To begin, could you provide a foundational overview of your artistic practice?

My artistic practice in conceptual photography explores the shifting boundaries between consensus reality and simulation. Informed by postmodern philosophy, particularly the concepts of simulacra and hyperreality, I create images that encourage viewers to question the authenticity of what they see. I construct and discover visual environments where the familiar takes on new meaning and where ordinary settings reveal symbolic or theatrical qualities.

Through both staged and found situations, I create photographs that blur the distinction between representation and invention. These images often function as heightened realities, compositions that appear recognizable but are infused with artifice, allegory, and cultural critique. Each series begins with an idea or question and develops into a body of work that examines how perception and meaning are shaped through images.

My practice is rooted in a commitment to the conceptual potential of photography as a medium. Rather than focusing on documentation or straightforward aesthetics, my work uses the camera as a tool for philosophical inquiry, poetic deconstruction, political response, and cultural critique. The result is a body of images that investigates narratives, symbolic exchange, and the ways visual representation influences our understanding of cultural relativity, consensus reality, ritual, and identity.

Your work visually investigates ambiguity, especially in relation to cultural systems and the unseen forces shaping everyday life. Could you describe how you visually depict this investigation and what drew you to focus on this theme?

Much of my practice begins with questioning the role of photography itself. Photographs are often described as records of reality, documents of things as they are, or memories preserved. That language is useful for journalism, vernacular images, and commercial work, but it is not how I approach the medium. My work is less about taking photographs and more about making them. It is about creating rather than extracting, transforming rather than informing.  Duane Michals once said, “I am a reflection, photographing other reflections, in a reflection.”

I use photography as a way to engage with mystery, ambiguity, and paradox. My images are not meant to provide closure or certainty, but to open up space for questioning. They are constructed to be experiential rather than descriptive, inviting viewers to participate in meaning-making. Sometimes this comes through single images that resist easy interpretation. Other times, meaning emerges through relationships between images placed in sequence. A pair of photographs may converse, conflict, or undermine one another, generating a shifting dialogue that cannot be reduced to a simple message.

The themes I return to are paradoxical in nature: authenticity and imitation, freedom and constraint, presence and absence, reality and simulation, art and entertainment. These dualities are not resolved within the work. They remain open, layered, and intentionally ambiguous, because I am more interested in perception and interpretation than in definitive answers.

My process reflects this same philosophy. I often work with “found sets” in constructed environments such as amusement parks, aquariums, or malls, as well as fabricated sets, purchased props, and props of my own making. These places and objects, when reframed through the camera, take on symbolic qualities that reach beyond their everyday function. They become stages where cultural systems, psychological states, and hidden forces can be suggested rather than directly shown.

I was drawn to this theme because of an early awareness that photography could never be neutral. My background in journalism and anthropology made it clear that every choice in framing, timing, or composition carries meaning, and that culture shapes how we see. Rather than resist that fact, I embrace it. Ambiguity becomes a tool, a way to reflect the complexity of human experience and the instability of consensus “reality.”

You are particularly interested in recontextualising the artificial and overlooked. What techniques and conceptual approaches do you employ to craft a narrative around this?

I am drawn to environments and objects that are often dismissed as superficial, disposable, or unimportant. Amusement parks, aquariums, shopping malls, and other constructed environments are designed to simulate experience, to entertain, or to distract. Yet beneath their surface, these spaces can reveal deeper cultural and psychological narratives. My work seeks to reframe these artificial landscapes as symbolic spaces that reflect the complexity of human experience.

I begin by approaching these environments with a heightened sense of awareness, looking for moments where the illusion falters or where unintended meaning emerges. I work with single-image, full-frame photographs, using minimal post-production. I prefer to let composition, lighting, and timing carry the weight of meaning. Lighting, in particular, is essential to how I reveal emotional tone and symbolic depth.

Narrative is constructed through the relationships between images. I often pair photographs to create visual conversations. Some pairs are harmonious, others are in conflict, and some resist clear interpretation. This sequencing allows me to explore paradoxical themes such as authenticity and imitation, presence and absence, natural and artificial. These dualities are not meant to be resolved, but to remain open for interpretation.

I also use humor, irony, and playfulness as strategies to disarm the viewer and invite engagement. A photograph may appear whimsical on the surface, but contain layers of cultural or political commentary beneath. This balance allows the work to be accessible while still operating on multiple levels.

By recontextualising the artificial and overlooked, I hope to shift how viewers see the world around them. What may seem trivial or empty can, with the right framing, become a mirror for deeper truths. My goal is to open up space for reflection, curiosity, and critical engagement, allowing viewers to co-create meaning rather than passively receive it.

