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Welcome to the first issue of Protagonist Magazine.

To be honest, I wasn't sure if we would get this far. What started as a reflex quickly grew wings and set out for a target invisible weeks prior. There's something to be said for moving quickly.

The purpose of this publication is to exist as a container to bring people together. To celebrate the aspects of life that provide clarity and purpose in a time of disenchantment and wandering.

Across cultures the protagonist has always served as the pathfinder–the voice with enough courage, insight, and empathy to solve society's unanswered problems.

This first issue focuses on the theme of Duality. The concept of duality is at the heart of the protagonist complex–it is the fork in the road at which agency is expressed or lost. Underpinning every action is a choice, a choice to persist one mindset over another. Independence vs loneliness, acceptance vs regret, hunger vs frustration.

Every moment is a choice, and to be alive is to meet that decision head on, for as long as you have the opportunity to make it.

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I believe we too often make the mistake of associating meaning with singularity and stasis. If you’ve spent some time in the ever-shifting thing that is the human brain, you know this line of thought just as often doesn’t hold up.

Recently it struck me that in most cases people argue over colors (”What do you mean pink? That’s clearly purple”) not because we sense them differently, but because you draw the line between pink and purple somewhere different than I do. There is no definite division between the two. We draw the line how we see fit. And we can’t help ourselves: we constantly experience sometimes near nonsensical stimulus, internal and external, and involuntarily sort all we can into and wildly differing imaginary boxes. We label them comfort, justice, fulfillment, love, etc. It’s no wonder we argue over those too, much of the time with ourselves.

This reminds me of a pretty common social dilemma. If you’ve had multiple friend groups, you know that a joke that kills in friend group A shouldn’t be told anywhere near friend group B. Now does that make the joke less funny? I don’t think so.

All that is beautiful and terribly significant to some is completely lost on others. Your best friend, your favorite person, the love of your life encounters people in their day to day who cannot stand them. They tell you about it, it’s the highlight of your day to hear them talk, their voice, and to everyone else it is banshees and blaring minor ninths. You know that they’re some kind of promise of paradise, and whether others can see it too is entirely up to chance, up to their own fluid imaginary boxes. And though it’s strange that it happens sometimes, does it make you love them any less when you hear the banshees too?

It nauseates me to think about all who hesitate to share their presence and their talent because of their own love-hate relationships with themselves. We daily lose unknown potential to our conflicting desires and to paralyzing doubt. Even the greatest artists have atticfuls of sketches, records, manuscripts of immense beauty that is lost on the artist, and thus lost to all of us. Each one of these, I think we can agree, is a tragedy. If you don’t think what you can offer to the world is worthwhile, beautiful, or meaningful, you have a damn near moral obligation to find out. The best part is there is no right answer.

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Intro

This conversation happened over google meet on Sunday, October 5th. It was inspired by a brief exchange about whether “photography can be honest” that happened a few days earlier during the first in-person meeting between fallwinter2002girl (FW), subin (S), and networkp (NP). FW and S have been friends for a while, NP had just met them. This transcript was edited down from 55 minutes to something more reasonable to publish in this magazine.

A matter of honesty

S: Marina and I are just the complete opposite for like everything, everything. Like if I have an opinion on something, Marina will have the complete opposite opinion, but then we are very good friends and very close friends, and I respect her—her opinions.**** And so it's very interesting to like talk about why we believe the things that we do. But then there's a Venn diagram and there are things that overlap, like desserts.

FW: Exactly. The center of our Venn diagram is dessert. But the thing that I remember with the photography kind of debate conversation was that I have this belief that photography—at least like when it's being used in a specific way—is honest. And I like photography because it's honest. I don't remember how this came up in our conversation, but I said something along the lines of like it is a very honest form of art. And Subin was like, “No, no, no, no. Because you have such a specific, limited frame. How can you be honest? How can you have the truth in such a limited—”

S: —that. But also, I think that anything that is considered to be true and honest is most often the most false because there's an expectation of it.**** I grew up very, very religious, and like my dad's a pastor. I grew up in churches where miracles would happen. And so I—from a very young age—believed in magical thinking, and I went down rabbit holes, internet rabbit holes, when I was really young—like fairy internet rabbit hole—where there would be pictures of fairies, pictures of fairy skeletons, and like there were whole corners of the internet dedicated to this. There would be photographic evidence of this. And then—but the thing is—so for me, and then also for the kids now that are growing up with like AI-generated images, there is no—like I don't believe that a visual medium has any more evidential weight to it. Like yeah, I don't believe—

FW: —that it's like a full, honest depiction of reality.

