I’ll give Karen Joy Fowler credit for this photograph. Years ago, I read a collection of her stories entitled Artificial Things, and since reading those shimmering, luminous exercises in speculative fiction, I’ve been inspired in countless ways. Admittedly, it’s the title of the collection that acts as something of a strange attractor, gathering my creative energies and allowing them to accrete and…become something. This happens, I notice, with photography more than with fiction. Though Karen Joy Fowler is a great writer, I can’t say that I’ve read much of her later stuff. Her concerns are different from my own, in terms of what she writes about, and her books aren’t always at eye-level whenever I’m browsing bookshelves. I’m lazy like that, at times. I grab what I see. I thumb through it and look for adjectives on random pages. That—among other things—is how I determine what I want to buy and eventually read. Of course, I’ll buy anything written by China Miéville, and even pay extra if the inner (or rear) dust jacket photograph features the astute and spooky-smart Mr. Miéville in a pair of skimpy swimming trunks and nothing else. Unfortunately, authors don’t go around putting eye-candy photos of themselves on the backs of their books. Anyway, this isn’t about cute writers of weird fiction; nor is it about their swimming trunks. This isn’t even about China Miéville, no matter how cute (and buff) he is. And this brings us back to Karen Joy Folwer, or more specifically, Artificial Things. That title has determined much of my visual aesthetic, and it’s not something that I thought about until browsing through my gallery and realizing that many of my photographs (no matter how objective they pretend to be) are driven by a mood, or a version of reality that isn’t “real” at all. I noticed it, in particular, with the photograph you’ve presumably just looked at. It was, at one point, a realistic photograph: a part of Chinatown did look exactly like the photograph I’d made. I found, as I tweaked and twiddled with the shot, that I wasn’t really interested in what Chicago’s Chinatown looks like. I can go there, whenever I want to, and see it. I was more interested in the relationships between colors and shapes and the ways in which various exaggerations might play together. I was interested in a kind of searing hyper-reality…something you can only feel but can never see, unless you manipulate a photograph. In short, I was interested in seeing and feeling this minute fragment of Chinatown as an artificial thing…something unreal…something that isn’t there, despite the fact that I’ve eaten at Won Kow on at least 3 occasions. I rather like the idea of creating unreal things with a camera and The Gimp, a camera and Photoshop, or a camera and a flashlight. I like the fact that I can exaggerate colors or tweak a sky filled with dramatic clouds. I’m especially glad that writers of science fiction and speculative fiction are among the people who’ve consistently shown me that there are ways in which reality can be manipulated and made a bit less…um…consociate. Now, if only I had a shot of China Miéville in nothing but super-skimpy swimming trunks. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all at the start of a brilliant, exciting, productive, and superb new year.