Is Photography...Art? - PART 1
I never saw it that way
Astronaut Terry Hart prepares to use IMAX camera - NASA, (April 9, 1984)
Prelude: The Angry Young Man
I went to MassArt in the 90s as a painter (not a good one) on academic probation before I opened the door to the Kennedy Building for the first time. I had a strong portfolio but shit-ass grades in high school.
Talented and collegiate-looking, but without the smarts to back up the cardigan. That first year in 1993 was fucking wild, man. Hell, the first day in the Big City was fucking wild. I took my first unaccompanied stroll down Newbury St., through The Fens, where I saw a bunch of cop cars, searchlights, and shit. It reminded me of The Departed scene: “When I tell you… to dump a body in the marsh, you dump him IN the marsh. Not where some guy from John Hancock goes every Thursday TO GET A FUCKING BLOWJOB!”
I never got a finance job at the John Hancock Building, though I did fail a calligraphy test for a Christmas card job, which still embarrasses me. I also never had any blowjobs in The Fens during my time at the college. One night, while extremely intoxicated in the days before Uber, no taxis would pick me up (I guess I can imagine why).
I punched a hole in one of those small church windows at the top of a door—the kind you can't see out of unless you're descending the stairs. Someone on Saint Germain Street had to call their management company the next day to explain the broken window. I don't know why that window became the target of my frustration, but it was around 2:32 a.m., after Boston had shut down. Those people probably don't remember it—just another hazard of city living. But I remember it every time I look at my hands. A three-inch white scar runs down my right hand, with smaller scars branching out to my knuckles. And I have a half-finished song in my head: 'I got the scars to prove it.' 'Duh Dum Duh Duh Duh,' the chorus repeats, rising on the second 'it.'
I wrapped my favorite button-down short-sleeve shirt around my fist and walked fucking home. I should have sought first aid or some help healing my hand when I woke up, but I probably just splashed some freezer vodka on it and walked around all scabby for a few days. I think I was living out in Jamaica Plain at the time.
You just can’t get there from here.
Cue Billy Joel, Angry Young Man.
Photographer Girlfriends & The Missing Tit Hat
I dated a couple of girlfriends who were essential to me and were photographers. My college best friend and creative partner in the spoken word game, Duncan, was a photographer. Duncan still shoots—shoots for me sometimes, even—and is very talented and has a business acumen that I admire from afar and frankly, I'm a little jealous that he knows how to use things like “scheduling work” and “QuickBooks.”
From what I can tell, my exes have also had successful art showings and professional careers with photography. Maybe it’s a hobby now. Perhaps they are showing in galleries. Too bad there’s no easy way to discover these things in 2025. I’m on good terms with them. Mostly the terms are, “Wow, what are you doing in my city?” and “I haven’t posted in 3 years, but here’s a picture of our dog that died.”
The first one I fell in love with was at the ice cream store. I was terrified to ask her out, especially by phone, and to my surprise, she just said yes. She worked as a photographer's assistant during college. She had this passion for portraits and cameras and took so much pride in her work at the photography studio. So much so that one day, I bummed a ride to work with her—and almost got run over at the red light because she could not be late!
The second photographer girlfriend was a neighbor who went to the rival school, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, also in the Fenway. She asked me out by slipping me her number when I handed her a waffle cone. The ice cream store provided, you could say. It started slowly, with us leaving notes on our Green Street mailboxes. Eventually, it progressed, and she told me she was going to Prague for the summer.
O...K?
She sent me 5x7s from her travels, which I had to piece together to form a larger image of Brutalist architecture in Prague. As far as long-distance relationships go, having the love of your life move 4,000 miles away and send you prints isn’t ideal, especially when you’re constantly thinking about them.
She returned and moved into my Mission Hill apartment, which I shared with three other people—one more person than ideal in a 4 bedroom, especially when your girlfriend moves into your space. I went to work to make ice cream cakes that first night, and when I came home, she had rearranged my room, put up a bunch of her photos, and was rollerskating on the hardwood floors. Like most intense romances, the rollerskating was just a preview of the passion that burned bright like a Roman candle but eventually fizzled out too quickly. But that brightness? It was phosphorescent.
During high school and college summers, I worked in a one-hour Fotomat called Sprints on the South Shore in a strip mall.
