“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without one.”
— Dorothea Lange

In late 2018, I began to curate found travel photographs taken by strangers, an ambition that continues to send me digging, sometimes for hours, through bins in scrap stores across San Francisco. I take any 3x5 or 4x6 print that sings to me.

The more vernacular photos I collect, the more I realize that we’ve been pointing our cameras at sunsets, pretty flowers and bodies of water as long as there have been cameras. Even in the age of phonetography, almost nothing has changed about the snapshotting of everyday life. As easy as it might be to write off snapshotting as not real photography, even the most tired shot of a mountain captured by an amateur can be absolute majesty if you look at it right.

So far I’ve amassed hundreds of prints, all scanned into groups based on tone, texture and vibe. Now that my collection is digitized, I’ve started an art journaling venture to turn each grouping into a single unique digital painting. It is, quite simply, a humble reimagining of the everyday photograph.

The next phase of my process begins when I drop the pre-grouped photos onto an 11 x 16 digital artboard. I then Iayer them into abstract compositions, often without much of a plan, until the art board is covered. In the next phase, I begin painting, but I never add anything new, no actual digital paintbrush strokes, no new textures. I only rework what exists by layering, deleting pieces, adjusting opacities, relayering rotated layers and smudge-pushing existing pixels. I tend to leave one or two artifacts in tact, partly to ground the scene in reality but also as a callback, or a tattoo, if you will, of the tangible printed pieces.

From these discarded prints of old—images of car headlights abstracted in the night, abstract accidental exposures and shutter-dragged faces, ocean waves, skies, shadows, forest and rock formations— brand new land, sky and seascapes emerge. Along the way, I have become most mesmerized by the ethereal color harmonies and the moods that surface than by anything technical about these digital paintings themselves. Though each scene is specific, all feel connected by a dream-like ghostliness and the muted, warm, unsaturated palettes we remember from the 35mm roll film era gone by. In this sense, what started as photo scavenging has become an exploration of color that is quite meditative, thus offering me a whole new way to understand the value of a photograph and the evolution of that value over time.