I went to grad school for photography, or rather I was a photographer in an interdisciplinary MFA program at the University of Texas at Austin between 2014 and 2017. The following are two excerpts from the master’s report that I submitted in partial fulfillment of my MFA. I decided to publish it here because grad school is a big weird thing and I thought maybe they could be useful to someone. Maybe it’ll help an artist deciding whether or not to apply, jog some thoughts for a current grad struggling with a thesis, or jeez, just help me. At the time, one of my readers told me, with a vaguely congratulatory air, that I did everything wrong.

It is fun to revisit. The work that wound up becoming The Toad started as my MFA thesis, transforming through time and revision into something that I could not expect at the end of grad school. Some of the facts of the work have changed in the interim. Many of the pictures have been replaced, and, significantly, this essay calls the work Canine Fields. But I had to write this, and think about it quite a lot after the fact, to realize the importance of the Toad to the whole endeavor. The dogs are still important but now they are a part of The Toad.

3. Killing the Father/Myths of the West

Pope John Paul II went to Phoenix in 1987. My parents probably didn’t have much energy for fanfare, what with Daisy, a blind pointer, and me, a very young baby, around. According to Mom, “we watched him on TV at Sun Devil Stadium—people thought that was funny. I remember trying to explain him to you in baby terms. They showed the motorcade to the airport and his plane taking off, so we went and stood on the tree stump as his plane flew really low right over the house. We waved to him. He was a nice pope I guess, as far as popes go, and the whole thing was kind of sweet. I remember you liking it. Why do you ask?”

We lived on Wilshire, at the edge of downtown in a brick house, dotted with citrus, a big tree stump in the lawn. The stump was once a tree, and when I was a newborn that tree was struck by lightning and burst into flames. We watched it burn as a family. The fire department came; the tree was doused but dead, and was soon cut down with a chainsaw. So even though I’ve seen the tree—immolated!—I can only summon a reasonably faithful image of the stump. I was too young for the tree. The tree is a ghost, nothing but a construct of my imagination, some amalgam probably closer to the oaks I see out the window as I write this than the mesquite or whatever it actually was. My images of the fire are from Hollywood—flames a color only found in cinema. Odorless, heatless, a furious cinder-edged tree either far more or far less dramatic than the actual event had to have been.

Recently, home for the holidays, I drove by the old house and saw no sign of any of that; just a low-profile façade of red brick, big dry yard, decorative oranges, newer swing set succumbing to the same sun as everything else but at record speed. I texted someone a picture of the house along with the observation that I’d seemingly spent my childhood living in a Henry Wessel photo. The comment made sense only to me, as only I had spent the first half of my twenties obsessively reevaluating my relationship to Wessel and the other photographers who made up the 1975 George Eastman House exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. (That’s the show where seven American and two German photographers displayed some modest, straightforward black and white photographs—and one American displayed some modest, straightforward color photographs—of suburbs, industry, and main streets from across the United States and in the process permanently rerouted the discourse around landscape photography.)

New Topographics does not only feel close to me because I grew up in the sprawling West that most of its artists strove to document. The show’s curator, William Jenkins, later became a professor of photography at Arizona State University. He was there as I matriculated. To his credit Bill wonders why there’s still so much fuss about that show, though his objections did not stop its influential ghosts from lingering inside our darkroom. The same deadpan photographs of parking lots and suburban homes surfaced in student show after student show, and I understand why. We were so close to the source. Many of us grew up in those suburbs, and we felt some sense of expertise with regard to their banalities. But these photographs were mostly redundant and—not necessarily the fault of their makers—as banal, as superficially superficial, as their subjects.

One can find a lingering desire through the history of (specifically) American photography, an attempt to express, with some veneer of objectivity, the conditions of the present through precise renderings of place. In her introductory text to the 2010 New Topographics revival catalog, Britt Salvesen charts this continuum:

In an elegant generational cycle, [Walker] Evans was now poised to play for young photographers in the 1970s the role his own nineteenth-century predecessor, Mathew Brady, had played for him in the 1930s, encouraging them, in a time of social crisis, to situate their medium and their subjects in an explicitly American context.

Extending that timeline to the present, almost the same amount of time has passed since the original New Topographics exhibition as separated the New Topographers from Evans. And we are still in a moment of social crisis. But the Brady-Evans-Topographics thread carries, alongside its Americanness, an adherence to a documentary style that is disconnected from the current social tenor.

