Currently going for a glorious walk here in the sun at Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia. And today’s simple thought and idea is for daily photography, you know, the protocol.
Just keep the camera with you.
I mean, when you have a camera that just slips in your pocket, you take it out, you turn it on, you pop that red filter, and you snap the button, you just find that the whole practice, the whole medium of photography is effortless.
It doesn’t get in the way of you living and experiencing life.
That’s the whole protocol.
Just integrate photography so radically where it disappears from your day-to-day life.
Photograph What You Genuinely Enjoy
Only photograph things and only go to places to photograph that you genuinely enjoy photographing.
I think it’s really simple.
If anything in your practice is becoming a bore, or a chore, or feels like a job, where you’re making these checklists and ideas that you have to execute each day, I don’t think it’s sustainable.
We have to go beyond these basic notions in photography:
technical mastery, storytelling, the ability of the photographer to synthesize the content with the formalities of composition, and all of these superfluous things.
Set these to the wayside.
Photography is merely a way for me to affirm my life, to say yes with the click of the shutter.
It gives my life purpose and meaning despite the external outcome of whether or not the photos are good, or somebody validates them, or checks them off with some metric of success.
The Noise of Contemporary Photography
These ideas in contemporary photography are very lame to me.
This contest culture of judging photos based upon whether the photographer has the ability to stock more complexity, or add this little sprinkle in the background that ties things together in the foreground.
Or these basic ideas around photography:
Is that street photography or not?
Is this documentary photography or photojournalism?
All these categories and topics of discussion are such a distraction.
99% of contemporary photography culture is noise. The 1% signal is within your heart.
It’s within that spiritedness, within your core, that drives you to make photographs.
It’s not about fitting yourself in a box and working on this story, this theme, this contrived narrative or idea that you’re trying to impose with your ego upon the work.
As if you have this duty to the world with your practice.
Like you’re going to change the world with your photography or something.
It’s kind of funny to me.
Photography Beyond Photography
The idea is to use photography beyond photography.
It’s just a way to exist.
It’s a way to affirm life and that you exist.
I think about photography as a way for me to combat against the existential fact that you’re going to die.
Photography is merely a vehicle that gets you closer to the moment, that keeps you here right now.
My approach is photographing every single day, repetitively walking the same mundane space and the same streets daily, but finding new ways to articulate everything for the way that I internally feel and perceive life.
What it comes down to is your inner curiosity, your courage, your sensitivity, the way that you feel about life, and the way that you engage with humanity.
That influences the way that you practice your photography.
And I find that the most impactful photographs are the ones that go unnoticed.
The quiet moments.
The personal moments.
The ones that carry emotional weight.
Forget Everything You Think You Know
Honestly, I don’t even necessarily consider the act of making photographs an act of self-expression.
I think about photography as a way for me to unlearn everything.
A way for me to discover the novelty and mystery of life.
There’s such a mystery of everyday existence that we overlook as we move through the motions each day and force ourselves to be productive.
But when you sit back, relax, allow your mind to go fallow, walk slow, embrace the moment, respond with your camera, and chip away each day at things, you become more grateful for life generally.
You become more joyful as a human being.
And as you’re photographing from that state of being, you discover new things, learn new things, and increase your curiosity and joy for life.
Life Is a Video Game
After meeting somebody out here dancing by the water, the vibe is basically this:
Stop taking your life so seriously.
No, seriously.
Life is a video game.
Just explore, have fun, interact with people, and be more open to all people.
That’s one of the things I’m most grateful for with photography.
It’s given me this ability to engage with humanity in such a nuanced way, where I can interact with pretty much anybody and just have great conversation, make memories, go on adventures, photograph, and live.
I’m Not Hunting
You can argue that you can tell a story about a moment, a place, or a thing. You can follow somebody around and make photos of their everyday life, or go to a new community and photograph that community and tell some sort of story.
But what I am most interested in with this medium is that it allows me to forget everything I think I know.
It allows moments, people, and interactions to flow toward me.
And then I’m simply there, prepared with my camera, photographing my way through everyday life.
I’m not hunting.
I’m not looking.
I’m not trying to say anything.
I’m not trying to tell stories.
If anything, I’m just trying to discover new things.
I’m trying to uncover the mystery of everyday life.
Craving the Surprise
Even on the most practical technical level, with the way the camera interprets light, the way the light emanates through the lens and touches the camera sensor, what I seek to achieve through this practice is surprising myself.