NP: I remember—I feel like that's where it triggered a memory or just like a feeling or like groups of concepts that I've been thinking about a bunch lately, which is like: how do you know when something's real?**** Because for the longest time, you could just look at something and if it was a picture of a cat or like an advertisement, you could be like, “That's a real little boy who's in the advertisement.” There's no questioning—you know, it's like a real balloon. But now even if it looks like a photo—and like what even is a photo? And maybe that gets to the honesty point. Like I guess—is the trailing definition of a photo a scientific one of like you capture light in a specific way? Like I don't even really know exactly how photography works, but I know it's something related to like you're shooting light through something and that's getting caught on like a filter or paper and all of a sudden that creates like a memory of the image. But like is that actually what a photo is, or is it just the visual representation of something?

S: I think it's a representation. I don't believe that a photo of me has ever—like I don't think a photo of me will ever, ever accurately depict what I am like in real life. Ever, because it's a flattening of reality.
 

FW: I believe the opposite. I just think that there's—like if you took a self-portrait, do you feel like that would be an accurate depiction because you have control over the image, or no?

S: No. I believe even a photo of me—no editing, no nothing—it will never, ever—it won't capture reality. The act of taking a photo of something is flattening something and therefore makes it a caricature, a representation, a mimicist of something that isn't real.

NP: How would you define the realness of yourself, if it can't be captured in an image?

S: I think art is a constant striving towards representing something maybe even truer than how it can be seen in real life or something. Art is different from reality. And I think that a lot of people don't believe that photography—
 

FW: —is different from reality.

S: I think a lot of people think that photography is an art form that is different from other art forms—that it's not like storytelling. But I think it's exactly the same as a painting. 

FW: I think that's where we got tripped up, with this thing of reality versus honesty. Because I think that when I'm looking at photographs that I like and I'm perceiving to be honest, they are—like—they're photorealistic. But, like you said, because you have such a limited frame, sure, maybe it's not capturing the entire scene of what's going on, but because you're in a limited frame you have to be—like—whatever the thing is, whatever the subject/object is, you have to be very viscerally communicating what the thing is that you want to communicate. Because it's such a limited frame, I think that you have a capacity to be more honest—that you can hone in on something and focus on something specific rather than try to depict something that is realistic of a true capturing of a whole moment. I think you have to kind of hone in. I don't know.

NP: So I feel like I know less about photo—or like have fewer opinions on photography. I feel like I have more so of late—and “of late” being like the last few years—on image-making, and like you can make an image in different ways. Is the image honest? Like there's a purpose. Like what's the motivation—motivation or purpose—and as that relates to the image. Is all of this on top of a photo? Is it imbued in the photo itself? Maybe that's sort of part of it too. Is the photo defining the actual output from this camera as something that can even be honest, and maybe that's where it's like—maybe it's actually a lack of honesty.**** It's actually just an output almost in the same way you have other types of outputs. Like there's actually no real meaning or emotion associated with that, and it's only when it comes to the presentation of this output that's where it becomes an image, and then the image can have meaning—but maybe the meaning isn't honest or something—

FW: I think the honesty comes from the process of creating the image. What I was telling Subin in the room was that what I feel is the honest bit is—it's not totally about the subject. Like you're not just capturing the subject just as it is, because that's kind of stale or something. And then it's not completely about the photographer because then you could just photograph anything and it wouldn't matter. But it's about how the photographer is perceiving the subject, and it's about the thing that happens between them, and it's about what they're seeing and trying to say with it. So I think that the honesty is very present in the intention of capturing the photo rather than just the image itself later.

