Two days ago I drove my sister to the airport so she could catch her flight to Puerto Rico, where she’d spend 10 days doing I’m honestly not too sure what. She explained it many times but all I really retained is that she might be “wrangling snakes.” Nothing she said after that felt more important than “wrangling snakes.”
The whole ride there, I could feel the getting-on-a-plane buzz radiating from her skin and into the car and then onto me. It was completely palpable, and strange to experience secondhand.
On the way home, as the late blue hour turned to true night, I thought about the trip I took when I was her age. In 2019, a few days after my 20th birthday, I flew to Iceland and spent a week driving around the country on my own, before staying another week in Reykjavik with a team of interns to collect information for a travel guide.
Although I took no shortage of photos, hardly any of them have made it past my hard drive. I haven’t even talked about the trip all that much. My aversion to sharing anything from this experience puzzled me for a long time. I brought like three cameras. I took hours of video. Thousands of photos. In classic wannabe influencer fashion, I even recorded audio of myself talking that I planned to lay over the video footage in some super epic travel montage film. But as soon as I got back I just couldn’t look at any of it. To this day, the SD card with those audio files remains untouched.
This was the first solo trip I ever took, so maybe it just felt too personal, too mine to share with anyone else. Or maybe I put too much pressure on myself to make this vacation at the start of my 20s something monumental and full of realizations and epiphanies that I could artfully wrap up in a pretty video with epic drone shots and an inspiring monologue. Maybe I spent most of the trip feeling free, but intensely lonely and tired, and it just bums me out too much to revisit that. Maybe all my photos feel stolen from a culture that’s not my own. Who gave me the right to document these rocks, these hills, these people? Maybe I realized it was boring, and no one cares.
Whatever the reason, I never did revisit those images, which is a shame because I spent 80% of my energy while I was there just trying to get the shot. The internet was so saturated with influencers posting their travel selfies and montage videos at this point, that I must’ve thought that’s all travel was. I recorded myself walking and cooking and driving, and I invaded the quiet airspace with my obnoxious drone, and I sat by the abandoned Sólheimasandur plane crash for like 2 hours waiting for an opening with no other tourists so I could get my epic picture in front of the wreckage that’s definitely going to be unique and cool and make everyone on Instagram think “woah, now THAT’S a photograph.”
I did all of it. I put in the work. And it felt so. Embarrassing.
Thankfully my perception of what constitutes good photography has since moved beyond the insufferable era of Instagram travel influencers, and I no longer feel the compulsion to be that person on my vacations.
In January, I began reading Photo No-No’s, an Aperture book edited by Jason Fulford. The premise is described below in the book’s own words, which are much more succinct and complete than any of my attempts for the last 10 minutes have been.
Photographers often have unwritten lists of subjects they tell themselves not to shoot—things that are cliché, exploitative, derivative, sometimes even arbitrary. Photo No-Nos features ideas, stories, and anecdotes from many of the world’s most talented photographers and photography professionals, along with an encyclopedic list of more than a thousand taboo subjects compiled from and with pictures by contributors. Not a strict guide, but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, Photo No-Nos covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility. At a time when societies are reckoning with what and how to communicate through media and who has the right to do so, this book is a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.
Reading this mega list of photo clichés and taboos reminded me of how I felt in Iceland - foregoing what felt right in pursuit of the kinds of images I saw celebrated online. Since finishing the book, I’ve wanted to make my own (non-exhaustive) list of photo no-no’s.
It stands as follows:
drone shots of natural spaces while people are trying to enjoy those natural spaces
brick walls
the bird I buried in my front yard
boudoir
spider webs with dew on them
homeless people/communities
graffiti walls
railroad tracks
body paint
anything where I have to set up a tripod and stand in front of the camera in public
flowers in hair
cloudy days
bananas
the people I cross paths with on a walk
green-blue sky
tennis courts
the card
Card 21, The World, is the last in the sequence of major arcana. It represents a similar kind of detachment and optimism as The Fool, but this time from a place of wisdom and experience, rather than naive hope. The figure has moved through each card’s lesson, and now dances, free and unafraid. They not only balance opposites, such as the masculine and the feminine, but combine them perfectly. Upright, The World represents this union, as well as travel, ultimate achievement and reward, new worlds opening up, closure, completion, spiritual nirvana, reflection, and celebration.
reflections
This project was born in December (November?) from an insatiable itch to write, which was weird because that had never really happened before. “Okay, yeah,” I thought, “photography hasn’t come easily to me lately. I could switch to writing for a bit.” The prospect of a different creative outlet - one without a lifetime of aspiration and 4 years of academic pressure weighing it down - was exciting in a way I thought I’d lost.
I wanted it to be playful, open-ended, experimental. I wanted to see if it could reasonably replace what Instagram had become for me. I wanted it to be a curation of what I was thinking and doing and learning and loving at 22. Because I loved being 22.
I hoped it would be fulfilling. I hoped it would be read, and praised, and shared. I hoped I could make this commitment to myself, and follow through for once.
And it was. And it was, and was, and was. And I did.
And it felt really good. And I think I’ll feel proud of it tomorrow, and for a few tomorrows after that.
Will my presence here replace all the dismal hours spent on Google Chrome > https://www.instagram.com ? No. Not yet, at least. I still feel compelled to engage with that beast of a website. But I remain optimistic that one day Instagram will collapse in on itself, and when it does I will have this, and phone calls, and “come over for dinner so we can catch up” invitations. And maybe without that constant, equal access to every friend we ever made, we’ll all finally stop feeling so hopelessly lonely.
thank you
From my current vantage point at 23 and some days, loneliness is the most crushing problem I’ve faced in my adulthood - which I’m not alone in, ironically. We all just want to be loved. And if not loved, then understood. And if not understood, then respected. Or heard. Or seen. At the very least glimpsed at, for gods sake. But the world is so, so loud right now.
