Aron Sanchez-Baranda (@waterbod) photographs and films organisms along the California coast — marine life mostly, some fungi — and in an interview published by designboom as part of its POSTHUMAN UTOPIAS chapter, interviewer Thomai Tsimpou draws out a practice built around resisting the urge to identify what’s in frame.
“I think we increasingly overlook singular activity,” he says, describing a culture of constant information and distraction that fragments attention before it settles on anything. His counter-move is to stay in what he calls the abstraction of sensory responses — the uncertain moment before an encounter becomes knowledge, before a shape in the water resolves into a species name. His stated position is that images don’t need explanations, and that identification can actively distract from the experience of looking.
That’s an unusual thing for a documentary photographer to argue. Most nature photography sells itself on exactly the information Sanchez-Baranda is trying to withhold — the caption, the species, the behavior explained. His interest traces back to early childhood observation, and has grown into open skepticism of the idea that humans sit at the center of the natural world, a stance that lines up with the posthumanist framing designboom built the interview around.
Asked about the future, he describes one with fewer resources and less consumption — not as a utopian blueprint, but as something closer to a necessity. And he describes his own creative process as “a series of concentric experiments,” with some pieces emerging through trial and making rather than a plan set in advance — a working method that matches the resistance to premature naming running through the rest of the interview.