John Michael Swartz

I was relieved to finally submit my application for this year's Larry Lederman Photography Fellowship at the New York Botanical Garden.

I do not plan to share my proposal or biography here until at least after the recipient is announced at the end of March. However, here is the artist statement, which caused me some grief with its 200 word limit.

I spent several decades refining my photographic practice into a restrained and detached sensibility, what might be called pingdan tianzhen (平淡天真) in classical Chinese landscape painting. Placid compositions, subtle ironies, social and environmental anxieties.

After recovering from a broken foot and losing work with USAID in early 2025, I decided to push myself toward a more exuberant, experimental, and embodied approach.

I photographed a lot of water last year: through it, in it, and under it. I biked along much of the beautiful, PCB-polluted Housatonic. I let the surf crash into me at The People’s Beach at Jacob Riis Park while I attempted selfies and more traditional compositions. I tried to catalog its endless colors and textures, the optical effects it has on itself and the things around it, how it physically interacts with the camera and my body.

I have been presenting my photographs as essays on my personal blog. I write about making them. A kind of psychogeography. For example, an encounter with a dead porcupine, and then an abandoned Chevy Suburban—while pushing my bike through a rough forest road in 95 degree heat—resulted in a meditation on my father’s death and why I don’t use film anymore.

These are the ten work samples I provided. The main challenge was deciding between presenting only, and exactly, what I describe in my artist statement (which itself is somewhat conscientiously ambivalent about any grand narrative about my work, hand-waving over the past 25 years and focusing on 2025); or a set of photos that are both technically strong and balanced with respect to mood, theme, and composition. Do I risk representing myself as having an incoherent style or intent, or do I ambitiously attempt to show how even the most stylistically radical work of the past year is still connected to my ongoing identity?

I think I struck a pretty good balance. I am always glad to be reminded that the mere title of a photograph (as with a story or poem) can really help provide the audience with as much or as little context as you, the artist, want to provide. Even personally, the process of choosing titles can be very cathartic: flicking back and forth between reading the title and looking at the image can start up a terribly moving resonance. Whereas some images seem to want to hang in an indefinte nebula of imminent meaning, others definitely benefit from the studium which comes from a well-hewn title. In landscape photography, the simplest convention of providing the location, perhaps the time, of the picture can be enough. A misty field? Fine. "Gettysburg" or "Kent State"? For better or for worse, you are stirring up a billion more possibilities for the sensitive viewer.

I am fully aware that, throughout much of the writing in my application, I took liberties with a certain amount of cheekiness and hand-waving. Sort of like how Fermat wrote in the margin of his copy of Arithmetica that the proof to his infamous last theorem was too long to fit. In my biography, I also was perhaps alarmingly direct about some family dynamics that I have, over the past few years, come to realize are perhaps the most importantant influences on my photographic work.

That is to say, I think I was trying to get at the punctum of some of my photos: essentially subjective and autobiographical details that I often write about on this very website. But given the limitations of this particular application process, or the scope of the fellowship itself, I had to settle for some provocative prose instead. Let's hope it works. Or if I don't get the fellowship, let's hope it wasn't the reason.

With that thought, let me briefly provide a little bit more personal context for each of my work sample choices:

1. My ongoing "Underwater Selfies" series yielded some particularly stunning (IMO, duh) results, particularly in the crashing waves at Riis. I chose this one beacuse it was the most dignified of the lot. I say "dignified" not as an statement of value of this quality over others which are clearly more erotic, humorous, or frightening. I am, after all, essentially a wannabe punk in the body of a courtier. I just think that it would appeal more to this particular panel overall. I think of Hokusai and any number of images of Mount Fuji. Perhaps you can imagine the curls around my neck area as a ruff.

   One might miss my face altogether if one looks too carelessly; but when you do notice it, there is just the right amount of ardour of resistance in it. The purely accidental concealment of my already closed eyes by delicate fingers of water poignantly accentuates the concept of merging, returning my body to nature.

   The process of making and editing through these photos also made me realize the connections to other art-making practices that have always appealed to me: performance art and chance processes.

   Also, anybody who knows me well knows how fond I am of the video for Radiohead's "No Surprises".

2. A staircase, made of gently laid stones, presumably found reasonably nearby. A staircase, of human ingenuity at its most elegant. I thought of beautiful length of the Appalachian trail: long enough to be unimaginable but short enough to be actually hikeable; and actually hikeable because people put a lot of effort into it as an institution. Even more unimaginably beautiful to think of all the little details of the trail itself, like this staircase, and the nearly countless hands that made them. How so easily, so quietly, all of this collective effort would disappear back into the landscape after just a few decades of neglect.

