A picture, a thousand words.

Last week, this image was still on an undeveloped roll of film, commentary-in-potentia.

Tulsa’s a nice town to walk around in. There’s a lot of public art, a very good bookstore, the Center of the Universe (which will sneak up on you), weirdly constrained paid parking, a local coffee shop to fit any vibe, and Woody Guthrie.

I’ve never much interacted with the works or life of Woody Guthrie. We briefly looked at his songs within the larger American context in my one-semester enthomusicology elective, and “this machine kills fascists” is ingrained into the popular consciousness (possibly more through parody than understanding.) After the writing on the guitar, “This Land is Your Land” is probably next.

The thing about Tulsa’s downtown is that it was hard to take a photo without a security camera in it.

I know Tulsa’s not alone in this - I know I could take such images in every modern American city of 1,501 people. We’ve been sold on such a level of security theater - even if it doesn’t stop “them” you’ll have proof to catch and punish later - and don’t you want to keep an eye on everyone that might walk by? It’s the same impulse that means that every new-build retail establishment has more cameras than the previous one, Ring doorbells record “teenagers walking around,” and gives us all permission to record strangers on the train with our own personal monitoring devices.

I don’t do a lot of street photography. I’m only about a year into a return to intentional photographic practice, so my approach is still developing and maturing - as all artists’ approaches change over their creative lifetimes, but I’m not yet to the point where I feel incredibly comfortable taking pictures of people without their knowledge and consent. Occasionally people creep into the edges of my frames, as they will when you’re working in any public space, but it’s not the purpose of the image. Conceptually, I have no problem with street photography or documentary photography. True documentary photography holds an incredibly important place in our historical documentation - telling the stories of so many in an indelible visual format, but even though photography is a kind of truth, like all truths it can be bent by the biases of the observer. Sometimes I do have to stop any make myself contemplate the ethics - what makes me, taking an image that has a mother and child in the background in a crowded place and publishing it, different from the thousands of cameras that surround us every time we step outside?

Intent, I think, has to be the answer. The artist’s intent is curiosity, observation in the name of recording. The watchman’s intent is suspicion, a desire to separate out those for whom the land is not for those whom the privilege is granted. But if this land was indeed made for you and me, where does that leave us? Standing on the sidewalk in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a little chilly in the fall air, looking at the murals that are looking back at us.

Pre-Footnote Foonotes

(a) I promise the next newsletter will be a less-heavy subject matter! I have many pictures of planes and also greenery to share with you.

(b) For those of you who have made it this far, thank you! If there is anything in particular you’d like to see me put my unique spin on - photographically or otherwise, drop me a note on Bluesky!

(c) A song: My favorite band has been The Crane Wives for a few years now, and I’ve been lucky enough to see them in concert twice. This song (off their latest album) was something so very special to hear live - and to hear a whole music hall singing "This blinding light, this reckoning/There's more to life than suffering,” reaching some kind of catharsis.

1  Spitzer, Nick. “The Story of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land.’” NPR, NPR, 15 Feb. 2012, www.npr.org/2000/07/03/1076186/this-land-is-your-land.