Introduction

What you’re holding in your hands is a chunk of me. My guts. My process. My study. It’s a look into the production of my ideas. These pictures, all taken with my iPhone, make up my visual notebook—a photographic journal—from the past year of my life. Though The Best Camera closes the door on this period, this ongoing study continues to fuel my curiosity and provide boundless inspiration. It is an invaluable reference and will continue to inform my future bodies of work.

It is said that Rodin molded hundreds of hands in preparation for creating the hand of The Thinker, as he explored musculature, the folding of fingers, and on and on. Undoubtedly, each of those hands merits the label “art” in its own right. It’s in this same vein that I consider the images in this book. While each iPhone picture certainly contributes a thread to the overall fabric of my creativity, it’s of a deeper—or, perhaps paradoxically, simpler—interest to me that each iPhone image ultimately stands on its own. Two megapixels at a time, each photograph reveals how I process the visual information around me, how I see the world.