About this project

It all began with an exhibit for Daidō Moriyama, a Japanese photographer and contemporary of Andy Warhol.

I always gravitated toward his imagery. My favorite series of his is a set of B&W polaroids. I’ve always liked street photographers as social commentary on culture. He made a series of magazines, and then got involved in other projects.

Daidō put out little publications, and his were simple and succinct - 12 pages. I tend to be verbose both in words and pictures, so I was inspired by this photographic format.

Places (plas) ushers in a succinctness, while continuously unfolding over time (as new editions release twice per year).

What’s the magazine’s form of expression?

I am more visually oriented in my thinking process, so I didn’t see the need for words much. It’s an entirely visual presentation of the meaning I want to communicate to people.

The word ‘place’ has 52 meanings to it. It’s one of those things that has a wide variety of meaning.

The thing about pictures is that you can juxtapose them, and it creates energy and meaning with that juxtaposition.

The people in the frame behave a certain way.

I like it to be highly digestible, so you get tastes of it. The twice a year. Over time, as the different issues come out, it creates this very elaborate conversation of our culture.

The theme of ‘places’ has inspired much of my canon of photography.

Forcing Nature is really about ‘place’.

Can you take a picture of something that provides the experience of the place, so that people have a sense of what that place is like? That’s always been of interest to me.

We have such a fluid society. There’s a large blending of culture in the West, as well as East.

And so I thought: is there a way to capture a place and its authentic essence in that moment in time?

Places (plas) is about ‘place’, so each place has the qualities of what is recognizable about that. Because of media and the nature of the way we engage with information, the things that distinguish a place both are the part of the place that’s there, and the influence of the broader culture on it.

In the late 70s or early 80s, you go to Kings Road, and everything was made in England. I went there in the 2000s, and everything was made everywhere else now.

The English micro-culture was completely absent.

If you think about it through music, the origins of the sound had to do with people. Now, it’s completely homogenized in a way.

If you think about AI coming and how it’s going to affect all of us, everything is going to be generic. There isn’t going to be anything unique, or original, and that will create a real durth of meaning.

Reflecting ‘actualness’

People are reacting to a place within which they are, and the time at which they’re in this place. At 14-15 years old, you’re learning how to cognitively engage culture.

Culture is important to us because it’s the transmission of knowledge. No one has to understand how to pave a street or build a building; it’s just handed to us.

The thing is: the thing you’re experiencing wasn’t always where you started. There was a whole history and revolution to get it to where it is now.

This glorious representation of progress begins with the development of your cognitive mind around age 15. Everything else before it, you don’t know.

So, how does that look? How do you represent that in a visual format? It’s unusual to be engaged with visual only.

With my magazine Places (plas), my intention is to engage you in a visual exploration of meaning that is not defined by the narrative of text.