Terms of the work

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, and it has always reminded me of Underworld: 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’s claim that much of what we see has already been bought, at every scale from the Indy 500 sky to a wrapper on the sidewalk, is Debord’s claim made with a camera.

Short essays reading wrestling, soap ads and magazine covers as myths that make a culture’s values look natural.

From Oz to Eden stages the same kind of national myth, Mickey Mouse beside the Statue of Liberty, so that its entertainment shows through as ideology.

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.

PYADE's Street View and Google Earth captures are poor images in Steyerl's sense, taken from a screen and still carrying the logos they record.

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

Limelight Firefight sets real paper targets shot by children in Kelly’s kind of formal order, so the marks of violence sit inside clean fields, held under control.

A BBC series and book that criticized how European painting and advertising cast men as the ones who act and women as the ones to be looked at.

Limelight Firefight watches that same split being taught to children, being seen or doing the fighting, without judging the families; the project page cites Berger.

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.

A model of thought as a root system with many entries and no center, set against the single trunk of the tree.

Dissolving Boundaries is subtitled ‘A Rhizomatic Psycho-History’: each plate has several histories and none is the root.

A LIFE photographer’s portraits of the original negatives of famous photographs, some held in hand, with the story of how each became its print.

The negative as its own object with its own history, separate from the print and from the captions institutions give it: the idea behind the plates of Dissolving Boundaries.

An invented natural-history archive of impossible animals, with field notes, photographs and specimens credited to a fictional German zoologist.

Like the Dissolving Boundaries plates, it borrows the look of institutional evidence to show how much authority the look alone carries.

Documents about Lebanon’s civil wars attributed to invented donors, presented as a real archive.

Its archive with many invented authors sits beside Dissolving Boundaries, where material fact, institutional record, myth and psychoanalysis each speak for a different author.

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 reenactments become big production pieces, and in making them the men reveal what no interview could. It made me aware of what enactment can do.

Carpentier’s claim that in the Caribbean and Latin America the marvelous is part of lived reality, not added to it: lo real maravilloso.

Pine Tree Ballads and Labor Omnia Vincit stage lore as part of what happened, and the same idea carries into the Puerto Rico work.

A family saga in which the impossible is told in the flat voice of fact.

I think of Pine Tree Ballads as a poetic memoir in the spirit of magic realism, a family history where a creaking floor can become an ancestor.

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 actors, as Pine Tree Ballads does at night in the Maine woods.

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.

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.

A study of vernacular photographs that people framed, painted, stitched and wrote on to hold memory.

The family photographs in Sol y Sombra and the handwriting on the plates of Dissolving Boundaries belong to this history of pictures made to be touched and added to.

A true crime account written with the tools of the novel, which Capote called a “nonfiction novel.”

Pine Tree Ballads and Sol y Sombra hold documented fact and literary telling in one book, with the order of the story carrying the meaning.

The first piece called gonzo: the writer inside the story, subjective and exaggerated, with Ralph Steadman’s drawings beside the text.

I place myself inside the work rather than outside it, a participant in the family, island and land I photograph.

A memoir of grief for her husband and others, moving between dreams and daily routine, set with her own photographs of cafés, graves and the possessions of dead writers.

Sol y Sombra, the book I am making now, also moves between grounded memoir and a dreamlike register, with my photographs set inside the writing; Smith is one of the writers I keep near it.

Eighty-three photographs ordered so that meaning builds through recurring motifs (flags, cars, jukeboxes) rather than any single picture.

It is the photobook model for meaning that ‘accumulates through sequence, metaphor and recurrence,’ which is how I define the doculiterary.

A novel of a Nebraska family farm with Morris’s own photographs of the place on every facing page.

A family place told through photographs and literary prose together, as in Pine Tree Ballads at Gray’s Point.

An elegy for Carson's brother made as a single folded sheet in a box: family photographs, letters, fragments and a Latin poem translated word by word.

Like Sol y Sombra, it grows from a family death and builds meaning from archive, image and writing placed side by side, in a book that is also an object.

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.

I began Flea Jesus with that ironic distance from Christian objects, and over the years of the project I traded it for humility toward what they had done for people.

A poem that watches a grasshopper eating sugar from the speaker’s hand and admits not knowing exactly what a prayer is, only how to pay attention.

Flea Jesus began in mockery and ended in attention; I did not have to know what the plaster saints meant to a believer to see that they had been prayed with, and Oliver’s attention without certainty is the stance I arrived at.

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

It names the stance I brought to the flea market and then outgrew in Flea Jesus.

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

Flea Jesus arrives at the same view: a plaster saint on a nightstand did real work for someone.

Frontal, unpeopled photographs of libraries around the world, attentive to shelves, light and order.

Bibliophilia looks at working libraries with the same patience, closely enough that the everyday turns almost abstract.

Arendt separates labor, the endless round of keeping life going whose products are used up almost as soon as they are made, from work, which makes durable things, and from action.

PTB Labor Omnia Vincit comes from a motto carved over our door in Maine, work conquers all, and from summers that were labor rather than vacation; Arendt’s distinction names what the installation did, turning a century of labor that left little behind into a room you can walk through.

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

Labor Omnia Vincit rebuilds the Maine house from memory, down to the bedroom’s paint color and the plaster bat.

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

Labor Omnia Vincit asks to be met ‘with the whole body rather than as a sequence of pictures’: creaking floor, pepper, salt underfoot.

A non-denominational chapel built around fourteen dark Rothko paintings, where light and space prepare a visitor for contemplation.

The cathedral experience was my aim in Labor Omnia Vincit, and the Rothko Chapel is its modern secular form.

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.

Photographs of paper archives in India, bundles, shelves and files, part of Singh's larger practice of portable museums and book-objects.

Labor Omnia Vincit and the Isla de Las Palmas installations build the archive as a place to enter, and Singh's work treats the archive as a room first and a record second.

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.

Campt reads ordinary photographs of Black subjects, such as ID photos and prison portraits, by attending to their quiet frequencies rather than only what they show.

The pictures of Isla de Las Palmas and 100 Yrs follow what was heard first, and Campt gives a method for letting listening shape how photographs are read.

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.

A history of Puerto Rico told through the lives of ordinary and marginalized people as well as leaders, written by a Puerto Rican historian in the diaspora.

Meléndez-Badillo is one of the thirteen writers of 100 Yrs; his history of the island from below, written from 'the cold, imperial North,' sits beside the portfolio as a collaborator's work, not an influence.

A Cuban writer’s account of the Caribbean as a meta-archipelago whose culture repeats with difference across islands and diasporas.

Guasábara’s ‘forms crossing, repeating, disappearing and returning’ sits beside Benítez-Rojo’s repeating island.

A crónica set on a night flight from San Juan to New York, treating the shuttle as one Puerto Rican place in motion.

100 Yrs gathers voices from both ends of that route into one box.

Photographs Espada made from 1979 to 1981 in more than thirty Puerto Rican communities across the United States, from Hawaii to Hartford.

A photographic precedent for documenting Puerto Rico as a people spread across places rather than one island.

Essays, testimony and images by scholars, journalists and artists on Hurricane María, debt and colonial rule, written from the island and the diaspora together.

It gathers many Puerto Rican voices on both sides of the water without a single center, the same form Isla de Las Palmas and 100 Yrs take.

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.

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.

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.

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.