Burnout, loss, and coming back to photography after four years off

"As a practical matter, it seems to me that the biographer of an artist ought not only to begin with a commitment to use the subject's work as primary evidence, but to remember the nature of Aristotle's argument for its centrality - that it is a unique curative for sickness - and assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experiences of confusion and pain. Which is to say that if we are to use the artist's work as our evidence about his life, we must, to some degree, turn it around and find the negative that stands behind the positive. If a work shows a beautiful woman or an orderly landscape, the biographer ought to inquire about the nature of the world in which the artist usually felt he lived, the one he struggled to place in a more affirmable perspective." — Robert Adams | Why People Photograph

I’ve been meaning to write about the last four years and my coming back to photography for a while. What follows is about what happens when you lose your way artistically, about grieving, and about art as a means of struggling to once again find meaning and beauty around oneself.

Backstory: Social media burnout

If you go back and look through the blog posts on this website you will see a conspicuous gap between 2019 and 2024. In about the end of 2019 I quit photography, or at least damn near close to it. Up until that point I had been posting my work to Instagram twice a day, every single day. One photo in the morning and another photo about four hours later. That’s 14 photos a week, week over week, without end. This was largely the entire enterprise of my photographic work. I would keep my website updated and publish some blog posts from time to time but by a large margin the end goal of my creative output was uploading images to social media, twice a day, every day. If you take a look in my binder of film negatives you will see that the sections for 2018 and 2019 have an immense number of rolls of film in them. I was producing tons of work in order to keep up with that upload schedule, mostly shooting it on film but there was digital work being produced in there as well.

In hindsight holding myself to a standard of such prodigious output was bound to end up in fatigue, burnout, etc etc.. The mental and physical toll of trying to keep up with that kind of output was bad enough but what was worse from an artistic/creative standpoint was the way that the motivations for my artistic output became so twisted and disfigured, alien to any of the original intentions with which I had started doing photography in the first place. We should all already know this, but Instagram is a horrible muse. It is a soulless capitalist machine which demands content in order to commodify our experience and produce profits in the form of revenue from advertising companies. Infinite content for infinite capital accumulation is what the machine demands. Under these conditions my work became less and less about sharing the beauty and meaningful experiences that I had in the places I walked and more about producing content for the content machine. Looking back at what, again, should have been obvious, this was profoundly corrosive. This way of “creating” and the forces of the social media landscape which produced and reproduced it effectively emptied my work of any and all deeper purpose and meaningfulness.

As you may have guessed this led me to profound artistic burnout. I no longer enjoyed photography under the pressure to constantly produce. I no longer felt connected to the process, having reduced it to the rote production of content. The original, meaningful practice that had once been about going to walk quietly in the presence of the transcendent beauty of nature had become little more than a constant struggle to guarantee that I was producing enough work to be able to maintain my all encompassing upload schedule. Walking in the landscape was simply a means to making photographs, photography for the sake of photography, my most hated iteration of the craft. With this being my dominant experience with photography at the end of 2019, my coming to ultimately set aside photography after a move to Montana in early 2020 is not entirely surprising.

Moving to Montana, artistic confusion, and setting aside photography

At the end of 2019 my then fiancee and I moved from our home in Washington state to Northwest Montana. I was born in Montana but had moved away as a kid. I did, however, spend my summers in the beautiful Flathead Valley with my grandparents. Consequently, Montana had always been a special place to me growing up, a place that had always felt more like home than home. From the wisdom of adulthood I have come to learn that it was my grandparents that I really loved, that my grandparents were what always felt like home. Regardless, the idea of Montana always held sway over my soul and the experiences of my childhood, spent in the loving presence of my grandparents and the staggering beauty of the Rocky Mountains, had been formative of a deep love of the place.

With this relationship in mind I was both excited and terrified of the move. Despite the existential upheaval of uprooting my life and moving 600 miles away I knew that I loved Montana and was excited to be able to get there and make work in this place that I had loved all my life. At least that had been the plan. As is often the case the reality ended up being less rosy than the fantasy. The move went off perfectly well despite moving in the middle of December and having to navigate three mountain passes on the way to Montana. We settled in to living with my grandparents while we tried to figure out housing and I tried to figure out work. But I struggled immensely photographically/artistically. It was almost the opposite of what I had expected, anticipating struggling with the moving and adjustment to a new normal but being able to take solace in my photographic work.