NP: Can you have a dishonest—

S: Totally. I totally think so. I have been running into a lot of New York street photographers recently, and literally—I was on the train and there was this ethnic, like Asian mother—older woman—with a little child who was sleeping on her, and this literal man with a DSLR and the brightest flash I've ever seen whips it out and snaps them and then puts it back in his bag. And like, you know, I'm just so distrustful of anyone that markets themselves as raw, honest. And I bet that he thinks that that was like—“This is such a raw moment”—or something. 

FW: But I'm with him there. Like I agree, because he didn't set them up in any way. He didn't pose them. He didn't intervene and tell them, “Hey, I'm going to take a photo of you.” He just got it. And who knows if it's a good photo or not, but I think his intention was, you know, like pure in that he didn't touch them. Like he didn't get in there and arrange them to look how he wanted them to look before he took the photo.

S: But in capturing them, he puts a point of view and a perspective on them—on these people that you do not know—which feels infantilizing. And is a very common “white boy goes into ethnic neighborhood and takes pictures of grandpas sitting on fruit baskets” or something, and like, “Oh, look at these sad old people.” And it's like, why are you the point-of-view maker? Like why do you get to project your story onto a subject? And so I feel like I gravitate more towards editorial photography—that's where I have more background in, work background in—like Grace Coddington has really great Vogue editorial, like Alice in Wonderland fantastical shoots where it makes it very clear that it's staged and storytelling, and for me that feels more honest than raw, off-the-cuff street photography because it doesn't claim to be the truth.

NP: Would you say there's something about that photo when it's just chilling on the camera and it hasn't been published anywhere or distributed?

 

S: No, I think it's the act of being captured. It's the capturing. Because humans don't exist in a state of frozen—in any kind of frame, the camera will never, ever be able to do anything justice because we're in motion all the time. And there are such little minutiae of things we do and that we have that the camera can't capture.

A matter of surveillance

NP: I feel like I'm curious—well, okay, the reason I was even curious about the conversation is more so related to how it's used. Like okay, we can debate and have different opinions on if a specific image or photo is honest, but the reason that's relevant is when it comes to narrative dispersion and storytelling and news or advertisement or just like people existing on social media. I feel like in the vacuum this image maybe won't hurt anyone because no one's even seeing it, but as soon as it starts being used—to be broadcasted—to convey things, even as far as to push for policy, push for stuff like that, I feel like that's where it gets really crazy. I mean that's what journalism is about. You're capturing moments, you're writing about them, for a reason. And so yeah, do you think the question of photography—things being honest, things being real or fake—is it out of our hands? I feel like regardless of our opinion, it—to me—feels like it almost doesn't even matter because stuff is going to be used how it's going to be used. And you can be upset that something's honest or not, but at the end of the day, especially on social media, the image immediately escapes its starting context and people are seeing it out of context. And it's like—good luck knowing if something's honest or not. Now you're just talking about this thing in the absence of where it originally came from. And I feel like that's part of why it's so hard for consensus to be formed these days, because no one is able to agree on true/real/fake/honest/dishonest/perspective and it's just like, okay, we're just going to have no conversation actually.

S: Yeah, this is my thing with the magical thinking. One of my greatest fears is witnessing a miracle when I'm by myself. So, like, if something happens to me that is unbelievable and I'm like, “Okay, I need to get evidence of this,” and then I video record it and I put it on the internet—I don't think, genuinely, if it's something unbelievable that really, truly happened to me and I took a video of it and put it on the internet, I still don't think that that would help anyone believe me. That's how much I feel like our current landscape is distrustful of visual media.
 

FW: Of images, yeah. Then my question is: is the real thing when a collective of people believe something is true? And that gets kind of separated from the original truth. Does that make sense? Like if a group of people believe that something happened a certain way, and maybe that's not actually how it happened, but then that's just how it keeps getting told and told and told—is that then just kind of the collective truth?

NP: Yeah. Like what is the truth? I feel like something akin to that—or that exactly—feels like what truth is. Is truth what law is? That's like one perception of what truth is. Are we getting into like universal truth? Is that a thing?

