Persistence of Vision is the letter I send out every week from the Tennessee back roads. It's free, all of it. Get it in your inbox →
I've spent my entire life driving back roads whenever I can, even when the highway would get me there faster. I was turning that over on the drive this morning, trying to figure out where the impulse comes from. I think it goes all the way back to my earliest visual memories: riding in the back seat of my mom's Monte Carlo, squinting at the oncoming headlights to change their shape in my eyes. I was playing with light and time before I had words for either one.
That's about as close as I can get to explaining what Persistence of Vision is, and why I started it.
MY YOSEMITE
I came home this fall after a long summer of festival work and picked the camera back up every morning, the way I did for years, going back to high school. Most days I drop my kid at school and take the long way home. Bull Run Road. A little graveyard. A barn I've been wanting to photograph since we moved here. On October 30th, pulling out of my favourite gas station, I said into my glasses, "This is kind of like my Yosemite. My morning practice and my camera in the car."
I meant it. What I always admired about Ansel was that he kept returning to the same places and waiting on things.
At the same time I've been digging through my archive, and I keep running into the work I made as an early twenty-something, back when it was just unbridled creativity. It's reinvigorating me. I feel the way I did in college and the few years after, when all I was doing was creating for myself. And the funny part is that the work nobody asked for, the stuff I did to satisfy my own inner sense of being, is what prepared me for everything that came after it professionally.
My bio says I'm a time artist. That's really what I am. My work lives on a much longer timescale than any one project. It's about the places I revisit over and over again, and the kind of still photographer that's part of my DNA. The filmmaking, twenty-five years of it, with people I've been lucky to stand next to, has been kind of accidental.
Photographer first. Filmmaker by accident. Time artist by nature.
WHAT THE NAME MEANS
Persistence of vision is the old explanation for why a zoetrope works. Your eye hangs onto an image for a split second after it's gone, so a strip of still frames spinning past a slit turns into motion. A lot of what I'm making right now plays right in that gap. I'm using AI to investigate a new kind of cinematic zoetrope: loops, Muybridge-style sequences, slit-scans, little poetic postcards built out of the morning's frames.
The other half of the name is the plain meaning. Persistence. Go back to the same road. Keep looking. Most mornings I miss the shot, truth be told, but sometimes I win. It's the exercise of looking, waiting and anticipating, kind of like when I played hockey, waiting for the right moment to make a pass.
WHY IT'S ALL FREE NOW
When I launched the letter at the end of October I set it up the way everybody does, with a paid tier and the good stuff behind a wall. About a week in, I took the wall down. Persistence of Vision is one letter, it goes to everyone, and it's staying free.
Here's what changed my mind. On November 1st, out in the rain feeding the horses, I said something into the glasses that I keep coming back to: what's finally become clear to me since digging into my archive is that the things that are really important are the in-between things. The time I spend focused on myself and my family and my art. Not the dozen projects that give me street cred.
The things that are really important are the in-between things.
And a week later, on the drive: my fine art campaign is really more about myself, so I'm going to keep doing it. I'm doing this for myself regardless. Charging people at the door to watch me do something I'm going to do anyway felt backwards.
There's one more piece of it. I know there's nobody really out there watching, or paying attention, not yet anyway. But I feel like the universe is listening, and that's probably the most comforting feeling I know. That spiritual connection to being alive is what these awareness experiments are all about. If you want to listen in too, the door's open.
WHAT I'M BUILDING, AND SHARING AS I GO
Here's everything on the bench right now. You'll see all of it in the letter, finished or not, including the parts that break. I'd rather show you an abject failure than pretend it didn't happen.
Morning Haunt
A weekly ride-along with my daily shooting practice. Slow TV, more or less: the drive, the light, the chores, the director's notes I dictate to myself, and whatever I managed to make out of it that afternoon. No. 1 and No. 2 are out.
The daily postcards
Every afternoon the morning's frames become something small: a zoetrope loop, a Muybridge strip, a slit-scan of a river. Some of them work. Some of them I post anyway.
The same photograph, every day
I drive the same roads every day, so I started making the same photograph of the same places, over and over. The big version of the idea is a time map, where you could scrub through a place and watch the course of a year happen in a day. It's a massive undertaking and a whole lot of data. The light version started on Ben Collier Road, and it's a great exercise for my eyeballs and my brain either way.
The print store
The store is open, organized one series per page. My Tennessee is pure black and white, panographs and single frames of abandoned houses and barns around Dickson County, and I'm writing a story for each piece. It's really romantic for me to think about the people who lived in these places and what their life was like. Did it get better, and that's why they moved away? Or did it get worse? I don't know. The Spacetime Paintings go back to 1998: Upper Canada from the Niagara region, the black and white Infrared set, and International Spacetime, which starts with one motorcyclist in a Paris roundabout from Daniel Lanois' Flesh and Machine tour in 2015. A few more sets are on the way. Open editions ship straight to you. Limited editions of 25 come to me first so I can sign and number them by hand, and each one goes out with a certificate and a note from me.
The Upper Canada book
A print-on-demand photo book of the complete Upper Canada collection, from the 2016 set right through to later pieces like Great Lake House. I'm testing printers against each other now, and you'll see the proofs before anybody else does.
The archive
Decades of work spread across a pile of hard drives, some of them still sitting in Canada. I'm cataloguing what's on every one, with thumbnails, so I can finally find the personal work I made in between the higher-profile jobs. Twenty-seven terabytes in, out of something like a hundred. Every week it turns up something I forgot I made, and that usually ends up in the letter.
The tools
I build my own pipeline, mostly out of open source parts. The glasses, my phone and the camera feed an archive every day, everything I say gets transcribed, and the machine helps me find the good bits and put them together. Most of what you read in the letter is dictated, straight from my mouth, on the drive or in the barn or over the footage, and AI helps me format it and assemble the pieces. I'm a proponent of this stuff being a force for good. Take how I'm using it for myself: a second brain that lives in my house and understands me, so it can help take care of the day-to-day and leave me more time to look at things.
The shed
The tool shed is turning into an all-season office, maybe with a little sauna off the side, built a little at a time on a very narrow budget. I scanned it with the LiDAR on my phone and had a model in Blender by the afternoon. "Maybe this could be my office office."
Photographers in cars, chasing light
A series for my YouTube channel. I'm putting together a list of photographers in my world to ride along with while they go out chasing light. More on that when the first one's in the can.
Holler and a Half
The farm story, with Jess: the horses, the chickens, the coops, the fence, the truck breaking down, all of it. That one is going to get its own letter down the road.
A screenplay, slowly
I wanted to be a writer before I ever picked up a camera. I'm writing something now. It'll take as long as it takes.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
The most useful thing you can do is subscribe. It's free, it lands once a week, and it gives me a reason to keep the practice honest. If you know somebody who likes back roads or old barns or long exposures, forward it to them.
If it means something to you and you want to help keep it going, there are a few ways. You can leave a one-time tip at adamckvollick.com/support. You can pick up a print. November's code is POVNOV, 10% off any order, one use per customer, good through November 30. Or you can turn on an optional paid subscription on Substack, $10 a month or $100 a year, and founding members at $150 a year get a signed 4x6 as my thank-you. Nothing is held back from anyone either way.
I'm also posting pieces on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Send notes. It's a living process.
CK
Persistence of Vision
The letter is free, and it's staying free. I'm doing this for myself regardless. If it means something to you, a tip helps keep it going, and so does a print from the store. Either way, thank you for reading.