A novel of American life from 1951 to the 1990s narrated by a waste-management executive, moving through the Fresh Kills landfill, decommissioned B-52 bombers repainted as an artwork in the desert, the Watts Towers built from broken tile and glass, nuclear blasts sold as waste disposal, and a home video of a highway killing replayed on television.

My Machines series built a future landscape out of thrift-store trinkets and broken machine parts, walked by small figures with clipboards: a bureaucracy managing the wild. The landscapes look beautiful, but underneath runs a current of violence and badly regulated pollution. Underworld is where I find that world written: waste as “the secret history, the underhistory,” bombers turned into art, a tower made of what was thrown away.

Debord argues that in modern consumer society, social relations between people are carried by images.

PYADE reads the landscape through the logic of advertising at every scale, macro and micro, from logos in the open sky to a wrapper on the city sidewalk: the physical and social landscape treated as a textual commodity. It is Debord’s argument made with a camera.

Architects who studied the Las Vegas Strip as a landscape of signs, where advertising matters more than the buildings behind it.

PYADE photographs the landscape the same way, as a surface for logos, whether read from a car, from the air or from Google Earth.

An essay on the compressed, copied, low-resolution images that circulate online, and what their degraded copies reveal about how images now move.

What stays with me is Steyerl’s sense of images that move fast and multiply on their own. Advertising behaves that way in PYADE: logos replicate like a contagion, breaking out across every surface, and even as litter carried on the wind they still claim our sight. The Street View and Google Earth captures are poor images in her sense, pulled from a screen and still carrying the brands they record.

Eco tours American wax museums, roadside replicas and Disneyland and finds a culture that prefers the perfect copy to the real thing, what he calls the absolute fake.

From Oz to Eden staged imagined meetings between Mickey Mouse and the Statue of Liberty. Eco describes the country those pictures were made in: one where the copy is meant to satisfy more than history does, and the national story is sold back as a ride.

Boorstin describes an America organized more and more around staged events and manufactured celebrity, made in order to be reported.

The tableaux in From Oz to Eden are pseudo-events on purpose: meetings that never happened, built to look like the news a country tells about itself.

Heartfield cut and recombined press photographs into political satire on the covers of a mass-circulation workers’ magazine.

Oz borrowed the political cartoon’s logic and made it with a computer instead of scissors. Heartfield is where montage as satire begins.

Sixty-four canvas panels in a grid, each one flat color with hard edges.

Limelight Firefight arranges real paper targets, shot by children, in the order of Kelly’s hard-edge abstraction. The marks of violence meet the modernist grid: bullet holes set into clean fields of color, so that play, harm and formal beauty sit uncomfortably side by side.

A 1972 BBC series and book arguing that images are never neutral: how we see is shaped by what we know, by who owns images, and by desire. It traces how oil painting celebrated possession, how the European nude taught women to watch themselves being looked at, and how advertising took over painting’s language to sell an envied future self.

Limelight Firefight watches children learn early to be looked at or to act, through toys and poses rehearsed for a parent’s camera, without judging the families. PYADE follows advertising’s promise of an envied self out across the landscape. Berger gave me the tools to see both.

Butler argues that gender is not something a person has but something repeated into being.

The home videos in Limelight Firefight record the early repetitions, the pose rehearsed for a parent’s camera, before a child can choose them.

Photographs of children in their rooms surrounded by all their pink or all their blue possessions, revisited as the children grow.

Like Limelight Firefight, it shows roles taught through things rather than words, and it watches without judging the families.

Men who led death squads in the Indonesian killings of 1965–66, when hundreds of thousands of alleged communists were murdered, are invited to reenact what they did in the film genres they love: gangster scenes, a western, a lavish musical number. Herzog and Errol Morris were executive producers.

