A large majority of them were lifestyle shots for DNO.

When that work ended, the volume of portraits I made dipped quite a bit.

The uniqueness of that work was that I never actually worked with professional models. It was an odd assortment of friends of the brand, artists, and aspiring models. It often came with its own challenges in that way, as anyone who has worked with professional models knows how talented they are, and how much they help the shoot along.

But here’s the thing: I wouldn’t have had it any other way. It taught me how to photograph people in my own way, to capture their essence slowly and naturally — and without the poses and gimmicks and tips and tricks of the wedding world or conventional family portraiture.

Below I’m sharing a sample of some portraits I’ve made this year.

Artist portraits for Rose Vaughan

Business retreat portraiture for Young Jerks

Music video BTS for Juno Dunes

Reader,

What’s in your Notes app? Or do you use other tools to record the passing days? I use the Notes app for lists and lyrics, but Notion is where I store most other things. Occasionally, that visceral need to put pen to paper resurfaces and I break out a notebook.

In Notion I keep a digital notepad of passing thoughts; the most ordinary of revelations that sweep through my mind, seemingly at random. Years back I titled this now-longest-of-pages ‘Temp notepad’, which I assume isolates it in my mind from more permanent and categorical notes. In so doing I created a home for my freedom to jot — anecdotes, inspirations, opinions, narratives, philosophies. It is, in fact, the garden where much of Miscellanea is mulched and matured.

Notes prevail in their tendency to pressure meaning from that which would otherwise be fleeting and unconsummated, which bears some profundity in our contemporary present, in which many potential meanings are subject to the frictionless damning of posts into the digital ether, the scroll, the swipe.

Below I share a few of these ‘temporary’ notes which, vaguely speaking, concern our humanity, “sacred and terrible,” and stem from, as Marilynne Robinson puts it too, “the continuously variable inward weather in which we live from birth to death.”

On acceptance and self-deprecation

Friends and family: I want to remember you as you were; not as you wished to be. For all your longing reminds me of my own, the silted scratching of disrespect — the grim analyses we reserve for our selves.

On drinking with family

The way you gotta liquor yourself up to be with the ones you love, not because you’re uncomfortable with them so much as you’re uncomfortable with yourself, and so you drink yourself to be yourself to be true around your family. Everyone doing the same as you, not exactly drunks, but earnest-loving-family downing the ego.

On social media

A bunch of show-offs... How can we ever love each other well if we’re all always being presented with fragments of projections of ourselves, constantly fed the false selves we want each other to see?

On ghosting

I guess it’s just become acceptable now to completely ignore people; to completely shirk the responsibility of correspondence; to wholly ignore our humanity — instead becoming ghosts gone ghosting. We are all translucent, ready to be painlessly trampled over, ran through.

On writing about fatherhood

I don’t know how to write about fatherhood. So much of what’s happening to me is just flying over my head, a thousand birds that never land — and I never learn how to fly. Flightless I father her, and without a wing to wave, I write of anything but.

Perhaps I need a quill or two that I might be less ‘in over my head’, more weight-less and roaming the skies for what escapes me. If I were up there maybe I could grab on to an idea, some feathery scrap of insight or revelation.

Perhaps too though, a flightless and grounded fathering is Fathering in deed. With the weight of gravity comes weight indeed: expectation, responsibility, sacrifice, work, love.

Links

📚 Looking for something to read? I’ve read 32 books this year — see them all in the Miscellanea Bookshop.

🎵 I recently went to a vinyl swap at my friends’ brewery. In addition to somehow ending up with Frank Ocean’s Blond, I went home with Courtney Barnett’s End of the Day, which is an instrumental soundtrack to her documentary, ‘Anonymous Club’. Great ambient guitar vibes while you read or do chores or whatever.

🤷🏻‍♂️ In the Who Cares Era…

💙 Bring Back Sincerity

👍 One cool way to care: Good Conversation is Not Small, It’s Specific

“It is better to say ‘I am suffering’ than to say ‘This landscape is ugly.’”

Simone Weil

“After a lifetime of blaming others, it is exceedingly difficult for us to finally acknowledge that the only person who has consistently been in all the scenes of that long-running soap opera we call our life is us, and, as a necessary corollary, that we bear some large responsibility for how the drama is turning out.”

James Hollis

“A person of love is also a destroyer. This is absolutely the essence of the universe.”

Haku Zynkyoku

Last week I announced that I was giving away a copy of Wildsam’s Gulf Coast guidebook. I’ll soon be hand-delivering the guidebook to the winners, my friends Kara and Ben, long time readers and worthy recipients whom I know will make the most of all it has to offer. Stay tuned for more giveaways in the future.