At a young age I learned the subtle art of maintaining eye contact and nodding encouragingly to the person who started talking in a big group and soon became talked over. Having endured that particular brand of embarrassment many times, with no one to prevent me from trailing off and pretending I wasn’t just trying to say something, it became my job in every group conversation to keep that person talking with my I’m-paying-attention-to-you stare and I-care-about-what-you’re-saying nod.
Writing these letters felt similarly quiet. There’s no way they could have truly competed in this circle of millions of loud voices, but a couple tens of people saw my words in their inbox and maintained eye contact and nodded for me to keep going, which made me feel a little less alone.
So, if you’ve been here through these 22 weeks, or if you’re here with me now, thank you for each attentive moment, each second you’ve devoted to getting a glimpse inside my head.
influences
Since I don’t have a specific plan (yet) to continue this newsletter or one like it, I want to leave you with some recommendations for what to consume in the meantime, to fill the massive hole in your inbox I know my absence will create. Some of these were previously mentioned or linked, some new.
The format is as follows: If you liked [this specific newsletter] - you may enjoy [this specific influence upon my writing and art and personhood].
But it’s not like all those other disappointing “if you like ___ then you should try ___” lists, because for most of these, the first “___” is like my off-brand version of the second “___” work of art which I assure you had much more time and effort and thought and money probably thrown at it than my hasty letter did. Upgrades people, upgrades!
0 The Fool - Data Feminism, by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein. Starting this “___ → ___” list off with a reach, but I think about this book all the time and I want everyone to read it at least once and it’s FREE online sooooo…
I The Magician - The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron
II The High Priestess - Circe, by Madeline Miller
III The Empress - Madelyn’s Contemporary Tarot Journal series
IV The Emperor - Song Exploder, or really any interview with an artist about their process.
V The Hierophant - Alexandra Anele’s un-edited, out-loud thought vomits
VI The Lovers - INSIDE, by Bo Burnham
VII The Chariot - Lord Birthday’s fantastically weird lists
VIII Strength - City of God, an incredible movie that I had to include somewhere on this list. Beautiful in its urgent and meticulous explanation of events.
IX The Hermit (the first letter I wrote, and still my favorite) - The Anthropocene Reviewed, by John Green
XII The Hanged Man - Liana Finck, who now has a newsletter
XIII Death - On Photography, by Susan Sontag
XIV Temperance - 78 Degrees of Wisdom, by Rachel Pollack. If you want to get into tarot OR you’re just an art history geek, I highly recommend. It will help you make sense of the cards and artistic symbolism in general.
XV The Devil - My sister, who feeds me an infinite supply of art and media and ideas about that art and media. I cannot really link her, but I’d be happy to introduce you :)
XVI The Tower - Ember’s film account. This is a new find that I can’t claim as an influence for 22, but I do wholeheartedly enjoy. It will influence some future artistic project I’m sure.
XVII The Star - Essays One, by Lydia Davis
XVIII The Moon - Little Weirds, by Jenny Slate (another cheat because I just started reading it a few days ago, so it doesn’t really count as an influence. but it IS wonderful and I highly recommend)
XIX The Sun - SIDEWALK, by Evan Patrick Maloney, who introduced me to this platform and the idea that a newsletter could be more than a self-promotional marketing tactic.
XX Judgement - pop culture historian and, I argue, most entertaining person on the internet, Michael Messineo of Mike’s Mic
XXI The World - Photo No-Nos, edited by Jason Fulford
tarot resources
I also want to leave you with some tarot-specific resources. For those who are intrigued but unfamiliar with these cards I’ve been basing my letters off of, I encourage you to buy yourself a deck! I ordered mine from some sketchy website in 2017 (I think?) and have been practicing with it ever since. Here’s a non-sketchy link to the same one, but I actually recommend starting with the deck if you want to explore tarot.
The most helpful resources for me have been Contemporary Tarot, Ellen Goldberg on Howcast, and (I cannot emphasize this enough!!!) Rachel Pollack’s 78 Degrees of Wisdom.
However, my own biggest piece of advice when it comes to learning and using tarot is that the cards will speak with you on your level. If all you know when you look at the cards is “black feels scary and yellow feels optimistic and I like the look of that little dog”, then that’s all you need to know. If you watched a youtube video explaining the meaning of The Wheel of Fortune that seems to contradict what you read on a different website, know that neither of them are wrong. Take note of how you feel in response to each different explanation, but find comfort in the knowledge that whichever definition feels the most applicable is the one you’re allowed to roll with and act upon.
Other tarot tips I’ve learned:
(see above)
Take pictures of each reading on your phone, and write your interpretation in the notes section of the image. Collect all the photos in a “tarot” album and refer back to them - especially when you get recurring cards. This is wayyyyyy more practical than keeping a physical journal like many people will tell you to do.
Start with 3 card spreads, but don’t be afraid of the Celtic Cross. It’s a classic, so there’s tons of writing on it, and the more you practice with it the more you can mold it to each situation.
Start with small timeframes. Whether I’m asking them to or not, I find my cards usually talk in weeks, at the longest. Usually days though.
When you boil it down, the cards are just another way to get information. I think of them as a language, more than anything. A bridge between the subconscious and the conscious self. When you do a reading, it’s your choice how you want to apply that information to the world.
two last little gifts
The last two gifts I want to shove towards you in a show of fierce appreciation are this playlist of my favorite or most defining songs from January → now, and this premature discount code because I think I might try to organize another print sale soon? If you’ve made it this far with me, use TWENTYTWO if you want a print 30% off. (ya know, when the time comes. I’ll remind you)
Happy Saturday (in spirit),
Don’t be a stranger,
Jordan
I’m going to miss this.