Keeping myself curious about life.
I find that curiosity is fueled through the medium, through the way that light touches my camera sensor.
Ultimately, the way I’m thinking about photography is about going beyond reality.
Trying to discover what life looks like when you photograph it.
The way that I find my curiosity these days is through returning to day one each day.
Just snapshotting through the day.
Not trying to contrive the composition.
Not trying too hard visually.
I kind of just throw the camera around, move my body into the scene, and arrange things naturally and physically.
Through those imperfections, I discover new things with the medium.
New ways that light is interpreted through my camera.
The way moments and gestures align.
The way composition falls in place.
I’m craving the surprise.
The surprise of the medium.
Surrender to What Is Out of Your Control
You have to surrender yourself to the medium.
Surrender yourself to what is out of your control.
What is out of my control is the light.
I can’t control the way the light is going to cast upon the world, or the way it’s going to interact with the surface.
I’m not in control of whether or not I’m going to see a joyous moment of somebody dancing on the outskirts of the city where there’s hardly anybody.
I’m not in control of these things.
But what I’m in control of is waking up with eagerness and enthusiasm for life.
Through that enthusiasm, curiosity, and courage, I carry myself out there to photograph more and surprise myself more.
Through playing more.
Through letting go.
Through forgetting everything I think I know.
When you recognize that you know nothing, you let go of all these superfluous ideas about photography.
Because it has nothing to do with photography.
This medium is a way for you to cultivate a way of being, a way of engaging with everyday life, and affirming your existence.
Just waking up in the morning and pushing your rock uphill.
And then you smile when it rolls back down each night, because you know that you’re going to come back out in the morning and push it right back up again.
So after meeting my new friend Dominic Sofia, Dante Sisofo is going to return to his mythos of pushing his rock endlessly.
Welcome to FLUX Weekly Witness IV, where I look at the photographs submitted through the FLUX community and talk about them physically through the printed books themselves.
Today we’re looking at a new body of work from Chris Walters out in Wales.
Before we even get into the work itself, I just want to thank you, Chris, for joining FLUX and participating in this whole experiment.
What stood out to me immediately from your introduction was how you were feeling burnt out with documentary photography and how this new workflow felt liberating again.
Honestly, that’s one of the main reasons I created this protocol.
Not to create more pressure. Not to create more perfectionism.
But to bring photography back to something immediate, daily, physical, and alive again.
Removing Friction
It’s really cool hearing that you’ve already been using the Ricoh system for years and are now starting to adopt:
the small JPEG workflow
high contrast black and white
the iPad workflow
fast sequencing and publishing
Because that really is a huge part of FLUX.
It’s all about removing friction from the practice so you can focus on actually making work every day.
Photography, for me, is a ritual.
The point is to:
make work quickly
sequence it physically
publish it
move on
Instead of collecting endless hard drives full of unfinished imagery.
Different Worlds, Same Protocol
One thing that excites me is the fact that Chris is all the way out in Wales.
Different cities. Different countries. Different lives. Different eyes.
Yet people all over the world can adopt this exact same protocol:
36 frames
chronology
sequencing
contact sheets
shared visual language
…while still creating something completely unique through lived experience.
That’s where this starts becoming bigger than just “street photography.”
The archive itself becomes a living document of human movement through time.
The archive becomes the artwork.
The protocol stays the same.
The worlds change inside of it.
What FLUX Actually Is
FLUX is an open photographic protocol for publishing life in chronological sequence.
The archive is the artwork.
The goal is not to make your best single images.
The goal is to continuously enter the stream of making new images.
The sequence becomes more important than the isolated “hero shot.”
Photography becomes:
a visual diary
a lived record
a document of time
…instead of a curated story trying to force poetry after the fact.
“You Cannot Make the Same Photograph Twice”
The entire philosophy comes down to one idea:
You cannot make the same photograph twice.
The light changes. You change. Your body changes. Your mind changes.
Every frame becomes unrepeatable.
Every issue becomes a fragment of transformation.
Why 36 Frames?
I locked the books into a 36-frame constraint as an homage to one roll of 35mm film.
But more importantly, the limitation creates:
rhythm
structure
completion
No endless editing. No infinite additions. No obsessing over what to remove.
The work exists inside a fixed numerical structure.
