On the camera and the machine.

When photography first arrived in the 1800s, people dismissed it as a cheap trick.

Painters panicked. Critics said it required no talent.

The same fears we hear about AI today.

I studied photography at Pratt. I learned image making through light, composition, intention, and craft.

I also grew up watching technology evolve. I have always been drawn to how visual language travels across new mediums.

My career has moved through brand, campaign, and digital work, driven by one question: how can imagery shape culture and connect with people in more meaningful ways?

AI and spatial tech feel like the next natural chapter in that evolution.

Here is the pattern I keep seeing.

New tools do not kill creativity. They expand it.

The camera did not replace painting. It opened new forms of expression for those willing to explore them. AI is asking us to do the same.

The core skills that matter in visual storytelling have not changed: taste, perspective, meaning, emotion. Those only become more valuable as the tools evolve.

I am not interested in using AI to replace creativity. I am interested in using it to expand what a creative director can be today.

Too many roles keep creativity in a narrow lane. I want to bring everything I know about imagery, culture, and story into spaces that invite experimentation — new tools, new forms of expression.

AI will not replace image makers.

Image makers who embrace it will shape what image making becomes.

On working with the machine.

I once had a boss who thought it was a flaw that I couldn't make photo-quality mockups in Photoshop.

They wanted pixel-perfect comps before we had validated the idea.

I remember thinking: I'd rather spend my time making the idea better.

That friction shaped how I think about creative leadership.

Fast forward to now. That boss's work looks exactly like it did then — same visual language, same approach, same energy. The industry moved on. Platforms shifted. Audiences evolved. The tools exploded.

The future of creative direction isn't about who can render fastest. It's about who has the clearest thinking, the strongest ideas, and the ability to move at the speed culture demands.

That is where AI changes everything.

I use AI the way I used to work with a great copywriter — as a collaborator that speeds up iteration without replacing judgment.

Midjourney and DALL-E let me explore visual directions in minutes. I can test five concepts before a kickoff and walk in with clarity, not guesses.

ChatGPT refines messaging and helps me think through positioning faster. It is like having a copy editor on call.

AI production tools let us create three times the variations in half the time.

AI is infrastructure. It removes friction so creative teams can focus on what matters: the thinking, the taste, the cultural instinct no tool can replicate.

The old model rewarded technical virtuosity — who could build the most polished deck, who could stay in Adobe the longest.

The new model rewards velocity and clarity. Getting to the right idea faster. Testing with real data. Building systems that scale. Staying platform-native and culturally fluent.

AI doesn't replace creative directors. It separates the ones who lead with ideas from the ones who hide behind execution.

The machine produces the volume. The choosing is still the job.

In an industry where most of the labor cost was always in the executing, the executing cost is collapsing. The judgment cost is what's left.

That makes taste, position, and conviction the actual scarce resources. People who can decide become more valuable. People who can only execute become less.

This portfolio was rebuilt with the machine as a daily collaborator. It is not the part of the work that should be hidden. It is the part of the work that explains how I am still here — still arguing, still making things that mean something.

The machine made the volume cheap.

It made the conviction obvious.

On the moves I made.

The cleanest version of a creative career is one company for thirty years.

I do not have that career.

The next cleanest version is two companies — early years somewhere prestigious, mid-career at the company you build into a thing. I do not have that career either.

What I have, on the page, is editorial, then beauty, then haircare, then dance, with two freelance periods threaded through.

Read one way, that arc looks chaotic.

Read another way, it is the only path that gets me to the work I am actually trying to do.

I started in editorial because the magazine was the room where culture decided what mattered. When the magazine stopped being the only room, I left it. I went inside heritage beauty because the next room was the brand itself, and you cannot understand how a brand earns trust without seeing how it actually behaves on a Tuesday.

I went DTC because scaling without losing texture is one of the hardest problems in modern brand work, and I wanted to see how the levers actually felt. I went to live content systems because cultural attention had migrated into a place that few people who came up in editorial knew how to operate in.

