Hall, Conceptual Photography, and the Difference Between Constructing Meaning vs Discovering It
I was told about a year ago that my photography shared similarities with Hall’s work. At first, I resisted the comparison a little. Not because it was insulting — quite the opposite — but because photographic comparisons are often too broad to mean much. Saying two photographers are “conceptual” can sometimes feel like saying both use small cameras. Technically true, but not especially revealing.
Still, the comparison stayed in my mind because there is overlap there, even if the routes we take are very different.
Hall’s work, to me, feels more stage-driven. More constructed. There is an intentional arrangement of symbolic elements, a deliberate shaping of the emotional field of the image. The photograph becomes a kind of theatre. Meaning is designed into the frame.
My work tends to move in another direction. More documentary. More observational. Less interested in constructing symbolic environments than in discovering them already latent within everyday life.
That distinction matters.
I am often walking through public space looking for fractures in reality — accidental poetry, media collisions, strange cultural echoes, liminal moments where civilization unintentionally reveals itself. A Pokémon magazine beside a political headline. A couple disappearing into fog. Stairs reduced to pure geometry and shadow. A city accidentally creating conceptual art without realizing it.
The camera, in that sense, becomes less of a paintbrush and more of an excavation tool.
That does not make the work “less conceptual.” In some ways it may even intensify the conceptual element, because the viewer is confronted with the unsettling realization that these symbolic structures were not staged. They were already there, waiting to be noticed.
This is where I think the overlap with Hall actually exists.
Not necessarily in visual style alone, but in the idea that photographs can function as thought-objects rather than simple records. Images not merely as memories, but as epistemological devices. Ways of thinking.
The difference is that Hall appears to construct meaning into existence, while I am usually trying to uncover meaning embedded inside culture itself.
The closest analogy might be archaeology versus architecture.
One builds the structure.
The other discovers the ruins and asks what civilization produced them.
Historically, photography has always had this split. Some photographers build worlds; others reveal the strange worlds already surrounding us. Photographers like Gregory Crewdson create highly orchestrated cinematic realities, while photographers like Garry Winogrand or Lee Friedlander often found surrealism embedded directly within ordinary American life.
I suspect my own work sits somewhere in between documentary anthropology and conceptual excavation.
Urban photography, especially the way I approach it, is often anthropological in nature. Cities become symbolic ecosystems. Advertisements, architecture, consumer objects, gestures, media fragments — they all begin speaking to one another inside the frame. The image stops being “about” a single subject and starts becoming about systems of meaning colliding in real time.
That is probably the real similarity.
Not that Hall and I make the same photographs, but that both of us treat photography as a medium capable of carrying ideas, not just appearances.
And maybe that is the more interesting comparison anyway.
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