Studio Sessions

Someone who knows Matt's work better than he knows them wants him on a demanding project, and he asks what a person like that has to bring to win him over. Alex calls it reputation. The catch-22 is that nobody lets you do something until you've done it before. Around new people, Matt sometimes slips in a credit, partly from ego and partly so they'll talk to him at the right level. A...

Alex spent years feeling he was wasting his time, and now thinks he was filling a bucket that’s finally pouring out. One of the things pouring out is an acting workshop, which takes Matt back to acting school, where he spent most of his time managing his lines instead of acting. Improv was the only performing he loved, because it’s all listening and responding. Alex thinks improv is writing withou...

Once a week, a cozy bar in Omaha has jazz, and on certain nights the room feels like magic. One of us wants to make a concert film there in the spirit of Jazz on a Summer's Day and The Last Waltz, on the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, an old Super 16 digital camera that records to one SD card. Between us we own three, and they're tougher than we expected: a 256 GB card holds a...

At a yard sale in Malvern, Iowa, one of us asked the woman running it about old cameras, and her husband climbed into the rafters of his barn and came down with a dusty 8x10 view camera, which he gave us. The bellows are full of holes and there's no lens, so it needs a restorer. One of us has been in a creative flood for 3 months and fears that if he stops, it all stops; the other's mome...

madebyalex.online Last episode of "season" 3! One of us has a Squarespace site he means to redo, and watching the other build madebyalex.online with Claude has him tinkering. The builder has wanted his own corner of the web since customizing MySpace pages in 2004 with Web Design for Dummies from the library. AI finally let him build one without years of learning to code. He's off al...

One of us is convinced the next big change in computing is an operating system you talk to, one that writes whatever you need on the spot, down to a VHS effect for the video you're editing. The other doubts anyone is waiting for new hardware. When his MiniDV capture broke, an AI built him an app to fix it in about an hour while he read, and his cameras and computer haven't held him back...

We start with the show. Owning our own feed means no platform can switch it off, and when we finally have guests, we'd rather hear how someone thinks over a long conversation than listen to the story they've rehearsed about themselves. That leads into how friendships last once everyone is an adult with too much to do. Most of our closest friends turn out to be the people we're makin...

One of us pulled over to photograph an old pickup and a beat-up basketball hoop, and 30 seconds later the owner was walking him through his garage. The man, in his 80s, has a '69 Camaro under a cover and a drawer of hot rod t-shirts he's never worn. He turned down a portrait, but gave his address and said to come back any time. None of it would have happened without the camera, and neith...

Send us a message. We start with a night at the movies and end up talking about why some art grabs you and some doesn't. What makes a theater different from a screen at home, why certain films only land years later, and how much of the experience is the room you're in versus the thing you're watching. From there we get into horror and what it does that other genres can't, how a...

Send us a message. We open on what a trip does to you once you're home. Time away, then the return, where the familiar looks sharper and the work feels urgent again. That sets up the thread running through the whole episode: the difference between a trip planned down to the hour and one you make up as you go, and why the unplanned kind tends to leave the stronger memory. No itinerary, no book...

Send us a message. We open with Daniel Arnold's new book You Are What You Do from Loose Joints — the sequencing, the blank pages, the editor's role — and end up on a harder question: what happens when you spend a decade on something and the first question someone asks is "what's next?" We talk through Josh Safdie's account of finishing Uncut Gems and why that question...

Send us a message. Matt picks up a Cartier-Bresson book at the used bookstore and we read two passages from it — one on prowling the streets, one on primitivism and the hobbyist trap. The quotes pull us into a longer conversation about what it means to make work outside commercial pressure, and whether the thrill of hunting for things to sell has become a structural parallel to street photography:...

Send us a message. We open with a letter — Rilke's first letter to a young poet, written in 1903 — and the question at the center of it: must I write? Not do I want to, not is it going well, but must I. We talk about what it means to look outward for reassurance while making something, how that search for validation reshapes work before it's even finished, and what happens when you'...

Send us a message. We open with a 93-year-old woman who ran an oil pump valve repair business and a boutique until she was nearly 100, and what her life says about the post-WWII metrics we've organized our sense of security around — the 401k, the house, the college fund, the car in the driveway. We dig into EM Forster's observation that the novel is sogged with humanity, and what happens...

Send us a message. We spend a lot of time thinking about what we make, and not enough thinking about what we take in. What we listen to, what we read, what we let interrupt us, what we hand our attention to without really deciding to — all of it shapes the output, whether we're conscious of it or not. This episode starts there. From that we get into the systems designed to keep you feeding th...

Send us a message. This week we got into something we'd been circling for a while: what happens to the work when the work and the content share the same camera, the same hours, the same brain. We used the image of food coloring dropped into water — once it's in, you can't pull it back out — and followed that wherever it went. Which turned out to be pretty far: the scarcity feeling t...

Send us a message. We started this one talking about whether building a content ecosystem around photography risks turning the work into content, and how the pressure to produce on a content timeline can collapse the space that photographs actually need. When you're operating from scarcity, you grab the recognizable brand for cheap instead of holding out for the thing that represents what you...

Send us a message. More of a fun for us one here. What started as a pretty standard phone call turned into one of the most unexpected camera days we've had. Matt found a Leica M11 and Q2 listed on Facebook Marketplace by a woman selling her dad's collection to cover nursing care costs — and after some back-and-forth, both cameras came home with us. We talk through the full story, the leg...

Send us a message. We catch up on the gallery space that didn't come together — not because of conflict, but because the arrangement shifted enough that the original vision no longer fit. What stings isn't the logistics, it's the built-in community that came with that particular spot, and the version of things we'd already started imagining. From there the conversation turns in...

Send us a message. WE STILL HAVE NO NAME... We spend most of this episode wrestling with what to name our new gallery space. The conversation moves through dozens of possibilities—from "Synchronicity" to "Room" to "Keyframe"—trying to find something that isn't pretentious, that wears well over time, and that captures the intersection between a photography gallery...

Send us a message. We talk through the unexpected opportunity to create a photography exhibition space in Omaha's Old Market. The conversation covers how a casual connection through vintage reselling led to subletting a space for three months—low financial risk, no formal contracts, just the chance to experiment. We discuss rejecting the traditional gallery model entirely: no price tags, no s...

Send us a message. We sit down for our annual year-end conversation, reflecting on 2025 and mapping out intentions for 2026. The discussion moves between practical revenue planning and deeper questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to build a creative life without losing yourself in the process. We explore the tension between chasing grandiose visions of success and learning to b...

Send us a message. We stumble into uncomfortable territory when Matt shares a YouTube channel that initially captivated him—a series of video essays about art and commerce, aesthetically compelling and philosophically engaged. But when Alex identifies the footage as a filmmaker's documentary work, used without direct credit, we're forced to examine our own assumptions about appropriation...

Send us a message. We explore the vintage clothing and collectibles scene in Omaha, examining the intersection of genuine appreciation, social signaling, and dopamine-driven consumerism. The conversation ranges from Matt's solo trip to a vintage event at A Priori (complete with Polaroid gift-giving) to broader questions about why we acquire things—whether it's a 1940s bomber jacket, rare...

Send us a message. We spend most of this episode exploring James Carse's "Finite and Infinite Games," working through the distinction between societies that defend boundaries and cultures that exist on horizons. Alex reads passages from the book about how patriotism requires enemies to function, why authentic movements like the Renaissance don't oppose anyone, and how any finit...