In your recent series, My Family, you utilize inflatable machine guns as a medium for conceptual photography, offering a critical commentary on the tragic prevalence of mass shootings. Can you share the origins of this series? What emotional and conceptual messages do you hope viewers take away?

The origins of My Family go back to when I first moved to Florida. The PULSE shooting in Orlando had just happened, and the horror of that event was fresh in my mind. I was grieving for the community and extremely angry. Then I saw several bumper stickers on big white trucks that read “My Family,” showing cartoon guns lined up as a symbolic family unit. That image was offensive, grotesque, and inappropriate, and I knew I had to respond through my work.

The reality is that the only reasons anyone owns military-grade automatic weapons are to collect them as toys, to display them, to fire them for amusement, or to commit murder. These weapons are not for hunting. Yet people defend their entitlement to own them with no restrictions, even as more children die from gun violence than from any other cause in America. It is obscene that the right to own these machines is treated as more important than the peoples’ lives.

If someone wanted to, they could walk into a store a mile from my home, spend less than one thousand dollars on an AR-15, purchase a kit to make it fully automatic, and leave with enough ammunition to destroy dozens of lives. At the same time, many Americans refuse to even discuss regulating these weapons. They cling to the myth that the Second Amendment means armed citizens could overthrow the government if necessary. This fantasy is hollow. Not even an AR-15 stands a chance against drones, fighter jets, and the advanced machinery of the military.

The point is clear: automatic weapons in America exist either as toys or as tools for mass murder. Through My Family, I use inflatable replicas of these guns to reveal the absurdity of this culture. The inflatables are harmless yet menacing, comic yet tragic. They show the contradictions of a society that normalizes and fetishizes violence. My work is meant to provoke anger, unease, and conversation. Silence is not an option.

You mentioned in your statement that the camera is a tool for deliberate, embodied seeing. Could you elaborate on this idea?

When I say the camera is a tool for deliberate, embodied seeing, I mean that it allows me to shift from simply looking at the world to truly seeing it. It is like the moment when you are thinking about buying a car: suddenly, every car on the road appears sharper, more detailed, more relevant than before. If you didn’t care about cars before, you do now. They were always there, but now your attention is attuned. The camera functions in the same way for me, giving me a structure of intention that changes how and what I see.

One of my processes is a kind of conceptual scavenger hunt. I deliberately place things on my radar that are usually ignored, and the act of photographing them transforms the ordinary into something newly visible. Instead of following the ropes and signs that tell us what we are “supposed” to look at, I grant myself permission to look in-between the spectacles. I turn my attention to the zoo cages themselves, the infrastructure, the theatrical shell of the world. That shift in focus opens a doorway into seeing, rather than just consuming the star attraction, the prescribed image.

Often when I am photographing, people will gather behind me, assuming I am focused on an animal or a spectacle. When they realize I am photographing a cage wall or a blank surface, they dismiss it and move on. But children sometimes look through the viewfinder and immediately understand. Where their parents saw “nothing,” they saw a “cave for ghosts.” That is the essence of embodied seeing: stepping outside of consensus reality and allowing perception to transform.

At its core, this practice is about giving yourself permission to notice, to slow down, and to engage with the overlooked. The camera is not just a recording device. It is a way of activating vision and reshaping the relationship between self, world, and meaning.

A key theme in your work is constructing photographic 'realities' that explore simulacra, signs, and signifiers. Do you view your photographs as exposing the artificial nature of how gun culture constructs meaning around firearms?

Yes, absolutely. The series My Family is very much about exposing the artificial ways in which gun culture constructs meaning around firearms. Guns are not just objects in America, they are wrapped in layers of symbolism that distort their function and significance. They become signs of power, freedom, masculinity, protection, or family identity, depending on the narrative being sold. These associations are cultural fabrications.

By photographing inflatable machine guns, I highlight the absurdity of this symbolic language. The inflatables are fake, soft, and childlike, yet they mimic objects of immense destruction. In that contradiction, they expose the hollowness of the myths surrounding real weapons. They are symbols of symbols: an imitation of an imitation. The imagery makes clear how far removed the cultural fetish of firearms is from their deadly reality.

The bumper sticker that inspired My Family depicts firearms as cartoons, arranged like a family portrait. My photographs push that logic further, transforming weapons into toys and then into art. At every step the meaning shifts. Instead of affirming gun culture’s signs, I twist them back on themselves until the constructed reality they uphold is revealed as grotesque and absurd.

In that sense, my photographs are not neutral. They are critical interventions. They aim to puncture the spectacle of guns in America by showing how meaning is manufactured, distorted, and defended at all costs. If gun culture thrives on myth and symbol, then art can challenge it on that same terrain by exposing the artificial nature of its signs.

Can you recount a specific moment when your work successfully "made the invisible visible" in terms of cultural power structures?