My mom got me the job—it was her go-to place to get her real estate appraisal photos taken, and with doubles, always doubles, sometimes triples. It was primarily automated, except for the black-and-white film, which needed some The Craft wizardry to mix chemicals that smelled bad, and for some reason, I had to go in the bathroom to do it? Like many jobs I had, I wasn’t good at it. But I was happy to be employed and do my mom a solid by sticking with a job she got for me.
She was fast friends with the people who ran the place. And they loved her (everyone did!). She was part of the family at Sprints. I remember one time when, let’s call her Louise for this story, one half of the couple that ran the place, had a mastectomy. Her husband and my mom bought a novelty baseball cap with two boobs on the top and just chopped one of those fuckers off, and the husband, Carl, wore it proudly. We didn’t have sophisticated coping mechanisms back then. It seems insensitive on the face, but that missing tit hat was sort of an “I’m with you” kind of thing. No shame in what you have to deal with here, more than it was a crude, insensitive joke. Maybe taking the piss is the most heartfelt thing you can do in life sometimes.
The Brown Arborvitae Tips Feel Like A Paintbrush
Though my major in college was called the Studio for Interrelated Media (minor in video! You can’t take away those 18 credits!), one media I avoided at all costs was photography. First, I could barely afford a new 16x20 newsprint pad for my drawing classes. Photography involved gross-smelling chemicals, papers, glossies, and darkroom hours (and hours). Fuck that Red Room bullshit. I’m not part of the Black Widow program!
I already sucked at my painting classes (I’m a better draw-er than a paint-er). My mind would get caught mixing acrylic or oil paints, trying to find the perfect shade, but it would just be a brown mess. My “Intro to Painting” class professor, taken Freshman year when I had already chosen “Painting” as my major, gave me quizzical looks as I tried to pass in a painting I hastily created at my parent’s house of a familiar scene, the one looking out my bedroom window to a predictably green backyard, with a pear tree, a grape arbor, and two flanks of Arborvitae bushes, carefully curated and maintained by my father (a tree man), and my mother (a gardener).
The painting was… not great. It was a swirl of messy swatches and a grey background (I never could mix colors properly), and it was supposed to have taken me 10 hours. I banged that shit out in like three.
If I close my eyes, I could describe this, the most indelible image in painstaking detail: how it smelled and looked through the panes of my window. I know instinctively how tall the grass got, where the divots were, and the exact location of the sewer cap. In my bones, I feel how the metal of the wrought-iron chairs my mom spray-painted felt on a bare leg in 80s gym shorts.
Sometimes, the Arborvitae got a little brown at the edges, depending on the season. Those lush green bushes—when you touched them—were soft, prickly.
I know my ‘sister's tree’—thankfully, she’s still with us—was a rare kind not native to New England. My dad planted it for her, bringing it with us from our old house. It was a tall-ass tree. In all five senses, I could peek around behind the garage to another great tree of our land. We had a beautiful Japanese Red Maple that turned all shades of Alizarin crimson to maroon during a season.
What I couldn’t do was mix viscous pigments on a palette and wait for it to dry (an underpainting? Seriously?) and then use a series of different-sized brushes and techniques to apply that onto a stretched piece of canvas. I’ve been to museums. How the fuck did they do that?
I forgot the conversation—it wasn’t mean-spirited, but that professor suggested I try something else.
And I did. I still wanted to draw. Comics, most likely, or mess around making zines on the photocopier. Was there a way I could, I don’t know, put on shows? Call it art? Perform? Write poems? Ditch the cardigan for baggy pants, a chain wallet, and expensive Hook-Ups t-shirts from Newbury St.? If only there were a whole other department I could attend.
Enter SIM, and suddenly, spoken word took over—permanent Sharpies, bound volumes filled with verses, sketches, and hot rod flame drawings.
I recognized that painting (realistically, not in the abstract or psychedelic) just wasn’t at my skill level. I may have needed those basics to move into other expanses of the mind. Perhaps I still do. And I owe that kind woman a favor for telling me I sucked, because that was a cornerstone moment in my life. That shitty painting was just a test. I failed, only to crush it in the next 5 years at college. So what? I told you my grades weren’t that good academically. Do you think I somehow got better at doing homework?
Where I’ll leave it—for now.
PART 2: One Day..I’ll Just Sit In My Studio, Paint, and Shut The Fuck Up For Once