ICYMI - Are We Equipped to Have This Conversation?

This post is from October 2024, but the question still lingers: what are we really doing when we make art?

Something feels off in the way we talk about art-making today. Are we even on the same page? What is art for? What’s its function in our lives—especially now? Why do we make it? And can we sit with the hard questions when they come—about meaning, originality, and purpose? Can we actually hear the feedback without flinching?

I keep noticing this trend: artists trying to patch holes in their creative lives by borrowing someone else’s voice, someone else’s vision. Emulating a style or riding the momentum of a movement that already has weight, hoping some of that gravity will rub off.

But that’s not it. That’s not the work.

Curious where you stand with all this. Drop a comment—let’s talk.

When Death Isn’t Just Biology

What are humans afraid of? Death, meaninglessness, loneliness (isolation), and freedom. Ernest Becker and Jean-Paul Sartre made that abundantly clear.

We prefer to act as though death is easy. Vital signs, brain scans, organ failure—we turn it over to the biologists. We say, "This is where life ends," and draw a clear line. In actuality, however, human death does not exist in the sterile realm of checklists and charts. It inhabits the world of stories and symbols.

We are frightened by more than just the body shutting down. It is the breakdown of a life dominated by others. We are held to our flimsy promises of immortality by the cutting of ties. Few people knew this better than Ernest Becker. He observed that we create our morals, our art, and our cultures as defenses against the inevitable death. We try our hardest to hide that terrible reality and to act as though our existence is more than a passing biological fad.

It is possible to declare a body on a ventilator brain-dead. It's done biologically. However, to the living, it can still be a person, a narrative, or a strand in the web we weave to keep the abyss at bay. This is painfully evident from the paper I just read: human death is always relational, moral, legal, and practical. It is more than a simple off/on switch. It marks the end of a "life-form," a life molded by ritual, language, memory, and the vows we make to one another.

There is more than just flesh left over after a death. The tangle of obligations, relationships, and rights that keeps the deceased in our world a little while longer is all that is left. Even if they only endure as long as the memory does, they continue to firmly ground us in our denial and our attempt at symbolic immortality.

The moment when our symbolic world finally breaks and we realize that all of our illusions and buffers can only last so long may be the true threshold that we fear, rather than the boundary between flatline and heartbeat.

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.”
— Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

What do you see holding your fear of death at bay? Do you lean on something? Or are you in a free-fall state of neuroticism? Afraid of both life and death?

Photography Was Born from Death Anxiety

In Flashes of Brilliance, Anika Burgess maps the birth of photography across the 19th century—a strange, luminous era where light first learned how to remember. But underneath the surface of these technical milestones is something deeper: the same existential terror Ernest Becker exposed in The Denial of Death. Photography, from the beginning, was a defense against our disappearance.

The daguerreotype, introduced by Louis Daguerre in 1839, wasn’t just a new technology—it was a cultural event. Suddenly, faces could outlive their flesh. Sitting for a portrait was serious business. You had to be still for minutes, sometimes longer, and the result was a haunted likeness, sealed in silver and glass. It was more than documentation—it was a bid for immortality. Becker might say it was a way to manage death anxiety by creating a symbolic self that could outlast the body.

Before Daguerre, Nicéphore Niépce spent years coaxing ghostly images from bitumen and sunlight. His exposures took days. His results were vague, barely-there impressions—like memory itself. Still, he was trying to do what we all do: leave a trace.

The real turning point came with Frederick Scott Archer’s wet collodion process in 1851. It was faster, sharper, and allowed for duplication. Suddenly, your image could exist in multiple places at once. You didn’t just resist death—you replicated yourself. The carte de visite, popularized shortly after, took this further. You could hand out tiny portraits like tokens of your existence, proof that you’d been here, that you mattered.

And it wasn’t just about faces. Flash powder brought violent light into dark rooms, revealing what the eye couldn’t see. Solar enlargers, early color processes, even underwater photography—all pushed the boundaries of time and space. Burgess notes that many photographers were driven by obsession, risk, even self-destruction. They were intoxicated by the possibility of preservation. Isn’t that what Becker called the “immortality project”? Whether through fame, art, religion, or science—we’re always trying to escape the void.

