"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera."
— Dorothea Lange
There is a photograph I keep thinking about. A fellow photographer lies flat against a rocky shoreline, his body pressed into the earth, a small film camera cradled in both hands and aimed directly at the lens looking back at him. His face is hidden, swallowed by the camera, dissolved into the act of looking. That is Chris. He is also, in some way, every photographer I have ever admired.
The Ground-Level Gospel, Pebble Beach, CA, 2011
Today is National Camera Day, and I find myself reflecting on what a camera actually is. As a posture, not as a machine. A way of paying attention.
I have moved through several of them in my lifetime. Brushes and paint first, then the long, patient discipline of analog film. Then digital. Now, almost exclusively, an iPhone. The arc of that journey used to feel like a kind of loss, each step away from the camera, the darkroom, the deliberate chemistry of the image. But I don't see it that way anymore.
In February 2026, I attended a workshop organized by the Monterey Museum of Art where photographer Sean Mohoot demonstrated the wet plate collodion process. This 1850s technique produces images on metal using hand-poured chemistry, a large-format camera, and a patience that borders on ceremony. Watching him work was humbling. The camera he used, a massive wooden and brass instrument on a tripod, looked like something dragged out of a daguerreotype. And yet the images it produced had a presence, a gravity, that no filter or preset has ever replicated. There is a reason photographers still travel across the country to learn this process. There is something in the slowness that demands honesty from both the camera and its subject.
The Eye of the Process, Monterey, CA, 2026
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made the first permanent photograph in 1826. He had to wait roughly eight hours for the light to do its work. A century and a half later, in 1975, a young engineer named Steven Sasson at Kodak invented the first digital camera — a 0.01-megapixel device the size of a toaster that recorded to a cassette tape. Today I carry a phone in my pocket that shoots in ProRAW, adjusts for depth of field, and sends images to the other side of the world before I've even exhaled.
And yet something essential has not changed: the gesture of raising a camera to your eye, or your eye to a camera, is still an act of intention. It says: this moment, here, matters.
Looking for Something Positive, Pebble Beach, CA, 2023
I watched a woman on the pier recently — hat, tote bag, the fog burning off the bay behind her — hold her phone above her head to frame the bay, the birds, and the quiet. She was shooting the same Monterey I shot. A seagull stood sentinel on the railing beside her, indifferent. She was, in that moment, every bit as serious as any photographer I have stood beside in a darkroom. The camera doesn't determine the seriousness of the seeing.
Devotion in Fog, Pebble Beach, CA, 2011
Jim, another fellow photographer I've known for years, was out on a foggy beach a few years back, bundled against the wind, tripod legs sunk into the water, camera raised to his face, looking for the exact moment. You could barely see him in the fog. That image, soft and cold and a little spectral, is one of my favorites from that year. Such devotion.
Mirror, Interrupted, Pebble Beach, CA, 2020
My own self-portrait, shot in a mirror with my iPhone, captures something I've been sitting with lately. I am not hiding behind a bulky camera and lenses anymore. The phone is held up like a confession. My face is blurred, motion-smeared, the image scattered with the noise of a wet plate it wasn't trying to imitate. It looks like what it is: a man still figuring out what he's looking at.
That, I think, is what photography has always been. Not a technology. A question.
Happy National Camera Day. Go make a picture, with whatever you have in your hands.
Artist Statement
My work lives in the space between memory and observation — images that arrive at their meaning slowly, the way fog does over a bay. I came to photography through painting, and I've never quite left that world behind; I'm drawn to light that feels earned, to subjects who seem unaware of being seen, to the visual texture that comes from process rather than polish. Whether I'm working with my iPhone or standing beside someone who pours chemistry onto metal in the dark, I'm looking for the same thing: the moment when a photograph stops being a record and starts being a reckoning.