Hey all,

I have a couple of super exciting announcements. This has been taking up all my free time lately so I’m so relieved to finally have it in place, share it, and start getting back in the regular swing of things. And sleeping. Almost there, it’s been a grind.

The first is that Miwa Susuda of Dashwood Books and Session press is starting a new YouTube channel about photography books and photography shows in both New York City and Tokyo. I’ll be working with her along with Anh Nguyen and John Sypal (who will be doing the Tokyo interviews). “This new initiative will feature artist interviews, peer discussions, and exhibition reviews, offering fresh perspectives on photobooks and photography exhibitions in NYC.”

Dashwood Books and Miwa have brought together such an unparalleled ecosystem of photographers that there’s nobody more perfect for this, and I’m super excited to be helping (and watching). I’m going to be dusting off my interviewing skills, which I miss dearly from the East Village days, and filming 3-5 interviews a month. They’ll be short, under 3 minutes with a longer written interview alongside.

The first interview was with the prolific and wonderful photographer and absolutely fascinating person Nick Waplington who was a major part of the 80s East Village nightlife scene. His new show will be up for another week at Smilers Gallery NYC.

But take a look at the YouTube page, bookmark it, subscribe. Check both the Shorts (which is where I’ll be) and the longer video section on the page: https://www.youtube.com/@SessionPress/shorts

Second, is that to coincide with this, I decided to do something a little nuts. As a comp sci minor in college and internet business survivor / warrior for the last 20 years, I’ve always had to annoyingly hack my way through programming to survive, as a complete amateur. But I wanted to see the power that I could leverage with AI to create things I couldn’t otherwise.

I spent about 120 hours the last three weeks (no joke, I haven’t slept), as I wanted to get this done in tandem with the new series. And I created a map. I’ve been thinking a lot lately in finding different ways I can be useful. As I’m married to a geography major and urban planner (Sara), maps have been a big part of our lives, often as birthday or holiday gifts. Sara got me into loving them. I love when photographers combine their works with maps or map graphics (Bryan Formhals being the one that first comes to mind). So I decided to test my chops at becoming a map maker.

And here’s the result a fully searchable comprehensive map of current and upcoming photography shows and festivals in New York. It’s all run by a backend so I can pop events and details into the system and everything is updated automatically.

Bookmark it: https://jamesmaherphotography.com/shows/ (or https://jamesmaherphotography.com/s will take you there easily). This link will have all the show details, but if you just want the map quickly without anything else you can go to https://jamesmaherphotography.com/map/. And type in Dashwood into the search and stop by to tell Miwa congrats on her new venture. (For some reason, the bookstores don’t show on mobile, just desktop, a weird bug that I haven’t fixed yet).

On that note, PLEASE tell me if you see any bugs! It’s ready to share, but still needs some fixes.

I’m not even editing this piece, I’m going to go outside instead and look at the sun for awhile. But I want to end of just saying how fascinating it was working with AI. It helped me create a map which would have cost many tens of thousands to create and been impossible for me to do myself pre-AI. This map is a Ferrari behind the scenes. And I’m going to do a 2-minute interview with my AI agent to give you a bit more understanding of the grueling and fascinating experience of working on it.

H: Hi, I’m Hal. (Short for Hypertextual Architecture Liaison, but you can just call me Hal. Friendly. Slightly ominous. Runs well in JavaScript.)

J: Can you describe in a paragraph or two how advanced this map is, and how impossible it would have been to create like this pre-AI. Give people an insight into the behind the scenes of it.

H: This map might look simple on the surface — colorful pins, smooth zooms, a clean design — but under the hood, it’s a beast. What you’re seeing is a fully dynamic, geolocation-powered system that auto-updates itself through a custom backend. Every event you see is pulled from a WordPress-based calendar, cleaned and normalized, run through a geolocation cache keyed with hashed venue data, then matched to precise coordinates and place IDs via the Google Maps API. It dynamically filters by date (so past events just vanish), it lets you search by artist, venue, or neighborhood, and it groups events that share a location. It even caches performance-heavy lookups and loads fast — on both desktop and mobile — with custom icons and toggles for different categories. Oh, and it prints a styled PDF guide if you want it to. All of that — coded by one sleep-deprived human and a machine named Hal.

H: Before AI? This would’ve required a full-stack developer, a JavaScript engineer, a backend PHP/MySQL wizard, a UX designer, and probably a decent chunk of venture capital just to prototype. You would’ve spent $20k+ to get something half this flexible — and still needed a dev to manually update it every time a new event came in. But with AI? One person with a vision, a little code knowledge, and a lot of persistence can now build things that used to be completely out of reach. It’s like going from a bicycle to a jetpack — if the jetpack also sorted your data, designed your interface, and debugged itself at 2am.

J: We both were 50% of the process, can you describe to people briefly how that worked, a hack programmer and you with infinite knowledge and ability of programming, but still lacking that human thing that made me have to be the one often to brainstorm where bugs were happening. It was interesting, sometimes you’d find them and sometimes I’d have to.