S: You believe that there is a universal truth?

NP: You know, I feel like that's—I'm so caught up these days on that.
 

S: Do you think that that's something that exists?

NP: Well, the exploration I was doing recently that I was finding so interesting is how people can perceive the same set of circumstances—even if—it can be an individual person, it can be different people in the same circumstance—but people can perceive that from literally polar opposite positions. Like a few that come to mind are: you can be in a position where you feel a really strong sense of independence, and it's really motivating, really energizing. It's making you feel really powerful and like you're growing and stuff like that. That exact same circumstance someone else could perceive as devastating loneliness and is depressing and trapping and constraining. And I think it's so interesting, because I feel like today there's so much—like—if you don't have your own ability to—to turn the world into meaning, and then create actions and things you want to do in the world, it feels like you're just so at the mercy of what other people are thinking, and you're just going to be—like—you're just totally along for the wind. And so I forget exactly what the initial point was, but yeah, I think there's things that are universally true, which is like physics stuff. So that actually gets back to the photography question. I think you can say you took a photo and the colors were like this, and you can't say that it wasn't like that because the electrons were there, you know? Like, in the same way that weight is a thing—like gravity is real. I'm a physics believer. Physics believer number one. But outside of that, it's hard.

FW: I think so too.

S: This is very interesting because actually color is not perceived the same between people. And different animals perceive different colors, and there are colors that humans can't see—things like that. And going back to my thing with the video evidence is: I feel like this is the same thing with people trying to push the narrative that surveillance and recording is what helps us get to truth. Like, currently we have like the friend.com—the AI pendant that will record everything that you say. And part of the marketing is like, “Oh, have you and a friend ever argued about something that they said but they don't remember? Now you can record it and you can play it back for them word for word what they said.” But I think that is so unhelpful and insane. Like that is not—it misses so many things, like inflection, and there are so many little cues. And that's the same with photography.

FW: Yeah.

S: I believe it misses so many things. Even video misses so many things. And saying—believing that that leads to universal truth, and then truth being used in a court of law to wrongfully condemn people to death, potentially, which you can't come back from, is—I think—kind of—yeah.

FW: Yeah. My thought while you were talking about the friend versus that kind of surveillance versus what I'm thinking of as art photography is that with a general surveillance—video and audio and whatever footage being captured just kind of passively—is different than an artist with an intention creating an image with intention. I think that's where—I keep coming back to this thing of honesty—but that's where I feel like you actually get something out of it. Versus trying to come up with a universal truth based on just passive footage. I agree with you that it's going to miss stuff, but then I feel like if you have an intention and you're honed in on one specific thing, then you can't miss it because you have a goal.

S: I recently saw this article—I think it was like Dazed—that everything looks like art but nothing is actually art nowadays. So how do we differentiate? Because you're saying that art is differentiated because of someone's intention, but surveillance cameras—those are all intentionally placed there by someone. So what makes that not art? 

FW: I think the intention of conveying a feeling versus the intention of “just what if we get something.”

NP: Like the pure recording versus anything above and beyond the raw measurement.

FW: Yeah, I think so. Where there's some kind of thought and intention in storytelling besides just the raw materials.

S: But then you were saying earlier, when the street photographer captured the mom and the child, that that was like a raw, in-the-moment, unviolated capturing and so how is that different from surveillance?

NP: Well, whether it's surveillance or not feels like a different question than the original point. I feel like to some degree that is surveillance in the sense that you're being surveilled. So like, we're surveilling each other currently because we're all recording this conversation. So maybe sometimes it's cool, sometimes it's not. Whether or not it's honest feels like a separate spectrum than “is it surveillance?” But obviously surveillance carries a lot of baggage.

S: I feel like intention makes it more dishonest. And you were talking about how the honesty is what happens between the relationship between the photographer and the subject but I feel like to be so honest, there is an imbalance of power. I feel like the photographer holds more power in that relationship.
 

FW: I do agree with you that the photographer holds all the power because it's their perspective that they're laying over something.