A documentary that reaches its truth through staging. The men restage what they did as big production numbers, and in making them they reveal what no interview could. It opened my eyes to what enactment can do. In Sol y Sombra my cousin Juanko and I stage scenes together, pushing the truth toward a kind of magical realism: a figure in the jungle held by monstrous hands. Pine Tree Ballads works the same way, reenacting and exaggerating family lore to get closer to it.

A fantasy epic drawn from African myth, in which a hunter called Tracker, alongside a shape-shifting leopard, tells his story to an inquisitor. Monsters, spirits and shape-shifters are reported as plainly as the weather.

Myth told as lived testimony, with no line drawn between the marvelous and the real. It is the register I reach for in Sol y Sombra, where family lore and invention share the same ground.

A philosopher’s account of perception as something the body shares with the living land. In the chapter “Shapeshifting,” near the end, Abram describes apprenticing with Sonam, a healer in the Himalayas, and watching him become a raven and return to human form. Abram does not explain it away; he leaves open that it really happened, and argues that our bodies bend themselves toward whatever they attend to.

What stayed with me is that Abram reports the transformation as something he witnessed, neither proving it nor dismissing it. Enacted lore works the same way: the shape-shift is told as part of what happened, and the telling changes how the land is seen.

A family album in which Meatyard’s wife, friends and family all wear the same masks, published after his death.

It enacts the uncanny inside family life with family members as the actors. Dissolving Boundaries and Pine Tree Ballads were made the same way: much of the cast is my own family, masked or staged, at night in the Maine woods and on the plates.

Staged, often veiled figures photographed in ruined Louisiana plantation houses.

Laughlin used theatrical figures to bring out the history lodged in a place, as Dissolving Boundaries and Labor Omnia Vincit do.

Made over years as the resident photographer of Kitakama, a coastal village in northeast Japan, staging scenes with residents at night and with flash from their stories and memories, before and after the 2011 tsunami.

Like Pine Tree Ballads, it enacts a community's lore at night with flash and the people who carry it, so that staging becomes a way of telling what happened.

Two novels of Colombia’s Caribbean coast: one family’s history carried across generations, and a love that waits more than half a century.

One family’s history carried across generations, in a Caribbean way of telling where the extraordinary is part of daily life. I read them while Sol y Sombra was taking shape.

A man goes to his dead mother’s town to find his father and finds it full of the dead, whose voices tell the story in fragments.

A town of ghosts that keeps talking, the story arriving in fragments, out of order. I talk about being a ghost a lot while making Sol y Sombra, and I have felt like one trying to get this work out into the world.

Varda’s film memoir at eighty, restaging her past on beaches with mirrors, props and old photographs.

Varda stands inside her own documentary and restages memory with props and play, which is where Sol y Sombra puts me.

An essay on Frank’s biography of Dostoevsky that asks why contemporary art seems to need an ironic distance from deep convictions and desperate questions, faith among them.

Wallace asks why contemporary art needs an ironic distance from deep conviction, faith among it. I came to the flea market with that irony, and five years of photographing those objects taught me what the irony could not hold: they had been handled, prayed with, and had carried people through real difficulty. The irony did not disappear, it had to make room for respect, and Flea Jesus holds both, which is what the title is doing.

Sontag’s essay on the love of the unnatural and exaggerated, a way of enjoying things through irony.

Sontag names the taste I brought to the flea market, a pleasure in the exaggerated and the artificial. What she gets right is that camp is a kind of fondness rather than contempt, and that is the part that survived in Flea Jesus. The objects stopped being funny to me before they stopped being strange.

A history of American Christians’ ordinary religious objects, from Bibles to cemetery goods, taken seriously as lived faith.

McDannell argues that mass-produced religious objects are a medium of faith rather than a debasement of it. The distinction I would make is between an object that gathers a history through use, a rosary passed from a grandmother to a cousin, and a printed Jesus made in China that turns up in identical copies at stand after stand. One carries an aura from having been handled by particular people and the other does not, whatever it depicts, though I have seen a thin mass-produced thing carry someone through a hard time, which keeps me from settling it.