This week I’m giving away a copy of Wildsam’s Gulf Coast Guide. I’ve loved Wildsam’s Field Guides since their inception — concise and artful, they glean the best of cities and regions, packaging it honorably in pocket sized booklets. Take it from them:

Inside Wildsam Gulf Coast, you'll find stories from prize-winning writers, past and present; a detailed road trip plan and profiles of 10 idyllic towns; interviews with historians, mermaid performers, fishing guides and photographers; delightful miscellany from the archives, selective recommendations about authentic Gulf Coast experiences and a deep dive into the work, culture and recipes revolving around seafood.

More information about how you can win your own Wildsam Gulf Coast Guide Book at the end of this newsletter.

Last Fourth of July, we gathered in the backyard to shoot at beer cans with a BB gun that my sister Callie wound up with at our family’s ‘White Elephant’ — one of those very unserious holiday gift exchanges inherited when all the cousins grow up, and the actual investment of real gifts feels too vulnerable.

When we brought home the gun, I’d guess it was to be stashed in a closet or the pantry and then duly forgotten. We didn’t grow up with guns around; I’ve never even been hunting. My experience with guns is basically limited to a variety of boyhood airsoft and paintball outings that I wasn’t particularly inclined to anyway. So it was kind of funny – in an ironic way – that we were doing this at all: outside and shirtless, shooting a BB gun in a context and manner that implied the ease of something handed down.

This Fourth of July we brought out the gun again, partly because I thought it seemed like a quirky and enjoyable tradition. It’s funny the way that something new can feel like it never was so.

So we emptied beers into the bellies upon which we laid like snipers, each of us (read: just me) coveting the unspoken and annual prize of Best-Bad-Shoota-on-Bayou-Chinchuba. To my absolute pride and pleasure, I was able to match the lore of my sister Grace who, sharpshooter she is, once shot a brewski right out the air.

Afterwards, my dad made a Facebook post, picturing me and Grace “Preparing to defend our small piece of the USA,” which I thought amusing, because my parents live in a gated subdivision in the suburbs.

I clicked on the picture of me, eyeing my thinning crown of colorless hair, when my eyes drifted rightward across the screen and I saw it: a comment deriding my less-than-impeccable form.

“need to lower that right elbow and then it will at least look like you have shot a gun before!!” Thanks, Lynn. Thank you very much.

Lynn’s stand-up aside, Now, trailing my quest to manufacture tradition, buzzed this feeling of familiar fragility — like it was all a performance, or worse, a stand-in for the sensitivities of natural-born customs and quality time.

Our gun, the little white elephant in the room, returned to its corner assuming the posture I wish I’d known sooner, straight-spined and resolute, unafraid and harmless.

Here are some photos from July 4, 2025. Please now imagine and immerse yourself in the soundtrack of our target practice: Bad Bunny, American citizen.

Inside Miscellanea

• Last week: What is Miscellanea?

• Next week: Do you have a place where you jot down notes, random revelations and throwaway thoughts? I’ve got the Notes app, Notion docs, real journals, etc. — they all house these things for me. Despite the disorganized nature of it, the chaos has a way of producing a unity of its own.

Win a Wildsam Gulf Coast Guide

Enter to win through Wednesday — here’s how:

• 1 entry: Like this post

• 2 entries: Comment on this post

• 5 entries: Become a paying subscriber to Miscellanea

I’ll send the winner a message on Wednesday! And then send off the Guide Book, announcing our winner in next week’s newsletter.

Subscribe now

• A long-form re-introduction to myself and (mainly) this newsletter

• Setting expectations for future issues and their contents

• Everything I’ve read in 2025

• Opportunities to financially support this thing

I think it may be time for a brief reintroduction around these parts, as Miscellanea has seen some modest growth since I last spoke with y’all directly. Substack, too, has grown quite a bit.

My name is Michael. I’m a photographer newly embedded in parenthood with my wife — our daughter’s name is Hallie. We’re from Louisiana and we live in New Orleans, a place as special as it is dysfunctional.

I started writing Miscellanea in 2017 as a way to share what was on my mind and other things I was enjoying. It has evolved over the years; it has always been a bit erratic in its delivery.

I write mainly about the mood of Care, what it means to ask questions and live earnestly, which means I comment upon fairly normal and ubiquitous things, like social media and phone addiction or family and friends.

But as a photographer who likes to write, I also muse on the practice of art, which feels to me a blatantly spiritual path. Naturally, photo essays make their way into the mix.

In the words of Montaigne, “Bees ransack flowers here and there, but then they make their own honey, which is entirely theirs and no longer thyme or marjoram.”

This is the essence, and the heart, of Miscellanea. In a world devoted to niches, Miscellanea is purposefully wide-ranging and curious. If there is a focus it is this: I am intent in my devotion to the thoughtful pause, the bee hovering, just above the petals, pre-indulgent and satisfied in searching.

