ghosts got left behind

Posted on October 9, 2026 by greg

What do you do on a bright sunny October day when you don’t want to do the stuff you really ought to be doing? You decide to drive 30 miles into the countryside to photograph an abandoned (and reportedly haunted) 1860s Italianate house for Wikipedia.

Well, that’s what I decided to do anyway. But some days just don’t turn out the way you expect them to.

The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has a Wikipedia page. Officially it’s called the J.G. and Regina Long house, but historically it was known as the Maple Grove Hill farm. Why? Because the house was set on a hill and Joseph Grayson (J.G.) Long planted a grove of maple trees which, in the mid 19th century, weren’t common in Iowa.

Three things on the Wikipedia page caught my attention. First:

According to local tradition, it was a stop on the Underground Railroad and features an underground tunnel connecting the house to a barn.

How cool is that? Very cool, is how cool. Who wouldn’t want to see a house with an underground tunnel (okay, ‘underground tunnel’ seems kind of redundant) to help escaped slaves? And then there was this:

a radio station in Iowa, has reported the house to be haunted by evil spirits due to its history.

Really, a house with a secret tunnel would have been enough. A house with a tunnel that was part of the Underground Railroad would have been enough. Dayenu, right? But on top of that we’ve got some evil spirits. It’s almost too much. According to the documentation to have the house listed on the National Registry,

A female wraith, projecting an image of haunting, albeit benign, sorrow, has appeared over the years to individuals in different rooms. The present owner, who has experienced the phenomenon, believes the figure to be Regina Hiskey Long, second wife of J. G. Long, because of its resemblance to a photograph of her.

So okay, maybe the spirits aren’t all that evil. Maybe Wikipedia got that part wrong. But even benign spirits are cool, right? And the third thing that caught my attention? There was no photograph of the house. We’re talking about a house that was part of an informal secret network to help slaves escape their bondage, a house haunted by a wraith (who may or may not have been evil, who knows?), and there was no photograph of it on the Wikipedia page? How was that possible? A house like that? It deserves a photo. The situation needed to be rectified. And I decided I was just the guy to do the rectifying.

So there’s me yesterday, camera in hand, ready to do right by Wikipedia…and what did I find? No maple trees. No underground tunnel leading to a barn. No barn, in fact. And absolutely no ghosts. Not even the slightest tingling feeling of ghostitude. I can’t say I felt cheated, because the house was still exceedingly cool (for an abandoned farmhouse), but it wasn’t quite what I expected.

There was a very good reason for that. It turns out the house has been moved. Back in 2012 the property was sold and the new owner apparently decided he didn’t want to own a historic haunted house. So another person bought it and had it shifted a couple of miles to this new location. The tunnel, the barn, the maple trees, and the ghost were left behind.

But here’s the thing: houses aren’t just buildings; rooms aren’t just areas enclosed by a ceiling, floor and walls. Inhabited spaces can be metaphors for the people who inhabit them. A lived-in room can inform you; it can answer questions. Who lived here? Who worked here? What were their lives like? How did their lives shape this structure, these rooms?

The J.G. and Regina Long house, even though it’s been moved and inhabited by many other people, can start to answer a lot of questions about who J.G. and Regina were. And the first question is this: how did they come to build a farmhouse in an Italianate style with Gothic arched windows in rural Iowa in the 1860s?

The U.S. Civil War had ended; ‘civilization’ was moving westward, driven by railroad expansion. The arrival of the Chicago & Rock Island railroad in Monroe, Iowa made it feasible for goods to be shipped from the east coast. Italianate style private homes had become popular on the east coast in the 1840s, largely because the development of cast-iron and press-metal technology made the production of decorative elements more affordable. Without the railroad, it’s highly unlikely an Italianate home could have been built in Iowa in the late 1860s.

An 1875 illustration of the Maple Grove Hill farm in its original location.

In the early 1860s, Joseph Grayson (J.G.) Long and his brother Jesse moved from to Iowa from Pennsylvania following the death of J.G.’s first wife. They’d been prosperous in Pennsylvania and farmland was cheap in Iowa. They both bought land, built similar Italianate houses, and became successful breeders of thorough-bred cattle. J.G. remarried (Regina Hiskey, a schoolteacher from Ohio) and had a family. Jesse became the president of a local bank. The future looked bright and promising for the Long brothers.