Chronology Over Narrative
The chronological sequencing is about relinquishing control.
The walk itself becomes the structure.
Time organizes the work.
Not the ego.
Not rearranging images later to create artificial meaning.
The sequence should reflect:
the real movement you made
through space
through time
The photographer becomes a witness instead of a manipulator.
Why Black and White?
Black and white removes distraction and friction.
The workflow becomes focused on:
light
shadow
gesture
movement
instinct
This system is optimized for:
cheap office printing
reproducibility
speed
daily publishing
Cheap Paper, Bureaucratic Aesthetics
These books are intentionally:
disposable
archival
bureaucratic
poetic
They’re printed on cheap copy paper.
The aesthetic language comes from:
manila folders
police records
field reports
contact sheets
bureaucratic evidence
These are not luxury art objects.
The contradiction between:
fragile physical object
permanent digital archive
…is intentional.
The Protocol Page
Inside the book, the protocol page functions as the artist statement.
Not mythology. Not over-explanation.
The protocol itself is the statement.
The QR code invites anyone to participate.
Anyone can run the structure.
The process is transparent.
The protocol becomes the curatorial principle.
I designed it intentionally like a mechanical instruction manual.
Contact Sheets & Manifest Pages
At the back of the books:
we have the contact sheet
the 36-frame homage
the manifest page with exact timestamps
The layout itself is extremely minimal:
blank white space
visible staples
visible staple marks
simple typography
blank backs
protocol page
contact sheet
The object itself is supposed to resemble an everyday bureaucratic document.
Something mundane.
Something you’d see somebody carrying around through the city.
Looking at Chris Walters’ Work
Now getting into the actual photographs themselves.
The very first image is incredibly strong.
Compositionally:
the light
the timing
the gesture
the background placement
…everything is working.
But more importantly: there’s emotional closeness.
And that’s what makes a photograph powerful to me.
Not just technical perfection.
I feel something in the image.
Emotional Closeness
The visual diary approach is about embracing what’s nearest to you.
You don’t need to travel across the world.
You can:
drive in a car with your family
sit at the movies
walk through town
observe your child sleeping
…and create profound work.
I believe emotion can emerge through:
gaze
light
shadow
gesture
absence
Not necessarily dramatic events.
Relinquishing Control
One thing I love is seeing how diptychs naturally arise through chronology.
These images made within minutes of each other suddenly begin speaking to one another.
Without forcing it.
Without constructing it.
There’s magic in relinquishing control.
Geometry & Minimalism
Chris has an extremely strong sense of geometry and minimalist composition.
The ambiguity in the frames is beautiful.
The relationship between:
interior/exterior
reflections
silhouettes
mystery
negative space
…is handled very naturally.
You have a very strong eye, Chris.
Memory & Time
I love photographs that bring you back to the exact moment you were there.
Even seeing:
a pint
an empty chair
a shopping bag
a small gesture
…can transport you back into lived experience.
That’s why I’m interested in chronology.
It preserves memory through sequence.
Imperfection
One practical thing:
If you’re using the iPad Photos app with high contrast black and white, sometimes the highlights clip heavily.
Honestly, half my images look like that too.
If you care:
slightly reduce highlights
underexpose a little
pull highlights down maybe -5
…but also:
embrace imperfection.
Who really cares?
Cheap Printing & Texture
Something I’ve been realizing more and more:
I’m honestly more drawn to these cheap laser prints than expensive fine art prints.
The textures:
toner
artifacts
cheap copy paper
crushed blacks
blown highlights
…it almost starts resembling charcoal drawings.
There’s something deeply human about it.
Even the imperfections become beautiful.
Carrying Prints Physically
I actually printed one image recently and literally carried it around crumpled in my pocket.
Folding it. Destroying it. Aging it.
And honestly?
I love it more now than when it was pristine.
The imperfections become part of the life of the object itself.
Final Thoughts
Great work, Chris.
Looking forward to more submissions and seeing more work in the Discord daily walks channel.
Going forward:
submit directly through the generator
I’ll review one body of work each week
print the issue
physically go through the sequence
I think this approach feels much more personal.
Heraclitus & Flux
The primary inspiration behind FLUX philosophically comes from Heraclitus.
“You cannot step in the same river twice.”
Applied to photography:
“You cannot make the same photograph twice.”
By reducing photography back down to:
light
shadow
movement
time
…I’m finding infinite possibility in the medium again.