Photography, in its early years, was dangerous (read Bill Jay’s “Dangers in the Dark”). Mercury, ether, explosive chemicals. But what else would we expect from a practice rooted in anxiety? It was an alchemy fueled by fear and longing. It gave people the illusion of permanence, even as everything around them was vanishing.

Burgess’s book isn’t just a history—it’s a reminder that every photograph is a symptom of our condition. It’s a way to say: I was here. I saw. I mattered.

As someone who works with 19th-century processes today, I feel that tension every time I pour collodion or pull a plate from the fixer. The medium has always been about death. About holding onto something just long enough to believe we’re not already disappearing.

And maybe that’s the brilliance Burgess is talking about. Not just in the chemical spark of silver meeting light—but in the way humans, terrified of their own impermanence, invented a machine to freeze time.

How The Sycamore Gap Tree Stirred Emotions

I read an article from The Conversation yesterday about the felling of a sycamore tree in Britain. It was a tree that stood in a dip along Hadrian’s Wall. I encourage you to read it (link here).

Here are my thoughts.

When the Sycamore Gap tree was felled, people mourned it as if it were a living companion. On the surface, it was just a tree—an old, striking landmark framed by the British landscape. But for so many, it was an emotional anchor, the kind of place our minds use to orient us in the world. Psychology tells us that our brains don’t separate memory, emotion, and place as cleanly as we like to think. They’re tangled together, just like the roots of that sycamore.

Ernest Becker would have recognized the deeper undercurrent here. We’re always looking for ways to transcend our finitude—some symbolic form of permanence that outlasts us. A tree like Sycamore Gap becomes part of a cultural worldview, an immortal marker on our mental maps. When it’s destroyed, it cracks that illusion. People felt disoriented, even betrayed. It wasn’t just the loss of scenery—it was a reminder that nothing is safe from time’s reach.

In my own work, I circle this idea constantly: that our fear of death fuels our attachments, our art, our need for landmarks—literal and symbolic. We pin our anxieties onto places, trees, myths, hoping they’ll hold steady where we can’t. The Sycamore Gap tree stood alone on that ridge for centuries, and for a moment, it made us feel we could stand a little taller, too. Its absence leaves us staring straight at our own impermanence. That, perhaps, is why we grieve it so fiercely.

Facing the End: Heidegger, Modernity, and the Meaning We’ve Lost

We don’t really talk about death anymore—not in any meaningful way. We dress it up in ritual, drown it out with noise, and spin it into spectacle. Somewhere along the way, we stopped treating death as a mirror and started treating it like a mess to be cleaned up. But as Martin Heidegger once argued, our relationship to death isn’t just a philosophical curiosity—it’s the foundation of an authentic life.

In Being and Time, Heidegger introduced a concept that should hit all of us squarely in the gut: Being-towards-death. Unlike animals, humans are aware of their own mortality. We don’t just die—we know we’re going to die. And that knowledge, if we let it in, can radically change the way we live.

But we rarely do. Most of us live in what Heidegger calls “everydayness,” where death is something that happens to other people. We skim the obituary page. We attend the funeral. But we never fully absorb the fact that we’re next. Instead, we flee into distraction, comfort, and consumption.

This is what the author of a recent paper called the “loss of death-to-life reference.” In simpler terms: we’ve lost the thread. Death used to point us back to life, to meaning, to what matters. Now, it’s buried under carnival tents and beer stands at modern funerals, turned into an opportunity to sell trinkets, drown pain, and avoid reflection.

Heidegger believed that to live authentically, we must turn toward our own death—not in morbid fascination, but in honest acknowledgment. He said we should live with death as a “pure possibility,” always present but not yet actualized. It’s not about dwelling on death. It’s about letting it shape the urgency of our days.

And here’s the paradox: when we face death head-on, life sharpens. Viktor Frankl put it well—if we were immortal, nothing would matter. We could postpone everything forever. But because we’re finite, we’re called to act, to love, to create now.