Almost all of the work I had ever done had taken place in the Pacific Northwest, in the rich, verdant coastal rainforests and in the Cascade mountains and foothills. It was a landscape that I knew intimately, that I felt deeply connected to having known it all my life. Photographing that landscape came easy to me. Montana was a very different landscape. I knew this already, obviously. But I had underestimated just how much I would struggle to find that same connection to it that felt so easy in the dense forests of Washington, the kind of connection which, for me, has always been the primary source of imagery. This was all the more exasperating because in my mind, that connection already existed. But try as I might, outing after outing, I just could not find it, could not feel it, could not figure out how to make images that I felt satisfied with.

And so I just stopped, altogether.

A very typical representation of the forests one encounters on a walk in Montana

2020-2024: The interim years, other pursuits, and phone cameras

I could count on one hand the number of times in 2020 I actually used a camera, and I’d have fingers to spare. While it’s true that I didn’t really have the energy or the desire I think the most important factor was that I just didn’t feel the connection I felt I needed to actually engage in an authentic artistic relationship with the place. I didn’t feel that I could see, understand, and relate to it properly and translate that experience in to compelling imagery. I feel like I have harped on this idea of connection to a place over and over again in this piece and in others but I can’t understate how important I think it is that one’s relationship with a place be primary. The land-become-muse, so to speak. In the absence of that the work (in my experience) inevitably feels contrived, mechanical, archetypal, a process of going through the motions of what we think an image should be rather than an organic outgrowth of our lived experiences with a place.

My solution to all of this was walking, a lot. Specifically walking without a camera. Me, myself, and the land. Walking, seeing, feeling. And I had found in the several attempts at bringing a camera that it inevitably felt like an intrusive barrier to that relationship, or the process of forming that relationship. When I had a camera with me I felt ineluctably pulled back in to a frame of mind where I needed to “do photography.” I would find myself going through the motions, fumbling through attempts to make images based on the felt need to produce imagery and some default set of formulaic processes. But this default mode of operation, reinforced by the presence of a camera, precludes the possibility of listening, of watching, of a state of generalized openness and receptivity to the land which, to me, is the condition of an authentic engagement with the landscape. So the camera had to go.

This was largely the state of affairs for the rest of 2020. A lot of hiking in Glacier National Park and the surrounding country, and aside from the two or three outings where I brought the camera with me (only to realize I didn’t like it), it never really made an appearance through the rest of 2020. In 2021 and through much of 2024 I found myself pursuing other ways of spending my time rather than photography. I turned to bicycles as a way of getting out and exploring the world around me in addition to hiking. I took up XC skiing to do the same in the winter, getting in to GNP in the winter to take in the beauty of the winter landscape. All of this, in retrospect, was a great way of losing myself in non-photographic ways of relating to place, similar to the way that I had first come to photography out of a non-photographic relationship with the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Throughout all of this, specifically after late 2020, I did find a small place for photography in the form of phone photography. Having a small but reasonably capable point and shoot with me allowed me to be able to quickly stop and photograph moments as they appeared to me, integrated in to the flow of experience without intruding too much or drawing me back too much in to that old compulsion to “do photography.” But through those years photography never again came to hold the centrality, the importance, the meaningfulness that it had held for me in the years preceding 2020 and it would not come to do so again for several years.

Diesel, November 2023. About a month after his first episode

The loss of a dear friend

In late October 2023 there had been a string of days when I could not sleep to save my life. I would be up all night, maybe able to scrounge together a handful of hours of sleep each night. In retrospect I think I knew something was off, intuition or something like that. On the morning of October 21st our dog, Diesel, was acting very much not himself. Between my exhaustion and his behavior I decided to call out of work that day, but as the morning progressed it became increasingly obvious that something was wrong. At around 10am my wife rushed home and we took him to the emergency vet. There they told us that his abdomen was filled with blood, that he had had a mass on his spleen which had ruptured and he was effectively bleeding to death internally. He was rushed in to surgery for an emergency splenectomy and they were able to stop the bleeding from the spleen but the vets believed there was a second source of bleeding in a difficult to operate area. Their recommendation was that we take him straight from surgery and make the 5 hour drive to Bozeman where an advanced vet facility might be able to save him. We did exactly that, arriving in Bozeman sometime around 9pm. He was taken in and monitored for his recovery from the splenectomy. Some other tests were performed to check for other possible masses, issues, etc etc.. After three days in a hotel in Bozeman and the vets opinion that he was recovering well and in good health we were finally able to take him home with us, and at least for a little bit it felt like we were going to be okay.

