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Garbage City
In a desert metropolis of 22 million, many things are scarce, and few are as abundant as trash. For decades, Cairo lacked an organized approach to waste management—an administrational gap filled by the people of Manshiyat Nasser, a neighborhood known as Garbage City.
1 min read
Outside Job
A manufactured, artificial opposite of the natural world, the workspace is a peculiar invention. It has the outside wrapped all around it, separated by just a few inches of wall and yet fully out of reach for eight hours a day. And those working in it are always ready to put their pay towards a vacation escape to the other side, while those working outside of it never dream the other way around, never fantasize about vacationing inside an office.
1 min read
idealism across open borders
In a time when global cooperation is paramountestest—because existential threats like climate change and rogue AIs don’t recognize borders—the EU is a role model for multilateralism. Cultural exchange. Open trade. Pooled resources. It’s smart. And it’s the future. We don’t need more walls. We need more doors.
3 min read
Reverse Genocide
How does a militant group commit genocide against a regime?
1 min read
Cojímar
It’s hard to follow someone like Hemingway into their world. He lived it and wrote it with so much ethos. Cojímar is said to have inspired the Old Man and the Sea, and the writer’s heavy bronze head rests on a pillar by the oceanfront, but to interpret the cluster of juxtaposing structures and buildings as a fishing village, one needed an avalanche of imagination or a time machine.
2 min read
Havana
Dissecting Havana with my feet during those first days, I tripped over quite a few of the political and economic implications wedded by the Marxian ideal, surprised by how divorced some experiences were from others, both for Cubans and visitors.
7 min read
Cuba
Perhaps, December 2014—the dawn of the Cuban thaw—marked the tipping point of Caribbean communism (two words and concepts that feel almost at odds): the first act of the last wriggle, the overstretching of a cocoon that was too tight and worn too long. Moving, shaking, breaking. No going back.
4 min read
like night and day
You can't always be on top. Because then it wouldn't be the top anymore. It'd be a plateau, and you wouldn't appreciate the heights. We need the downs, we need the dark, we need the existential contrast between night and day to feel alive and glad. Over the years, I've worked my way through some deep valleys—filled with obstacles and lashed by headwinds—and I know there will be more ahead. That's why my gratitude is at its peak whenever I'm having an up-moment.
2 min read
Cartagena
„And what about the camera?“ the officer asked, looking at it with glassy and hungry eyes that glowed like honey-colored phosphor in the dimly lit garage.
“I’m not giving you my camera,” I answered, my voice turning into verbal exclamation marks.
10 min read
Kibuye
Somebody had said something about deadly explosions or eruptions, and I wasn’t looking for any of that per se. Least of all in a lake. I just wanted to get out of Kigali for a while. Not because I didn’t like it, but because I did. A little too much for my liking. Its comforts and niceties had lulled me.
4 min read
hot summer, cool tees
We're not even halfway through another record summer, but it seems like we've stopped counting—records, summers, days till doomsday. The climate catastrophe keeps knocking, but we're busy procrastinating while people are dying so-called "excess deaths" in extraordinary heatwaves that are becoming ever more extra and ever more ordinary. Find out more about my take on the real reasons and real solutions below, and maybe pick up a FLAMINGONE tee along the way!
2 min read
can't trust AI
"You are a true writer," my friend and fellow artist Boris Eldagsen told me the other day, after he'd read my essay Lost in Latent Space. Meaningful flattery—thank you very much—because those who know me through my viral photographic work, might not always know me as a writer.
3 min read
Paris
They all said it's different when you live there. Paris. Worse they meant, but when I lived there it was better. The best. The Paris you live in is the best Paris. Those who were born into it don't understand the Paris that is Paris by choice.
13 min read
14 years, 14 photos
This month—14 years ago—I left home in search of...something. I didn't quite know what it was back then, and maybe I still don't. So, I keep going, not so much to find answers but to keep asking questions. And now I'm 14. Fourteen years a nomad. To celebrate the occasion, I'm sharing 14 of my favorite pictures, and the latest news.
3 min read
Lost in Latent Space
After Boris Eldagsen and I replied to Joan Fontcuberta’s musings on “algorithmic photography” with an article published by PetaPixel, Gregory Chatonsky replied to us with a theory that expands on latent space. Now it’s our turn again. Gloves are off, but it’s all in good fun.
15 min read
a theory of lemons that is bananas
PetaPixel just published an essay co-authored by Boris Eldagsen and me, which should be an interesting read beyond the photographic community, with implications for anybody who consumes images. The article is a critique of Joan Fontcuberta’s “algorithmic photography,” presented in his latest book. Since we are mentioned in it, Boris and I saw it necessary to respond to an artist and intellectual who theorizes that we're past the distinction between photography and AI imagery.
9 min read
Photography Is an Honest Lie
In the public arena, photography is a long-standing winner of truth-telling contests, beating older forms of visual representation that aim to approximate reality with brushstrokes, chisel-chipping or textile-loops. The camera as a tool establishes a more direct relationship with the subject, at least from an optical point of view. That much is obvious.
10 min read
Nuance or Nothing
At the rate polarization is driving us apart these days, unity’s embrace might end up out of reach sometime soon. As the planet is heating—a divisive issue really putting the “polar” in polarizing—it feels like we’re all heating with it: families redraw the Thanksgiving table’s seating chart according to vaccine schedules while politicians on TV oscillate between shouting and screaming as the aisle widens into an chasm.
4 min read
Reality Check for AI Prophecies
A technology with civilizational, planetary consequences, AI is a gravitational heavyweight that moves all of us, one way or another, some day or some other, whether we want it or not, know it or not.
With our stakes at an all-time high, it's important to understand what AI is and isn't, what it does or doesn't do, who it benefits and how, what it destroys and why.
2 min read
saving the planet a little for Earth Day
Today is Earth Day—a little calendrical reminder that every day is Earth Day, whether we honor it or not. The climate movement has lost its momentum, spinning out of the news cycle somewhere between pandemic and war, but its urgency didn't diminish alongside our attention. With political and corporate agendas diverting awareness and investments from sustainable climate solutions, individual civic action becomes the key lever.
3 min read
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