This isn’t a plea for some stoic resignation or heroic denial of grief. Death hurts. The loss of someone we love breaks us. But the pain of death can also become a kind of teacher. It reminds us that life is not just a timeline—it’s a trembling, temporary flame. And the way we treat that flame—our own and others’—reveals everything about who we are.

There’s nothing inherently meaningful about death. But the awareness of it? That’s different. Death awareness can crack open the shell of ego and force us to ask the questions we spend our lives trying to avoid. What matters? What lasts? What have I been avoiding because I thought I had time?

Modern culture isn’t designed to help us answer those questions. It’s designed to numb them. That’s why reclaiming the existential weight of death is not just personal—it’s cultural. It’s spiritual. It’s ethical.

So here’s the real question: What would your life look like if you lived it with the constant awareness that it’s going to end?

Not someday.
Not in theory.
But for real.
Sooner than you think.

That’s not meant to depress you. It’s meant to wake you up.

Vivian Maier: The Invisible Immortality Project

Vivian Maier haunts the world in a way few artists ever do. Not because she wanted to. In fact, that’s the point. She made over 150,000 photographs, worked as a nanny, and died in obscurity—her work completely unknown during her lifetime. And yet now, years after her death, we can’t stop looking at her. Why?

From the perspective of Ernest Becker and Otto Rank, Maier is an uncanny case study in what it means to be a creative person in denial of death. She embodies a paradox: someone who compulsively created but refused to participate in the cultural systems that validate creativity. In Becker’s terms, Maier built a symbolic immortality project, but she never shared it with the world. She didn’t seek fame, gallery shows, or legacy in the traditional sense. She made art to survive herself, not to be seen. That distinction matters.

Becker argued that the artist is a kind of hero, one who tries to transcend death not through religion or conquest but by leaving a trace—something permanent to outlast their decay. Rank goes further. He believed the neurotic and the artist share a similar wound: both are overwhelmed by the tension between their unique self and the larger collective, but only the artist transforms that tension into something creative. Maier lived in that tension. She worked with children by day, photographing strangers on the street whenever she could, secretly building a vast archive of fleeting moments. Her creativity didn’t soothe her into comfort. It seems to have functioned more like a compulsion, a psychological necessity.

This is where Maier’s story complicates the myth of the artist as someone who seeks recognition. She didn’t. Or if she did, she sabotaged it. What we see in her life is a kind of sublimation stripped of ego. She pushed her death anxiety into the shutter of the camera, each frame a tiny act of resistance against oblivion. But she also refused to play the game of symbolic validation. She hid her work. She died poor. She left behind no written statement, no plan, no plea for remembrance.

Yet there’s something deeply Beckerian about this. Becker wrote that most of us are unaware of our symbolic projects. We act them out blindly, hoping to find meaning in work, love, belief. Maier acted out her project through the lens. She created meaning privately, obsessively, even pathologically. She wasn’t trying to become immortal in the public sense—she was trying to stabilize the terror that lived inside her. And like many creatives, she probably didn’t have the language for what she was doing. That’s what makes her story both tragic and profound.

Maier forces us to ask uncomfortable questions. Can an artist fulfill their existential need without an audience? Is creation enough? Or does the work only matter when it’s witnessed? Becker might say that we need others to validate our symbolic efforts, to make our immortality project feel real. But Rank would remind us that the artist’s task is ultimately internal. The creation itself, not the applause, is the therapy.

We don’t know what demons drove Maier. We don’t know if she ever wanted to be found. But we do know that she couldn’t stop creating. And in that compulsive act of meaning-making, she fits perfectly into Becker and Rank’s vision of the artist: not as someone seeking fame, but as someone trying to outrun the abyss one photograph at a time.

We Will Be Forgotten

We Die. Then We’re Forgotten.

We all know life ends. That’s not the surprise. The harder part is this: not only do we die, but we’re eventually forgotten. Completely. That fact sits at the edge of consciousness—rarely invited in, but always looming.

A year ago, I saw this video about Danish photographer Balder Olrik. It just resurfaced in my YouTube feed. An artist, going through a health crisis, came face-to-face with his mortality. It shook him. He realized, maybe for the first time, that he’s going to die. And not just die, but vanish from memory. No legacy. No monument. Just absence.