Every move I made was a vote against staying inside one literacy.

I took freelance periods between roles for a reason that is easy to explain and hard to advertise: I did not want my next job to decide what I thought for me. Both periods produced some of the most original strategic work on this site. Snow Peak, the NARS conceptual work, the pitches I am still building toward — they were made in the rooms where nobody outranked me into a different opinion.

What I have learned, from making the moves I made, is that the brands that matter for the next decade are not going to be solved by editorial taste alone, platform fluency alone, or strategic confidence alone. They need somebody who has lived all three and is unafraid to argue with the brief.

I am one of a relatively small number of people who has done all three.

That is the job I am looking for now.

On the difference between a brand and a place to stand.

A brand is what a company says. A place to stand is what it does, every day, when no one is watching.

Most brands are brands. A few brands are places to stand.

You can tell the difference in about ninety seconds.

A brand has a brand book. A place to stand has a smell. A regular. An hour at which the door opens. A way of folding the bag.

A brand has a tone of voice. A place to stand has a person who answers the phone.

A brand has a positioning statement. A place to stand has a reason it would still exist if no one had thought to write the statement.

The reason this matters now, more than it did, is that the platform era trained customers to expect that a brand is the campaign and the campaign is the feed. Both of those things are decoration. They are not bad. They are just not enough.

The customer who has spent ten years scrolling has become very good at seeing through decoration. She is not articulate about it. She doesn't post about it. She just doesn't come back.

This is the part the dashboards miss. The metric for will not come back is unfilled.

The brands that are working right now, quietly, are not the loudest ones. They are the ones whose product, language, store, packaging, and Sunday hours all answer the same single question. The customer can feel the answer before she can name it. That is what trust is. It is a feeling she had before she had a thought about it.

A brand asks: how do we appear to her?

A place to stand asks: what is she actually doing here?

The second question is harder. It has fewer experts. It pays better in the long term and worse in the short term.

Most clients want the first. The interesting clients want the second.

On what the customer already knows.

Most briefs assume the customer is somewhere behind us.

That she needs to be educated. Persuaded. Walked carefully toward the conclusion the brand has already reached. The campaign is the explanation.

The customer is rarely behind us. She is usually ahead of us. She has seen ten years of versions of the thing we are about to show her. She knows the angle before the angle has been chosen.

You can see this in two places, very clearly.

The first is retouching. For most of the last decade, retouching was the unstated language of beauty. It said: we have decided what is acceptable, and we have made it perfect for you. The customer learned to read the language. Then she learned to dislike it. Then she learned to distrust it. By the time brands started un-retouching, it had stopped being a gesture and started being a baseline. The customer was already there.

The second is celebrity endorsement. It used to be enough that someone famous was in the campaign. The customer would do the rest of the work. Now the customer asks, immediately: did they actually use this? did the photographer have any agency? whose idea was this? She wants to know if the relationship between the famous person and the brand is real. She can usually tell.

The brands that are working right now have made a quiet adjustment.

They have stopped trying to be more aspirational than the customer.

They have started trying to be more honest than the customer expected.

That is the move. It is harder than it sounds. It requires you to figure out what the customer is already noticing, before she names it, and to walk toward the noticing rather than away from it.

The brands that figure this out next will keep their audiences. The ones that don't will keep paying for media against people who already left.

What surrealism was actually telling us.

Two years ago Business of Fashion called the moment "surrealist marketing."

Big shoes. Mouths in cars. A handbag the size of a kitchen.

The pieces that called it surrealism were half right. The shoes are not the point. The shoes are the symptom.

The point is that customers stopped believing the previous register. The previous register was: a beautiful woman in a beautiful field, looking at the middle distance, slightly windblown. That register depended on her being more aspirational than the customer.

The customer caught up. Then the customer surpassed her.

The aspirational image stopped doing the job. The customer was already there.