And yet, something was clearly wrong. In 1875, J.G.’s brother Jesse committed suicide by hanging. A few years later, J.G.’s son died from a self-inflicted gunshot. And according to the local newspaper, in 1899 J.G. himself “became insane, was adjudged a fit inmate for the asylum at Mt. Pleasant by the commissioners and has been taken thence.” He was institutionalized for a year; shortly after his release, he died in house he’d built. Jesse’s house was destroyed in a tornado.

Regina continued to live in the house her husband built; she died there in 1925. If ghosts actually exist, then I can see her as an “image of haunting, albeit benign, sorrow.”

The house and property passed through various hands until 2012, when it was relocated. It’s now completely abandoned. Sadly, but not very surprising, the house has been vandalized. Inevitably, at some point in the future, the house will be gone—either intentionally demolished or a victim of severe weather. It’s a shame for many reasons. There’s something poignant and tragic about any abandoned house, but especially one that held such promise when it was built.

As the documentation for its inclusion on the National Register of Historical Places says:

The Long house dramatically expresses the optimism and economic vitality, which [the region] experienced during its early years when its location on a major overland route from the southeast to Des Moines seemed to insure its future growth.

Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defined the future as a “period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.” Obviously, that sort of future is often an illusion. J.G. Long surely didn’t anticipate his future. And hey, my day yesterday didn’t turn out as I’d expected. But spending time in the J.G. Long house, learning about his life and the odd history of the house he built, has been worthwhile. I do find myself thinking about Regina, alone in that large house out in the countryside.

Any actual ghosts may not have moved with the house, but house itself is in the gradual process of becoming a ghost. I’m glad I was able to witness and explore a part of that process.

unexpected romance

Posted on September 28, 2026 by greg

I live in Iowa, a farm state, but I don’t know dick about farms. Or farming or farm life or farm culture or farm technology. Crops—I can distinguish corn from soybeans. Livestock? I’m sort of familiar with basic farm animals—I’m okay with generic pigs and cows, but I couldn’t tell you about different breeds. I can identify some farm equipment, like a combine, though I don’t really understand what it does. I’m basically ignorant about almost everything farm-related.

That said, I’m sort of intrigued by farming in a sociological way. Periodically, I’ll make my way out into the countryside or I’ll visit a small town to shoot some photographs and maybe try to get a sense of what life is like for rural folks. In keeping with that, last week I went on a brief tour sponsored by the Iowa Barn Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving old barns. I expected to learn something about the history of barn architecture.

I did not expect romance.

Two sheds, a wheelbarrow of bricks, and a very red truck.

I’ll come back to the romance in a bit. First, the reason I wanted to take that tour and visit the Mitchell farm was to see their barn. Not the barn you see in the photograph below. Their other barn. The barn they bought in 2019, the barn a neighbor was about to demolish, the barn (built in 1915) they decided to jack up and move to their property. That’s right, the young couple you see in the photo bought a used barn for US$2000. Then they found some folks who’d put it on a massive trailer, and they had it hauled a couple of miles to their farm.

I was eager to see that barn. I figured any barn that could elicit that sort of response from folks must be one hell of a barn. But when we arrived at the Mitchell farm, I didn’t even notice the barn. In fact, I spent the entire morning on the farm and failed to shoot a single photograph of the exterior of that vagabond barn, that vaga-barn. Why? Because I was immediately distracted by…well, by everything else on the farm. Beginning with Matt and Libby Mitchell.

I noticed them even before I left the tour bus. They were sitting on the tailgate of a pickup, casually talking to each other. What struck me was how obviously comfortable they were with each other. Kicked back, patiently waiting for a bus to disgorge a small group of strangers who were there to nose around on their property. There was no sense of discomfort or unease or anxiety; there was, instead, a very palpable aura of quiet contentment. You could see that these two people liked and cared for each other, that they shared a casual, companionable intimacy. They were so obviously affectionate, so relaxed and comfortable, so contented. I wanted to photograph them…forget the barn.

Then, of course, there were all those tractors.

Some of the approximately 35 old tractors.

