Writing Beyond the Wounds: Reflections on a Body of Work

Another short essay inspired by John Blase's text message.

Tuba Jazz in New Orleans, 2026

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Reflection on the Modern Body of Art

Everything in a lawyer’s office is designed to give the body a mechanical sense of efficiency. I have three desks—one for my laptop and two monitors, one with a stack of legal documents requiring a response, and one with pens and notepads and two empty coffee mugs I’ve collected during my morning grind. Overhead, the fluorescent lights create a shadowless envelope, the kind of lighting my family calls evil.

On the bookshelf over my shoulder are the icons. A typewriter. A camera. A collection of leather-bound Easton Press books. These are meant to remind me that I am not a machine. Instead, I am a stifled creative who spends the majority of his time employing machines to make practical things, things that pay the electric bill.

It’s the ten o’clock hour, and as I pore over a piece of writing I hope will be persuasive to a judge, John Blase sends a text:

Martin Shaw has a plea: “No more jabbing our pen in the wound and calling it art.” Damn.

Jabbing the pen in the wound. I consider the language, the metaphor. A wound is a bodily thing. Art is a sort of work. No more contemplates a terminal variation to a constant. When crammed together, these three phrases beg a question: What is the current body of art? More to the point, What does it mean to have a wholly human body of art?

Last Christmas, my wife handed me a brick of a present, all wrapped in red paper with silver snowflakes. I peeled back the paper to find Sebastião Salgado’s book, Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. Through his work, Salgado explores the nature of human occupation—farmers, fishermen, factory workers, miners. Over the 350 photographs, Salgado shows men struggling at the nets, women carrying children in the fields, a mine filled with slaves shouldering heavy loads while climbing thirty-foot ladders. The frames carry a weight, show the entire range of human emotion. There is sorrow, elation, exertion, joy, fear, revolution, and the quotidian mindlessness of the menial task. It’s a body of fully formed work, something more than a singular examination of the human wound.

I sat in my office, considering Salgado’s work, and I wondered: What does it mean to create a body of work, one that’s about more than the wounds?

We live in an odd age, one that seems to be threadbare at the seams. No, that’s not quite right. Maybe a better way to say it is this: We live in an age of wounds, and the stitches binding those wounds are coming loose. So much has been written, painted, and produced about those wounds. The political wound. The church wound. The marriage wound. This is not a de facto negative thing. After all, dressing any wound requires examination. But what happens when an entire culture builds an entire body of work that is all about the wounds? What happens when the art is so wound-referential that it forgets to look beyond the pain, the damage, whatever? There is a word for that: myopic.

So, why does so much of today’s content focus on the wounds? I don’t know, but maybe it’s because our innate nature makes it impossible to turn away from any car wreck, rubber-necked as we are. And if wrecks and wounds pull eyeballs and modern algorithms optimize for eyeballs, algorithms will always incentivize artists to jab pens into the wounds. Wounds are big business, come to find out.

And here’s where I disagree with Shaw’s quote, which I’ll admit I read with no additional context. Some of the best art comes from examining the wounds. Consider East of Eden or anything written by Cormac McCarthy, for that matter. But here’s where I agree with Shaw: That cannot be the whole of a body of work. Like Salgado’s body of work, the wounds are only a sliver of the story. There’s a much bigger body to explore, one that seems to be trending toward neglect.

I click on Substack to post this short piece, and my feed is full of wound essays. Three scrolls down, I find this piece by Andy Adams at Flak Photography. Adams shares a photograph from Robert Darch—a photographer whose work I’ve never seen. A boy floats face up in the water on a summer day. Two other men find their places in the opposing corners of the frame, waist-deep in the water. The lighting is warm, almost golden, and the boy is wearing blue swim trunks. There is the transcendent peace of a summer swimming hole.

I look and am reminded of the swimming hole at Steel Creek or my teenage years at Bluff Hole or my college years jumping off the cliffs at Heber Springs. I smell hot dogs, taste the summer sweat, hear my buddies cackling at some joke not fit for mixed company. Pearl Jam or Madonna plays on the radio. This is what rest feels like after a long week of too much work.

I consider the quote Blase sent, the work of Salgado, the Adams post with the Darch photograph, and I reach for my journal from one of the three desks. I write: A body of work comprises the whole—the wounds, sure, but also the head, the heart, the hands, and the soft light of warmer days.