Seeing Beyond Human Vision
Your eyes don’t have shutter speed.
You do not see the way the camera sees.
Photography becomes an act of surprise.
You chip away at life and light.
The camera reveals something your eyes alone could never fully perceive.
That mystery is what keeps me endlessly curious about photography.
Influences
A huge influence on this work is:
Provoke
grain
urgency
imperfection
anti-perfectionism
cheap reproducibility
And also conceptual art: where the system itself becomes part of the artwork.
Ran into some artists in the park today and one of them randomly told me to look into Steve Reich and also the NASA Moon archive/Flickr metadata thing in relationship to what I’m building with FLUX.
Just leaving notes for myself here.
Steve Reich
Apparently Steve Reich is a minimalist composer whose work revolves around:
repetition
loops
gradual shifts over time
systems/processes
accumulation
Simple structures repeated over and over until they slowly evolve into something larger.
The artist said this reminded him of FLUX because of:
daily walking
repetitive photographic practice
sequencing
chronology
accumulation over years
process over perfection
Interesting thought.
Especially because FLUX isn’t really built around isolated “masterpiece” images as much as continuous movement and publishing over time.
Need to look more into:
phase music
tape loops
process art
minimalism
Steve Reich interviews
NASA / Flickr / Metadata
The other thing mentioned was that NASA has apparently been using Flickr heavily for recent Moon mission archival distribution.
What’s interesting is not just the photographs themselves but the metadata attached to them:
timestamps
mission information
camera data
sequencing
geolocation
archival structure
contextual information
The idea being that the image itself is only one layer.
The metadata becomes part of the historical object.
This feels strangely connected to where FLUX is unintentionally heading:
issue numbers
photographer attribution
exact timestamps
GPS
QR codes
downloadable originals
cryptographic verification
public archives
searchable systems
long-term preservation
The idea of the photograph as an archival object instead of merely “content.”
Flickr
Also interesting to think about how early Flickr functioned almost like a public visual memory system:
searchable archives
visible EXIF data
geotagging
chronological uploads
camera metadata
tagging systems
Feels very different from modern algorithmic social media.
More archival. More informational. More chronological.
The Burning of the Library of Alexandria has become a symbol of cultural fragility — the idea that entire worlds of thought can vanish through war, neglect, ideology, or time. Whether the destruction happened in one event or across centuries almost doesn’t matter anymore; it represents the fear of impermanence itself.
And in a strange way, your FLUX ideas are reacting against that exact fear.
Not through marble temples or institutional gatekeepers — but through:
distributed copies
open archives
cheap reproducible books
downloadable PDFs
mirrors across servers
hashes and verification
physical prints + digital redundancy
public participation
chronology instead of curation bottlenecks
That’s a very modern form of preservation.
Prometheus stealing fire from the gods becomes a fitting metaphor here: not just fire as destruction, but fire as technology, memory, craft, transmission.
The irony is beautiful:
ancient archives centralized knowledge into one vulnerable place
the internet dissolved knowledge into infinite fragments
blockchain/exahash systems attempt to make records computationally permanent
Your instinct toward:
“every image having a verifiable existence”
is basically treating photography like a cultural ledger rather than disposable content.
And honestly, the combination is compelling:
ephemeral street moments
printed like temporary zines
but cryptographically anchored forever
Almost like:
the fleeting moment vs. the immutable record.
That contradiction feels very FLUX.
3.5 years of small JPEG – I was genius for getting a 2Tb iPad Pro. No external drive needed for 3.5 years 400k shots sheeesh
Every day I go for a walk along the Schuylkill River Trail in Philadelphia. At the end of the walk, I stand on top of the cliff behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art, looking out toward the horizon.
Ever since I started this daily ritual, this feeling of abundance has started to flow through me. It feels like there’s a gravitational pull from the water, always tugging my body here first thing in the morning. And while I look out at the water moving and flowing, I remember how everything is in flux — always in motion and always changing.
I will never return to the same river twice.
Not only is the river always moving, but I too, on a physiological level, am changing each day. My cells are replenishing, my muscles are growing, and my creative capacity expands.
There’s a paradox though. As I walk the path, I’ve eliminated all freedom. If I go left, I’ll follow the river and drown to death. If I go right, I’ll get hit by a train and die tragically. And so the only path for me to walk is onward and upward toward the cliff, looking out toward the beautiful river. This is the perfect location to catch the sunset.
