*Note: I recently redid my entire website archive, including the documentary section and the prints section. I organized, edited, and keyworded 1,163 photos, also creating a super fun searchable archive. I included everything from the classic city photos, the documentary work, to any random city moments that I might want to find quickly for this column. Try it, type terms like ‘Trump, Lower East Side, red, dog, capitalism,’ anything you can think of: jamesmaherphotography.com/images.
I have a dream. It’s a recurring dream, where I find out I never graduated from college, a handful of classes short, which I’m suddenly told about.
In some versions of the dream, I depressingly go back to college, while all my friends have moved on. In others, I take online classes. But in each version, I can’t do the work, I don’t study; I plan to cram, but as the time to the test gets closer and closer, focusing gets hard and harder. I fail the test, take the class again, then the same thing happens over and over. I’m so close, yet I just can’t get myself to do the work.
It’s funny because of how useless my degree and college time was for my education, except for the inspiration to download Photoshop to make fake IDs.
This is an ADD dream. Always feeling like you’re failing, because often you are in the traditional sense, yet it’s for a reason. You’re somewhere else more important, and your brain just doesn’t let you do the thing you’re supposed to. As a child in the strict structures of education, this can be torture, and the recurring dream certainly brings up that trauma.
I get the dream strictly when I’m in the midst of an obsession, a work push, or anything seemingly impractical in the short-term that I can’t keep my brain off of, all while the regular tasks of keeping up with life start to falter. But I’d never have this career if it weren’t for those obsessions, for those falters.
Anyway, so after spending a lot of time working on my writing and transitioning parts of my business this year, I had a recent reality check where we had some new sudden expenses, and I had to turn the business back on to full strength, in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the country, so fun.
You can possibly tell from this column that I’m pretty decent at coding & technology, through the sheer brutal force of time, struggle, and obsession with it. But what you probably don’t know is how much I hate working with it; it’s torture, what they’ve made us do to survive in 2025, and for the last two decades of this technological revolution.
In college, I saw learning technology and web design as a way out, and learned it on my own time. But most of what I learned came after college. And the drive to learn how to survive through these means came strictly from the sheer terror of thinking about having to step foot again in a school or office.
While I feel like my ADD has improved in adulthood, you put me back in school, and it all comes rushing back. I spent this past Tuesday morning in my kid’s 1st-grade class for a parent event, and two minutes in, my leg started twitching. I felt the walls closing in, my mind started wandering, thinking about anything other than what’s happening in the room. It’s a slow type of torture.
If you have a photography business, any internet business, or any business at all, give the website a check, as the obsessive work over the last few months has been bringing in about 1.5-2 times the job leads. I know, this is boring, mind-knumbing stuff to talk about instead of artistic, photography things, which I promise I’ll lean into more in the New Year as I finish this life repositioning.
But just so you know me better, a lot of these crazy, intense things I do really stem from that. This column and the site is meant to be a system to communicate in a ‘connected’ world that has pretended to help us communicate while making true communication much tougher and fraught with pitfalls, Zuckersbergs, and alt-right content.
Anyway, check out the archive—https://jamesmaherphotography.com/prints/.
*And I want to give a hat tip—the impetus for the search was my recently being shown Daniel Arnold’s similar super interesting search here (compare it to mine). He’s got a new excellent book out, You Are What You Do, by Loose Joints.
The hits of Daniel Arnold hit very hard, and I very much enjoy the overall feeling of his work: messy, dreamy, surreal yet all too real—searching for something. He also includes photographs from his life in a way I’m not good at. Or I should rather say, I just can’t will myself to want to do. I prefer instead to write about my life, and photography is for when I’m simultaneously escaping yet confronting it.
And for anyone who has trouble finding inspiration photographing the suburbs, I’d also recommend Blake Andrews’ new book, Asa Nisi, although sorry to say it’s sold out. Blake’s work hits at the assumption that the suburbs are in any way more orderly and less messy than the city. They are just as messy and absurd (perhaps even moreso?) yet there is also a fondness and a joy to the work. There’s a twisted quality, a philosophy that, to me, oscillates between a darker edge and a more optimistic edge. Blake’s work has even more of an absurd edge to it than Arnold’s, yet underlying it is a realism that you also find in his writing.
These are the reasons I enjoy Arnold’s and Andrews’ work, seeing things and places in ways that I don’t. And it’s easy to feel competitive with someone who shoots the same city and is a similar age (and of course has like 300,000+ IG followers), but those motivations are an important thing, and its a wonderful book.
Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans, and cheers to completing an obsession and throwing that terrible dream in the trash.
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James – those dreams are common and almost always stress related – I get them dating back to my college days studying engineering – and thats 40 years ago – they are still fresh memories.
This is a great pice – keep on writing
That makes sense! And I have no clue what these dreams are like for someone without ADD, but they take me right back to childhood.
Nice piece – I love your work and your honesty – I too, have ADD, having been diagnosed in my 50s was difficult, and I am also a photographer, so there’s a whole lot of AHA moments! Keep up the great work!
Liz
Thanks Liz! My dad similarly got diagnosed in his 50s, around the time I did.
so good James…I’ve had a similar dream of not handing in my final PhD dissertation to the correct faculty…i remember being coded in grad school as Code 54 dyslexic…never liking reading text or papers a loud…but i can memorize and then talk my papers…i will look closer at your already intriguing website.
I’ll be curious to know what you did your PHD in next time I see you. And it’s interesting knowing all this with respect to your photography Hedy!
I completely cracked up at your comment about being in your child’s classroom. I mean, yes yes yes.
There’s a LOT of content in this newsletter, so I will have to get thru the clicks one at a time, slowly.
You approach life as a photographer and you are a very skilled photographer. I am an artist, always struggling to find MY voice. Sure, I’ve been at it long enough to be better than people who have never done it, but nowhere near the level one (me) would expect after all this time. Now and then the thought strikes me to just chuck it. But then I realize that I actually DO enjoy it. It challenges me. Every now and then I surprise myself. So I keep going.
Anyway, your musings have resonated with me. Thanks!
Thank you Rita! I like to think of myself these days working at the border of writing and photography. And yeah finding your voice, your inspiration, and the exact way to get that through is so tough to figure out! Never chuck it, although I know how those tough times feel!! Really appreciate this comment.