The mass that ruptured on Diesel’s spleen, as we would eventually come to find out, was an incredibly aggressive cancer known as hemangiosarcoma. It affects the blood vessels, essentially growing tortured networks and masses of blood vessels which can then rupture, and if those masses are on major organs, well, you get the idea. The prognosis for hemangiosarcoma is terrible. Life expectancy is generally on the order of weeks. As such an aggressive cancer what usually happens is that by the time it manifests in some kind of medical crisis like a splenic rupture the cancer has spread all over the body and death comes shortly after.

After the first episode Diesel did recover quite well. He was always a pretty spry and energetic dog even at 12 years old but after the splenectomy it was like someone had given him a second wind. Things looked promising, against the odds. We ended up going back down to Bozeman in December of 2023 to have some more testing done to check for spread of the cancer. Somehow, two months after his first episode, there was no signs of spread anywhere. Diesel had always been one to defy the odds. He was still incredibly active and otherwise healthy creeping up on 13 years old and it seemed like he had dodged another bullet. He was unstoppable. Of course he would beat the most aggressive cancer a dog could get. We did our best to be cautiously optimistic but in all honesty it was one of the most stressful times of my life. As well as he was doing it always felt like there was this looming shadow threatening to destroy everything. He was good now, but would he tank in a week? In a month? How much time did we have with him? We tried to be realistic, to just be thankful for every bit of time we had left.

And that ended up being another 6 months, to the day, actually. April 21, 2024 was the last day we got to spend with that beautiful soul. In the end the cancer came back, on his liver this time. He had a second episode, the color fading from his gums and his body growing weaker and weaker in a matter of minutes until he was too weak to stand. I still remember carrying him to the car knowing it would be the last time. We rushed to the emergency vet and learned he was bleeding internally again. But this time there was going to be no saving him. No emergency surgeries or drives to Bozeman to try and keep him with us. He declined rapidly while at the emergency vet and passed away that day. I know some people won’t understand, won’t understand having a bond with a dog the way we did with Diesel. If you never met him it’s hard to understand. He was the most special dog we’ve ever known, he was a part of us, he was there through everything. Saying goodbye to him was the hardest thing we have ever had to do. I cried for the first time in 10 years saying goodbye to him, holding him until the very end. I wanted to be there for him up to his last moments, the way he had always been there for me, unquestioningly, through every high and low.

Robert Adams proof of concept, grief, and coming back to photography

I opened this article with a quote from Robert Adams on the impetus of the artistic impulse. Adams states (and I have come to agree with him) that the drive for artistic creation begins, in some sense, in pain, in suffering, in the artist’s urge to render the world affirmable in the midst of their suffering. Reflecting on my first real forays in to photography in 2016 or so this feels resonant. I first came to seriously engage in photography in a particularly dark period of time in my life. At the time I was spending a great deal of time walking in a nature preserve near my house to clear my head, or maybe more accurately to try and get out of my head. There I found a kind of salvific experience in the rich forests, something personally transformative, something I found so moving that I felt motivated to dive in to it photographically, to try to explore it more deeply through the camera and attempt to take some small piece of it and share it with others who might find the experience meaningful. I had always dabbled in photography growing up, but this period in my life is what sparked, for the first time, a more serious engagement with the craft and what we might call the first real “artistic” engagement with photography.

Diesel’s death was devastating to me. But it was also a profoundly transformative experience, explicitly spiritual. I still remember walking in the hills above my grandparents house the evening after we lost him. We didn’t know where to go after everything had happened, my family was in town but weren’t back to my grandparent’s house yet, so we went to the hills above their property where we’d all spent so many hours walking together. The forest had never been so magical as it was that evening. There was a sense of transcendent radiance to everything that evening, a sense of divine presence, an intimation of the sacred shimmering through the everyday. What more I can say about this experience is limited, as it runs up against the limitations of language. But it was deeply moving, as anyone who has had these kinds of experiences will understand. The walk that evening was like one final, beautiful gift. There was sadness, joy, reminiscence, but throughout everything there was also this profound sense of peace and beauty.