Ever since photographing in high contrast black-and-white, I’ve become much more in tune with light itself. I recognize that the way light casts itself upon surfaces, people, places, and things is always in flux and changing.
Light and life are out of our control.
And so my interest in photography lies in that lack of control — the surprise, the serendipity that lies within the magic of photography.
The way that life emanates through my camera’s lens and touches the sensor gives me an unrepeatable practice, a walk that becomes endless.
Now I can walk this same mundane lane every single day, pushing my rock to the cliff just to watch it roll back down again — and smile.
Photography, for me, has gone beyond my simple engagement with a medium itself.
It has become life affirmation.
My absolute fuck yes to life.
Beyond Good and Bad
I now recognize that there is no such thing as good or bad photographs.
I treat each photograph equally.
My personal duty as a photographer is simply to step into the stream of becoming, of evolution and change, through making new frames each day.
The archive is art.
Why Copy Paper?
I’ve recently started printing my work on cheap copy paper with my monochrome laser printer at home.
I feel like I finally found the output of the work that I’m trying to make.
I even printed the small JPEG large at 17×22 on proper luster paper with a Canon PRO-1000, which looked absolutely beautiful, but it was too perfect.
Now I’ve taken my small JPEG and compressed it even further into small PDF files that are instantly downloadable, transferable, and printable at home.
And I am personally blown away.
The texture and imperfection of these photographs sitting physically upon copy paper finally feels aligned with the spirit of the work itself.
Ephemeral Yet Permanent
Recognizing my flesh nature, my imperfect design, is what reminds me that I am divine.
Despite the fact that I have a finite timeline, and that I will and must die, I find something permanent and everlasting within the way that I experience life through photography, through light itself.
And so this is why I treat photography as a simple act of affirmation.
Clicking the shutter is me saying:
“I am alive.”
Photography is now my lifeline.
Maybe it’s true that Bresson died before he died physically. He gave up photography at the end of his life, which was his true death.
Now I treat each click of the shutter like it could be my last breath.
Why High Contrast?
The photograph is an instant sketch, an instant drawing.
When I consider the word photography arriving from drawing with light, this is what I seek.
Active self-expression through photography is unlike any other medium considering the physical nature of it.
Walking through the world, embracing the sights, sounds, and senses of embodied reality while photographing becomes a spiritual act.
While moving your body and photographing, you simultaneously exist within the realm of being and becoming.
Yes, everything around me and within me is changing, but for that fraction of a second that I click the shutter and say yes to the moment, I can simply be.
The photographs I make become fragments of my subjective interpretation of reality within the moment.
They are not meant to say:
“This is a fact.”
Through embracing contrast, grain, abstraction, and imperfection, I hope to evoke something emotional rather than merely descriptive.
Beyond technicality, beyond storytelling, beyond perfection in composition or geometry, the imagery I seek to create goes beyond language itself.
The Front Lines of Life
Photographers should focus more critically on traits that have nothing to do with technicality.
Instead of worrying endlessly about lighting and timing for storytelling, why not focus on curiosity and courage as the true measurement of whether or not you are improving?
If the photograph requires courage, if you’re photographing from your heart, then to me, that’s a successful photograph.
If you’re waking up each morning increasing your curiosity, propelling your body onto the front lines of life to make new frames, then you are already succeeding.
Photography has nothing to do with photography.
It has everything to do with the way that you engage with humanity out there in the open world, on the front lines of life.
This is not to dismiss the difficulty of making impactful frames, but rather to recognize that
In order to make great frames, one must first cultivate a great heart.
Why Compact Digital Cameras?
I don’t believe style emerges through color or black-and-white, nor through the content of one’s photographs.
Style emerges through consistency over long periods of time cultivating instinct.
Most photographers overcomplicate things.
But your style ultimately emerges through the way that you physically move your body through the world — through your intuition, positioning, rhythm, and instinct.
And the compact digital camera is the fastest way to make a photograph.
You click the button and move on.
No friction. No hunting autofocus. Just pure speed, simplicity, and instinct.
A small JPEG file is all you need.
By embracing compact digital camera technology, we can transcend the medium itself until the camera disappears entirely.
The compact camera becomes the closest thing to not having a camera at all — the pure extension of the body, the eye, the heart.
And through wandering the world with this ability to instantly create from instinct, you arrive closer to authentic self-expression.