So many tractors. At one point I asked Matt how many he had. “Oh, about thirty-five or so.” Thirty-five or so. Like the actual number didn’t matter. What makes this even more weird is that the man doesn’t seem like a collector. At least not in the traditional sense. Not like people who collect coins or thimbles or comics. He doesn’t seem to be deliberately putting together a collection, he’s not out tractor-hunting. He just hears about old tractors nobody wants…and brings them home.

Those tractors? They’re all operational. They work. He hasn’t restored them; he apparently doesn’t care that they look like old tractors. He just wants them to work. To be working tractors. I don’t know, maybe he wants them to fulfill their tractor destiny or something, and tractors are supposed to work. That’s the purpose of their existence.

It was the same with almost everything on the farm. Matt Mitchell is something of an agri-tech otaku. He has a deep, obsessive passion for old farm equipment. He finds it, buys it, or barters for it, or just agrees to take it off somebody’s hands so they can get rid of it. Then he brings it home, gets it in working order, and…and that’s it. Then he’s happy.

Scattered throughout the farm are projects—some finished, some in progress, some only a vague promise in the future. It’s a working farm, of course, so there’s a haymow in the vaga-barn’s hayloft (a brief tangent; I learned that a haymow is a pile of hay, loose or baled, stored in a hayloft). The vaga-barn is also a place to store future projects. An old Suzuki motorcycle, a pair of ceramic farm sinks, a rocking chair, an old desk—all of it dusty and distressed but potentially functional.

Potentially functional, that seems to be the key. Functional and practical. Not necessarily practical in the present day, but practical for its time. For example, the vaga-barn has an operational Louden Hay Carrier. “What in the hell is a Louden Hay Carrier?” you ask. It was a revolutionary pulley and track system developed by William Louden in 1867. It allowed farmers to easily transfer hay (either loose or in bales) into a hayloft, which made it possible to build bigger barns with larger lofts to store more hay. Here’s a video showing how it worked:

Unfortunately, I didn’t learn about the Louden Hay Carrier until after I’d spent time in the loft, so my photographs don’t show the tracking system. But in the photo below you can see the loft’s drop door and the ropes that accompany the system.

The loft of the vaga-barn, with the ropes of the Louden Hay Carrier

Following Matt and Libby Mitchell around their farm, listening to them talk about the things they’ve acquired, the projects they’ve completed (or started), I came to understand their interest isn’t grounded in nostalgia. Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for a golden past that’s very likely imaginary. This isn’t about a desire to capture the past.

This is romance. Not the sort of soppy, sentimental romance we see in movies (and, okay, I confess to enjoying rom-coms, but this isn’t that). This is romance in an older sense. I’m talking about an active, emotional connection with, and affection for, old technology. It’s passionate, to be sure, but not the burning, all-consuming sort of passion that torches everything and eventually extinguishes itself. This is a quiet, relaxed, enduring sort of passion. It escapes the boundaries of logic and convention, yes, but it never strays very far from reality. This is romance grounded in the appreciation of the beauty, purity, and out-dated practicality of agri-tech that can still work.

Matt Mitchell praising mortise and tenon joinery.

The Mitchells don’t need a thing to be shiny or pretty; it just has to have a history, it has to have had a life, it has to have mattered once to somebody, and it needs to have the potential to perform its function. If that potential is there, the Mitchells would like to see it fulfilled.

That’s romance, right there.

deadpan — not really dead at all

Posted on August 2, 2026 by greg

About a month ago I happened to use the phrase ‘Deadpan aesthetic’ in conversation with a photographer friend. He was unfamiliar with the term—with the entire concept, really—and asked what it meant. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but it was essentially this:

It’s what Buster Keaton would shoot if he had a digital camera.

Which didn’t help him at all because, let’s face it, it’s a bullshit answer. I was trying to be clever, but ended up just being a smart-ass. However, I’ve been sporadically thinking about the concept ever since. So I did what people normally do when they’re sporadically thinking about anything. I turned to the internet, which kindly gave me this definition:.

[A] deadpan photograph is devoid of emotion. It simply exists as a subject and photograph, yet it seems to be empty. There is no joy or sorrow.

