Dear Patron,
Today I am sharing some photographs of Evan from a trip to Los Angeles in 2024. At the time, I was shooting everything on 4x5 film which, I eventually decided, was too cumbersome for portraits. The focus was intentionally done to pull focus to specific pars of the image. As well, I loved the reference we made to the toe sucking Peter Hujar portrait.
I'm also reflecting on this concept of millennial optimism that seems to be so pervasive at the moment.... The photographs are new but the essay comes from a post a few months ago. Read more below !
I’ve been reflecting recently on the concept of millennial optimism – the promise and possibility that permeated culture in the early Obama years. Back in the 2010s, the beginning, or perhaps height of millennial optimism. I don’t think we felt free, but that freedom was nearby. In New York City, where I moved in 2008, rents weren’t cheap, but they were nearly affordable, and everyone had a friend, a few years older, who had an amazing place in Williamsburg or the LES. We all had stories upon stories about our favorite bars, places to dance, and late night encounters with famous artists just trying to have a good time.
As millennials, there was a short distance between us and a life that was meaningful and beautiful. It was over there–in the future. Some guy you’d met at a bar would take you back to his huge loft in Brooklyn for the night and you’d think, “this could be my life someday.”
Back then, all you had to do was go to Skowhegan to be considered a great artist. An MFA from Columbia or Yale meant that soon, you too could make a few lazy paintings and sell out a whole booth at Art Basel year after year. This was back in the aughts when the Clinton economic surplus merged with the Bush tax cuts and artists were making all kinds of easy money. Soon, the first big 20th century financial crisis hit and Obama-era ‘hope’ would make a perfect storm of smooth-brained willful ignorance that made us, or at least me, feel that life as an artist was not only possible, it was the future.
And why not? Seemingly endless VC money made Uber cheap and the Vice Media offices beautiful. The founders of AirBNB were just some RISD art majors with a good idea. Why would we be anything other than optimistic? We could pay rent with a silly job at Gawker or Buzzfeed and never once questioned how these companies seemed to function off of shoestring budgets.
This all happened to a backdrop of colonial Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where young artists rented cheap warehouse space and the coolest thing you could be was a coked-up skinny white Ryan McGinley model. Damien Hirst diamond-crusted-skulls were in fashion and motorcycles parked in a living room was the height of interior decor.
Grindr launched in 2009 and quickly became the most popular “dating” app across any sexuality. And somehow that too became a way of life, a form of optimism. How easy it became to meet other gay people, and how difficult it seemed to date, which didn’t matter because gay people could really get married anyway.
I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on a concept called cruel optimism, a complex theory around a way of life that promises a clear future but robs you of true possibility. The best way that I can explain it might be a piece of advice from an older grindr hookup I used to go to dinner with in 2013.
“Grindr is an addiction,” he said, “like anything else.” He explained that there was an experiment done in which a mouse was shown a button. When the mouse pushed the button it was either given a piece of cheese or zapped with an electric shock. If the mouse was given too many electric shocks, it would stop pushing the button. It was the same for a mouse given too much cheese. The key to getting the mouse to continue to push the button was the alternating reward or pain. “If you alternate between electric shock and cheese reward, that mouse will push that button until he dies,” he said, very seriously as if imparting some great wisdom. I always thought this was ridiculous and probably a made up experiment.
And yet, the truth is, almost 13 years later, I feel like it is an apt description of what optimism is about. It's about the possibility of being rewarded cheese while knowing full well that cheese is not always the outcome. There’s no need to be optimistic if you know everything is going to work out, and the same is true if you know your endeavors will fail. The opposite of optimism, then, is not pessimism, it is certainty.
It wasn’t simply a youthful idealism that made us optimistic, it was the merging of a prosperous past with an unclear future. If the economic collapse meant there were no jobs, and yet young 20-somethings were building multi-billion-dollar companies like Facebook and AirBNB, the best thing in that world to become was a creative out-of-the-box thinker. A forward thinking three-dimensional person with liberal politics and a creative soul who cared about connecting people in this new online environment.
The situation in the 2010s, for anyone paying close enough attention, was bleak, but the future was, possibly, bright. We were stretched really thin, buried under mountains of student loan debt, and yet still able to afford Sunday brunch after a night out. There was somehow still the promise of good jobs, and prosperous creative endeavors.
Still, that future we thought was on the horizon hasn’t materialized. It might never materialize. But it is still the possibility, those dreams we had late at night in Brooklyn bars, or in some guy’s loft. It’s the optimism we had for the secret futures we whispered about in our friend’s studio apartment on their bed sharing a late night bagel, that keep us moving toward the future.
Perhaps the future we dreamed about didn’t come, or maybe we just never realized the role we might have to play in building it.
Thank you for reading !
See you next week,
Matthew