I believe that the nature of life is transformative, and all of our varying interests and creative works inform our experience of growth and change. Miscellanea is a distillation of these interactions.

When we allow ourselves to be inspired by not just our proximities but their constellations as well, we begin to see a bigger picture. Our world widens. Miraculously then, our trinkets and our totems gain an equity of spirit. It’s the little things. It’s the big things. Everything collides.

As a photographer, I deal in abstraction and paradox — with what seems apparent and what actually is.

As I show up in your inbox or feed or wherever, I ask that you grant me these moments to share this perspective: of everyday beauty, of silver linings, and of that which glitters but is not gold.

Thank you for being here.

What’s to come

I hope to build a rhythm here that you can come to rely on. Everything should fall into these categories:

1. Prose and photo essays

2. Artist profiles and interviews

3. Reading life and book talk*

4. Scraps and thoughts and inspiration, leaving a little room for experimentation with format and content

5. The occasional recommendation(s)

*You might notice this as a natural extension of this space, but you also might recall that I’ve never truly written about reading or books. This is true. But my reading life has grown exponentially this year and is now virtually inseparable from everything I think about and write about.

Bookshop.org is still hosting their anti-prime sale till the end of the day. You can visit the newly opened Miscellanea Book Shop here, and expect me to talk about this more in the future. It’s basically just an affiliate account (if you buy books through my link, I earn a percentage), but truly, every bit helps. Until I build out more lists and make specific recommendations, I’ll keep it simple:

Everything I read in 2025

How you can support Miscellanea

Until I can maintain a consistent schedule here, I will hold off on seriously pushing subscriptions.

But if you feel so inclined, I’ll offer a discounted subscription over the course of the summer — many of you have been subscribers for years, even some nearing a decade. Your support, of course, would mean the most.

Get 20% off for 1 year

Better than that, however, you can always share this newsletter with a friend. Sharing is caring. This probably isn’t the issue you’d want to share, so here are a few others that y’all seemed to vibe with:

Share Miscellanea

This has been my long-winded way to recalibrate around these parts. Thanks for sticking around. I’ll be back soon with words less administrative. Photos, too!

A NOTE FROM M.G.

I’ve been meaning to share more, to write more, to post more. But all too often I come up against myself; call it imposter syndrome or something more mechanical, less melodramatic — nonetheless it stops me in my tracks every time I’m on this dot com. In an effort to shake that misguidance, today I’m sharing a passage right out of my own personal journal, from over four years ago, edited for clarity and brevity. It’s about embracing others as they are — so that we might learn to love and accept ourselves more fully. I’ve paired these words with some photos from Father’s Day (my first as a father myself).

Remember them now how you’ll remember them later. In our finite lives, we spend far more time complaining about the many inconsequential faults of others; the kind of thing that we write off as a personality quirk in a eulogy.

For now, we put them on blast in our private conversations — but in the days to come, when they’re no longer here for us to enjoy their presence — we will see these quirks as uniquely them.

I think without knowing it explicitly, much of why we love our friends, and especially our families, is because of their faults — for their faults embody their personhood and highlight how we love them despite them.

When we learn the things we don’t like about our peers, we settle into a space of growth. If someone stays in your life, it means that you have decided that you can accept some things you don’t like about them, and that they transcend those issues for you; that they are not just more than their faults, but an amalgamation of their better and lesser attributes. We are not settling – we are growing and empathizing.

Who we choose to grow with, and thereby accept the faults of, says much about who we are and are choosing to become.

It is exactly the faults we see through in others that we learn to forgive in ourselves. Furthermore, if we wish to be forgiving of ourselves, it may be fitting that we seek out in our lives the troublemakers and personalities that awake in us these specific discomforts. The way out is through.

We become our forgiveness – our grace is what shapes our future self.

Grace, I feel, is a curling and wavelike motion that crashes and builds on itself. The tension that washes away our fear through confrontation and fruitful deliverance.

We cannot transcend our current and present selves without the waves of grace that we extend to ourselves and others.

Moving past the self, however, I go back to my original thought, which had much more to do with how we treat others in the immediate and short-term. Some of what I come up against in my day-to-day is frustration with the people I am doing life with. I know, for me, it is important to reframe how I experience this frustration by thinking of these individuals how I might if they were to suddenly die.

So much of my frustration must be born of placing an infinite condition on a finite life. I have to learn to see the insignificance of my frustration in light of your significant existence.

February 1, 2021

There’s something here to be said for change and integration. I can see myself now as the person who both wrote these words four years ago, and the person whom after becoming more a person who can live these words, then took these photos.

Me and my people, like you and yours, are imperfect. And I’m sure at least somewhat to their chagrin, I prefer to see them that way — to make photos of them that way.

What lies so damn prominently in the word ‘imperfect’ however, is the word ‘perfect’. By comparison to a gratuitous, heavenly standard you win my heart of hearts. You are im-pishly perfect, you are ours, you are annoying, and I love you.