Greenberg sets kitsch against the avant-garde: ready-made feeling sold to a mass audience, which serious art should refuse.

Flea Jesus began on Greenberg’s side of that line and crossed it. Five years at the market tables showed me that the objects he dismissed carried something the work had to take seriously.

Olalquiaga reads kitsch as a form of longing: souvenirs, snow globes and devotional objects that keep a lost experience close at hand.

This is the reading of kitsch Flea Jesus arrived at: not bad taste but an attempt to hold on.

Azoulay argues that a photograph belongs to no one person but to everyone in the encounter it records.

100 Yrs acts on that idea: the people in and around the pictures write the archive.

Portraits of San Francisco residents who wrote directly on their prints about their own lives.

The closest photobook precedent for 100 Yrs, where each writer answers a photograph in their own hand.

Photographs and dreams made by children in Appalachian Kentucky with cameras Ewald gave them.

It hands over the camera and the page, the move I made as authorship widened from borrowing to giving.

Photographs of Frazier's family and hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, many made together with her mother, who is credited as a collaborator in the pictures.

Like 100 Yrs, it hands part of the authorship to the people in the pictures, so the record of a family and place is not made by the photographer alone.

An issue on what documentary becomes after its old models, with Ariella Azoulay on collaboration and Keenan and Steyerl on what a document is.

I read it in 2023, as 100 Yrs was coming together. Meiselas’s idea that photographers make frameworks as well as frames, and Azoulay on collaboration, confirmed a direction I was already on.

A film made entirely from decaying nitrate footage, set to an orchestral score by Michael Gordon.

The decay becomes the subject, as the corroded plates of Dissolving Boundaries do.

Essays treating photographs as physical objects, with backs, mounts, albums and wear, whose meanings change as they are handled and kept.

The Kodak backprint showing through a portrait in Sol y Sombra and the newsprint pages of Isla de Las Palmas make the same argument: the object is part of what the photograph says.

Morgan studies how believers actually use mass-produced religious pictures, such as Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ, in prayer and daily life.

The printed Jesus that turns up in identical copies at stand after stand is Morgan’s subject exactly: an image that is everywhere and still personal to whoever holds it.

A study of how houses, cellars, attics and corners hold memory and daydream.

The motto over our door in Maine says work conquers all, and the hall of Labor Omnia Vincit holds both halves of that at once: cracked gold frames showing generations working the land, one of them the whole house lifted on jacks to put a basement under it, and against that the low light, the smell of pepper, the plaster bat lit by a nightlight, which is reverie rather than work. Pine Tree Ballads leans all the way into the daydreaming side of the same house and land. Bachelard says the house we grow up in stays lodged in the body rather than in memory, though he keeps to the house and leaves the worked ground outside it, which is where I had to go on my own.

Merleau-Ponty argues that we know the world first through the body, not as detached observers.

I wanted people inside a place rather than inside an exhibition. The boards creak, the pepper is in the air, and in the salt room it is underfoot, so you arrive somewhere before you have looked at anything. Merleau-Ponty argues that the body knows the world first and the detached observer comes later, which is the order I was after.

An installation at Dia in New York: a floor covered in horsehair, a figure burning away lines of text, sound and smell filling the room.

Like the salt room, it makes material, smell and sound carry meaning before any image does.

A book of Lyons’s photographs of the American street, its signs, windows and surfaces, printed without captions so that each picture is read against the ones around it.

Where I learned that a sequence can think: the meaning is made between the pictures, not inside any one of them.

A book artist’s study of the book as a physical sequence in time: the page turn, the spread, pacing, and the gutter as part of the composition.

A book is read in time and the turn of a page is an edit. That is how Pine Tree Ballads, the Isla de Las Palmas books and X are built.

A three-volume survey that treats the photobook as a form of its own, arguing that a good one should be “an extended essay in photographs.”

