answer.

Rebellion is.

The casino is only as good as the attention it can still take from you. If you’re not interested
anymore, you’re no longer a customer. You’re no longer a mark. The flashing lights can’t grab
your eye anymore.

But look, photography is in crisis. I’ll just be honest with you. There is a generation of
photographers that have never touched their photography. Never made a print. And that is
because our relationship to photography has almost exclusively been about posting. Not to a
bulletin board or a local art gallery, but to an online casino. And in that online casino, we’ve
never felt the warmth of our work being truly acknowledged.

A few years ago, I was desperate for my photography to feel real. I had been obsessively making 365 Projects with the goal of posting my photos daily on social media. At first, in the early Facebook days, it was novel and fun. My non-photographer friends saw my photos and wanted to model for me in hopes they could be featured as the “photo of the day”. But eventually, as the algorithm became a more effective way for these companies to distribute advertising, my friends quit seeing my daily posts, and suddenly I just felt like I was throwing my daily photos into a void. I knew that if I wanted my work to ever be seen or noticed, I needed to find ways to bring my work into the real world.

I needed to go back in time.

In the early 1900s, postcards were beginning to be a major craze. When the post office began
to deliver mail to rural areas, communicating through images became much more ubiquitous.
And then, on March 1, 1907, the Post Office began to authorize the famous “split back” of
postcards where one half of the postcard had your message and other had the recipient’s
address. Before that, the whole back of the postcard was the address, leaving almost no room to add text to whatever photo you were sending. (Many postcards before the change in
regulation have messages written on top of the photos themselves).

Postcards could be anything. Recipes, church hymns, family photos, propaganda, and of
course, tourist photography. Postcard photography was its own style at the time, and it’s said that famed street photographer Walker Evans was inspired by the photography of postcards at the time. And it makes sense, because postcards were the main way that normal people were able to experience images of any kind.

We are obviously at the other end of the spectrum now where we experience so many images daily, it’s almost like experiencing none at all. How rare is it to actually be struck by a single image to the extent that you carry it with you in your thoughts for an extended period of time?

Images are no longer precious, and I think that’s mainly due to them not being real.
Over the past year, I started printing my photos as postcards. I take a lot of pictures, so it’s not
financially viable to be making fine art prints of every single one. Postcards are the easiest way for me to quickly and easily bring my photography into the real world. But the best part of postcards to me isn’t even the print aspect, it’s that I can write a note on the back to a single person. Everyone loves sending and receiving mail, and now my friends who wouldn’t have my photos in their algorithm can join in with my work once again. Putting a postcard in a mail slot feels a lot like actually throwing a photo into a void, but it’s really a highly targeted way to ensure that someone will actually interact with my photos.

I’m still doing 365 projects. And finally, my photography is back to being seen by real people.

This year, I’ve been making a new postcard available every day. Basically, I select a group of my photos that feel sharp enough to stand alone, and I write a poem spurred by an idea that the photo presents. I then sign and date it, and suddenly I have a 1 of 1 print that I sell for $5 daily. And now, my photography is worldwide! There are people in the UK, Paris, Budapest, Thailand, Singapore, Germany, and Wisconsin that have a collection of my prints. 

All through the affordable, real-life power of postcards.

From a photography standpoint, proofing my photos via postcards has also helped me to be
able to sit with them a bit more. There are some photos that I’ve printed that don’t quite work like I thought they did when I first saw them on my screen. On the flip side, there are photos that I didn’t like that I fell in love with once I held them in my hand!

But listen, I still send photos to the casino. There’s a lot of people there, and I don’t want to exclude them. But now, I make sure that I’m building a strong real world relationship with the photos I take BEFORE I just toss some of them over to the ad pile.

Now look, I know it’s easy to just post and see what happens. (The man in the suit just shows
up to your house and takes the artwork to the gallery for you!) But if you don’t spend the time
and energy to meditate on and experience your own work, it’s a guarantee that no one else will.
I’ve been encouraged by the steep rise of film photography over the years, because it shows
that the tangibility of our photography is still hugely important to many people. I think we need to expand that, and not only limit real-life interaction with our work to our own personal
process, but also how we share it with others as well.

Besides, I don’t know about you, but I’m not really a big casino guy anyway.