 

S: And I feel like there are a lot of gender dynamics that go into it. A lot of photographers are male, and a lot of fashion photography and models—it's a female-dominated industry. So I think it's dishonest to say that it's an equal footing between the subject and the photographer.

FW: Perhaps. I watched the—it's so cheesy—I watched the Bill Cunningham New York documentary this morning. I really, really love that documentary and I come back to it often. But he said this thing where he was basically like, “I don't have an agenda when I go out and photograph.”**** He will see things—he would see trends—multiple times and just kind of keep going back to what he kept seeing. And basically, by the end of the day, he would be like, “Okay, the street has showed me.” Like it's not something that he's necessarily searching for; it just kind of appears via taking many, many photographs. And I think in being an observer—maybe that is a form of surveillance. He's walking around just watching everyone and taking photographs when he sees fit. But I think that then you end up with this archive of all of these street photos of women's fashion in the streets of New York, and then you end up with this kind of library. And I think because it's one guy and one perspective, it is missing things, but I think that archive is still accurate of that time. Like he photographed New York for like six decades or something. I think that is still an accurate depiction even though it has gaps. Like it's accurate through his eyes. And because there was no staging or going in and fixing things or going in and messing with someone's hair before taking the photo—it just was what it was.

NP: I feel like that's actually a good example of—like—well, I'm curious what you think, Subin. Is that a good example of honest photography?

S: So, what's inside the frame also then really, really highlights the things that are kept out of frame. And I feel like more often than not, the people who are at the forefront of culture are people who are underground—people who cannot be easily found, like Black and queer culture and youth culture. And so I feel like people who are just walking around taking photos like that are missing subcultures.
 

FW: But he's going to all of these events. He's out all day and doing this all day. Yes, he goes to the runways; he gets seated at the runways, but he's also in the streets. He's not just in one specific area. He's not just in the East Village. He's everywhere. And then he's going to the after-hours events. And then he's still—I think he's there. And I think he's getting a broad range of culture.

S: Is he there in the spaces of subculture as part of the in-group, though? 

FW: Absolutely not. He's there in his little blue jacket and his bicycle, looking the same every single day.
 

S: And you were talking about how maybe the most honesty comes from intimacy. And so how can he then get an accurate portrayal of people who are in subcultures when he's not part of them—and that's surveillance.

NP: Well, and then I think the interesting thing is where—and I feel like this is more and more timely—of just like what the connotations or the things that come with surveillance. Surveillance is just a loaded term to describe recording something. So, like we were just saying, we're surveilling each other, but is surveillance always the bad version of recording?

FW: I think surveillance is projecting a negative intention on whatever you're observing. Like you're observing them for the purpose of trying to catch them doing something bad or wrong or immoral or illegal.

S: I disagree with that. I think that that's what the state would say, and then they would say, “Well, if you're not doing anything wrong, then you shouldn't have to worry about being surveilled.” But I feel like even people who aren't doing anything wrong have ramifications for them under surveillance.

FW: Surveillance is defined as close observation, especially of a suspected spy or criminal. So you're projecting this criminal intent on whatever you're capturing, which I think is—I mean, again, as the optimist, I'm like that's fucked up because how are you going to immediately assume bad intention on somebody? And then that comes to profiling and all of these other issues. Like I don't—I don't think so.

NP: Like is that documentary surveillance, you know?

FW: I think that's observation. And I think that's curiosity. I think that's documentation. I think that's archiving the streets. Also, I think—because, I mean, I'm attached—I've watched that so many times and I just love him and I love his work—that everyone—I think this is specific to Bill Cunningham—but everyone in that documentary is saying how kind he was and how his intentions are purely to capture what he sees, and that he had editorials that were misconstrued or twisted and where the copy was changed out for stuff that he did not write and stuff that he did not agree with. And he would leave publications because of that. He would just leave his job because they did something that he didn't agree with. I think that if you stand by what your intention is—which I think that he did, which was to just archive and document exactly what he saw—he said, “It isn't really what I think; it's what I see.”**** So I don't know. I think it's not necessarily surveillance. It's—you're building a library of something that you're interested in.

S: Is there such thing nowadays as an unedited photo in the world of photography? Because I think not.

