Photogenic Drawings

An example from my new book, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain” pages 251-252:

“Rocky Mountain Cotton On Vellum Paper” 

This image really speaks to the heart of what I’m exploring about mortality and artistic process.

The Talbotype process creates this direct indexical relationship between the object and its representation—the Rocky Mountain cotton literally left its shadow on the paper, what you might call a kind of death mask of the plant. This connects powerfully to what Becker writes about our need to leave traces of ourselves behind.

The luminous quality of the cotton head against that deep, velvety darkness reminds me of what Terror Management Theory describes as our attempts to create permanence from impermanence.

By using Talbot’s historical process, I’m not just capturing an image – I’m participating in a kind of photographic immortality project that spans nearly two centuries. The plant’s physical contact with the paper creates what we might call a “presence of absence.”

What fascinates me most is how this process makes visible something I’m deeply exploring in this book – the way artists transform ephemeral moments into lasting artifacts. The cotton’s delicate structure, rendered in this ghostly white against the dark ground, becomes both a document of its physical existence and a meditation on its transcendence through art.

The fact that this image was created through direct sunlight adds another layer of meaning—it’s as if nature itself is participating in this act of preservation. The process captures not just the form of the cotton but something of its essence, its being-in-time.

This relates directly to how I think artists process mortality differently—we’re not just recording death, we’re transforming it into something luminous and enduring.

Photogenic Drawings

As a visual artist exploring mortality and creativity, I'm fascinated by how Talbot's early photographic experiments mirror our human desire to capture and preserve moments against the inevitable flow of time. In 1834, five years before photography was officially announced to the world, William Henry Fox Talbot began his quest to record nature's fleeting images. His work wasn't just about technical innovation—it was about our deep-seated need to hold onto the ephemeral.

What draws me to Talbot's process is its raw intimacy with light and shadow, life and death. He called these camera-less images "photogenic drawings" drawings"—drawings born from light itself. The process feels almost alchemical: paper baptized in sodium chloride, anointed with silver nitrate that darkens like aging skin in the sun. When he laid objects—delicate botanical specimens or intricate lace—on this sensitized surface, he was essentially creating shadows, preserving the ghost prints of these items in negative space. Where light touched, darkness bloomed; where objects blocked the light, whiteness remained.

The resulting images were fragile, temporary—not yet truly "fixed" in photographic terms, but stabilized in a salt solution. Like our own attempts at immortality through art, they existed in a transitional space between permanence and fade. Talbot's preference for recording delicate, intricate patterns in nature speaks to me of our attempt to capture beauty before it withers, to hold onto the detailed texture of existence before it slips away.

His negative-to-positive process, which became the foundation for photography throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fundamentally changed how we preserve our memories, our faces, and our moments of being. In doing so, it transformed how we negotiate with our own mortality.

Are You Challenging My Illusion?

I want to direct this essay directly at you. I want to talk about your death anxiety. I’m trying to find the best way to succinctly explain it to you. I want to explain what it is, the fact that it exists in everyone, how you repress it and why, and what happens when your illusion is challenged. I hope you get something from it.

The first issue to deal with is understanding that death anxiety is the main driver or motivator in life. In hierarchical order, this is at the top. Everything else would be listed below it. Everything. Also, if you didn’t know it, it’s the premise of my project, ”In the Shadow of Sun Mountain.” This is what the work is about.

First things first, in that order. Like other living creatures, we have a strong instinct to stay alive. We are also the only beings (or animals) that know we are going to die. That creates some major cognitive dissonance, psychologically speaking. What does that do to us exactly? It creates death anxiety. How do we cope with death anxiety? We repress it. We bury it deep in our subconscious. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to stand up in the morning. It would be overwhelming.

How do we bury it? What mechanisms are in place to do that? To answer those questions, we need to address illusions, or what Becker calls “immortality projects.” He says we all strive for heroism. It’s our cultural worldview that provides the buffer and allows us to put death out of our minds. We bury this terror (the knowledge of our death) through our cultural worldviews. Whatever our culture holds up to be meaningful and significant is what we use. For example, we find meaning and significance in our jobs, our families, our social clubs, making art, religion, holidays, earning money, a manicured lawn in suburbia, material things, a fancy sports car, being youthful, being famous, etcetera, etcetera. It’s anything that the culture holds up as meaningful and significant. These distractions allow us to psychologically bury the terror of mortality. Striving for heroism distracts us from the reality of our human condition. Everyone has a buffer; if they didn’t, they would be in a constant state of anxiety and depression. Sheldon Solomon said if we had to psychologically deal with our death—if it was constantly on our mind—we wouldn’t be able to stand up in the morning. We’d be reaching for a Valium the size of a Buick to deal with existing. Whether you realize this or not, you do it every day. That’s how you make it through each day.