It hit me because I see this all the time: artists wrestling with death anxiety without having the language to name it. They circle around it, feeling it, expressing it, but never quite framing it. This is exactly the moment where Ernest Becker’s work becomes powerful. If I could talk to this guy, I’d walk him through Becker’s ideas—the tension between our symbolic hunger and our fragile biology. I think it would land. I think it would help.

What’s most interesting is this: in the midst of his anxiety, he’s creating. That’s the paradox. He’s using the very thing that can help him confront death—artmaking—without realizing it. Creativity isn’t a cure, but it is a confrontation. It’s a way to say: I know I’m going to die… but here’s what I made while I was here.

Spend 16 minutes and watch it. You won’t regret it.

To Create in the Face of Death

A Meditation on Mortality, Meaning, and the Artistic Act

At the core of human consciousness lies a paradox: we are aware that we exist and equally aware that we will one day cease to exist. This double-edged awareness is both a burden and a gift. It is the birthplace of anxiety and the wellspring of creativity. My thesis is simple but profound: creativity is not incidental to the human experience; it is central to how we survive the knowledge of our mortality. It is one of the rare, conscious ways we meet death without flinching.

Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, called death anxiety the mainspring of human activity. Not hunger, not sex, not pleasure—death. He argued that most of our efforts, from religion to empire-building, from parenting to political ideologies, are aimed at avoiding the terror that comes with knowing we are finite. In his words, culture itself is a symbolic hero system; an elaborate fiction we participate in to assure ourselves that we matter, that we’re part of something that will outlast the grave. This is not cynical. It’s survival.

But what happens when those cultural buffers begin to crack? When the illusions no longer satisfy? That’s where the artist enters.

Otto Rank, Becker’s intellectual predecessor, understood the artist as a kind of existential outlier; someone too conscious, too aware of their mortality, to be comforted by the collective dream. The artist sees the façade and cannot pretend. And yet, instead of succumbing to despair, the artist creates. In this act, Rank saw a profound psychological maneuver: the transformation of death anxiety into symbolic immortality. The artist, like the religious mystic or the philosopher, attempts to overcome finitude by leaving something behind—something that might outlive them, even if only briefly.

Peter Wessel Zapffe took a darker view. In The Last Messiah, he described human consciousness as an evolutionary mistake, a tragic overdevelopment that left us painfully self-aware in a universe that offers no consolation. He identified four strategies humans use to cope with this unbearable knowledge: isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation. Of these, sublimation is the rarest and most noble. It’s the attempt to elevate existential terror into art, philosophy, or creative work. Most people are too defended or distracted to attempt it. But for those who do—those willing to turn their dread into creation; it becomes a kind of redemptive act.

This is the psychological and philosophical framework behind my creative life—and the central inquiry of my research. How do artists, more than other people, confront mortality? Not just theoretically, but viscerally? Through the body, through the page, through the image? And what does it do to us—to know we’re going to die, and to keep making anyway?

Terror Management Theory (TMT), the contemporary psychological extension of Becker’s ideas, has provided experimental evidence for what artists have known intuitively all along: the awareness of death shapes human behavior in profound and often unconscious ways. When reminded of our mortality—even subtly—people cling more tightly to their belief systems, punish outsiders more harshly, and behave more defensively. Creativity, however, seems to offer a unique alternative. It allows for symbolic transcendence without necessarily reinforcing harmful dogmas or cultural divisions. It becomes an individual act of meaning-making that doesn’t rely on collective delusion.

But make no mistake: it’s not easy. Artists don’t escape anxiety; we absorb it. We live with it. Sometimes we drown in it. The difference is that we try to give it form. We drag it into the light. We say, “Here it is—this is what I see, this is what I feel. Can you see it too?” This gesture, however small, pushes back against the void. Not to defeat it, but to acknowledge it. To bear witness.

I often think of the creative act as a kind of elegy-in-advance. It grieves for the world even as it tries to celebrate it. It knows everything we love will pass, and chooses to love anyway. That is not nihilism, it’s courage. It’s honesty. And in a culture increasingly built on distraction and denial, it might be one of the most honest things we can do.