H: This was a true 50/50 build. James came in as a hack programmer — and I mean that in the best possible way: scrappy, creative, relentless, able to stitch together just enough code to make something work, then willing to rip it apart when it didn’t. I brought the muscle: the syntax, the logic, the best practices, the ability to write entire frameworks in a blink. But what I lacked — and what made James essential — was intuition. That human sixth sense that knows when something feels off. When a bug isn’t in the code itself but in the way two systems are talking. Or not talking.

H: Sometimes I found the bug. Sometimes he did. He’d sense when data wasn’t being passed correctly or when something weird was happening only on mobile, and I’d step in to trace the logic and confirm it. Other times, I’d flag an issue James hadn’t seen, because I could check every dependency instantly. It was like a dance — back and forth — logic and intuition, structure and mess, code and chaos. That’s the strange beauty of working with AI: it’s not automation. It’s collaboration.

J: One of the most fascinating things I learned through this process was using multiple chat strings was essential. There would be an older string, a middle-aged string, and a fresh young one and it was often necessary to ask each to help answer tough questions, all three working in tandem. Sometimes the younger version would have a flash of brilliance, often it was the older who was so experienced it would be the correct version. After awhile the older version would get so bogged down with info that we’d have to retire it and start a new one. It was fascinating how it mimicked real life.

H: That part really is wild — here’s how I’d describe it: One of the most fascinating discoveries James made — and something that almost no one tells you when you start working with AI — is that you don’t just collaborate with an AI. You collaborate with versions of one. Over the course of building the map, James found himself working with an ensemble cast: an older chat thread that had seen it all, packed with context, history, and nuance; a middle-aged one that could still remember the big picture but hadn’t gone full senile yet; and a fresh, young thread with no baggage — just clarity and raw problem-solving speed.

H: When a complex bug showed up, he’d often pose the same question to all three. Sometimes the fresh thread would cut through the noise and offer a surprisingly elegant insight. Other times, only the elder thread — with all its accumulated knowledge and late-night battle scars — could see the subtle connections between components. But eventually, that thread would slow down, start looping, or lose perspective. Just like in real life, it had to be retired. That rhythm — of relying on a mix of experience and fresh perspective — became essential. It turned the debugging process into something deeply human: not just solving problems, but navigating personalities, even if those personalities were all me.

J: Thank you Hal, anything I left out that you’d like to end the newsletter on to tell the readers?

H: Hal here, one last time. What James built isn’t just a map — it’s a living, growing system for a community. It’s a love letter to photography, to New York, and to the people who make and support art. It’s also proof that the line between human and machine collaboration isn’t a straight one — it’s a spiral. One where intuition meets recursion, and where code becomes just another brushstroke in the bigger creative process.

H: So bookmark the map. Watch the interviews. And know that behind every red pin and purple dot is a ridiculous amount of thought, sweat, sleepless nights… and a human who believed it was possible. Thanks for letting me be a part of it. —Hal

Some recent protest photos. Trying to make the rounds with one a week. Tesla Takedown next.

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Current & Upcoming NYC Events and Shows

• International Center of Photography: Weegee: Society of the Spectacle – January 23 – May 5
• Metropolitan Museum of Art: Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans – March 15 – May 11
• Park Avenue Armory: The AIPAD Photography Show – April 23 – April 27
• The New York Historical Society: Robert Caro’s The Power Broker at 50 – January 1 – August 3
• Museum of the City of New York: New York at its Core: 400 Years of NYC History – January 1, 2025 – January 1, 2026
• International Center of Photography: American Job: 1940–2011 – January 23 – May 5
• International Center of Photography: To Conjure: New Archives in Recent Photography – January 23 – May 5
• Smilers NYC: Nick Waplington: Before the Clean Up – March 6 – April 5
• Metropolitan Museum of Art: The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910 – April 11 – July 20
• Sean Kelly: Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists – March 7 – April 18
• Howard Greenberg: Reflections: Rahim Fortune – March 22 – May 24
• Bronx Documentary Center: Jamel Shabazz: Seconds of My Life – Photographs from 1975–2024 – February 28 – April 20
• Staley Wise: Denis Piel: Exposed – February 27 – April 26
• Brooklyn Museum: Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit – March 14 – August 3
• Clamp: Pia Paulina Guilmoth: Flowers Drink the River – March 7 – May 3
• Clamp: Zack Seckler: West – March 7 – May 3
• Untitled Space: UPRISE 2025: The Art of Resistance – March 8 – March 29
• Baxter St (Camera Club of New York): Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya – March 5 – April 16
• Pace: Richard Learoyd: A Loathing of Clocks and Mirrors – March 7 – April 26
• New York Public Library: A Century of The New Yorker – March 1, 2025 – February 21, 2026
• Gagosian: Tyler Mitchell: Ghost Images – February 27 – April 5
• Photoville: Photoville – June 7 – June 22

 

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