"The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death." - Gore Vidal

Some “immortality projects” are not ideal—the pursuit of wealth and fame, for example. While it seems worthwhile and meaningful, it’s always short-lived and very superficial. The pursuit of staying young through surgeries, botox, and hair dye will only last so long too. It’s all done in vain and will never work—none of them will. However, some are better for humanity and the environment than others. I believe good or healthy projects include creative pursuits, spending time with loved ones, being in nature, critical thinking, authenticity, and working on gratitude, humility, and openness. Albert Camus said, “There is only one liberty, to come to terms with death, thereafter, anything is possible.“ I think what he meant by this is that living in reality, as harsh as it may be, will give you freedom—true freedom from the illusions we use to buffer the anxiety of death. I think of Buddhist monks, for example. They understand that life is suffering (death anxiety) and meditate every day on death.

What happens when your illusion is challenged? Anytime your anxiety buffer, or illusion, is challenged, it will cause you to react in a negative way. Religion or politics are good examples of this. When someone from a different religion or political group says or does something you disagree with, it makes you angry, it stirs emotion, and it makes you question, subconsciously, if your illusion is the correct illusion. When that happens, your instinct is to defend your illusion, sometimes at all costs. This is where the treatment of “the other” comes into play. We start wars, we kill, we ostracize, we humiliate, and we hate all to defend our illusion or worldview. That’s how much we want to buffer the knowledge of our death and impermanence.

TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY (TMT)
This is a great video to explain all of this. The movie, “The Matrix” really deals with TMT and how we fashion the world we want to live in or not.

“Rocky Mountain Wheat Grass-Photogenic Drawing,” a whole plate, palladium-toned, waxed, photogenic drawing on vellum paper. I designed a way to process these with the deepest color and to fit cleanly into the whole plate (6.5” x 8.5”) window opening of the mat. They look super gorgeous—I hope you can get an idea from the iPhone photo!

THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE
I have to mention Thomas Ligotti's book, "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror." I have not read it, not completely anyway. I get the gist of it from what I have read. It’s heavy. It’s depressing and can challenge you with some of his “truths.” The author is known for supernatural horror stories. In this book, he uses philosophy, metaphysics, science, and biology to make the claim that life is a mistake. "Existence is a condition with no redeeming qualities,” he writes. and that’s tame compared to some of it. Here’s the strange part: there is a lot of it that I agree with. He borrowed a page or two from Becker’s books.

Like a Buddhist, he believes that life is suffering and that “human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist.” And the sooner human beings cease to exist, the better. But why does he write this, and what is the “conspiracy” of the title? It all stems from the self-knowledge that we do our best not to acknowledge: the fact that we alone of all living creatures know that we are going to die. Does that sound familiar? As with Eve’s apple or the snake in the Garden of Eden, “human existence [is] a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness—the parent of all horrors.” In other words, we act as if we lack “the knowledge of a race of beings that is only passing through this shoddy cosmos.” He addresses the absurdity of life, drawing on Albert Camus and other absurdist philosophers.

He’s not the first person to postulate that consciousness was an evolutionary mistake. Many philosophers have hinted at it for millennia. I’m not sure it was a mistake, but it does create big problems for us. Trying to reconcile our biological drive to stay alive with knowing we are going to die and be forgotten is a big burden to bear, as is understanding that everything we do is an illusion that we create to distract us from the knowledge that there is no purpose or meaning in life.

Before processing and waxing the print.

Exterminate All The Brutes

“You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.”
― Sven Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide

Have you seen the four-part series from Raul Peck called “Exterminate All The Brutes”? It’s based in large part on Sven Lindqvist’s book of the same name. And Lindqvist based his book on Joseph Conrad’s book, “Heart of Darkness.” Francis Ford Coppola’s film, “Apocalypse Now,” was based on Conrad’s book, too. Whew! That’s quite a lineage! There is very powerful content in all of it!

I highly recommend reading both Conrad’s book and Lindqvist’s book. They deal with the genocide in Africa (committed by the Europeans)—colonial genocide. Conrad’s story is about what happened in the Congo, and Lindqvist’s book gets at the root of the genocide in Africa as a whole. It’s a modern-day diary or travelogue in a way too. And definitely check out Peck’s piece on HBO. It’s an amazing 4-hour series. It’s so well-made, accurate, and very moving that I think it should be mandatory viewing for every American and European. I recommended it last year on my YouTube show. I used to do recommended reading and recommended watching every week. Doing that kept me in the books and films. I found some really great material.

My work has always confronted and questioned how marginalized communities are treated. This is not new territory for me, but the information that I’ve been studying over the past few years has really taken it to a new and solid place. Ernest Becker and Sheldon Solomon have given me a new set of tools to work with. These resources, among many others, have informed and supported my work in big ways. For many years, I’ve wrestled with the real history of America and Europe—the places of my heritage—and how we treat (and have treated) “the other.”

