No Sorting

Most photographers learn the rules early—what goes in a portfolio, what gets buried in a private folder, what never appears in the same image as what. Kristofferson San Pablo, a photographer from Manila now based in LA, seems to have never learned them, or learned and ignored them. He shoots roadtrips and Simpson riffs and nudes and whatever else interests him, all filed together with no hierarchy. A picture diary without apology.

The work doesn’t defend itself. No thesis, no concept, no career strategy visible. Just someone with a camera documenting things he wanted to look at—color, light, skin, cartoon references, the absurd next to the considered next to the explicit. You see a lot of contemporary photography straining so hard to say something important. His stuff just says: I saw this, I wanted to photograph it, here.

There’s a confidence in that indifference that comes from actually not thinking about it, not performing the indifference. The moment you become aware you’re being transgressive, the performance shows. He seems genuinely unaware there’s supposed to be a filter. That takes either stupidity or a kind of intelligence I don’t have. Either way it reads true in the work—an absence of self-consciousness that ruins most contemporary photography.

You can feel in the pictures that he’s not fighting the place or trying to make statements about California. Just using it. Shooting what’s there and what shows up. Girls who say yes, light that works, roads that lead somewhere strange. The pictures feel like documentation more than art, which might be all the difference.