I have no photographs of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Sunrises, mostly. I couldn’t reconstruct them for you. I’ve forgotten the clouds, the colors, whatever was standing between me and the light. But I remember wanting more.

We photograph things just because. Something catches our eye and we want to take it home.

For I Won’t Stay Very Long, I asked Mario to throw sheets of paper into the air. The photograph grew out of Sufjan Stevens’s “Futile Devices”—that tenderness of having so much affection for someone and so little ability to say it.

Believe it or not, there’s a model in this photograph. His name is César. We shot in a botanical garden on Tuesday. By Thursday, I had made him nearly disappear. A strange thing to do with a man you’ve enjoyed looking at. But I left enough to make you look twice.

The stars may not be the first thing you look at in this photograph.

I can live with that. I did put an entire galaxy through his head, but I understand it has competition further down.

Your eye follows the curve of his body, lingers in the hair on his chest. Then there’s that mouth, slightly open, and the galaxy spilling through his head. Perhaps his mind has gone where his body wants to go.

There are moments when being an artist is remarkably similar to having a very specific fetish and enough confidence to explain it.

Six years ago, I invited Gabe to my apartment in New York and asked them to take off their clothes and sit at my piano. Then I asked if I could put a beetle on their back.

A real one. Dead, admittedly. But real.
Fortunately, Gabe said yes.

When I was a child, I remember sitting with my family in the back of a car at the little airport in Livermore where my dad kept his plane. Outside, it was pouring.

I loved being there. I still do…

Not in the rain. Just outside it.

There comes a point where I love you becomes too small for what you’re trying to say.

So you say more.

Most people think imagination means making things up.

I’ve come to believe the opposite.

Imagination is a way of noticing reality that realism can’t quite reach.

Almost everyone has tried to photograph a sunset.

Almost everyone has been disappointed afterwards.

Every photographer knows this.

You weren’t trying to remember the sky.

You were trying to remember what it felt like to stand beneath it that day.

Schrödinger imagined a cat that was both alive and dead until someone opened the box.

It’s an absurd way to describe a relationship.

Mine happened to be exactly that.

People often assume that nudity automatically creates sexuality.

Yet standing beside a freezing waterfall in a canyon while your friends wait patiently for you to “get the shot” doesn’t feel particularly sexual to me.

A dear friend of mine once told me, very seriously, that he suffers from a rare medical condition where his body does not naturally produce alcohol. Which, according to him, means he has to replenish it manually several times a week.

Hope begins before you understand where you’re going.

You wake up one morning and realize you slept properly for the first time in weeks. You make coffee and notice it tastes like coffee again. You notice you’ve gone almost an hour without thinking about whatever broke you.

This photograph began because I became obsessed with the invisible lines pulling us toward futures we mistake for coincidence while we’re still inside them.

For this piece I wanted the figure to feel less like a man and more like inevitability itself.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be alone—properly alone. Not lonely. Not abandoned. Alone as in: there is no one else here, and nothing is expected of you as a result.

That’s where this photograph begins.

I met David Byrne —frontman of Talking Heads— on a street in New York a week before everything stopped.

He was unlocking his bike outside the Spring/Break Art Show. We spoke for a minute or two. He said he liked the fair. I mentioned Superfine—the art fair I co-founded. He said he wanted to come.

Mount Shasta has a reputation. People travel there, quite seriously, because they believe there are openings in the mountain—thresholds, access points, something just out of sight but not entirely out of reach. The locals tend to be more conservative. The visitors tend to speak as if they’ve just returned from a very meaningful conversation with a rock. The mountain, for its part, offers no clarification.

The photograph shouldn’t have worked.

Wrong day. Wrong light.

It was a grey day at Black’s Beach. A low ceiling of cloud pressing everything flat into a dull, even wash.

There are seasons when the world becomes distant, as if it has stepped slightly away from itself.

I wanted to photograph that feeling.

There is a field in Brooklyn Bridge Park that fills with yellow flowers at the very end of summer. If you stand there long enough, Manhattan begins to dissolve across the water. It feels like a mistake—like a piece of countryside briefly misplaced inside New York.