I hope you’ll read this short essay I wrote for you. I reserve an indeterminate amount of time for reflections such as this, and I do not want that time to be spent in vain. I believe in words and I believe in reading and I think we have an opportunity to participate in something special together if you spend the time with me here. Thank you for subscribing to Miscellanea, which perhaps should be named something else entirely. Well — not ‘Something Else Entirely’ — though that’s not the worst name I can think of. My point is that the trajectory and meaning and purpose of this newsletter is becoming more clear to me and that maybe the name should reflect that? I don’t know: Miscellanea is so conveniently catch-all. Eh. I’ll let you read the essay now.

Filler-lipped heart-pursed airpod-girl, turning to her side for candid smart phone selfies out front the coffee shop. The hotshot passing points at her Jordans and lends his approval — I can’t hear him through the window, but I can hear him through the window: Low booming voice lowered more to meet the injections where they’re at. He is gone now, and she sticks out her leg, looking down to recall which kicks she wore today.

Now arriving, the face of an actor in a role you don’t trust. In a black Adidas track jacket and with two opalescent orange-immune-juice-booster-shooters, he sits down next to her. In a gesture of health and prosperity he shakes and shoots his own, the exhaust of innumerable shots he’s shot before, a quick and fluid arc, up and back down: a fountain of tangerine youth, sprayed, splayed, and swallowed.

She’s laughing at him now; a forced smile. Yet soon the artifice wears away like the big hole in her blue jeans and both their bodies relax. Faces more human emerge and they sip on their take away coffees — the status symbol and grounding force that they are: Places to go, people to see.

Myself not immune from said superficialities, I wonder of these rituals and the posturing that accompanies them. It seems to me that we all want to be seen. But it seems to me, too, that we don’t want to be seen: a selfie we project unawareness that we’re taking, we want the document of ourselves.

I’ve been pondering lately the role of individualism, questioning it and turning it over in my hands. Does it act more to help us or to hurt us? And therein lies another answer: us. If you are to think and question in terms of a people, more than a person — if you are concerned at all with some collective or community, you must admit to yourself that individualism does not concern itself whatsoever with the group, the larger ‘us’.

The ever-present mirror of our front-facing cameras are a symptom of a larger idea, of course, that we should be taking the time to document ourselves. There are only so many people that can fit in an image created at an arms-length from a face; solipsism is baked into the design of the lens.

Have you ever taken a group selfie in this way, stretching your arm out as if an arm can actually stretch? Even at its greatest distance, yourself the largest subject? Friends and family are strewn across the background, smaller and smaller still.

I’d be the last to discount the rare and true benefit of insular activities; of contemplation of the self. But still it must be said that it is altogether lacking.

Which brings us back, finally, to the role of this camera and the selfies it generates. Their end-use being, of course, a post or a story or a message for others. For even in wanting the document of ourselves, and even in the posturing we perform for the camera, we do long more for the ‘document’ to be seen by others. This, to me, is an unusual and redeeming aspect of the front-facing lens: its propensity to ultimately facilitate contact, its blatant hope for connection.

Can we begin to see beyond the binaries we impose on the things of our lives? There’s a favorite social-media-show (?) of mine called SubwayTakes, in which the host, , asks the takes of his guests and responds with his assertion: 100% agree or 100% disagree, which is funny and acts as a segue to a larger conversation about said take. It’s a delightfully modern – and in my view beautiful – way to start conversations both trivial and consequential.

May we begin to see that thinking is not static, that contact makes it fluid, and that we, a collective, are more than the sum of our ideas and conflicts. May the artifice wear away, may our bodies relax, and may we create community.

Rebecca Solnit writes early in her book on the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster:

“… just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, […] we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.”

REBECCA SOLNIT, A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL

I love this concept of a noble default setting in community — as she notedly remarks it is within ‘us’, which I take to be not us as individuals, but us as a group of people together. It is this exact utopian togetherness that is so vital to remember, in our minds and our bodies, when we set out to affect the world in all of our miniature ways, to have conversations that move the needle and not the goalposts, and to foster some sense of communal likeness.

In the midst of all our places to go and people to see, and maybe in holding to these hopeful ideals, we can begin to gain some ground on the hustle of it all and find a layer deeper then — a plane on which we are more alike than dissimilar and a world in which our differences are minute and less consequential than we’d believed: a beautiful, expansive, communal plane of existence that we usually reserve for our guest lists and media bubbles. A life liberated as an open invite, an optimist’s knife to our pervasive babbling.

I hope you’ll allow me to ponder here; let’s go over some quick and incomplete thoughts, that is to say Questions. Questions being the meat of Miscellanea, mayhaps.

Without getting too insular here, let’s talk again about social media and its ways and its means.

