Every parcel, exempt or not, was photographed: churches, parking lots, bodegas, government buildings. A totalizing view shaped by bureaucratic vision, rendering the city as taxable surface.

In the 1980s, the NYC Department of Finance commissioned a photographic survey of the city, not for aesthetic merit, but for tax. Now catalogued at 80s.nyc

Explore this extraordinary archive at 1940s.nyc

Nearly every NYC property photographed in the 1940s by 32 WPA photographers for the city’s Tax Department. Referred to as “tax photos,” these images replaced traditional ledgers with visual records, each property marked with its block, lot, borough, and size. Bureaucratic vision made legible!

I’m curious to see how these ramblings (literally, figuratively) play out, and to practice writing as a performative act that makes the world. Come along!

I’ll try and post daily or every two days. If you’re interested in following along, then send me your email!

The idea is to delete all the subscribers after this two week period. It’s an ephemeral, immediate response to the starting of a photographic project…

For the next two weeks I’m going to make a disposable, “pop-up” newsletter with photos, some words, and other unformed thoughts…

The commission will result in a public art installation and collective ‘action’ with local amateur photographers throughout 2025 and into 2026…

We’ll be here for the next two weeks getting started on a research trip. Walking, surveying, experimenting, mucking about…

The Bureau has been commissioned to explore a dis-used railway line and bridge in Slovakia…

The Bureau of Operational Landscapes is getting… operational! Follow along on Instagram @operational.land

All things photography, (operational) landscapes, site-based encounters, mash it all together and you’ve got: The Bureau.

Ukrainians honourably resisted anti-democratic creep in 2014, only to be annexed, then invaded, by Russia, now betrayed by the supposedly democratic beacon that is the USA. What does the US even stand for now, other than vulture, extractive, rapacious capitalism? Can’t believe I’m even writing this.

4/4 Looking south west towards Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives

3/4 Panorama of Bethlehem looking West

2/4 Ten volumes were published, also containing botanical, zoological, topographic, and geological data alongside the photographs.

1/4 A series of panoramas photographed by the Palestine Exploration Fund between 1871-75 from a geographical scan made of Palestine by the British colonial administration, incorporating 46 different categories, such as: city, village, vicinity, to well, shrine, hilltop, stream, castle, etc.

In some ways they are monstrous symbols of the invisible ubiquity of fossil fuels that greasily finds itself in every part of life, physical manifestations of the “geology of elsewhere.”

Just finished Adam Hanieh’s book Crude Capitalism.

Oil drilling platforms have got to be some of the most terrifying structures ever built. A distant landscape of energy production and consumption conducted far beyond the horizon of prying eyes.