All three volumes were a big deal for me. I open my sequencing lectures with that line: extended means the meaning unfolds across pages, essay means the book is thinking, and the order is its syntax.

The Soviet filmmaker cut the same shot of an actor’s face against different images and audiences read a different feeling in it each time.

Same image, different neighbors, different meaning. Nothing in the photograph changes; everything changes in the sequence. It is the basis of the spread and the page turn.

A photobook of small everyday events, light and living things that returns to its motifs again and again rather than building to a climax.

A book of huge significance for me and, to my mind, a masterpiece of sequencing. I read the eclipse in it as the image that holds the whole book: light is the real subject, and the book cycles instead of arriving.

A line attributed to the novelist and filmmaker, who often set a spoken text against images that did not illustrate it. It reached me through a teaching handout, What Happens Between Photographs.

It is the rule for text in my books: the writing beside the picture unsettles it rather than explaining it.

Wide shots of the family’s courtyard return throughout the film, after each upheaval.

An anchor image: it orients the viewer and steadies the structure, so that the returns themselves carry the film’s emotional movement.

Three stories of women in small-town Montana set side by side, touching only at their edges. In the last, a ranch hand alone with her winter chores drives into town for a night class and falls quietly for the young lawyer who teaches it.

The silence is phenomenal, and the structure does the talking: three stories placed next to each other, never explained, so meaning comes from what sits beside what.

A book of men living off the grid, made with Lester B. Morrison, as much a sequence of hiding places as of portraits.

Soth and Halpern are definitive artists of the sequenced book. I especially love Broken Manual, which I named in my 2019 Humble Arts interview. When I am making work, I work much as Halpern does.

Godfrey Reggio’s wordless film of land and city, carried by Glass’s repeating, slowly shifting score.

Glass expands what a sequential pattern can do: small changes in repetition create new relations and new notes.

Folklore Hurston gathered by going home to Florida as both insider and trained researcher.

My return to Puerto Rico in midlife, learning and being taught by family, put me in the same double position.

Oral histories showing that where people’s memories depart from the record is itself evidence of what events meant.

The history I had been handed was changed by what I heard; Portelli explains why those voices count as history.

Sommer reads Latino and Latin American books that deliberately hold back from outside readers, and argues the withholding is a strategy, not a failure.

It describes what the uncaptioned Isla book and the Guasábara sequence do: share on terms set by the insider.

A Dominican family saga told from New Jersey, with its Spanish and its island slang left untranslated and unitalicized, and a second history of the Trujillo dictatorship running in the footnotes.

The book does not stop to translate itself for outsiders; a reader without the Spanish meets it on its own terms. The uncaptioned Isla de Las Palmas books make the same choice about the island.

Cole’s photographs, each paired with a short first-person text on the facing page.

The closest model for the suturas: a short passage in the photographer’s own voice stitched to one image.

An essay on why she keeps notes: not for the facts of what happened but for how it felt to her.

The suturas are notes in my own voice under the picture, closer to how a memory felt than to what the record says.

Photo-stories with Michals’s handwritten text on or under the prints.

Handwriting under the photograph, in the maker’s own voice, as in the suturas.

Tom Jenkinson set aside sequencers and samplers to play live drums and bass in a broken jazz-fusion style, working under self-imposed limits.

X began while I was listening to this record and asking what a rotted note would look like in landscape photography.

A phenomenology of perception in which the body is part of the land it senses; Abram writes on shadow and on depth, which he says depends on where you stand inside the terrain.

In X the camera does not stand apart from the landscape; I wanted it caught in the same density as everything it photographs, which is Abram’s point about the perceiving body.

Close, tangled photographs of desert plants with no horizon to escape to.

A photobook that stays inside the bramble, as X does along Virginia rivers and Guasábara in Puerto Rico.

Three lyric sequences set in the Arkansas Ozarks, in a dense, colliding language of body, underbrush and creek; Clevidence’s other books include BEAST FEAST (2014), Flung/Throne (2018) and This Household of Earthly Nature (2025).