There is a proliferation of content, here on Substack and in newsletters abounding, about leaving the confines of Musk, Meta, etcetera. But while all is fair in love and war, it’s sort of become the locker-room-talk of this town.

To be perfectly clear, this post does not intend to reduce the very fair criticisms of said platforms and their discriminatory algorithms and flavor-of-the-day ethics.

I only intend to impose a questioning I’ve been turning over in my own hands, diddling its stress through my knuckles, and outward now to the heavens of the forever-net.

What if the good outweighs the bad, for me? What if these millions of tiny connections do hold something fundamental together? What if – the reduced friction and the gofundme of it all – it is forming in the public an alliance? What if, after all, we do come together, in spite of the red and the blue and the power plays and the absolute reluctance to censor what ought to be censored? What about subversion, from within?

Could the tech monopolies, in seeking to disrupt, have given us just the tools and strategies to disrupt right back?

Just a question or two or five. Not counting.

At the end of the day, I think we’re all a little tired of it all. And that’s more than valid, and probably actually baked into the design. Again — I do not spray doubt on the skeptics or the mourners or the exodus. But I do believe that most of us stick around for more than just the dopamine hit. I think we do find value here, Actual Connection, though subdued since social’s inception.

These are the things I’m thinking about.

And aside from the philosophical and the partisan (that perhaps cannot be separated anyway), what of the brilliant information systems and community resources we’ve come to know and appreciate — that thrive and exist sometimes exclusively through big-bad-tech’s social empire?

I do not write to dissuade an exodus or the building of our own ecosystems, of course. By all means, go your own way. We love you for it.

I write this here today because if not for the internet, my thoughts might be left to my own devices — and something great about being here™ is that decent Questions might spread far and wide.

Here is to hoping.

Leave a comment

For the first time in my life, I listened to For Emma, Forever Ago in its natural habitat. The pleasure was mine.

A plethora of possibilities before me, I set out to trudge through the snowy white and capture the singularity of it all. This is New Orleans, after all. No one’d being pouring a little salt (we were never here).

Walking down Octavia to the squeak of fresh snow and blissfully unaware of potholes below me, I watched palm fronds hold the white powder as naturally they do the sunshine — curious if they too had been dreaming.

The main thoroughfares were muddy — a browned banana of pavement, peeled and half-eaten. Thanks truck boys and other waymakers.

As the sun shone down on major-snow-day-two, I set out with only film in tow (pictures to come at a later date). I wandered back to Frostop for a second time and ran into a friend who’d seen my story from the day before. I wove back through the alley behind our home and cut up Fontainebleau and then Broad. A once daily drive was now covered in blinding blueish whites and silent as I’d ever seen it. The occasional sedan screwed into some flaky, frozen pile and stranded in the meantime. Our snowy pause.

Enjoy these photos from day one, the day it all came down. A full work day’s worth of snow in New Orleans, Louisiana. Snuck in a couple from the day after here too!

In keeping to that, today I’m sharing some recent film favorites. I’ve shared most of them on Instagram, but I realized that it’s likely that many of you have not seen them there.

I value your attention here more than there, and it’s due time I start acting that way. It’s my opinion that the purest days of social media are over, and that that’s a good thing. The best parts of those days were the genuine connections made and followed through on, in-person. Connections that I still have to this day! And while that still occasionally happens, it’s on a smaller scale and moderated by algorithmic pressures. The circles of possibility have shrunk considerably.

So we have an opportunity now to get back to something even better and more true: connections that exist in a more analog world (I’m lumping the humble email into this category now).

This is your reminder then, in earnest and for posterity, to participate — reply to this email, or comment on the Substack post if that’s your thing. I genuinely look forward to hearing from you, and even more so if you’ve followed me or my work for some time. I know your names and it makes me happy to see them pop up when and where they do!

As always, thanks for being here. Thank you for subscribing to Miscellanea, my meandering newsletter and blog since 2016.

Film photographs from the latter half of 2024

NOTE

Some of your emails will cut this off before you can see all of the images. If you wanna see all of the photographs, please visit this post in your browser.

Life moves on, sometimes at a pace we never anticipated. Big life events can be spread across many years or be compressed into mere months. The constant, of course, is change. But change looks different every step of the way, and is experienced with an ever-evolving perspective.

I think what my head is trying to get at is the dissonance that exists between the versions of ourselves. How Michael 3 years ago was not ready for Michael today. How those two people are practically unrecognizable and yet completely aligned. This is the peculiar thing about time, how it compresses and expands at its own will; how we simultaneously experience it all flying by while the day drags on.

Is time all we have, or do we not have time at all? Everything seems to be happening all at once.

11/5/24

Since the birth of my daughter I’ve been in this reflective headspace, occasionally journaling, jotting down incoherencies and attempting to get to the heart of whatever it is — that constant yearning inside of us; I know I’m not the only one.

