Dead Squirrels and the Last Honest Photographer

Goddamn digital photography. Every time I wade through the flood of lifeless images—flowers nobody asked for, pets frozen mid-yawn, strangers pulling faces at arm’s length with their phones—something in me wants to tear its own heart out as an offering to whatever god still cares about beauty. Come back, I’d say. Just come back. But beauty stays missing, leaving the electronics-store pilgrims and the grinning tourist hordes to proceed in peace while I sit in my own metaphorical blood puddle and try to remember what it felt like when images cost something. When you loaded a roll of film and those were your thirty-six chances and you thought about every single one before you burned them.

Michael J. DeMeo from Portland doesn’t deal in any of that. He shoots analog, full stop, and carries himself like one of the last people who understand that photography is a craft before it’s a medium—skill first, nerve second, a healthy dose of self-regard in exactly the right places. Darkrooms. Film. The insistence on photographing only what’s real rather than flooding the room with flash. He keeps something alive that most people buried years ago and stopped mourning.

And it’s about more than naked bodies and tattooed street characters and drooling dogs, though there’s plenty of all three on his blog. He tells stories. His photographs feel authored rather than captured, like someone decided in advance what needed to exist in the world and then made it exist. There’s an authenticity to them that makes most contemporary photography look like wallpaper by comparison—decorative, disposable, forgotten the moment you scroll past. DeMeo brings the texture of actual life directly into the room. No apology. No filter.

The dead squirrel in the title is real, by the way. It’s on the blog. And somehow it says more than most photographers manage in a lifetime of work.