These images reiterate various tropes about landscape photography, architectural photography, narrative photography still life photography, and various other contemporary – notably, color – photographic practice. In the middle of these pictures, I have deposited a creature whose very presence hijacks the meaning of his surroundings. That’s The Baby.

The recurrence of this handmade brown lump of cloth is a gnatworthy annoyance, a blemish that shows up time and again almost like a scratch on my lens. The Baby gives me the cover to critique, mock, and ultimately pay homage to my photographic forebears.

The Baby could be seen as a William Wegman-type running gag in an Ansel Adams world, constantly interrupting the world’s abiding beauty with a nagging banality, but never managing to usurp the power of that beauty – or, in the final analysis, never even wanting to. If The Baby began as my anchor, he winds up as my foil, the dwarfed narrator in the nature documentary who has the grace to stay dwarfed and happy. The Baby isn’t simply the guy at the edge of the snapshot; he is the guide through the snapshot’s edgy world.