Day 1, February 4, 2026

I am writing this dispatch from Athens, Greece, where we are currently on the second day of shooting. The following work is part of the Nearest Truth Workshops, The Dailies workshop, which includes instructors Bryan Schutmaat, Matthew Genitempo, and Brad Feuerhelm. The workshop outline is detailed as follows:

Dailies is a newspaper term for a daily publication, and in this case, we will broadcast our workshop efforts via American Suburb X at the end of each working day. There are no rules about the content, so long as it can be considered an indexical experiment in response to the given prompts. Text will also be included in future posts, and participants should be prepared to write notes, however lucid or lyrical, and have them available for inclusion in the daily publishing of the material.

For this first day, the participants were given the assignment to consider the city of Athens through three photographic topics, in which they were to return with up to eight final images per subject, which are to be broadcast here on American Suburb X. Though the term Dailies originates from newspapers, we are looking at the subject matter as adjacent to the documentary or journalistic tendency. It is a mechanism to inspire participants to complete these assignments in the city under the tutelage of Schuttmann, Genitempo, and Feuerhelm daily. The topics for the day have included the following themes, in which the participants responded to the environment.

Portrait of a stranger
An image of deep time
Architecture that may suggest power

The following images from the participants are the result of their interpretations and experiences of making work in Athens. You will find the participants’ names below each pair of images. Please consider the work as part of a holistic group approach to the themes. Participants included in the work are as follows: Jack Sciacca, Tyler Sharkey, Johannes Huwe, Britt Andersen, Andy Bosselman, Giulia Thinnes, Johannes Kremer, Pedro Agra, Karl Bailey, Michael Obrien, David Myers, Stavros Charisopoulos, and Emmaule Coupe-Kalomiris.

From my perspective, the work that came back was fascinating as it exhibited a tendency to read the city from multiple viewpoints, but also from an umbrella of the participants’ knowledge of the instructors and their work. While we had a variety of photographers using different equipment, each brought back images that aligned with Bryan and Matthew’s broader approach to photography. From my perspective, I am very content in seeing what has materialized: taking two distinctly American voices in contemporary photography and seeing participants grapple with those sensibilities in a European context. Athens is a city that feels singular, but certainly not American. Here, the results reflect this and suggest how geography becomes complicit in trends percolating in contemporary America.

From Johannes Huwe’s images of Plato’s prison to Andy Bosselman’s cryptic images of statues and architecture, a sense of foreboding enters the frame. I can link these images to attitudes toward Bryan and Matthews’s work, but I also feel very close to Andy’s gloaming views of architecture and statuary. It is Greece, after all, but the pathos of those syrupy black images feels akin to our contemporary moment, both political and economic. Johannes Huwe’s images of Plato’s prison are a time capsule resigned to the past, but they also ask us about their present psychological symptoms, raising questions about historical figures, state power, and capture. His images of a grove of trees are an excellent bulwark to the cave, with their shadow-dissected forms, contingent on reading light and form in an associative, dreamy parallel. Athens native Stavros Charisopoulos’s Greek reproductions of historical statues question the idea of culture, pastiche, and the doppelganger, creating an uncanny consumer dialectic that asks the viewer to accept these humble statues as stand-ins for national identity. This also applies to his observation of an architectural ziggurat on the outskirts of Athens, suggesting that form, material, and time have been reshaped by human hands.

This architectural imagery is also prevalent in Johannes Kremer’s nighttime photographs. His images of quiet streets and subtle decay feel at home in this city, however quickly it is changing and updating. Shooting in Polaroid and digital formats, he emphasizes the night, reminiscent of Willie Doherty’s Berlin work. He has also created a body of work on Polaroid film of the local skater community, emphasizing camaraderie and portraiture. Emmanuel Coupe-Kalomiris’s signs of vacant billboards and industrial vernacular are formed by the compressed use of lines and are weighted with an uneasy suggestion of twentieth-century ruin. They are uneasy and suggestive, deceptive in their capacity to read as antithetical to Athens as a tourist destination, rather than in its lived experience.

In an example of time out of joint, Britt Andersen’s investigations of classical columns and archaeological sites being unearthed remind us of the fabric of the city’s history, as she bears witness to sites that appear, buried for millennia, encouraging discussion of culture and materiality. The notion of unearthing is incredibly compelling, and I could consider a performative leap from her work to Jack Whitefield’s interest in the Cornish landscape and native stone and ash. Karl Bailey has met Athens park space, among other locations, with a subtle inversion of the city’s enveloping ratio relative to its pastoral haunts, compressing the two into an intriguing montage in which Strefi Hill envelops the city, a metaphorical asteroid landing atop the urban cartography. His image of Lord Palmerston is perhaps an unconscious debate about the politics of his native England and its place on the Greek timeline. Though this has not been discussed, one cannot miss the metaphorical gesture, however intended or not.

Michael Obrien, like Johannes Kramer, has been working in Polaroid, capturing portraits, but has also returned with a series of abandoned houses that reminded me of Cy Twombly in their pale, subdued light, echoing traces, and the haunting of former residents. Sheets of glass and peeled paint congeal into a palimpsest of psychological toil. I have also included a great portrait from his day out. In thinking through architectural discovery and the living, Giulia Thinnes’ stark black-and-white images of classical buildings and passersby on Philopappos Hill create an interesting diptych, with the dark lines of her subjects’ pants echoing the recesses between alabaster architectural columns, creating a third image between the two.

This is also echoed by David Myers’ investigations of historical architectural power framed through the overgrowth and trees of Athens, with his study of the Parthenon, followed by a meditative study of the Agora Gardens. David is no stranger to Athens, having spent time here in the making of his Nearest Truth Editions book, Almost Heroic, in 2024. What is refreshing about these images is seeing David give into pictorial grandiosity without the hinterland roaming that he, Emmanuele, and I are all used to as Athens devotees. There is nothing wrong with great pictures of familiar places. Jack Sciacca has focused on portraiture in most of his work, but in this post, I have decided to give space to what he also does well: photographing the winter flora of Athens in all its bare life, branches and bramble undressed and unwavering during the darkest moments of the year.

Tyler Sharkey, one of the few participants working in color, has taken to viewing Athens as a chromophilic playground, with a grace noted in Big Bill Egglestonian gestures, delicately slicing out colorful gems from the city’s surface, leaning on the fragmentary relationship between the city and its quotidian contemporary usage and visage. His playful mix is a reminder of images that speak to photography as much, if not more than, narrative. Finally, Berlin-based Portuguese native Pedro Agra returned with a very interesting mix of architectural elements that challenges the “correct” posture we maintain in our relationship with it in photography, replacing head-on approaches with angular wire crossings while also limiting the skyline. It implores us, much like Japanese artist Osamu Kanemura, to reconsider the edifice of our otherwise benign building askance, laterally, with compression and skepticism.

Throughout today’s editing of the photographs, I felt at home with the work that was returned and with how Bryan and Matthew, through constructive criticism, have helped shape the work you see here. We will return in the next few days to add to this work and also begin including text from the artists involved about their experiences. As a five-day workshop, we are off to a great start.