Shrouds Selected For American Photography 42
Shrouds Selected For American Photography 42
I found out last night that one of my Shrouds images was selected for American Photography 42. I'm still sitting with it, but I wanted to write about it while the feeling is fresh.
American Photography is one of the most competitive juried photography competitions in North America. This is my third time being selected. Getting in once feels like a fluke. Getting in three times starts to feel like something else.
But this one is different from the others. Not because of the competition or the credentials. Because of what the image is.
Shrouds is mine. Entirely mine. No client brief, no creative director, no art department, no production budget worth mentioning. Just me, a length of fabric, and whatever location felt right that day. I spent the better part of 2025 making these photographs, and I'm still making them in 2026. Nobody asked me to. Nobody commissioned them. Nobody told me they were worth making.
That's the thing about personal work. It lives or dies entirely on your own belief in it. And some days that belief is harder to hold than others. Commercial work has external validation built in. Someone hired you, someone approved the images, and someone paid the invoice. Personal work has none of that. You're just out there on the shore of Lake Erie in winter, standing on ice that built up in layers from the water itself, trying to make something that means something.
The project started with Halloween. That seasonal thinness when the membrane between presence and absence gets acknowledged openly. I wanted to photograph that feeling. But it grew into something else. These aren't portraits. There's no face, no identity, no subject to connect with. They're disruptions. Anonymous figures dropped into the comfortable and the everyday, making the familiar briefly strange. Parking lots. Loading docks. Empty bars. Piers.
The work has influences. Beksiński, Tanaka, the chiaroscuro tradition. But those are references, not explanations. The work has to stand on its own, and for most of 2025, I had no idea if it did.
Two rules from the beginning: no white shrouds, which read as costume, and no graveyards, which felt too easy and on the nose. These are not photographs about death. They're about absence. About what remains when the recognizable is removed.
Getting selected for American Photography 42 feels different from other recognition I've received. The James Beard Prize last year was extraordinary, but that was for work made in service of someone else's vision. A client, a story, a brief. This is different. This is my own creative vision, working on its own terms, recognized on its own merits.
That's a different kind of flattering. It's a reminder that the thing driving me forward doesn't always need a client attached to it. Sometimes the work just needs to exist, and sometimes that turns out to be enough.