Clevidence is my collaborator on X and wrote its poem, By Gaze; their language builds up and stays unresolved rather than explaining, which is why it could sit beside the photographs and not under them.

A book on the ambiguity of photographs, including a long sequence Mohr made with no captions.

It argues for keeping a photograph open, which is what writing beside rather than under it does.

A film about Senegal in which Trinh says she does not intend to speak about, only to speak nearby.

Writing set beside the photograph, as in X, 100 Yrs and Guasábara, speaks nearby the image rather than explaining it.

The first public photographic process: a mirror-polished silver plate that shows a positive only at the right angle.

X’s silver pages make the reader tilt the book until light catches the image, as a daguerreotype does.

Books with no words, where cut and colored pages make the turning and handling the content.

X makes the physical encounter with the page part of what the image becomes.

A manifesto arguing that a book is a sequence of spaces experienced in time, not a container for text.

The reader of X moves through a sequence and around a surface at once.

A film ordered by a fixed alphabetic system that gradually replaces letters with images.

A sequence governed by a rule rather than a story, like the photo-poem’s reading of each image.

An animated film whose images are the optical soundtrack itself, so what is seen is what is heard.

The photo-poem turns visual qualities of the photographs into sound in a similar direct way.

A film made almost entirely of still photographs with voice-over.

It shows still images set into time, the move the photo-poem makes with X.

A study of the American pastoral ideal and the technology that keeps interrupting it, often as a train whistle in a quiet landscape.

Machines pushed Marx’s middle landscape into a future ruled by industry; Guasábara looks for what in the land will not submit to any plan.

Mann argues that many landscapes Europeans took for untouched wilderness had been shaped by Native peoples and emptied by epidemic, so that “wilderness” was partly a misreading.

In X and Guasábara I treat wildness not as untouched wilderness but as a condition that exceeds the systems put on it; Mann shows how the idea of pristine land itself was a colonial reading of places people had long shaped.

Wynter contrasts the plantation, grown for market, with the enslaved people’s provision plot, where another relation to land and culture survived.

Guasábara’s maleza, the growth that refuses cultivation, stands where Wynter’s plot stands against the plantation.

Ferdinand argues that environmental damage and colonial slavery in the Caribbean share one root: the plantation’s way of inhabiting the earth.

Guasábara’s claim that ‘agricultural and colonial systems joined the control of land to the control of people.’

A gardener’s manifesto for the ‘third landscape’: neglected, unmanaged ground as a refuge for diversity.

It values the scrub and edges that cultivation writes off, the ground X and Guasábara photograph.

Tsing follows the matsutake mushroom through disturbed forests to show how life continues in places that industry and plantation have used up.

Guasábara measures the land's power by continuation, not yield, and Tsing gives that idea a ground: life in the ruins of plantation, growing where cultivation called the land waste.

A Spanish officer shipwrecked in 1528 spends eight years crossing the continent among Native peoples as captive, trader and healer, and writes the account for the Crown.

It taught me a great deal about Indigenous perspectives and spirituality in the Americas, and what the land looks like from inside those lives rather than from a colonial plan. Guasábara begins from a word of Indigenous Antillean origin.

A history of the Columbian Exchange: the plants, animals, microbes and people moved across oceans after 1492, and the plantation ecologies they built.

Guasábara looks at land in Puerto Rico where agricultural and colonial systems joined; Mann shows that the ecosystems themselves were remade by that joining.

Two twentieth-century ideas of nature set side by side: Norman Borlaug’s, that technology can raise yield without limit, and William Vogt’s, that the earth has limits we must live within.

Enormous for how I think about ecosystems. Guasábara measures the land by what continues rather than by what it yields, a question Mann traces to this split.

A study of fungi and the networks through which they connect, feed and change the living things around them, often out of sight.

