Flat Pictures You Can Feel manipulates and repackages how we see (and feel!) images on screens, on walls, and in our hands.

Some of my favorite photographic series are ones that seep ambiguity. While I love typologies and projects with a clear beginning, middle, and end, pictures and sequences that at first bewilder me or make me think “What is this photographer actually thinking?" "What's going on in this image?" or ” Why are these photos organized like this?" often have the most staying power. Will Douglas’ latest book Flat Pictures You Can Feel, published earlier this year by Ain’t Bad, does just that.

Images of bullfights volley against religious iconography, photos of smashed surfaces, gravesites and others balancing soft and hard, peaceful and violent, immediate and metaphoric. Some are Douglas' own photographs, others are appropriated images from advertisements, rephotographed on walls or digital monitors. It's often unclear which are his own, and which are borrowed, but it doesn't really matter. The notion of "feeling," them, pulled from the book's title, is central to them all. Douglas collects and collates these haphazard moments into a strange meditation on how the process of viewing an image – whether it’s on a screen or in physical form – can change or even numb how we understand their place in the world.

After meeting Douglas at Portland, Oregon’s 2019 Photolucida portfolio reviews, I followed up to dig deeper into his ideas, process, and clarify the confusion that first drew me in.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Will Douglas