This is from the New York Film Academy. Far be it from me to claim the NYFA is full of shit, but folks, the NYFA is pretty much full of shit. There IS an approach to photography that’s devoid of emotion, but it ain’t Deadpan. It’s called New Topographics. Very few photographers follow a pure New Topo approach. I can only think of one. Well, okay, two—but they’re a team. Bernd and Hilla Becher. In the 1950s and 60s they photographed German industrial architecture. Which is about as exciting as you’d think it is.

Reserved Parking, Iowa Department for the Blind

There’s most definitely emotion in Deadpan photography. It’s just understated, soft-pedaled (see note) emotion. It may be dry humor, it may be wistful, maybe a tad melancholy, or nostalgic, or any quiet emotion, but it’s there. There’s something ineffably sad about a bare Christmas tree in an alley behind the Department for the Blind.

Let me give you a better, more accurate definition (with less bullshit than my earlier definition). Here we go:

Deadpan photography examines the living world as it is; simple, without pretense, without any attempt at artfulness, without staging, straightforward, but with an eye for understated absurdity.

Think Deadpan humor with a camera. You know what? My original definition was accidentally pretty accurate. Buster Keaton was the model for Deadpan humor. He put himself in absurd positions, but never cracked a smile. It’s an acknowledgement that the world is absurd, that absurdity is everywhere, but mostly unseen or ignored. There’s something quietly absurd about a nearly religious symbol in an alleyway near a metal container for used cooking oil.

Yea, though I walk through the alley of the shadow of cooking oil…

A Deadpan photograph makes you go “what?“. Not “WHAT??!!“. It doesn’t hit you over the head. It’s not farce. It probably won’t make you laugh, although it might make you shake your head a bit. Deadpan photography occupies an odd interstitial space between the very human tendency to seek meaning in life and the failure to find it. It doesn’t necessarily nudge you to ask questions, but it may make you blink and try to make sense of what you’re seeing. There’s a certain ‘What the hell?’ quality to Deadpan.

There are no rules to Deadpan photography, but there are some general similarities. The photos tend to be shot head on, straightforward, avoiding artsy angles. The lighting is generally flat and devoid of dramatic shadows. Colors are often soft, muted. Compositions are mostly somewhat formal and balanced. But those are just generalities. You can ignore all that and, if you happen across a wee church surrounded by dandelions in a decaying, semi-industrial section of a small town on a bright sunny day, you can still shoot a Deadpan photograph. I mean, what the hell is a tiny wooden one-room church with a steeple doing among those warehouses?

That’s te thing about Deadpan photography; photographically, it’s really simple. It doesn’t matter where you are, or what time you’re there, or whether the sun is right, or what sort of camera (or lens) you have, or whether anything ‘interesting’ is taking place. You just have to BE there and pay attention. The entire world is filled with ‘What the hell?’ scenes just waiting for a Deadpan photographer to wander by. The world you live in is going to give you stuff to photograph. All you have to do is look and see stuff that normal people are ignoring, to recognize there’s something—not wrong exactly, but not quite right—about what you’re seeing.

Then point your camera at it and take the photo.

If you shoot photos regularly, you’ve probably shot some Deadpan photos without realizing it. The trick is to do it with intention. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

NOTE: Yes, that’s right, soft-pedaled. Not soft-peddled and certainly not soft-petaled. The lefthand pedal on a piano is the soft pedal, which is used to create a quieter, softer, more delicate tone.

may in monochrome

Posted on June 14, 2026 by greg

A few days ago I posted some photographs I shot during a rainstorm, which disrupted a planned photowalk. I casually mentioned it was difficult to think in terms of color having just spent “a month of shooting mostly monochrome.” And I realized, I’d failed to write about my May in Monochrome project. So…here.

May is the month when Spring really takes hold. April gets credit for getting it started, but May is when everything seems to change overnight. That whole April-showers-May-flowers business is pretty accurate. May is a colorful month.

So what in the hell was I thinking when I decided to do a month-long monochrome project in May?