I’ve been hoping that some day soon I might land on it, and that I could reveal to you the thing. But in wiser moments I know that there is no grand answer and that my hope for that thing is an illusion.

We always come back to questions, that lingering unsureness of ourselves that crops up every time we reach for our phones.

For now I have decided to keep on questioning openly, because as much as we all want answers… there are none without the inquiry.

The consumer-driven culture of Christmas is so often heralded as its downfall that we overlook the generosity at its helm. Michael Tucker vaguely calling on the meaning of Christmas in the year Two-Thousand-and-Twenty-Four? You betcha.

As the years have passed, I’ve gotten increasingly excited at the prospect of giving. Adulting your way into disposable income has its perks, not the least of them being the opportunity for generosity. Christmas gifting proves a fitting way to end the year and signal to those that you love that you do indeed love them. In this ceremony of cliches, yes: it’s the thought that counts.

Here’s my operating rule:

• Something they want

• Something they need

• Something for home

• Something to read

This ‘guide’ is in no way comprehensive and only loosely organized (in the true spirit of Miscellanea). Let’s get to it.

The letter

Before I bombard you with any sort of link or starry recommendation, there is no gift that can have the impact of a simple letter. A letter is the gift of your presence and consideration. People always feel good when they know you thought of them, and a letter is the most direct way to let that be known.

The stocking stuffers

Dirty Coast is officially producing and selling the OG Pontcha Mosquito pin. Be on the lookout for more from Pontcha Surf Club in 2025.

For the friend with too many bumper stickers: Honk if you love foto books

Design nerds: A Dictionary of Color Combinations

The everybody gift

The locally-made candle we’re always burning

Not half-off anymore, but it’s still on my list: Alessi’s Plissé electric citrus-squeeer

Aaaand, my most-opened cocktail book: Spirited

Speaking of books, a few from my personal wish list:

The daily driver (A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World's Sacred Texts)

New dad club (Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances)

A history lesson (How to Hide an Empire; A History of The Greater United States)

Something to look at (William Eggleston: For Now)

Keep-and-reminisce

An affordable and easy to assemble book shelf I’ve been eyeing

When a splurge saves you money (Too many people asking me too often what online service they should use to print their own photos. We’re getting our own Canon SELPHY this year. You should too! Bring back the tactile experience.)

And after you print your photos, put them right here in this nice box

Other notes and ideas

Go to your family gatherings with a positive attitude and hope in your heart. Try to be grateful. Set aside some time to turn your friends into an extension of your family. We’re all we’ve got. Visit bandcamp.com and buy a record, or better-yet hit your local record store. Start building a stamp collection so that you can write more letters, not just Christmas letters (the USPS website drops new cool stamps all the time). If you care about your local economy, try to stop shopping on Amazon. Reduce a little bit at a time if it makes sense for you. Times are tight but you’re gonna want your local dive to stay open; drop in for a beer or two. Don’t shop just to shop. Log out. Savor each bite and swig. Sing along.

P.S. Radiooooo has a great Christmas station (click on the map, up near the north pole).

Pictures for fun

I don't take photos to make art. I take photos to remember, and as an expression of appreciation for what I see.

Memory and admiration, as much as any idea, can challenge our perceptions and the modern conventional thinking. Memory and admiration are as bold as any marked speech or provocative film.

Our media-obsessed world isn't conducive to the gentle perspectives offered by most photographers. Most photographs are reduced to content if not poignant enough.

The world doesn't need more content or even more poignant images — we need a collective memory not marred by myths, and a greater capacity for admiring simple beauty in nature, in ourselves, and in each other.

Photography and other practices of simple documentation can lend these gifts to the world, mending the scars of our desire for more extreme, more stuff, more more.

“This moment contains the fullness of all moments. Nothing else is needed.”

SISTER CORITA KENT

Being a photographer is being squarely on the fence of the ‘real world’ and the ‘art world’. Photography is still quite new to the world of fine art, and I’d be a fool to say that I’m positively sure that it belongs. But — riding that line provides some sort of advantage in the form of creative thinking and problem solving, because an ecosystem that doesn’t fully honor your art-form as it does others’ leaves fewer openings for photographers-practicing-as-artists.

I think too that there is in me and innate desire for control over how I show my work. In creating Greenwood, I enjoyed the full creative process of editing, producing, promoting, and showing — and it grew in me a desire to repeat the process and to bring other artists into the fold.

After seeing my friend Cora’s ‘Live Bait’ piece at her solo show at Aquarium Gallery, it was hook, line and sinker. I was hooked on the idea of producing a show that shared the sentiment of feelings of home as it pertained to the American South, Louisiana as Sportsman’s Paradise, and the unique aesthetics and vernacular qualities of our region.

