By now, Starbucks at the Oxford Road Building at Emory should be a mundane place for me; I come here almost every day, sometimes twice a day.

But every visit is distinguished by what I’m working on that day. Tonight, it’s reading Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. It’s writing about my three Lumen prints, which I designed and developed a few weeks ago. I consciously shut my laptop, put away my phone, and start copying down the quotes by hand with my blue-black fountain pain. I savor the smooth sensation of writing on paper while listening to the eclectic Starbucks soundtrack.

“Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”

“All these surprises obey a principle of defiance […]: the photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes ‘surprising’ when we do not know why it has been taken.”

“Ultimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”

I need to shut off technology more.

*A Subscriber told me that I made a Freudian slip by writing “fountain pain.” I am only in my first dead week at school…

**How ironic is it that I talk about shutting off technology and writing quotes by hand, only to open my laptop, compose this moment, and type up the same quotes?