Newsletter #176 - Membership Drive

Are you sick of subscriptions? How about one more?

It's been exactly one year since I resumed publishing this newsletter.

In that year, we saw a total solar eclipse, went birding, digitized my old video tapes, talked about not liking fireworks anymore, discovered local art, protected the network, hatched green eggs, and considered what it means to be a local, among other things. Forty-five stories in all!

Doing this is challenging and fun, but sometimes I need to remind myself what the point is.

I think it's often about transforming everyday observations into visual stories, and finding meaning in the ordinary.

It's also a way to document my ongoing photographic projects and create a personal archive while attempting to build a community around my work.

The newsletter serves as both documentation of my artistic practice and an extension of it – a place where I can be more conversational, more reflective, and sometimes more vulnerable than in my photography alone. (I could say the same about my YouTube show, too.)

It’s about everything. It’s about nothing.

These projects are truly my most favorite projects I have ever worked on. They allow me to be completely myself – sometimes serious, sometimes ridiculous, and maybe occasionally even funny.

They are also the least profitable things I’ve ever done.

I’d say this is ironic, but really, it’s just what I’d expect. There is very little commercial context for work like this with a modest following.

Money isn't everything, right? That's what most people will say. Even bringing it up seems incredibly cringe. But you know what? Money is something worth bringing up. It's the thing that allows me to stay focused on making more of this work instead of shooting a corporate job or some random commission that I really don’t have all that much passion for anymore.

I want the newsletter and videos to be my “real” work. But in order to do that, I need your support.

If you enjoy what I do and if you have the means, please consider becoming a paying subscriber here, joining the Hotline Show Patreon, or contacting me to collect some of my art. You can even do a one-time Venmo if you just want to cut out the middleman. Every contribution at any amount allows me to continue to produce these stories weekly.

Oh, remember my Normal Houses project that I talked about in #135? I have made some serious progress on the book, and I hope to go to print with it in the next few weeks. Subscribers/supporters will get a discount. That’s an actual perk!

I know there are hundreds if not thousands of other places on the internet that are asking for your money and they are probably providing more relative value to your life than my work is, so this humble newsletter might be an easy one to skip. I totally understand that.

But just remember, there's not a lot of other newsletters out there in which someone documents the same roadside catalpa tree for seven years, then questions their entire existence while wondering if taking photos of the same thing over and over again actually means anything at all.

Thank you and see you next week.

Maybe!

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Kristen Neufeld’s subscription auto-renewed because she forgot to cancel.
Zach Vitale never signed up for any of this.

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Support: Substack / Patreon / Venmo
Elsewhere: noahkalina.com / Instagram / Threads / YouTube / Bluesky