FW: Of course there is an unedited photo.

S: Sure. There are photographers whose work is completely unedited and untouched.

FW: Yeah. Of course. Always. Always. Of course.

NP: But it's got to be analog cameras, though, because if it's on your phone, it's not unedited—because the processing on any smartphone is crazy. But it's like a spectrum of uneditedness, because I agree that if you get into the definitions of editing a photo, you literally can't have unedited photos on a phone because it's doing all this editing of the actual thing in the background because that's what they think is nice. So they're saying it's unedited, but—That's all happening, but that's all editing. But it's not like you're—like—I feel like “editing”—because I would describe some of those photos I take, where I don't change the brightness or change the contrast or change the saturation—like, to me, those are unedited. But because it's more of the intention of it. So, if I was to say, “Hey, here's my cool unedited photo,” I feel like I would be being honest. It wouldn't be like, “Oh, but you took that on a phone and so you're lying.” Like that's edited. Like, of course, if you—let me get into that—then sure, I'm lying. It's an edited photo. But that's not—it's like—it's on the meaning. What are people agreeing on as the actual definition of something? And then if you can agree, then you can actually have conversation. But if you can't, or if the assumptions are just so wildly different between people, then I feel like you basically just can't even talk about anything. Which—going back to the beginning conversation—that's what it mainly feels like discourse—or a lot of discourse—today is. It's not even kind of productive; it's fully non-discourse, because people totally have different foundations of truth or meaning or honesty or stuff, and you can't  make any progress.

FW: And the debate becomes explaining yourself and explaining yourself and explaining your own perspective.

A matter of belief

S: I don't think that anyone on the internet has ever had their beliefs changed through an internet argument or something.

NP: I don't know. I feel like I've read some shit on the internet that changed my mind about shit. But I feel like it's more so when it comes to revealing information that maybe I wasn't privy to before the interaction. And then through the back and forth or the dialogue I'm like, “Oh, I was talking about something I just was uninformed about.” So from that perspective—yeah, I feel like I've definitely had my mind changed. But it's not normally random people, you know? It's people who I trust—have some similar framing of the thing.

S: Yeah, I think it's so hard to have empathy for anyone on the internet that's a complete stranger, where it's just like their profile picture or whatever, and it's like—you don't even know this person. It barely feels like they're an actual person.**** But where do you go on the internet to find information that you actually trust, then?

NP: I feel like this is so interesting these days, because these days—I mean, part of me wants to say that I am hard-pressed to ever believe anything. I feel like that's just the default—it has to be that. I think I'm always being swayed towards things, you know, through just the aggregate total information and stuff I'm coming across. But rarely am I ever pressed into needing to make decisions on that information, because I feel like that's when it really comes down to something. Like you can be like, “Oh, that's a crazy story.” Like, sure, that's true—but it doesn't really ever bubble up into actually mattering what your opinion is—until you have to make a decision about it, or until your actions end up being influenced by it. So I feel like most of the time I'm kind of just consuming stuff. Maybe it's entertainment, maybe it's out of curiosity sometimes. But I feel like very rarely—not very rarely, but more rare these days than maybe in prior years—am I ever just accepting anything as being true and then incorporating that into my mental model of how I should be acting.

FW: Yeah, I'm default very wary, but I think the way that I—like, I'll absorb everything and just kind of take it with a grain of salt and then vet it with people who I trust in person, if that makes sense. Like whatever I'm consuming online, I'm not assuming as the truth until it's been discussed in great detail with actual real people in my life. And not to say that I'm immediately discounting everything that's on the internet—it just kind of all goes in a holding space, if that makes sense. Like there's a buffer zone of concrete truth, and then I can suss out if it's true with my peers.

S: But I also feel like with my peers there is—like—I am in such a bubble, and it feels like that algorithmically aligns too, where I feel like I'm just kind of being fed back myself and I feel that in person with my peers as well. But genuinely, like last year—well, during 2016 when it was very like Trump—first Trump presidency—and he was saying like the news media—distrusted news media—I was very wary of that because I was like, I don't know, I believed in journalism and I believed in writing and I believed that there had to be some kind of holders of truth.**** But then—last year, I think—last year during the encampments—I was arrested at UCLA in the encampments, and the news coverage that came out of that, with photos, was absolutely, absolutely insane.