I suspect it had something to do with the release of the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome camera back in February. Even though I’m not considering buying one (at least not until they come out with a 40mm equivalent model), I checked out a lot of reviews of the camera. That means I saw a LOT of amazing black-and-white photographs. (Okay, I suppose we have to address the “Is there a difference between ‘monochome’ and ‘black-and-white’?” question. Technically, the answer is yes; monochrome means ‘one color’; we’re talking a single base color along with its different shades and tones. You could, for example, do a monochromatic photo in shade of red. But for most photographers, we use the terms interchangeably. Sometimes because ‘monochrome’ sounds more cool, sometimes (as in my case) it’s because we’re lazy and it takes fewer characters to type than ‘black-and-white. It takes even fewer characters to type ‘BW’ so guess what I’ll be doing for the rest of this post.)

I grew up shooting BW. That was mainly because BW film was less expensive than color film and much easier to process in the darkroom. But shooting BW taught me a lot about line and form and tonality. The release of the new Ricoh camera got me jonesing for BW again, so I decided to devote a month to shooting mostly monochrome. It was just my luck that the new Ricoh happened just before May.

Just to be clear, when I say I shoot BW, I mean exactly that. I never (well, almost never) shoot in color then shift to BW in post-processing. When I shoot BW, I set my camera to BW; everything I see in the viewfinder (or on the display, with the Ricoh) is in BW. I do that to remove the distraction of color. I want to see the world in shades of tone rather than hues of color. When you strip away color, then texture, contrast, light, shadow, and specularity become more critical.

There’s a better than even chance you’re not familiar with the term specularity. It refers to they way light reflects off various surfaces. When light hits a flat surface (like the side of the buildings in the first photo or the surface of the pond in the second) it reflects differently than when it reflects off the rough, bristly side of a longhorn steer. That specularity becomes significantly more important in BW. Specularity makes you decide whether you want hard, sharp, contrasty images or soft diffuse ones. I say ‘you’ have to decide, but in truth the subject matter is often the deciding factor.

If I’m shooting in the city, I tend to go more contrasty (I’m pretty sure that’s actually a word) than when I’m shooting in the countryside.

Removing color from a photograph removes any number of visual distractions. Oddly enough, that makes it more difficult to shoot good images. An ‘okay’ color photo can, to some extent, be rescued by the introduction of interesting colors. They draw the eye; color can be visually satisfying in itself. With BW obviously, there’s no ‘interesting color’ rescue. The image succeeds or fails entirely on its composition and tonality. BW photography is more unforgiving.

Earlier, I noted that when I shoot BW, I set the camera to BW. A lot of photographers choose to shoot in what’s called RAW format. This captures ALL of the physical information about the intensity and color of the light, which necessarily means it produces an image of unprocessed color. RAW files are meant to be processed later on the computer; they allow you the most control over the final image. In truth, RAW files will produce ‘better’ monochrome photographs.

So why don’t I do that? I’m not entirely sure. I tell myself it’s because when I shoot BW, I want to commit to the image. I don’t want to turn a color image into a BW image. But, again, it might be because I’m lazy and don’t want to spend the time fussing with a lot of post-processing.

The thing about BW photography is that it feels timeless. I admit, that sentence reads like the sort of bullshit photography purists say when they want you to take them seriously. But there’s some Truth to it. The photograph above, shot in May of 2026, could just as easily have been shot in May of 1986 (the apartment building in the center of the frame was built in 1985). The longhorn cow and calf could have been shot in the 1930s. That’s part of the appeal, isn’t it.

It was fun and challenging to spend a month shooting mostly monochrome. But I’m not likely to do this again, at least not in the foreseeable future. I’ll still shoot BW photos when I see something that feels like it should be shot in BW, just like I always do. But after a while I deeply missed color. Some images are just better in color. In the selfie above, that ceramic cat is orange; the roof of that building in the background is bright blue; the wallpaper was a soft sort of lavender; the sewing machine was hot pink. There’s nothing wrong with the selfie in monochrome; it’s just incomplete.

Maybe that’s the thing. Maybe that’s the challenge. Some images can feel complete (or more complete) in monochrome. And some just can’t. The photographer has to be able to know the difference.

rained out

Posted on June 11, 2026 by greg

I was supposed to meet a friend yesterday and do a sort of photo-walk. He’s got something planned that requires a specific sort of urban photography–street scenes without people. We agreed to meet at the top of a parking garage at 0930. That would give us the last of the morning light, and at that time of day most city workers would be at their desks instead of loitering around the street. The delivery drivers would have unloaded most of their goods by then, and the unemployed folks would probably still be in bed or having coffee.