A specific moment when my work “made the invisible visible” was through the series Shanzhai Zhexue (Counterfeit Philosophy), created as a response to my time living in China. In the photograph He Xie (Harmonized), I used an inflatable river crab as a coded symbol of protest against government censorship.

The river crab is a pun: in Chinese, héxiè (river crab) sounds very similar to héxié (harmony), the official word the state uses to describe its program of online censorship and content control. Chinese netizens co-opted the crab as a stand-in for censorship itself, creating a hidden language of resistance. To be “river-crabbed” is to be censored. By embedding this imagery in my work, I was able to participate in that coded discourse and call attention to censorship in an authoritarian country.

For me, the act of photographing this inflatable crab was not only about critique but about solidarity. As a Western artist, I was able to show this work publicly in China. My Chinese friends and collaborators could not. I worked from a position of privilege, and I felt a responsibility to use that privilege to amplify what they could not safely say. This was about cross-cultural artistic solidarity: making visible the fear that Chinese artists live with daily, while also aligning my practice with theirs.

In He Xie, the inflatable crab is both ridiculous and sinister. It mirrors the absurdity of censorship itself, fragile, inflated, but omnipresent in its ability to reshape meaning. By taking that symbol and reframing it photographically, I aimed to show how power operates not only through brute force but also through language, signs, and representation. The image becomes a mirror: a playful object that exposes the hidden violence of censorship.

That is one of the clearest examples in my work of how art can make the invisible visible, and how photography transforms things beyond their assumed function. Through conceptual photography, a toy crab can become a vessel of protest, a symbol of fear, and an act of defiance all at once.

How does your rejection of AI and digital manipulation align with your interest in revealing "simulation and spectacle" in contemporary culture?

I would not call my approach a blanket rejection of AI or digital manipulation. I do not dismiss AI as a practice for other artists, and I think it is still too new for me to have a fully entrenched opinion. For my own work, however, I choose not to use it, because I see myself first and foremost as a photographer. AI is an image-making tool, but it is not photography. Whether I will use it in the future remains an open question.

What I am more committed to is a set of aesthetic choices. I find that digitally overworked images often look oversharpened, overly saturated, or just awkward. That is a matter of taste, of course, and I have enough self-awareness to know what stylistic approaches feel true to my practice.

Now that AI has become a central point of discussion in the art world zeitgeist, my work feels more relevant than ever. That is reflected in the large number of exhibitions around the idea of "authenticity" and “truth” that are popping up all over the world. I have been grappling with these ideas of simulation and spectacle for over 20 years, connecting them with the Buddhist philosophy of illusion/samsara and Baudrillard’s philosophy of simulacra.  Conceptual photography has deep historical roots, reaching back to the Pictorialists, who were staging theatrical, fantasy photographs long before digital manipulation or AI. In many ways, the conversations we are having today about what constitutes authenticity in image-making echo questions that have been part of photography since its beginnings. 

From your perspective, how does art and artistic creation bridge the gap between global societal and political issues and the wider public?

Art has always been one of the only ways to cut through the noise and communicate esoteric and abstract thoughts in a tangible way. When I create, I am often responding to something that makes me feel things deeply, and turning that emotion into work is both cathartic and necessary. Creative response itself is a form of resistance.

The truth is that too many people are drowning in distraction, entertainment, mis-information, and propaganda. Most of the time, we are told what to look at, what to value, and what to ignore. Art can short-circuit that hypnosis. It can take something hidden, like power imbalance, censorship, or violence, and shove it into view. It can make people uncomfortable, confused, or even angry, but at least they are paying attention. 

That is why I believe art matters more now than ever before in my lifetime. It does not solve political crises or erase injustice, but it cracks the facade. It exposes the absurdity of things we have come to accept as normal, and it forces people to confront the structures and rituals that shape their lives. If the work inspires someone to question authority, to reexamine  consensus reality, or to question their own storylines, then it has done its job.

Finally, what message would you like to leave for our readers?

What I hope is that artists, students, art-enthusiasts, and art professionals cultivate a sense of urgency to make something of their own, to question authority, to question everything, and to approach the world with fierce curiosity.

I always think back to the first time I saw Sonic Youth live. Their creativity and experimentation hit me so hard that I went home and played music for eight hours straight. That is the kind of spark I want to pass along to younger artists. I want them to experience that rush of inspiration, to feel like they have permission to create without limits.

I want to reemphasize the importance of the act of seeing, paying attention, and to stop moving through life on autopilot. When you can learn to look closely and question deeply, the world opens up. Everything becomes material for art. If they leave my work/ this interview with some kind of inspiration, I know I have done my best.

Learn more about the artist here.

Cover image:

My Family, Family Vacation by Philip Ringler.

All images courtesy of Philip Ringler