Why Chronological Order?
One thing I’ve started doing is stamping my photographs with the exact metadata of the time and date they were created, arranging everything chronologically.
Once again:
The archive is art.
There are moments while photographing from this pure and present state where I feel as though I exist outside the passage of time.
And so the act of stamping the exact date and time onto the photograph becomes meaningful to me — a fragment within time itself.
This idea feels liberating.
To arrange everything chronologically removes the friction of trying to say something monumental.
Yes, we could spend thirty years selecting fifty photographs and curating ourselves poetically through perfection and scarcity, but this is not how we experience life.
We experience life through becoming. Through change. Through flux.
And so this is how I seek to share photography — as a stream of becoming unfolding chronologically without excessive design.
Why Remove Control?
I also enjoy the idea of extreme creative constraints.
From the technical workflow to the philosophy to the final output, I’ve locked in the rule that every issue I create will only ever contain thirty-six frames.
I enjoy allowing the sequence to emerge naturally through stumbling through life itself, paying homage to the tradition of 35mm film photography.
But what truly interests me is the lack of control.
I’m not in control of whether the light is beautiful. I’m not in control of the conditions. I’m not in control of whether or not I’ll encounter something extraordinary.
What I am in control of is cultivating curiosity and courage — the willingness to move my body through the world each day making new frames.
And so by removing the obsession with control — by wandering without destination, by not using the viewfinder, by relinquishing perfectionism — I arrive at a strange form of creative freedom through creative constraint.
What fascinates me most about photography is that light itself remains outside of my control.
A lot of times the photograph is not what I saw.
The photograph is what I didn’t see.
My two eyes do not have a shutter speed.
And so when photographing from pure instinct, relinquishing control, I surprise myself each day when looking back at the frames.
This increases my curiosity to return the next day and continue playing.
Why Is the Archive Art?
The archive itself is important because we now live in an existential time for photography.
With artificial intelligence, image generation, manipulated metadata, and synthetic realities becoming increasingly normalized, where does the role of the photographer intersect?
My personal response is radical openness.
To present everything. To stamp photographs in time. To arrange them chronologically as an archive.
This is my rebellion.
My way of saying:
“This was real. I, a physical flesh creature, was here. And this was worth remembering.”
Why the Bureaucratic Aesthetic?
The final presentation of the work exists within manila folders, adopting the aesthetics of bureaucracy as a critique of modernity itself.
The work is intentionally mechanical.
Everything organized chronologically and automatically through metadata gathered from the archive.
The physical object is stapled on the left side with exposed staples. The title, date, and photographer name appear small in the top corner. Blank backs. White space.
The work resembles an ordinary bureaucratic document that someone might carry into an office meeting.
But instead of organizing abstraction, I’m organizing lived experience.
Fragments of light. Moments of existence. Proof that someone physically stood here.
Bureaucracy vs Merit
I recently quit my job.
It felt like a pure calling. I had never felt such meaning in my life.
For nearly two years I was designing gardens and physically laboring all day in a seasonal position. I genuinely loved the work. There was something deeply fulfilling about physically shaping the environment around me with my own hands.
A full-time opening appeared, and for the first time in a long time, I thought everything was finally crystal clear. I thought I had finally found my place within modern society. A job I could genuinely do for the rest of my life.
And so I went all in.
I went far beyond my actual responsibilities. I wasn’t simply watering plants or maintaining the grounds. I was redesigning sections of the park, creating long-term proposals, measuring plots, calculating soil requirements, planting neglected greenhouse plants directly into the earth, and physically restoring sections of the space almost entirely on my own.
Despite this, when I submitted my application for the full-time position, it was declined.
The reasoning had little to do with the actual quality of labor or dedication. Instead, it came down to categories, qualifications, points, and bureaucratic systems that didn’t properly recognize the reality of the work I had already done.
And that experience deeply affected me.
But what affected me even more was what happened near the end of my time there.
I remember sitting in the hospital after getting poison in my eye at work. The doctor told me to avoid dusty environments for a period of time, yet the next day I still found myself shoveling snow and being questioned about productivity.
What disturbed me wasn’t even the labor itself. I’ve always loved physical work.
What disturbed me was the feeling that the paperwork surrounding the injury seemed more important than the actual human being experiencing it.
And that realization stayed with me.
It made me realize how much of modern life exists within abstraction.
