I’m happy to announce that two of my recent photographs are currently on view at Incubator Studio Gallery in Brooklyn, NY as part of the “Literature of the Land” group exhibition. The gallery is open 1-6pm on Sundays, and the works will be on view for the entire month of August 2026. Closing on August 30th – please come by!

This is also an announcement, of sorts, that I am, among all the other things, also a photographer. Although claiming that title still feels a bit like a stretch, even though–a gallery show, surely that means something? How many shows, how many publications until it feels legitimate, how much skill, experience, know-how? I do not claim at all to be some kind of professional. Tired questions for those who make art of any kind. My photographs are printed and hung upon a wall–there, I am a photographer.

But with a new kind of art comes the need to explain, justify, analyze, speak, critique. This is where the writer in me still holds unshakeable supremacy. I want to let the photographs speak for themselves, but unfortunately I just love to talk too much. In my scholarship, the visual has always haunted. Even text has a visual quality that must not be missed. Everyone loves to talk about W.G. Sebald and his use of photography in his novels but I am less interested in that exchange (and besides, no one has satisfactorily answered for me what I see as the ethical challenges of his particular method: a brute recontextualization of a photo, of a person, made to do something unintended–maybe this concern is trite but I still believe a photograph is uniquely defined by its subject and its maker) than I am the ways Ingeborg Bachmann’s handwriting has been visually analyzed to the point of pathologizing, the inextricable relationship between Unica Zürn’s text and illustration, or the visual traces left on an anamnesis from a psychiatric archive.

Like language and sound, image and text coalesce for me. It’s all one practice, all one attempt to discover and produce knowledge. Aesthetics and epistemologies one in the same.

More to say about the photograph, someday, but for now, please consider coming by if you happen to be in the area.

PS. I chose very intentionally not to travel this summer. I needed rest, after the PhD and a very traumatic injury that occurred last August. Time not necessarily to heal, but to learn to live with a new disability and its meanings (they will tell you this is a kind of “healing” but for those of us damned with the words “chronic” and “permanent” by our doctors, the word is aggravating in the extreme). I will try to make art out of it, eventually. Academia is very unkind to these disruptions in life–one falls behind. But the art continues, the thinking emerges from the mire and inevitably it needs to find its way out.

But all of that to say: there is a massive benefit to staying put even though academics tend to be quite nomadic. The gallery show would not have happened without the random connections fostered by wandering to random events, neighborhood bars, zine parties, DIY shows, trivia nights, local whatsapp groups. It’s New York freakin’ City baby, one’s gotta live in it. A fellow motorcyclist posts that they are also an artist–they are in a show with someone whose work my photos currently sit beside. Of course I will go: this is the social organic, the webbing that only becomes clear when one speaks to strangers and tries something new and despite everything, tries to live.