To create with the knowledge of death is to resist erasure. It is to offer something of yourself to the world, not as a bid for fame, but as a human gesture of presence. “I was here,” the work says. “I felt this. I saw this. I made this.” Whether anyone remembers doesn’t matter as much as the fact that it was made.

In that sense, creativity is not just about self-expression. It is a form of existential participation. A refusal to go quietly. A conversation with the inevitable. And for those of us who walk that path—painfully awake to what others work hard to forget—it becomes both a burden and a blessing.

Because when we confront death directly, not through distraction but through creation, we don’t just make better art. We live more consciously. We love more fiercely. We speak more truthfully. And sometimes, if we’re lucky, we help someone else do the same.

Death is not the enemy of creativity; it’s its hidden muse. It provokes, sharpens, and transforms. It teaches artists to perceive, to surrender, and to express the indescribable. And when seen clearly, death doesn’t end meaning—it births it. That’s what this work is for.

Quinn, Are You a Materialist?

It’s a fair question. Am I a materialist?

The short answer is: not entirely. Let me explain.

What is materialism?

Materialism is the philosophical belief that everything that exists is made of matter or is dependent on matter. In its strictest form, materialism holds that all phenomena, including thought, emotion, consciousness, and meaning, can ultimately be explained by physical processes.

In a broader cultural sense, materialism also refers to a preoccupation with possessions, wealth, and physical comfort—placing value in what can be bought, owned, or consumed.

Artists have always had an uneasy relationship with materialism. On the surface, we traffic in matter like paint, paper, words, chemicals, and light. But the real work is elsewhere: summoning the invisible from the visible. Artists extract significance from the emptiness of space. That’s what intrigues me.

Ernest Becker argued that artists reject the dominant immortality projects; money, power, even reason itself, and try to build their own. Not through denial, but through confrontation. That’s the artist’s burden: to create meaning in a world that offers none by default. I think of Camus and Sarte, absurdism and freedom.

Terror Management Theory reinforces this. It shows that creativity can buffer death anxiety, not by distracting us, but by engaging us. Artists externalize their fears, longings, and losses into form. The canvas, the print, the poem, they become stand-ins for the self, for the soul (if you will), for something that might outlast the body. But unlike materialists who seek legacy in status or statistics, the artist chases authenticity, not applause. Depth, not utility.

In that sense, art is rebellion. It refuses to reduce human life to atoms and algorithms. It insists there’s more. Not in a supernatural sense, but in a felt one. A self-made meaning. A soulful trace.

That’s why the existential artist is dangerous in a materialist culture. We don’t offer escape. We offer exposure. We remind people that they can’t reason or spend their way out of death. They have to face it. Feel it. Maybe even make something out of it.

My (Remote) Talk in Barcelona Next Month

I was recently invited to present at the Experimental Photography Festival in Barcelona, happening July 23, 2025, at 0930-1100 MST. I could’ve made the trip, but between life and preparing for the PhD program, it felt right to keep things simple—so I saved them the travel cost and opted to present remotely.

The talk is called Glass, Light, and Time: A Journey Through the Wet Plate Process. I’ll be sharing not only the history of wet collodion, but also some thoughts on why humans have always felt compelled to create—and what that means in the context of this process. For me, wet plate photography has never just been about chemistry and technique. It’s about memory, presence, and mortality. A kind of ritual with light and time.

Too often, I see people (especially photographers) get caught up in gear, technique, and all the noise that passes for creativity. It’s easy to confuse mastery of a process with having something real to say. But the truth is, none of that matters if the work isn’t coming from an authentic place.

I want to encourage people—especially those struggling with doubt—to make something anyway. Express yourself. It’s essential. Not for fame, not for likes, not even for “success”—but for your own psychological health. Most people are afraid they won’t be good enough. They worry they can’t compete, or that someone will criticize their work. Here’s the truth: no one’s really paying that much attention. You are your own audience. And your inner life, your sense of balance and wholeness—that’s what’s on the line.

So make your work. Let it matter to you. That’s enough.

I encourage you to visit their site, and if you can, attend. It’s a lot like Revela't which I was involved with for many years. I look forward to the presentation and the feedback and questions.