It changed how I see a landscape as connection rather than a set of separate things, and it fed directly into Guasábara and X.

Two performers clap the same pattern; one shifts it by a single beat, again and again, until the two lines come back together.

Modulation in its simplest form: the material never changes, the structure does, and so does what you hear.

Choreography built from repeated gestures under small shifts of tempo; in Rain, dancers pass energy across the stage to Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians so no one body holds the center for long.

Some movements are not there to be noticed on their own but to keep the whole piece alive. That is the work bridge images do in a book.

A piece of courtship rituals performed in a dance hall, later restaged with performers over 65 and again with teenagers.

The same gestures return in older bodies and no longer mean the same thing. Return is repetition altered by what has been lived in between.

Pop songs play one after another while the performers sometimes dance, sometimes stand still, and sometimes leave the stage empty.

Ellipsis in dance: the expected action is withheld and the waiting becomes the experience. A sequence does not always have to give the picture the viewer expects.

At the emotional peak of the film, when the daughter has agreed to marry and leave her father, Ozu cuts away to a vase in a darkened room and holds it.

The central moment is missing and you feel it anyway. The vase absorbs what we are not shown, which is how a withheld picture works in Sol y Sombra.

A film that moves by memory rather than plot: a house, a field, a mother’s face, and wind through grass return across time, color and black and white.

The image comes back but does not mean the same thing, altered by everything in between. Early scenes stay unclear until they are echoed later.

A man drives the hills outside Tehran asking one stranger after another the same question, in the same framing, at the same pace.

Nothing new is added and the weight accumulates: curiosity, then frustration, then moral confrontation. The question stays the same while the answers unsettle you.

A Tehran crew waits in a Kurdish village for an old woman to die. The same drive up the hill to catch a phone signal repeats again and again, until a doctor on a motorbike talks about this world against the promised next one.

The repetitions irritated me at first. Then the doctor’s ride reorganized everything I had seen, and the film taught me that a return can change the meaning of all that came before it.

The same stairway, noodle stall, rain and waltz theme return again and again with small changes in distance, timing and posture.

Repetition as feeling. Each return carries a different pressure, which is how recurring pictures work across Sol y Sombra and X.

One life told in three chapters, with the formative years between them left out.

Identity built from gaps: the viewer completes what the cuts skip, the way a book can leave out the middle of a before and after.

Fiction that often arrives as a reconstructed record, a voice pieced together and framed by whoever assembles it after the fact.

Narrative as something built and framed, where the order and the frame decide what we believe.

A novel in five parts circling the murders of women in a border city modeled on Ciudad Juárez. The fourth part records the killings one after another in the flat language of police and forensic reports.

It showed me that literature can be conceptual. The weight is carried by the structure itself, report after report, and by the refusal to look away, not by any single scene.

A man says he burns abandoned greenhouses; the young woman between him and the narrator disappears; no greenhouse is ever seen burning and nothing is explained.

Ambiguity with delayed pressure. The event at the center is never shown, and scenes that seemed ordinary grow heavier in memory afterward.

A woman driving on a country road in Salta hits something, a dog or perhaps a boy, and does not look back. The rest of the film lives in the aftermath, while her family and class quietly close around her and the evidence disappears.

The event at the center is withheld and never confirmed. The silence and the half-seen edges of the frame carry the weight, and the not-knowing becomes the subject.

The film opens with one unbroken shot of dawn coming up over a Mennonite farm in Chihuahua and closes with its mirror, a nightfall.

A beginning that teaches you how to look and an ending that rereads it. The opening sets the moral and spiritual temperature of a world before anyone speaks.

A family’s life in the Mexican countryside told out of order: scenes jump ahead to the children grown, into dreams, and once to a rugby match in England, with no signal of where we are in time. Much of it is shot through a lens that blurs and doubles the edges of the frame.

The structure trusts the viewer to hold memory, dream and future at once and to find the connections without being told. It is one of the films that changed how I think a sequence can move.