Tackle Box was born and I got to work compiling a roster of prospects, and within two months had curated and produced my first group exhibition, without any real gallery setting, expertise, or budget.

The opening reception was lovely and lively. Gratitude! I learned many things along the way, and I’m looking forward to getting to work on what’s next. In the meantime, please feel free to email me at mchltckr@me.com to arrange a private viewing of Tackle Box, or visit the site to see the works in a more rudimentary form. But I do highly recommend seeing them in person, of course.

If you’re an artist in the Greater New Orleans area, please reach out — I’d love to visit your studio (or home), see your work, hear about your process.

Scenes from opening night

This Sunday, August 18 at 5-8pm I am showing new work – of mine and of others – in a group show I’ve curated Upstairs at Coquette. If you’re in New Orleans or nearby, I hope that you will make it. 2800 Magazine Street!

About the show

Tackle Box explores the utilitarian nature of leisure in our Southern climate. Beneath the familiar refrains of ‘Sportsman’s Paradise’ — the whip of a fishing line, the gurgle of engines, the chorus of croaks and calls — we confront the eternally flat and unnerving state of the delta landscape while finding comfort in the pastimes of our shared environment.

Notes from M.G.

Curating and producing an entire new show of works that mostly are not my own has been quite the learning experience, especially as they’re to live in a space that is not a traditional gallery. The walls are very old brick, the lighting is not controlled (there are ton of large windows), the works need to live high enough on the wall to accommodate regular diners, the list goes on. The space is beautiful and lends itself to a certain type of work for sure, and I think that Tackle Box will prove to be a great example of that. I am grateful to have the privilege of showing my work and the work of friends in this space, and to continue to learn how to curate and produce exhibitions. It is a treat.

I hope that you’ll make it and see the work that was made for Tackle Box. The small roster of artists I brought together to bring this show to life went above and beyond and truly are so talented. I am happy to know them and be inspired by their work every day. I think you will love it!

The show was initially inspired by a piece that Cora made for a solo show at Aquarium Gallery, but that piece went on to live in the Ogden for their current show, Louisiana Contemporary. It’s a great show that you should go and see if you’re in town! The initial idea grew from that inspiration and absorbed the inspiration of the small bayous and outdoor environments of my youth, which I think of often and fondly. I’ve never been a fisherman — the extent of my fishing experience involves casting off of big concrete pipes into suburban retention ponds for tiny little perch. But down here in Louisiana it is an unavoidable and romantic scene. Leisure is made a priority here, and I think I’ll carry that value with me wherever I go.

See you on Sunday ♥

Long before Miscellanea moved to Substack, this newsletter was essentially a hub for recommendations. I made a habit of sharing articles, small goods, artists I liked, etc. These days there are many of those newsletters, each specialized for its own audience and niche. I will make no attempt to really recreate that version of Miscellanea. But every once in a while I do feel inspired to share some things, for whatever rhyme or reason.

The thing is, I know that people love to be recommended shit. Digestible content! Links and commerce we can duly incorporate into our feeble personalities! This is what life is all about, no?

My stupid irreverence aside, sharing cool shit is kind of an essential function of our species, and it’s fun!

Here are 4 things I think are awesome right now

1. PERFECT DAYS

Wim Wenders’ ‘Perfect Days’ is a perfect film. I’m not a movie guy to be honest, but this one was so ‘M.G. Tucker’ I couldn’t help but wanna share it with everyone. I loved the description Google spits out: Hirayama feels content with his life as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine, he cherishes music on cassette tapes, reads books and takes photos. Through unexpected encounters, he reflects on finding beauty in the world.

If you don’t think you’ll enjoy this movie after reading that description, then my guess is that it’s probably not your kind of thing. And that’s ok! But this movie instantly became my favorite of all time.

2. THESE $58 GARDEN CLOGS THAT LOOK LIKE LOAFERS

Mary has a similar pair that she can vouch for, so trust me, I wouldn’t just throw these in here willy-nilly. Right now I have a thing for shoes that meet three criteria: good for working in, comfy comfy, and can also look sort of proper with the right outfit. The shampoo-conditioner-bodywash of footwear. Considering gardening is in vogue or whatever, it’s probably wise to buy many things from Gardenheir anyway; people will like you for it.

3. GAËL MONFILS

I doubt many of you watch tennis, or keep up with sports in any serious fashion, but you should know that I am a fanatical sports junky. I can get invested in teams and athletes on a whim, and lately I’m watching a ton of tennis.

Gaël Monfils is a 37-year-old French tennis professional, and when I watch him play I’m transfixed by his youthful enthusiasm and lanky acrobatics. What impresses me most is the way he loses points, games, sets, and even matches: with a smile.

4. NTS FOR WHEN FRIENDS ARE OVER

An are.na user is compiling NTS (an online radio station) episodes for nights with friends, and I think that’s delightful… I keep forgetting to actually use this when the time is appropriate, but I try to keep it handy.