We hadn’t counted on the storm, which arrived almost precisely at 0925. My friend had the good sense to turn around and go back home. Me? I’d arrived early (an old PI habit; you always get there early and check out exits). I was atop the parking garage watching the storm come. It was impressive. Lightning, thunder, wind, the complete package.

I do love a good storm. My camera, however, does not. My little Ricoh GR isn’t waterproof. It’s not even weather-resistant. I’ve had it out in a light sprinkle, but that’s it. This wasn’t the sort of storm that begins with a few tentative drops; this arrived as a goddamn deluge. I took shelter in a rooftop elevator lobby…at the opposite end of where my car was parked.

I was dry, but effectively trapped. That gold Prius in the photo below? That’s my car. Without a camera, I might have made a run for it. But nope.

I didn’t mind being trapped, really. I was dry, my camera was dry, and I figured the rain would let up eventually. I just had to be patient (which reminds me: a million years ago when I was in high school and got in trouble (again), the Boys Advisor told me that patience was my only redeeming quality). Besides, there were windows in the stairway beside the elevator, so I had stuff to look at. And, as I said earlier, I enjoy a good storm.

After about ten minutes, I remembered something obvious. The city of Des Moines has a skywalk system. And (I believe) it connects every public parking garage in the city center. So I wasn’t trapped at all. I just had to find the skywalk entrance and I was free to wander around.

I used to spend a lot of time in the skywalk system. It’s been somewhat diminished over time; a major urban fire cut off a large central chunk, as did some urban renewal. It’s not quite as extensive as it once was, but it still covers about four miles and connects over fifty buildings and parking ramps. The skywalk is climate-controlled–heated in the winter, air-conditioned in the summer. There are coffee shops, barbers, law offices, restaurants, small markets along parts of the skywalk. It used to be one of my favorite places for photography.

The thing about the skywalk is that it zigzags all through the downtown area. It not only connects building (hotels, banks, businesses, apartment buildings), it sometimes passes between them or behind them or through them. It crosses streets, rambles above alleyways, sidles up against structures, and reveals parts of the city you might otherwise never see. And reveals them from perspectives you wouldn’t otherwise get.

I roamed the skywalk for maybe half an hour, then the storm passed, the rain stopped, and the sun came out. I found the nearest exit to the street level, stepped outside and shot this photograph. The post-storm light was delicious…for about ten minutes, at which point the city became unbearably humid. I should have stayed in the skywalk. Instead, I hiked the streets back to the parking garage, got in my car, and went home.

I didn’t get to meet my friend (we’ll reschedule for next week) or shoot the sort of photographs he needs/wants. But I had a good time and stayed mostly dry. After a month of shooting mostly monochrome, it was difficult to think in terms of color again. I did shoot a lot of high contrast monochrome photos during my walk, but I decided to stick to color for this blog. It was refreshing to think about color again. Refreshing…I guess that’s what rain is for.

It worked.

in which i look at an old photo (part 9)

Posted on May 24, 2026 by greg

Back in May of 2024 I read an article that suggested photographers could benefit from looking at their old photos as if they were made by a different person. At the time, I was skeptical about the idea, but what the hell…I did it anyway. And here’s me doing it again, for the 9th time.

What’s weird is the fact that I’ve never been at all interested in looking at my old photos. I understand a lot of photographers do that, but it never made much sense to me. I mean, I shot those photos; I know what they look like. I’ve already seen them; I want to see something new.

Without rereading the original post (or the original article), I can’t quite recall the actual point of this exercise. I think the idea was that by looking at one of your old photos as if some other photographer had shot it, you can learn more about yourself as a photographer. That doesn’t sound quite right, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with dissociating yourself from your work and evaluating it. Whatever the point was, it was apparently enough for me to go rummaging through my digital archives.

Which brings me to this:

I shot this about two months after buying my first digital camera–an Olympus C770UZ. We’re talking four megapixels. I’d put away my Canon A1 a couple years earlier, bored with photography (most of the photos I’d shot in the preceding years were job-related: forensic photos of crime scenes or surveillance photos). A friend had bought one of those Olympus cameras and it looked like fun. So I bought one and started playing with it.

