Career news:
After 11 years at James Madison University, I am leaving to become Waynesboro Public Library’s Digital Services Librarian. This is an achievement that has far greater impact internally than professionally. Professionally it is a big leap forward. The title “Librarian” is a title often gate-kept in the US behind a graduate degree, I do not have. Coming from my haphazard 20’s and lackluster, low-level career at JMU, this move establishes me in a position many would consider an end-goal career. I am honored that this institution would bring me on in this position and I’m excited to get to work.
On the personal/internal side of things, this is a change and achievement large enough that I am having a hard time being able to put to words. While stepping into this position will be life-changing, the changes that had to happen to get here are nothing short of a triumph for me and has seen me question all of the narratives I’ have told me I’ve held about who and what I am.
Visual Noise
The Visual Noise series is done… Maybe. Who knows. I’m sure I’ll make more statements I immediately contradict in the future. I’m just saying that I know better, but sometimes my intent runs ahead of me.
When I publicly said goodbye to this series last winter it was because no longer needed what I got out of the process of making it. The part of my life that I was struggling to accept and understand had stopped being a struggle. When I started the series I didn’t know what to call “the things about me” that I was trying to put to words. Even when I accepted that “neurodivergent” was applicable to certain experiences, I didn’t accept it as being a applicable to every part of my life.
Being “disabled” is something I’ve been actively in denial about since I was a small child when I was first diagnosed and moved into special classes and after school programs. I found ways around my disabilities and convinced myself that everyone around me had the same struggles but I was just too dumb, weak, or lazy to be like other people. In response I looked for areas in which I might have an advantage over others that I could leverage to “be treated normally”. Despite my best efforts, there were certain some things I couldn’t find workarounds for.
Visual Noise * 2011-2025
I’ve spilled a lot of ink about this series in the past. I’ve hung solo exhibitions of this series in 2013, 2014, 2020, and 2024. It has been a featured gallery on both of my previous websites and was the subject of at least three earlier blog posts. Each time I’ve written different things about this series. All my writings were different attempts at expressing an experience of the world that I knew was different from others’, but had failed to find the words to express. Trying to write about this experience quickly becomes contradictory and abstract to the point where worlds lose their ability to convey the meanings they symbolize.
There is a fractally ordered chaos to the world that is made tangible to those with the mind to experience it. The separation between dimensions is a gray area. Time and depth become impossible to distinguish from each other, yet remain discernible as a new concept outside present vocabularies. Rather than a psychedelic or spiritual skewing or playing with perception, this is perception as it always exists, but is often “seen through”. The mind’s filtering and unconscious sorting and dismissing of information is something most people never have awareness of—yet, for others it is something that requires conscious effort and practice.
We use different terms like “hypersensitivity” to describe it. We medicalize the experience usign titles like Sensory Processing Disorder or herd it into the spectrum of various developmental disorders such as ASD or ADHD. Those are all terms with very specific meanings, descriptions, and applications in specific settings. What they all have in common is that they are diagnosed and talked about in vocabularies that are limited in their ability to express an experience that is divergent from the commonly held norm. I’ll not shoot-down or insult this effort, as it has provided comfort and understanding for many and it is language I use myself. Even so, while I use that language, it feels insufficient.
Visual Noise is my attempt to find a way to express the parts of my experience where language fails.
Five from downtown Staunton, VA – May 2025
New images
I’ve accepted these parts of myself. I understand myself as “disabled”. I am no longer in denial. So if I am done with that process, why continue making the images? Simple answer: I wanted to.
If I interrogate my motives further it is some combination of this series being a comfortable concept and aesthetic to work with, and that the work of creating images for this series is a comfort and affirmation of these parts of myself. I no long “need” this series. It is no longer and expressive outgrowth of struggling.
That said, I am committed to new approaches to photography right now. I’m after something new or something that I’ve yet to understand in my own work. To that end, I doubt that I’ll be doing much work in this style going forward. I’m happy to call this project done and content and confident enough to let myself continue work on it if I am called.
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