This is also a great example of what are.na is so perfect for. A Pinterest for anything, albeit a hyper-niche community. I use it to collect visuals, words, ideas, and even as a wish list.

ONE MORE THING

The first three issues in my series covering each of the 13 photos in my show Greenwood are below, in case you missed them:

Until next time!

Michael

I think that if everyone at the opening of my show had 750 American dollars budgeted for a framed print, 96% of them would’ve purchased Flowers on Blue. It’s

I made this photograph before a dinner with friends in the Bywater. It’s good to get places early, with your camera on you, so that you can take photos of your immediate environment while the light is nice. Many of my photos have been made in a similar context.

There is nothing profound to say about this photo — it is exactly what it appears to be.

Upon its reproduction for this show, the post-scan edit was particularly challenging with this one. I wanted to be sure that the photo was absolutely true to how it felt in that moment, and I think I managed to fine-tune it to near perfection. I actually left some dust on the image because of the way it complemented the texture of the house and the light, and because sometimes imperfections are needed to ground a thing.

The print stands out among the rest of the show. I placed it at the entrance of the room, because it is the photo most removed from the narrative of it all — and I thought it could make a nice welcome piece. It did.

One more thing. This photo wouldn’t be the same without the shadows created by the bougainvillea blooms. The way I see it, those shadows are the subject of the photo and so force an existential question: which is more real, the object or its shadow?

My inclination is of course to say the shadow. What do you think?

Make It Yours

I was originally opposed to including this photo in Greenwood, bored and uninterested in it as a whole. But understanding its magnetism won me over, and come the night of the show I made peace with its inclusion.

‘Saint Augustine’ references the historic Tremé church that sits opposite the backside of these painted-ladies-esque triplets. I took this photo on assignment in 2018 for a Christian magazine called Nations, during which I photographed then-Sister Alison McCrary of now-recent Queer Eye fame.

On most any shoot there are pockets or lulls in which a scene inspires, and if you’re fortunate you have the flexibility to compose an image that stands alone and can live outside of the context of whatever shoot you’re on. This is one of those images.

The lines, the shadows, the flowers, the vibrant colors, the fence and the way it darkens the blue of the sky. All things that seem to set this one apart or make it notable to an onlooker. But of course what I remember best is the morning I spent photographing a nun who’d committed her time as a spiritual advisor for death row inmates.

I like people who believe in people. I feel that Alison’s positive energy shines through this photo; that you can sense the narrative of her life’s work here. Seeing through imperfection to redeemable beauty.

If you like ‘Saint Augustine’, it is available to purchase at greenwood.show. 1 of 5 editions has been purchased.

Payment plans are available.

All Greenwood pieces

Sister McCrary and such

While Greenwood might’ve held ‘Saint Augustine’ as the star of this set, the photos I actually set out to make never got much air time outside of the magazine’s article. I shot this piece on a Mark II (digital) and with medium format film; here I’ll share the salvageable film photos (most shot in dark settings on low speed positive film, meaning it was relatively difficult to get a proper exposure).

At some point in my childhood my mom bought me a Yellow Lamp, and it has followed me since. Until recently I’d wondered if perhaps it was too juvenile for an aspiring adult — and then something clicked. I love lamp. Its perfect spherical base and the yellow that can only be described as yellow. Its most basic shade and the chrome neck. The Yellow Lamp had become a fixture in my life long before I came to admire it.

By the time you’re in your 30s, there are maybe 2 or 3 things you keep around with you for their pure nostalgia. I have the Yellow Lamp and the last printed photo of our childhood dog, a chunk missing from the top right corner.

There was never a doubt that my photo of the Yellow Lamp would remain a part of the Greenwood edit. It’s quintessential mchl, a photo of the light and perfectly sentimental, almost too sentimental. When sequencing the show, it felt like the perfect entrance piece. You read the artist statement and are instantly transported directly into my current life, the Yellow Lamp I turn on and off every single evening.

Admittedly, this photo of the Yellow Lamp was shot at the end of a roll — just something to finish it off so I could send it to the lab. But often these end-of-the-rollers are just the right amount of stream-of-consciousness, and will later appear to be the most rooted in an actual story of day-to-day living. So is the case here.

If you like ‘Yellow Lamp’, it is available to purchase at greenwood.show. Payment plans are available as well.

All Greenwood pieces

Behind-the-scenes, super secret, private access

Early on in the design process for the Greenwood poster, there was a beautiful version featuring the Yellow Lamp, and then a successive version of the final poster that also featured the Yellow Lamp. Check ‘em out:

I still have a limited number of the final version of the poster (not pictured above) available for sale on the Greenwood site. This is the most affordable option if you want a piece of the show :) You can buy one here.