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.
No point in sweating the details, the small stuff, being caught up in thought, over analyzing everything . Just retard max. Walk around barefoot drinking raw milk, and jump on a fire hydrant.. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a serious photographer who’s critically analyzing everything, so deep and thought, over analyzing and never actually doing. Wondering about paper choice and wall space and who’s gonna validate what they do. I say fuck that. Let the chips fall as they may. Build your cathedral, brick by brick, just to tear that shit down again each day. 
300 Spartans, 300 publications,
So I just stepped away from the computer. Been pacing back-and-forth throughout my living room playing with Claude code and designing infrastructure to automate my entire photography publication, distribution, and archival workflow.  my frustration with the medium is how slow this thing is. And so the embrace of small JPEG, high contrast, workflow, compact cameras, has proven to be the only thing that can keep up with me. And so now, the main frustration is, when you have a hard drive of close to half a million photos and 15,000 photographs that you selected and put aside, do you really want to sit around and waste all of your time dwelling on the images?
Beyond good and bad
Notions of what makes or breaks a good or bad frame is extremely uninteresting to me. The reason being, is that I’ve already mastered photography. I know what it takes to get to the point where you can effectively make great frames over and over again all over the world. And so it became extremely boring and repetitive to me. And whatever Picasso said is 100% correct. He learned a master painting like Rafael, and then spent the rest of his life learning to paint like a child. I feel like the way forward is endlessly, returning to the childlike state, today one every single day, never mastering photography. I wanna be an amateur forever!
And right now what I’m doing is, fucking insane. I’ve designed a whole system around my practice from the ground up. From the way that I shoot, my philosophy, technique, approach, settings, everything in between. The one missing piece, is the distribution and publication. And so I decided OK I’ll use blurb, I’ve used it before, it was cool. It works and it’s easy enough. But even that, adds friction. Having to sit around and dwell on a sequence and contrive some sort of narrative doesn’t make any difference for me. I’m gonna be out the next day shooting 1000 frames and so who fucking cares about the photos I made yesterday. I’m not gonna sit around on my weekends looking at photos and making sequences. It’s absurd to me. Uninteresting. Basic and for the Normie‘s.
Everything in flux
My entire philosophy arrived 3 1/2 years ago when I realized that photography is endless. The way the light is always changing, and the way that life is out of my control, allows for infinite possibility within the medium of photography. You can never make the same photograph twice. And so as I began photographing with this streamlined workflow, I started to pile up stacks and stacks of pictures extremely quickly. What I would do is, shoot 1000 pictures a day, come home call through the photos and just upload them directly to my blog each day. It made sense and has become a ritual for me. Shoot, cull, published, move on.  I also really enjoyed looking at my photographs chronologically in sequences this way day by day month my month year by year. I find chronology and the passage of time to be very very interesting in terms of photography and actually creating sequences in chronology just make complete sense to me. Each photograph is merely a fragment of time. You could argue that the photograph exists outside the passage of time, but what happens when you actually stamp it within real time?
Techno futurist future
I started to play with extracting the Meta data from my files. Gathering the timeline in a CSV file. I upload everything to a website, flux.dantesisofo.com - create a timeline feature. And now browse my work by day a month by month.  it’s a very nice way of looking at the work this way as a stream in a timeline it’s just satisfying to me. But it’s time to upgrade. I’ve created a full pipeline. From shooting to publishing. Flux. You come home your dragon and drop your photos into a folder after making your selections. You then simply run a simple script command copy command P enter.  all files are uploaded to the archive online, everything is viewable downloadable. Another missing piece, the physical publication of this thing. And so when you go to upload, the script automatically determines when you have 50 new photographs ready for a publication. It organizes everything, titles, the work in sequence, flux_065 for example, and each photograph is sequence chronologically in order with captions with the date, time stamp and name. At the back of the PDF you have a viewable contact sheet and manifest document that is a one-to-one reference to the actual digital archive. There’s a QR code that you scan  that will then take you to the digital publication of that exact issue where you can download the original JPEG files. So now I’m walking around waiting for my Claude code to finish doing what it’s doing, and finish generating 304 publications.
## Shoot, print, staple
Everything open source. Instantly transferable. 10 MB PDF files. 28 sheets of paper, 50 images, double sided, 8 1/2 x 11 paper,. Simply print or PDF, stack up 28 sheets, staple, and enjoy. Doesn’t matter if you have a shitty printer, good printer, just use your basic office, printer at home and enjoy the work for free. The aesthetic qualities of the high contrast to workflow with these kind of LaserJet monochrome printers I was fucking beautiful. The imperfections actually make it more interesting. And the other thing, I even compressed my small JPEG even further, so the quality is reduced. But I find it to be fascinating. I’m just dreaming everything to pure simplicity and speed. Where I can now just keep going, keep shooting, come home, select my photos, instantly archive and publish a physical book daily.  no gatekeepers, no self publishing software or in design or print on demand bullshit.
The aesthetics of the physical object becomes bureaucratic. Simple mono space text. And I store them in manila folders. A living breathing archive. Ephemeral, reproducible, distributable, open and accessible, imperfect, because it’s not supposed to be. Rip out the pages, rearrange different PDFs however you want. The whole system is plug-in play. Do you wanna put on a show? Print out a PDF, take a piece of tape, and tape up 10 pictures to a wall somewhere. There’s your show.
I’m still working and tinkering and almost finished with my concept. Once it’s launched, just look for flux. 