This photo was shot at night, a 15 second exposure, illuminated with a flashlight. It’s just one of my old arson boots, jammed full of dead grass I’d gathered during the day, and set on top of a clay flowerpot. No idea why; I must have been in a Dadaist mood. I even gave the photo a title: Vase.

You know, I’m starting to understand some of the value of looking at old photos. I was a lot more playful with photography back then. I think having a digital camera–being liberated from the expense and constraints of film–gave me more freedom to just try weird shit and immediately get a sense of whether that weird shit worked. I recall getting several friends to simultaneously throw objects into the air, which I’d then photograph. Things like footwear or toys or pieces of fruit, hovering in the air.

Now I think of it, my first foray into Instagram was a project I called Things on a Table, which had a somewhat Dadaist anti-art nonsensical vibe, and was also sparked by the purchase of new tech; in this case, a cellphone with a decent camera. Since it wasn’t a ‘real’ camera and Instagram wasn’t a ‘serious’ photo app, I could just fiddle around with them. The project involved finding a thing, putting that thing on a glass-topped patio table, then photographing the thing. I wrote about Things on a Table back in 2014.

I may have to consider doing some sort of Dadaist project. Preferably one that doesn’t require buying new tech.

thisness and whatness and something more

Posted on April 21, 2026 by greg

I find I’m less and less interested in photographing stuff. By stuff, I mean things. Objects. Including people. Back in the late 1980s, William Eggleston declared, “I am at war with the obvious.” I’m not at war with it; I’m just no longer interested in it.

When you photograph things…and it doesn’t really matter what that thing is… you’re basically saying THIS is important. This thing, this object, this building, this person, this whatever. It’s an acknowledgment that THIS very specific, individual thing is worth your attention. Almost all photography is about THIS. I’ve spent most of my life photographing THIS. Look at THIS. This is how I see THIS.

There’s a term for that–the ‘thisness’ of things. Haecceity. Yeah, it looks like I just chucked a bunch of vowels and consonants into a jar and shook them up, but it’s an actual word (by the way, it’s pronounced hek-SEE-ity; I know you’re wondering about that). It refers to the unique, irreducible, often undefinable properties and aspects of a thing that distinguishes it from all other similar things. It’s what makes each identical twin an individual. It’s what makes your dog special. It’s what makes that elm tree distinct from all other elm trees. It’s the dings and dents and scars of life that makes this different from all of that. It’s the thisness of a thing.

If you’re interested in learning more about the concept of haecceity, do a search on John Duns Scotus, the 13th century Franciscan friar who put it together. I considered adding some of that in his post, but decided I’d rather pound a nail through my foot. My specific individual foot.

Much (maybe most) photography is an attempt to capture the haecceity of a thing. Every photograph of, say, a flower is an attempt to reveal the beauty of that specific individual flower. Every photograph of a water tower or a puppy or a pickup truck or a pair of old boots is an attempt to say THIS puppy or THIS boot is unique and special and is worthy of my attention. And let’s face it, most of those attempts fail.

Instead of capturing the haecceity of the thing, we more often capture the quiddity of the thing. Yes, quiddity is also a real word. It refers to the qualities and properties a thing shares with others of its kind. That photograph of the puppy or the boot is more likely to reveal a sense of puppyness or bootness. It’s the whatness of the thing…the thing that makes it a puppy or a boot.

That’s not a criticism. Depicting the essence of puppyness or bootness can be captivating. People familiar with that specific puppy or that particular boot may recognize it as an individual, but a lot of folks will look at your photograph of a puppy or an old boot and think, “Yeah, now THAT is what I call a boot, right there.” Which is another way of saying they appreciate its bootness.

I began this by saying I’m less and less interested in photographing stuff. These days I’m less interested in the thisness or the whatness of things. I still shoot those photos, of course. It’s most of what I shoot. But for the last few years I find myself trying to photograph something less tangible, and I’m not even sure I know how to describe it. I want to photograph…I don’t know, moods? States of mind? An ambiance maybe. A feeling.

I want to shoot photos that can express a sense of what it’s like to be there.