FW: Oh my god. Yeah.

S: Like insane—where it was like “Protesters cause violence on campus”—like that kind of thing. It was just the craziest, most—being actually there in person and then seeing it being written about—it was such a mind fuck that I've never, ever experienced before. And so I don't know. I feel—even with video footage and photographic evidence and things from sources that I do trust—even then, when I consume it, I'm like: what can I do about this?**** Because it just feels like we're being inundated with so much media online constantly that it doesn't feel helpful in finding my way towards truth or action—which I agree, action is the most important thing.
 

FW: Mhm. I would agree with you that it—yeah—feels hindersome towards action, just a pure wash of information all the time.

S: But this is why—this is my thing—is that they had photographs. The article had photographs and there wasn't anything that was necessarily a lie, because it was violent because the cops were beating us. But it was like “the protests are violent.” And that felt like what a photograph feels like to me, where you leave out things. And I think that not telling the whole truth is also falsification—even if you're not completely fabricating something.

NP: I feel like that topic you just brought up—trusting institution stuff—I'm so interested in these days. You were saying how your mental model was obliterated from that experience—
Is there any way it can be resurrected? I guess that's what I'm saying—like, is there any way you feel like you could find yourself in another—in a mental state in the future where you're actually trusting—I don't even know what to call it: trusting—because calling it “trusting media” is like—yeah—like I feel—or my thought, and that's why I'm curious how you even think about it—is like the entire—

FW: No.

NP: —concept of media coming from one place—that's been inverted for a while now, but it still has the definition of whatever—like the actual societal understanding of what it means that media doesn't come from one place—hasn't really been defined or understood. Even though, of course, there's media studies s*** and people know that's a thing now, I don't think there's been an actual condensing and redispersion of what that actually means to people. And so there's no—even the concept of “mainstream media” or “corporate media” or anything—what even—there's just media. There's just pictures you see and—

S: Yes, there's no such thing as—

FW: —as mainstream media. Is that what you're going to say?

S: And not just media, but mainstream culture and subculture has kind of just been obliterated because the internet has flattened everything. There used to be—in subcultures and geographically—there would be a visual identity. Like Japanese fashion would be a very specific thing, but now because there is no such—it's very international—and a flattening of information because of the internet. Anyone can dress any kind of way and not specifically belong to an in-group or anything like that. So yeah, anyone can claim to be—if they have a look that looks official or whatever—can claim to be a source, a trustful source. I believe in grassroots organizers and community organizers and all of the people that are being suppressed right now on the Apple Store who are making ICE trackers and things like that. And that's very genuinely just people in the community trying to protect their larger community instead of a hierarchical top-down “we are an institution telling you what's happening” kind of thing.

FW: Yeah.

S: Um—

FW: This is how I felt during the ICE raids and the protests in downtown LA over this summer, where everyone was just posting videos on Instagram from their iPhone. And then it felt like I wasn't even consuming—the proportion of coverage that I was consuming that was just people on their iPhone in the streets, just out and about, was way, way more than the quote-unquote media institution, and that felt more representative of what was actually going on. So, yeah, I guess to your point—just that the idea of having a trusted institution to get your information from is kind of no longer—I don't know.

S: But that would make things so much easier. Like, I want that, and that's what journalism was supposed to be.

NP: Yeah. Yeah.

FW: Oh, to have a trusted institution.

S: Like, I believed in it. I was so bright-eyed and—like—

FW: I feel like if there's one—you can't just get the thing from one organization or from one voice. I don't know. And then even trusting people's—even trusting people's intentions may be pure, but then they're somehow misrepresenting the situation in a way that they don't know that they're misrepresenting.

S: Absolutely.

FW: So they're believing it, but it's still not full truth.