Today, disarray—charted through an endless network of screens and slogans—may seem the only guaranteed content. Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s assertion that “everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects, impacts suffered or barely avoided,” is apt. “It takes everything we have,” she says, “but it also spawns a series of little somethings dreamed up in the course of things.”3 These “somethings” should absolutely appear in new photography, but may only do so if the practice is executed with a loose, inclusive approach. The authoritative objectivity that has become associated with American landscape photography suggests a sense of order that is obsolete. Instead we should reach for a disjunctive harmony, where long views, product shots, appropriated documents, and digital manipulation are free to live alongside more traditional pictures. Through this process we may discover that inside the confusion of the present, everything still is made of the same stuff.

This notion carries over into the content of Canine Fields: In one photograph a small white dog in an orange vest is observed in the early stages of becoming a cloud. Elsewhere a cloud of white foam seems on the verge of solidifying into a dog, complete with a bright orange leash. In both of these pictures an entirely organic—borderline magical—process occurs within a cold institutional landscape, without horizon, all linoleum or concrete. The web of associations is dense, generous.

Next time I visit Phoenix I’ll stop and see if the stump has been excavated. It wouldn’t alter the story, but it would be a reminder that change persists when we’re not watching. When the Pope visited Phoenix, to avoid offending the faithful, Arizona State University consented to enshroud every image of Sparky, their “Sun Devil” mascot whose dumb, generic mascot grin was allegedly modeled after Walt Disney, in yellow cloth.

5. The Picture of the Afghan Hound

I found the picture of the Afghan hound at an antique store.

He was staring up at me from a 3×2 inch card, dated 1948, his eyes warm and nearly religious. “Oh hello,” I said in the store to the piece of cardboard, before bringing it home with me for a dollar. Soon the Afghan needed to enter the work. The inclusion felt like a departure, both because the picture is appropriated and because of the direct gaze of the hound. Most of the animals in my photographs exist at a tangible distance—the space between the camera and the creature always makes the seen thing strange. At first glance this doesn’t apply to the incredibly present, iconic hound, but that sense of direct engagement is a ruse. The Picture of the Afghan Hound is much larger than its source, and the dot pattern of the original info card runs interference on a viewer’s interface with the animal. The sense of engagement gives way to a sense of being duped, of being taken in by a duplicate of a duplicate of the image of a dog, long dead, and frankly alien in the world of the photographs. Considering this, it comes to mind that The Picture of the Afghan Hound has a lot in common with a famous Afghan named Snuppy.

Snuppy died a year prior to my writing this. I didn’t know until now. In fact it was only yesterday that I found out Snuppy ever existed, and by then I was 364 days too late to attempt contact. Not that it would have been easy to say hello, what with Snuppy living in Seoul and me hopping around the southwestern United States. Still there would have been warmth in knowing he was out there, the first successfully cloned dog. Now that I know he was, how can I help but miss that warmth?

One tiny solace: apparently there are others. Snuppy’s family, or something. If I try, I can imagine what it would be like to meet these marvels. Licking, sniffing, smelling of dog, their canine natures would overshadow the technological wonder of their existence. I would want to pet them. I would ask permission from a Korean scientist in a spotless, bright white lab coat, and I would pet them. I would say, in a tone similar to the one I would use with a person, “Oh hello. How are you? You are a nice dog.” Meeting those clones would be lovely, in spite of the mystery, but I admit to heavy bias. Far as I can tell there is always mystery in meeting an animal, and it is always lovely.

For instance, take the Toad. I do not know the Toad, but it has lived in a crack on my front porch since I moved to Texas. On warm nights it crawls out and sits perfectly still on a step, waiting. When I come home from grad school I say, “Hello Toad,” before I go inside. Sometimes I’ll come back out in slippers and stare at it, or take its picture, or laugh. It usually doesn’t budge, which is fascinating. There is no fear. I love the Toad, but I do not know the Toad. I cannot, but this has almost nothing to do with the fact that I am human and the Toad is toad. It has a little to do with distance, and with language, but mostly it has to do with the fact that the Toad is a shapeshifter; it is sometimes brown, sometimes gray, sometimes it is the size of my fist and sometimes it is the size of a key fob. Sometimes it is even two toads, and on one wondrous occasion it was three. How could I ever expect to familiarize myself with such trickery?

Here’s the nearest I can get with language: I know the Toad is like The Picture of the Afghan Hound, and I know they are both like Toad, which is my best approximation of the Toad in photograph form. All three challenge indexes, just as indexes begin to feel understandable. These challenges are the system on which Canine Fields is built. It is a shaky foundation, doomed to crumble over and over, but of course it is. Those surging affects, those lost and hidden things, they’re damn persistent.