This @MeebitsNFTs has been my face here for a long time. It became strangely familiar—as avatars do. But the work and conversations I’m sharing have become more personal, and it feels like time to put my actual face back on the account. Same person. A few more pixels.

A few words on curation that I though might be useful to artists and collectors alike. @TheStevenWarner 's observation about the wingtip in Arrival #39 gets at something I think is important about curation. The wingtip shot is there deliberately. Arrival moves between photographs made from the ground, during ascent and descent, and at cruising altitude. In all of the aerial photographs, I excluded the aircraft entirely. Without a horizon, window frame, wing, or ground, there is very little to tell you where the photographer—or the viewer—is situated. You’re left with clouds, atmosphere and an uncertain sense of scale. #39 is the exception. The small piece of wing locates the viewer. Suddenly you understand that this photograph is being made from inside an aircraft, at altitude, looking outward. The relationship between the viewer and the clouds becomes physical. That distinction was part of the curatorial thinking behind Arrival. The photographs aren't simply organized around what the clouds look like. Where we encounter them matters. Looking up from the ground is fundamentally different from moving through them, or looking across them from 35,000 feet. What I love about Steven’s response is that he didn't need to know any of this. He simply said the wingtip was the detail that pushed him toward this photograph. That's something worth thinking about as artists. Curation isn't only deciding which works are strongest. It's deciding how individual works operate within a larger body of work—where to establish a pattern, where to interrupt it, and how much information to give the viewer. Sometimes the smallest decision carries a surprising amount of weight. ☁️

Dr. Dre and members of N.W.A, circa 1988, at Audio Achievements in Torrance while they were recording Straight Outta Compton. Ice Cube is notably absent. He was studying architectural drafting in Phoenix around this period, though I can't remember whether that was the reason he wasn’t there that day. The group had just returned from a gun shop and began unboxing their purchases in the studio. They asked me to photograph them with the weapons. I was the only photographer there along with doc filmmaker Matty McDaniel. One photograph from the session appeared in The LA Informer, a 3-4 issue 'zine I published with my friend Paul Stewart. The rest remained largely unseen. Years later, the USPS destroyed the negatives while they were being shipped from storage in Miami to New York. Only a few prints and one proof sheet survived. A single copy of the 'zine, replete with typos, is in my personal archives. I’ve been looking at these again this week. What stays with me is how close the whole record of this shoot came to disappearing.

There’s something especially meaningful about seeing a collector follow the work from one body of photographs into another. Doily — @ETC_TET — already holds two works from Evidence, and has now collected Arrival 05. This photograph carries its own history for me. I made it in San Juan during @gmoneyNFT’s Metaverso conference in 2021 — at a moment when so many of us were thinking differently about what photography, collecting, and digital culture could become. Five years later, it has found its way into a collection that already contains another chapter of my work. Very grateful for the continued belief in what I’m making.

Something that comes up again and again in critique: Making a strong photograph and making a strong body of work are two very different things. Sometimes the best photograph is the one that has to come out. A body of work creates its own logic. An image can be extraordinary on its own and still interrupt that logic. Learning to see the difference is one of the hardest parts of editing your own work. ✨📷

What did the camera see that you didn’t? One of the things I love most about photography is that the camera is indiscriminate. It records things we weren’t paying attention to — a gesture at the edge of the frame, a strange alignment, a reflection, someone looking back at us, a detail in the distance. Sometimes that accidental thing becomes the reason the photograph matters. I'll start. In this shot, it was the empty flagpole. Post one of your photographs where you discovered something afterward that you didn’t see when you made it. Tell me what you found.

Two works from Arrival have found collectors since the opening. I’ve also donated Arrival 20, pictured here, to @justinaversano 's Fondazione Aversano, already making a difference in the lives of artists and bringing a new wave of collectors into the community. After twenty years of photographing these skies, it means a great deal to see the work enter other people’s lives—and to contribute to a foundation being built by a fellow photographer. Thank you to the collectors and to Justin.