I’ve undertaken a series of projects in the last four years centered on the Trump presidency, starting with the early debates in 2016 (or was it 2015?). Nothing is especially photoshopped here–the weird spiraling colors are from interference patterns, layers of them, caused by the digital nature of the camera when it is photographing a screen made of pixels. Sometimes all those rows of pixels line up and weird things happen.

These twelve images are samples from one of those projects. I made the source images in late 2019, part of them made during an artist-in-residence at the Mojave National Preserve. I was living in a dorm with park service employees and I would come home way after dark (after shooting all day and then making night images) and would sit at the kitchen table while they watched TV, downloading the day’s photographs. Once that was done I would take pictures of the New York Times, CNN, and Fox News off my screen. They thought I was an odd duck.

There’s a video version of each of these, here’s one. If it plays correctly the video (which is only a second or two long) will loop seamlessly and forever, giving the illusion that you are seeing a much longer video or perhaps something happening live.