On vision, influence, and the distortion of the creative process There was a time when I could see a landscape photograph once and remember it for years. Not because it was technically perfect. Not because it depicted a famous location, collected thousands of reactions, or followed an immediately recognizable formula. I remembered it because it seemed to contain a world. It carried the unmistakable presence of the person who had made it: their obsessions, their visual culture, their...

On stress, creative exhaustion, and the hidden life of ideas during periods of apparent inactivity There are periods when creativity does not disappear, but becomes inaccessible. The ideas may still exist somewhere beneath the surface, yet the distance between imagining something and bringing it into existence feels impossibly wide. You open an unfinished photograph, look at it for a few minutes and close it again. You collect references without knowing what to do with them. You begin...

A Tolkien-Inspired Visual Story in Madeira There are places that do not need to be invented.They only need to be listened to long enough. Madeira was one of those places for me. When I first photographed its laurel forests, I was not thinking about creating a fantasy project. I was responding to what was already there: the darkness under the canopy, the cold diffusion of light, the moisture suspended in the air, the wet volcanic stones, the roots crossing the ground like old veins, and the...