I lived in Germany for five years and tried my best to come to terms with what happened there by making photographs. I studied, traveled, and explored everything I could that was related to that history. I ended up making a body of work called “Vergangenheitsbewältigung.” Unfortunately, I never got to address the core reasons for what happened there. If I could go back now, I would be able to square that circle of confusion. For the most part, I would be able to answer that question today with quite a bit of confidence.

Now, I live on the land of the Ute/Tabeguache and am trying to do the same thing, but armed with powerful and enlightening information. The information I’m in possession of now is based on empirical evidence—it’s the best answer we have to this enormous problem. It’s a good feeling. And it empowers me and drives the work in a certain direction—in an authentic direction—that motivates me to share these ideas with my brothers and sisters of the world. That’s very important to me and one of the main reasons the work is being done. I’m more concerned with the viewer understanding the theories than liking the photographs, Both would be ideal, but the theory is far more important than the pictures.

I have a lot of life experience that lends itself to expressing ideas in a certain way. I’m not quite sixty years old yet, but I can see why they say you make your best work at this stage of your life. I get it. There seems to be an opening or willingness here that I’ve never really experienced before. There’s also a certain sense of maturity in the relationship to the photographs, or making the photographs. There’s an unrestrained passion to make work that is interesting and powerful in your eyes, regardless of what anyone else thinks. Like life itself, there’s a beautiful freedom that I’ve never fully experienced before. I’m very grateful for it.

Currently, I’m writing an introduction for my book and working on some essays for it. I’ve completed my artist’s statement and have about 15 essays so far to include in the book. I feel good about the direction this is going.

It’s winter here in the Rocky Mountains now. My book project gives me plenty to work on when the snow flies and it’s cold out. We do get nice sunny days quite often, so I’ll continue to make pictures and prints, but it will be less often and not in any quantity. I had a great year working on this project. It was everything and more than I expected. If I get another year like this, I’ll have something exciting to work with. I’m in no hurry to finish. In fact, I only give myself general guidelines and no real timeline. I think I’ll finish next year, but who knows?

The Yarrow plant gone to seed-a photogenic drawing.

A medicinal plant gone to seed—a print from the vellum negative on salted paper.

Homo Mortalis And The Fourth Turning

“Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, the deification of existence.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901

There are some very interesting philosophies in our world today concerning the way we live and the cycles we go through as human beings. I want to address two of them in this essay.

HOMO MORTALIS (MORTAL MAN)
The first is from the book, “The Worm At The Core: The Role Of Death In Life,” by Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon. If you’ve read other essays that I’ve posted, I’m sure you recognize the reference.

They have suggested that the foreknowledge of our own death may be what most widely separates us from other mammals. Perhaps we might even be more aptly called Homo mortalis rather than Homo sapiens. They write, “There is now compelling evidence that, as William James suggested a century ago, death is indeed the worm at the core of the human condition. The awareness that we humans will die has a profound and pervasive effect on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in almost every domain of human life—whether we are conscious of it or not.”

It’s a transformative and fascinating theory. It’s based on robust and groundbreaking experimental research, and it reveals how our unconscious fear of death powers almost everything we do, shining a light on the hidden motives that drive human behavior. More than one hundred years ago, the American philosopher William James dubbed the knowledge that we must die "the worm at the core" of the human condition. In 1974, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death, arguing that the terror of death has a pervasive effect on human affairs. Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski clarify these theories with wide-ranging evidence of the many ways the worm at the core guides our thoughts and actions, from the great art we create to the devastating wars we wage.

The Worm at the Core is the product of twenty-five years of in-depth research. Drawing from innovative experiments conducted around the globe, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski show conclusively that the fear of death and the desire to transcend it inspire us to buy expensive cars, crave fame, put our health at risk, and disguise our animal nature. The fear of death can also prompt judges to dole out harsher punishments, make children react negatively to people different from themselves, and inflame intolerance and violence.

But the worm at the core need not consume us. Emerging from their research is a unique and compelling approach to these deeply existential issues: terror management theory. TMT proposes that human culture infuses our lives with order, stability, significance, and purpose, and these anchors enable us to function from moment to moment without becoming overwhelmed by the knowledge of our ultimate fate. (edited/Goodreads)

I’ll write more about Terror Management Theory (TMT) in the future. It does provide some insight into managing death anxiety. Becker clearly laid out these ideas; the worm at the core details them and provides empirical evidence for them.

THE FOURTH TURNING (THE ‘CRISIS’ PHASE)
It may have been better to separate these essays into two parts. As I was thinking about writing these, I realized that they are connected in so many ways that I felt compelled to join them in one essay. I think you’ll see what I mean.

