If you are here after seeing a few of my photographs, you are probably deciding whether this work is for you. Photographs I make are not pretty in the obvious way and they are not meant to be. They often lean into what the street actually looks and feels like: texture, worn walls, broken windows, messy power lines, and ordinary life moving through the frame.

There is a marketing writer named Seth Godin who uses a simple metaphor. Imagine you are passing a field with cows. At first you notice them. Then, a little later, you stop noticing altogether. The cows have not disappeared, but your attention has moved on because the scene is familiar. Now imagine one cow in that field is purple. You would notice immediately. You would point it out. You would tell someone later. Not because it is louder, but because it breaks the pattern.

His point is not “be strange for the sake of it.” His point is that in a crowded world, ordinary gets filtered out. If something is worth talking about, it needs a difference that lives inside the work, not in the promotion around it.

That idea feels relevant to photography because the internet is full of “nice” images: clean edits, perfect skies, safe compositions, the same places photographed the same way. A lot of it is genuinely good. But when everything is competent, it starts to blur together. And the word Godin uses for what survives that blur is “remarkable” in the literal sense, something people actually talk about.

I am not claiming my photographs are that. I am still learning, and most days I am just trying to make something honest. But his metaphor gives me a useful nudge: instead of chasing a generic kind of pretty, I would rather follow what I am genuinely drawn to, even if it is not for everyone.

Most days that means old walls and the clutter around them: layers of paint, posters, stains, cables. Light that is not always flattering. Corners that feel lived in rather than staged. And when people enter the frame, I am not looking for drama. I am looking for something small and real, the kind of moment you either catch or you miss.

This approach does not guarantee attention. Some photographs will get ignored. Some people will never connect with this kind of work. That is fine. I would rather make photographs that a smaller group genuinely cares about instead of what many would double tap and forget five seconds later.

I also did not start photography to sell prints. It was never a business plan. It was a way to slow down and do something which I actually enjoy. If the work eventually finds its way into someone’s home as a print, I will be grateful. But I do not want “what sells” to decide what I photograph. I want the photographs to stay close to what pulls me into the street in the first place.

So that is what the Purple Cow metaphor gives me. Not a marketing strategy, but a bit of clarity. The goal is not to shout louder. The goal is to make work that matters to me with a hope that it does not disappear into the background.