3. This is perhaps the most heavy-handed, polemical picture. But I thought it important to demonstrate I could do it, if necessary. Obviously there's nothing explicitly sinister going on here, unless you're the type of ardent anti-capitalist who can hardly breathe at the sight of the gilded excesses of our generation. To be honest, on some thankfully rare days, I am that person. I mean, the whole of Hudson Yards and much of the newest projects along the Hudson, provoke within me all sorts of apocalyptical feelings of dread. At the limits of the resulution of my camera, and possibly invisible in this online format, the tiny dots of people lined up at the edge of the Shard's balcony reveal the inhuman proportions of this kind of spectacle. The willow tree mirrors the angles of that building, having been aggressively pruned back (a normal and harmless procedure, but nevertheless somewhat visually upsetting), like an AI hallucination of a crucifix. Anyway, the formal balance of colors and shapes are also interesting to me.

4. This is a large stone grotto (possibly containing a statue of the Virgin) that has been wrapped with a brown tarp and secured with compresion straps. I do not know why. I imagine it is some kind of an attempt to respect Vatican rules over sanctified artifacts during restoration or replacement? Some sort of intensely obscure Roman Catholic inside baseball. But it's also like a weird body bag, or an attempt to cover up something shameful. These days I try to avoid such self-consiously mannered, plain and rectilinear compositions, but here we are.

5. Mt Stratton ski resort in the summer. I ended up here because I got soaked after biking through the Green Mountains while having an experience of the Sublime that had me singing Beethoven while bombing through fern-lined singletrack in the woods. I ended up having dinner at the one pub that was open in their strip-mall-like "village" where a large congration of drunk golfers were carousing. The next morning I was struck by the sight of the grassy slopes rising up over the bland rhythm of these condos. They're a lot like the clear-cut paths made for power lines. I think the sight of ski slopes in the summer will eventually be what many of them look like year-round, given the course of global climate change. So in my personal view, this is a pretty ironic and bleak photo.

6. The photo which normally accompanies this one is of the house I believe these may belong to. It is equally forbodingly bland as this scene. Note the weirdly stern expressions on their faces. It is the equivalent of a "No Trespassing" sign. At the same time I am also reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) brazen bull of Phalaris, which was supposedly used as an entertaining form of execution: the victim was locked inside, and as they were literally cooked by the heat of the sun, their cries and the emerging steam would seemingly bring the sculpture to life.

7. The swirl of duckweed, or possibly also an Harmful Algae Bloom, are contextualized by a sign warning that the wildlife could not be eaten due to PCB contamination (from the former GE factory upstream, not mentioned). A simple image documenting the reality of the disconnection from the simplest, human uses of land and water that we give up with careless, unregulated industrialization. This one, like the one that follows, gets pretty close to the influence of my somewhat recent obsession with Tarkovsky's Stalker (and also Solaris), which I have watched half a dozen times now. Much of the crew on that production were afflicted by and killed by various cancers, possibly from exposure to the toxic conditions of the shooting location. A weird, almost literal resonance with the story-line of the original novel and the film adaptation.

8. Just beautiful abstraction here, really. Unless you consider the thickness of the duckweed, and the slight swirl of a slick, possibly of oil contamination of an HAB, as indications of anthropogenic environmental imbalance. In relation to the photo of the Housatonic, it can easily be read that way.

9. These photos I took of duckweek from below were quite poetic, reminding me of some of the angelic imagery of William Blake. Move toward the light! But it was nice to experiment with abstract botanical compositions in an experimental mode.

10. I can't decide what the mood of this one is. Is it sad? Is there something sinister? Is it merely nostalgic feeling, with its gentle gauziness and distortion? It is clear that all the figures are in the surf at the beach, but are they having fun? The rhyme of the figures in the somewhat iconic towers of the bathhouse at Riis caught me off guard as a bit of punctum. Likewise when I remember that I took this photo on Juneteeth and realized just how many Black and Brown queer people were celebrating it by being here. They were literally embodying the recently recognized federal holiday at a time when the federal government was (is) becoming more and more openly hostile to them.

    A part of me always feels badly about excluding or obscuring people from most of my photos. Even in my "selfies" I am more often than not obscuring my or distorting my face. I don't think its a violent or thoughtless act. It's just indicative of my shyness, or my preference to maintain a respectful distance from people. I do not undertake intimacy lightly. I do think a lot about the appropriateness of titling this one Juneteenth without necessarily fully expressing the Black identity of any of the figures in it. However, I think as part of a broader essay of pictures taken from this day, my respect for any people in the landscape is clear.