$ John Michael Swartz

I think I've often struggled with unconscious (when young) and conscientious (when older, punker, and pretentiouser) outsiderism. There still remains in me an instinct to make things "weird", to resist anything that feels too familiar, easy, or pandering. The tendency has found its way into my music, my pictures, my appearance, even my own self-conception. Its evolved, middle-aged manifestation is rendered with all the same skill and subtlety with which I mask — or sometimes through apathy or exhaustion, refuse to mask — my neurodifference and trauma.

When I do embrace a more common aesthetic, it's usually

• an homage (to artists I truly adore but cannot be)
• a quotation (secretly I am capable of the most disgusting sentimentality)
• ironic (behind which I disguise my most deepest most disgusting capacity for sentimentality)
• a mockery (because I am angry at myself for being disgustingly sentimental)

Here then are a few ugly photos of fairly ordinary things taken with a camera with extraordinarily middling IQ. I'd describe these pictures as being on the verge of falling apart because they lack any traditional subject; they're more like fields of texture without many or any objective anchors (my bike is probably an exception). They're busy and anxious, unbalanced, moody; or lugubriously banal. The light is mostly "meh". If they're "pretty" that's on you (and on me, since I'm looking at them some way too).

I was just thinking about how the process of putting together my work samples for the NYBG photography fellowship last month had me looking over the photos I took with my dearly departed Ricoh GR III. I realized that they didn't resonate with me and actually struck me as quite bad, uninteresting, or uninspired for the most part. One theory is that technical image quality was too good, too "pretty" or polished, to work with my typical aesthetic. Or, considering that I have spent a lot of time and trouble making pictures with a leaky 4x5, the camera was just too easy to use, too casual. Whatever the case, I think the camera had me at odds with myself.

To be clear, I'm not always or even often in this kind of mood. But it's winter in the United States. I just finished reading Werner Herzog's memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. I'm grateful I can muster "ordinary" instead of "vicious".