The authors, William Strauss and Neil Howe, wrote a book in 1997 called, “The Fourth Turning; An American Prophecy—What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny".

Looking back to the dawn of the modern world, The Fourth Turning reveals a distinct pattern in human history—cycles lasting about the length of a long human life, about 80-90 years. Each cycle is composed of four “turnings,” and each turning lasts the span of a generation (about 20 years). There are four kinds of turnings: High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis, and they always occur in the same order. (from The Fourth Turning site).

In a nutshell, this book is about how the cycles of history (at least in American history) repeat themselves about every 80–90 years. There are “turnings” about every 20–25 years—four of them in each cycle. If you start with the American Revolution (1775), then the American Civil War (1861), The Great Depression, and World War 2 (1942), that leaves you sitting here in 2022, in the middle of the “crisis” era. These are all about 80-90 years apart. According to Howe, this crisis period will last until about 2030. After that, we’ll gradually enter a “high” period again. These “turnings” are like the seasons; spring, summer, autumn, and winter. We’re in the winter phase.

This is a fascinating concept, and our history tends to show its validity. There are some difficult turnings within the overall cycle. It seems we’re in one of those today. In fact, I would argue that we are. The good news is that in times of "crisis,” turning, historically, we’ve done some incredible things. The social security programs were all created in the 1930s—the depression era—as well as the American Civil War, which brought us the establishment of public education. There are some good things that come from it. There are also some very terrible things that come from these turnings.

In my opinion, death anxiety and these turnings are directly related. They sit together well. In fact, I would say they complement one another if I could use that term. Think of it as individuals acting out, or on, our immortality projects, and collectively, acting out, or on, the turnings in the generation we belong to; i.e., Boomers, Gen X, Millenials, etc. This makes a lot of sense to me. I can clearly see the death denial theories tying into the cycles of history. They provide different types of immortality projects for people of different generations and times, but it still comes back to the fact that death anxiety motivates these desires.

I would recommend reading the book or even watching some YouTube videos on the topic. It will really give you something to think about. It’s not religious prophecy or prophets, or anything like that. It’s based on the history of this country and the patterns that stand out. Almost undeniable. If this is, in fact, correct, we’re in for some rough waters ahead as a country and people. Forewarned is forearmed.

"Fourth turnings almost always end in total war." Neil Howe

Western Goat’s Beard - a photogenic drawing - No. 2

Western Goat’s Beard - a Palladiotype print from a wet collodion negative.

Turtles All The Way Down - The Song And The Print

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” - William Faulkner, The Paris Review, 1956

TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN
The print is a photogenic drawing of the pigweed plant. These are “one-off” direct contact prints—kind of like an Ambrotype or Tintype. The plant was laid on top of a piece of paper that I salted (ammonium chloride) and sensitized with silver nitrate. I put the paper and plant out in the sun for about 3-4 minutes. I washed the print (removing the free silver), toned the print (with palladium toner), fixed the print, and washed it. That’s it. I’ll do more of these in the future. They are special in that the actual object is in contact with the paper. The void is what makes the print. A lot to talk about there, philosophically speaking.

When I removed the plant from the paper, all of a sudden I had thoughts of the song, “Turtles All The Way Down.” The lyrics jumped right to the forefront of my mind. It was strange and powerful. Thoughts of near-death experiences came to mind as well. There were words like “universe” and “big bang,” all in this tiny little plant. It seemed to hold all of it and express it so beautifully in this print. The seeds that fell off onto the paper were a powerful reminder about life and death too.

Turtles all the way down is also the title of a book by John Green. He wrote “The Fault In Our Stars” and “Paper Towns.” I haven’t read it, but from my understanding, it’s about a young woman and her struggle with mental health issues. Anxiety and OCD. She’s trying to solve a mystery about a billionaire.

So where did the title spring from? “Turtles all the way down” is an old phrase that was used as a rebuttal for the existence of God. In his book, “A Brief History of Time,” Stephen Hawking describes its origin: The well-known scientist Bertrand Russell once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down!’

The idea is really rooted in infinite regress. The definition is, “a sequence of reasoning or justification which can never come to an end.” It’s about infinity, something that we can’t comprehend, and if we think we can, we’re delusional.

The specific lyrics that came to mind in reference to the print:

“I've seen Jesus play with flames
In a lake of fire that I was standing in….

Met Buddha yet another time
And he showed me a glowing light within…

There's a gateway in our minds
That leads somewhere out there, far beyond this plane
Where reptile aliens made of light
Cut you open and pull out all your pain..,”

The song really touched me when I first heard it. I couldn’t believe the lyrics: country music gone psychedelic. In this song, there’s no beer, bars, or women that left him. The pro-psychedelic position really made me pay attention. I think they (psychedelics) have a great future in the treatment of certain mental health issues. Anyway, listen to the song, and read the lyrics-it’s posted below.