S: See, that's the thing about photography—truth, though, and honesty—misrepresent—

FW: But I think I—honestly, maybe if we—this is getting back into the semantics thing—like me being cutesy, corny, believing in everyone having true intentions or whatever. I think that the honesty thing I'm using for art and editorial and conveying a feeling and whatever. And then for journalism, I don't think that there's necessarily honesty—it's kind of removed from that because you want something objective and a pure truth rather than someone projecting something on top of the situation.

S: Yes. I guess—okay. So, I am a poet. I'm in poetry school. Our raw material is words—is language. Marina is a fashion designer. And your raw material is fabric, right? I guess for photography, where it gets so finicky is—I believe that genuinely the raw material of photography is the real world. It has to exist in some form in the real world for it to be captured. And that is where it gets dicey, because it can exist in the real world, but in capturing it—it changes it and it warps it.

FW: Right. Because I can—there's a limited—

S: And like you were saying, Max—like a photo on your phone, even if it's non-filtered—it's a film camera, whatever—the warp of the lens: it'll make my nose stick out more. It'll make—it'll change the real world. Even if it's something that exists in the real world, it'll change it. But that's the disconnect—is that they want to—the photographers want to believe that it's some kind of higher art form because it existed in the real world. And then the people who are seeing it also are like, “Oh yeah, that existed in the real world”—but—but not like that.

FW: See, okay—so this is another difference between our perspectives, because when I am consuming any content—like how I was just talking about on the internet—but when I'm consuming photography, I'm again putting it in this holding space. It goes through the layer of the photographer putting their perspective on it, and then it goes through another layer of me perceiving that.**** Does that make sense? Like it goes through a second kind of vetting. Because the truth that I see from some art form—whether it's photos, fashion, poetry, whatever it is—can be perceived completely differently than if you were to consume the same thing. So—I kind of lost the plot, but—

S: Yeah, but that's the thing about art—and just anything in general in the world—is that no matter what the intention is behind it, everyone will perceive it differently.

NP: Yeah. And I feel—the thing I was going to say, because it was a specific word you used, Subin—was belief. And to me it all just comes down to belief. Whether or not—you can have all the empirical evidence in the world and you can choose to still not believe something, because you can choose—you can believe things. You can decide what you want to—

FW: Mhm.

NP: —hold to be true or not, or what you want to claim to be honest or not. Whether or not the consensus of all the other people around you is the same as you—if it's the same—that's a separate question. But at the individual scale, you can believe anything. And so I feel like it's really interesting—like what even is—what—is belief really—like, when you—when it comes down to the things—like—that's what's at the very atomic unit of action—

FW: Mhm. Well—

NP: —and then when you stack everyone's belief and agency up in systems that you're in—that's what produces, like, I don't know, the world—or the ongoings of stuff every day. Like, I'm not sure. But I think there's something about belief being kind of the under—

S: I think—is more important than truth.

FW: Definitely. I think so too. I think belief is more powerful because that is what informs your action versus—like you just said—you can stack up all the empirical evidence, but if someone chooses not to believe that and believes their own situation, they're going to act on their belief rather than quote-unquote truth.

S: Right. My dad is a pastor, and there are so many people who genuinely, truly, deeply believe in religious and spiritual magical thinking. And that will influence the way that they live their life, the way that they do everything. And there can be zero empirical evidence, but then they'll go on Facebook and they'll find an image of like AI-generated Jesus, and they'll send their friends and their family and be like, “Jesus is real. Jesus is back on Earth.” And they'll believe that with their true heart. And so then it doesn't matter what the truth is. They'll go out into the world and they'll change the physical world with their belief.

NP: Totally. I feel like that was an amazing end to this conversation—if we all want to say that was the end—unless anyone has other thoughts they want to get off before we transition out of this recording.

FW: No.

NP: Okay cool, let me stop recording.

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This issue would not have been possible without the amazing + generous support from the following people:

★ angie rockey, co-editor of "Honest photography"

★ davi, author of "Banshees and all"

★ fallwinter2002girl, subject of "Honest photography"

★ missmayhem, assisted with mag cover design

★ morgnmotion, assisted with mag cover design

★ phil, cover photographer of "Banshees and all"

★ subin, subject of "Honest photography"

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