Paperwork. Screens. Meetings. Management. Systems managing systems.
Meanwhile, the actual physical world — the tangible reality of making, building, growing, repairing, carrying, walking, photographing — often feels secondary.
And so in many ways, FLUX became my personal response to that feeling.
A desire to reconnect with embodied reality.
To move my body through the world each day. To walk. To photograph. To physically engage with life itself again.
Because ultimately, photography for me is not about escaping reality.
— What FLUX is — The philosophical foundation — The protocol — The 36-frame structure — Zine specifications — Archive architecture — Generator infrastructure — Public catalog system — Field assignments — Collaborative projects — Preservation protocols — Future roadmap
FLUX is an open photographic protocol for publishing life in chronological sequence.
The archive is the artwork.
This is the first complete canonical document of the system and will continue evolving over time.
Two photographers. One street. One day. Both move north to south across the entire spine of Philadelphia, documenting the city in real time from two different vantage points. Every photograph contains the exact date, time, and GPS coordinates of the moment it was made. The workflow collapses the distance between seeing, photographing, mapping, publishing, and archiving.
Generator
Download the exact HTML generator used to build this archive.
The Broad Street in Flux project was built using a custom HTML-based FLUX archive generator.
Instead of manually building webpages, layouts, maps, and publications by hand, the generator automatically assembled the project from the original photographs and metadata.
The system was designed around a simple idea:
Photograph first. Publish immediately.
What the Generator Does
The generator automatically:
reads the JPEG files
extracts metadata
builds the archive structure
generates the timeline
creates the image grid
organizes the project chronologically
links photographs to map locations
builds downloadable publications
creates a responsive archive website
The goal is to eliminate unnecessary friction between photographing and publishing.
Why This Matters
Most photography projects involve:
complicated editing workflows
manual website building
layout software
endless file organization
slow publishing pipelines
FLUX approaches publishing differently.
The system is designed so the archive itself becomes alive and continuously updateable.
Instead of treating photography as isolated masterpieces, the archive becomes:
a visual diary
a living document
a chronological record of movement through the world
Open Process
The generator itself is part of the project.
Rather than hiding the workflow, FLUX embraces transparency, reproducibility, and open systems.
The exact generator used to build the Broad Street in Flux archive is available below.
A new independent FLUX publication has been released by Miguel Monforte.
After photographing Holy Week in his hometown of Samper de Calanda, Miguel slowly realized that the images were all connected through a shared emotional territory — family, rituals, silence, memory, streets, gestures, and landscape. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}
What began as simple walks with a camera eventually transformed into his first completed photobook.
The Process
Miguel first created a manual selection of photographs that felt emotionally connected rather than simply selecting the “best” images. He then generated contact sheets with visible filenames and used ChatGPT as a sequencing assistant to help build emotional rhythm, pauses, transitions, and visual relationships between photographs. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}
The goal was not to create:
a portfolio
an Instagram gallery
a chronological report
But instead:
a visual diary
fragmented memory
emotional geography
poetic documentary photography
The Book
Miguel designed the book using Blurb BookWright with a small, lightweight format inspired by the FLUX philosophy:
— 13 × 20 cm
— soft cover
— matte black-and-white paper
— visual notebook aesthetic
He also experimented with collage-style cover generation using ChatGPT, embracing imperfection and directness rather than over-polished production.
A Key Reflection
One of the most interesting ideas Miguel wrote about was this:
“Taking photographs is just the beginning. The real work begins afterwards.”
The book ultimately became less about documenting drums or events and more about emotional memory, territory, and lived experience.
Two photographers. Two chronological visual diaries. Two direct publications made through the FLUX system.
This is the beginning of the open FLUX archive.
HOW IT WORKS
Shoot photographs normally.
Select 36 JPEG photographs.
Open the FLUX Auto Zine Generator.
Drag the photographs into the browser.
Click:
GENERATE FLUX ISSUE PDF
The system automatically creates a printable PDF issue.
The first independent FLUX_001 issues are now live. These were generated directly through the FLUX system: Shoot → Select → Sequence → Publish → Move on
No heavy editing. No perfectionism. No delay.
Just photography flowing in real time into physical form.
FLUX_001 — Dimitri_Wessendorf
Date Range: 2026-05-04 → 2026-05-08
A raw monochrome visual diary produced through the FLUX methodology.