May of 2024 was the first time in over four years that I picked up a camera with any real sense of intention and purpose again. I think at first I wasn't even exactly clear why, I just felt compelled to do it again, on the surface maybe as a means of distraction. I had had these incredibly moving experiences after the death of Diesel but at the same time I was still struggling immensely with grief, with the sense of loss. In retrospect, and to echo the sentiment of Robert Adams, I think I was looking for beauty, for something to affirm in my daily life, for that deeply shimmering beauty I had experienced walking in the forest that evening. I had taken up Plotinus and Neoplatonic philosophy again to try and give noetic structure to the experience, and the camera became the means of exploring the lived, experiential side of these “revelations.” And so I dove heavily in to that exploration. Photography, for me, has always had an interesting way of attuning me to beauty, of training my spirit to be receptive to beauty. And this attuning myself to beauty and exploring the depths of the experiences I had had was a salve against the corrosive effects of grief, of the urge to withdraw into oneself in a kind of world-denying despair, which is one path offered to us in the face of death.

To large degree this was not unlike my first deepened engagement with photography that I described in the opening paragraph of this section. In both instances there is some kind of existential turmoil followed by some deeply meaningful experience that motivates me to dig deeper in to the nature and meaning of those experiences, using the camera as the tool to explore and share those experiences. As Adams notes, pain becomes the impetus of art, and the struggle of art is the struggle to place the world around us in a more affirmable light, and the result (for some) is the meditation on and the mediation of beauty, in the most rich and metaphysical sense.

“Art's beauty does not lead, of course, to narrow doctrine. The Form it affirms is not neatly finished, at least to our eyes. It does not lead directly to a theology or a system of ethics (though it reminds me of the wisdom of humility and generosity). William Carlos Williams said that poets write for a single reason - to give witness to splendor (a word also used by Thomas Aquinas in defining the beautiful). It is a useful word, especially for a photographer, because it implies light - light of overwhelming intensity. The Form toward which art points is of an incontrovertible brilliance, but it is also far too intense to examine directly. We are compelled to understand Form by its fragmentary reflection in the daily objects around us; art will never fully define light.” — Robert Adams | Beauty in Photography

A changed approach, the omnipresence of the sublime, and the future

An interesting change in my coming back to photography after May 2024 was my willingness to photograph almost anything and everything. My work prior to this had largely been characterized by what you might call “pure nature photography” as Andrew McClees called it in this interview. I would never have dreamt of bringing out my camera to photograph anything in our all-too-human environment. But this time around I found myself pushing harder to find the beauty, the quiet sublime in the “mundane” surroundings of daily life. I think this was in part driven by my exposure to Robert Adams writing and photography specifically his work in the photo book This Day and the essays in his book Beauty in Photography. I found in these and much of Adams later work, such a beautiful mediation of the sublime in the everyday. It was also clearly driven by my need to counter my feelings of grief, a kind of existential medicine to continue to attune myself to the deeper beauty of life and the world in the midst of my struggles. The more I trained myself to find beauty in the smallest moments of my life, the more I was able to assuage the sense of loss.

In a sense I have always attempted to photograph this experience, whatever we wish to call it. The sublime, beauty, the sacred, that nameless source which goes by many names. But I had always restricted the means of seeing and photographing it to the natural environment, the untrammeled landscape as it’s called in the Wilderness Act. Diesel’s passing in some sense broke open my sensibilities, broadened my receptivity to the beauty that shimmers through all things, sometimes in plain sight but other times quietly glimmering just beneath the surface if we are able to utilize a manner of seeing which is the birthright of us all but which we hardly ever use, to paraphrase Plotinus. And for this I will always be grateful.

I’m not sure where I will go with photography from here. I don’t know how long this period of productivity and inspiration will last. If previous cycles are anything to go by maybe I’ll get another couple years of prodigious productivity out of this existential cataclysm before burning myself out and setting cameras aside for another four years. Regardless, I am thankful for the reinvigoration of my artistic drive, and I am enjoying the process. If you’ve read this far, I hope that my pontificating reads as more than a narcissistic word vomiting, which, maybe it is a form of cathartic release. But it is sincerely my hope that in putting my experience out there others might find resonance for whatever struggles they may be facing in their own life, and that some light can be found here in these words.

In loving dedication to my best friend. I miss you every day, bud. I hope we get to see each other again some day