About
Katsudon
…is a delicious Japanese dish made with a fried pork (or sometimes chicken) cutlet served over rice. If you haven’t had a chance to try it (and you eat meat), it’s good. The “don” in “Katsudon” means rice bowl.
I’m Don
I’m a philosopher & activist. And a photographer. Of course, as you have guessed, I am not a bowl of rice. The name is a play on the fact that I love Japanese food, and that although I am not a bowl of rice, the wordplay was irresistible to me.
Philosophy teaches us to question assumptions, but our most powerful assumptions are about the mundane world we inhabit daily. Thus, my subject matter is the invisible world that lies in plain sight—places and things that require a great deal of thought and effort to create, but which (often by design) we hardly notice.
I want to illuminate this invisible world, revealing our most fundamental assumptions and helping us to understand why things are as they are. I leverage my background in the philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, and engineering to find the unseen places, and best use my camera to make the occult manifest. Experiments are replicable, and I approach each photographic project in a way that encourages others to experiment and see for themselves.
I use a variety of photographic equipment and techniques, including both 135 film and APS-C digital cameras. Depending on the project, some work is made out of doors, in the found world—street photography of things, rather than people. Some work is made in the carefully-controlled environment of a photographic studio using strobe lighting.
I also write, about photography for 35mmc and my own site.