So the brands did the thing brands do when their grammar stops working. They got loud.

Surrealism was the loud. The big shoe is a flare gun. It says: please look. We are still here.

That is a fine thing to do once. It is a bad thing to build a strategy around.

The brands that are going to come out of this period strongest are not the ones with the biggest shoes. They are the ones that figured out a quieter answer to the same question.

The question is: why should anyone notice you, again, on a Tuesday?

The loud answer is a giant inflatable boot. The quiet answer is harder. It usually involves a thing the brand actually does, or makes, or sells, that justifies its place in the room without the boot.

The brands without that answer will keep getting weirder until they exhaust themselves. The brands with that answer will keep being interesting after the trend ends.

On what gets called creative direction.

Most descriptions of creative direction make it sound like authorship.

The creative director, in this version, has a vision. The vision is good or bad. Everyone else executes the vision. Their job is fidelity. The director's job is conviction.

This is almost entirely wrong.

The best creative work I have made was made by people I had the good sense to invite into the room, and the better sense to leave alone once they were there.

Studio Radiance was a foundation campaign. The brief was modernization. The actual job — once you stripped the layers off — was to stop retouching. That was the position, that was the conviction, that was the line in the sand. I drew it.

Everything you can see in the actual campaign was made by other people.

Micaiah Carter and Campbell Addy decided what the photographs would look like. The cast — who were activists, athletes, artists — decided how to be in front of the camera. They decided what their homes looked like the day they were photographed in them. They decided which moments of their own week to film themselves. The makeup artists decided what the faces would actually look like. The cast edited their own footage.

I did not direct any of those decisions. I made it possible for those decisions to be made by those people.

That distinction is the entire job.

The version of creative direction that thinks of itself as authorship loses access to almost everything good about working with other artists. It is the difference between an editor who has opinions and an editor who has notes. The editor with opinions tells the writer what to write. The editor with notes asks the writer what they were trying to do and where the writing didn't get there.

I want to be the second kind.

There is a corporate version of creative direction that operates on the first model. It produces, predictably and on schedule, work that is technically excellent and feels like nothing.

I have spent fifteen years trying not to make that work.

The way out has always been the same. You invite the right people. You set the rules of engagement so cleanly that they free everyone instead of constraining anyone. You ask questions. You stay out of the way.

You take the credit, when there is credit to take, in the form of who you got into the room and what you let them do.

That is what gets called creative direction.

Why brands feel late.

The fastest thing in the world right now is the speed at which a fifteen-year-old learns a new visual grammar.

She does it without a textbook.

She does it without realizing she is doing it.

She sees a thousand examples of a new kind of cut, a new caption rhythm, a new way of holding the camera, and within a week she is producing it back to her friends in her own voice.

The slowest thing in the world right now is the speed at which an organization with a marketing department decides what to do about it.

This is the actual gap. It isn't a creativity gap. It isn't a talent gap. It isn't even a brief gap.

It is a fluency gap.

Customers — particularly younger ones — read platform-native visual languages the way I read a sentence. They don't see style. They see meaning. They register what a brand is trying to do at the same speed they register what their friend at brunch is trying to do.

What they catch, most of the time, is the brand trying to translate one register into another. A TikTok-style edit cut by an agency that has never made a TikTok. A "raw" Instagram feed that has been color-graded for cohesion. A "behind the scenes" video that was lit by a DP. The customer reads all of this in under three seconds and silently downgrades the brand's trustworthiness by a measurable amount.

The organization doesn't see this happen because the organization is looking at a different dashboard.

There is no metric for she silently downgraded you.

The only fix is operational. Hire people who speak the language natively. Trust their judgment. Reduce the number of approvals between the camera and the post. Stop trying to translate from the conference room into the feed.

The brands that figure this out will look fluent.

The ones that don't will keep paying a premium for a slight foreign accent.

The slight foreign accent is what costs them the customer.