Yesterday on Bluesky I posted this photograph. It’s not about the haecceity of the dog (who was a wonderfully irreducible and highly individual dog named Luka) or his quiddity (although there was a lot of dogness going on with Luka) or the guy or the street or the city. It’s not about any THING.

I want it to be about being up early on a wet, chilly morning, bringing take-home breakfast back to your apartment while gainfully employed people pass by, isolated in their cars, trying to get to work on time. I want it to be about the dampness of the air and the noise and smell of traffic and the softer sound of a dog’s feet on cement. I want it to be about two beings who care for each other and are comfortable in their companionship, even though they’re of different species.

I want it to be about all of those things. But that’s a lot to cram into a photograph, and I don’t feel like I succeeded. It’s not quite there–not quite what I want it to be–but I like to think I’m getting closer.

in which i fuck up (but still have fun)

Posted on March 1, 2026 by greg

Let me first say this: I enjoy the hell out of my wee Ricoh GR3X camera. I’ve owned and used lots of cameras over the years, but I’ve never had one that suits my approach to photography so perfectly. I love that I can quickly shift between full manual control (which is a slower process but gives me control over every aspect of the exposure) and a setting that allows me choose the aperture I want and let the camera handle the rest (which is quicker and far more useful for street photography).

Last Friday I took a walk and decided to try something new. For the first hour or so, I’d shoot entirely in monochrome using the street settings AND I wouldn’t chimp the results. (For non-photographers, ‘chimping’ is reviewing the photos you just shot, which can inspire you to go “Ooh ooh” like a chimpanzee.) The second half of the walk, I’d shoot normally.

This where I fucked up. I somehow managed to change the street settings so the camera’s ISO was set to a minimum of 6400. What does that mean? ISO refers to the standardized scale that measures the sensitivity of a digital camera’s sensor to light. All you really need to know is this: the higher the ISO, the more ‘noise’ you see in the final image. In daytime, standard ISO settings are usually between 100 to 400. I was noodling around with an ISO that was at least sixteen times higher than normal. The result? Images like this:

As you can see, noisy. But because I was refusing to chimp, I was unaware of the problem. So for an hour or so, I kept wandering, kept looking at stuff, kept shooting at the wrong ISO. When I saw a pair of workmen–one prone on the sidewalk with his head inside a manhole, the other feeding some sort of conduit tubing into the hole–laboring with the golden dome of the State Capitol Building behind them, I paused long enough to shoot a photo. I was confident I composed a decent shot, and the camera did its best to find a correct exposure based on the settings…but yeah, noise.

The thing is, I’ve learned to trust the camera. I’ve learned it’s incredibly responsive, that (assuming I’ve set it up properly) it allows me to shoot quickly, reflexively, on impulse. For example, I saw this tattooed guy in a tee shirt, toting bags of groceries, and wearing a ski mask. He was at a crosswalk, waiting for the traffic light to turn (or for the traffic to ease up enough for him to jaywalk). There was no time to properly compose a shot, but with the Ricoh all I had to do was react. I simply raised the camera in his direction and pressed the shutter button. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Except, of course, for that ISO of 6400.

Noisy. Harsh. But I can’t blame the camera. I’m the one who fucked up. I’m not saying these photograph would have been great if I hadn’t fucked up, but they’d have been…well, better.

And that’s okay. Making mistakes is human, right? And I’m an avid believer in what Alfred Stieglitz called ‘practicing in public.’ He wrote,

“Some people go on the assumption that if a thing is not a hundred percent perfect it should not be given to the world… Either you feel that a thing must be perfect before you present it to the public, or you are willing to let it go out even knowing that it is not perfect, because you are striving for something even beyond what you have achieved.

I wouldn’t claim these photographs are ‘given to the world.’ More like inflicted on the world. But yeah, I’m surely ‘striving for something beyond what I’ve achieved.’ Because what I’ve achieved here is that I fucked up. I suspect I’ll continue to fuck up on (I hope) an irregular basis.

Despite fucking up, I still had a good time. I not only believe in practicing in public, I also believe any walk on a sunny day is a good walk. And I believe in the reality of the Happy Accident, of which I have some evidence: I actually rather like the final ISO-fucked photo, which happens to be a selfie.

gregfallis.com

it's this or get a real job

Category Archives: photography