This page separates photographic strains of expression from the more general JQD technique index. The categories are operational: a single photograph can belong to several at once.
1. Line / field partition
Wires, rails, tile seams, horizon cuts, doorframes and building edges divide continuous fields. The photograph often makes imposed geometry visible before it names a subject.
Related: Lines Imposed Upon Fields
2. Threshold / boundary photography
The frame is attracted to categorical edges: wet/dry, private/public-ish, inside/outside, architecture/atmosphere, object/reflection, day/night.
Related: Boundary / threshold method
3. Infrastructure as unconscious portraiture
Pools, utility wire, drainage, stucco, fences, parking, signage and minor municipal/commercial systems describe a civilization without official monuments.
Related: Los Angeles
4. Trace / residue / evidence
A used can, hose, empty chair, scuff, chalk mark, discarded object or maintenance zone can function as evidence of action without reconstructing the whole story.
Related: Trace / Residue / Evidence
5. Reflection / doubling / unstable surface
Pools, glass and reflective surfaces make the photographed world double, break, shimmer or become difficult to distinguish from its image.
Related: Reality, Deception, Fiction & Truth
6. Nocturne / artificial-light Los Angeles
String lights, bars, street lamps, club interiors, headlights and night streets produce a city whose visibility is already artificial and selective.
Related: Los Angeles & Civic Life
7. Found documentary surrealism
The camera repeatedly encounters reality at the point where an unstaged scene appears more implausibly authored than a staged surreal image would. The method depends on notice rather than fabrication.
Related: Attention / Notice / Witness
8. Vernacular text / wrong signs / civic speech
Signs, graffiti, product lettering, warnings, interfaces and accidental typographic collisions allow public language to enter the image as found writing.
Related: World-Building Through Micro-Error
9. Animals / nonhuman relation
Dogs and other nonhuman figures recur as companions, witnesses, interruptions and alternative centers of attention rather than decorative props.
Related: Love / intimacy
10. Oblique self-portraiture
The self can be distributed through clothing, route, hand, boots, mirror, shadow, partial body, domestic environment and selected object rather than stabilized by a conventional face portrait.
Related: Aniconism / Image Refusal
11. Fashion / object / status signal
Clothing, jewelry, boots, cars, drinks and domestic objects can be read simultaneously as personal style, class signal, material texture and documentary evidence.
Related: Fashion, Luxury, Status & Objects
12. Photograph → design object
Photographs frequently do not remain autonomous prints: they become liner pages, record graphics, collages, web objects and evidence inside larger textual systems. The photographic act and the later editorial/compositional use should be catalogued separately.
Related: Cross-medium index
Important contradiction: image-making under suspicion
The photo practice should not be described as uncomplicated camera-love. It develops alongside Aniconism and later explicit suspicion of capture. The result is productive tension: how can an image register an encounter without pretending to possess, exhaust or stabilize the subject?
Archive status
See Photography source index / archive status for the material currently archived and the broader public stream not yet represented in the local archive.