Noah Dillon Entretien — madonnapopstar12

California provides an impossible landscape for the writer to describe accurately, for the filmmaker to color grade authentically, and for the photographer to capture the nuance of the state and its misapprehended cultural reputation. Noah Dillon is successfully en route to this with his use of the non-autonomous motion sensor devices, as it provides perhaps the only “objective” photograph.

I sat down with Dillon in August 2025 at his recording studio on an exceptionally hot day, he had taken a break from recording his sophomore album, Riviera, to discuss photography project in which he placed non-autonomous motion sensor devices (trail cameras) across the city of Los Angeles, obtaining millions of images that capture the apotheosis of Los Angeles in all of it’s trangressive beauty; a feat many artists fail at. Think Didion, think Lynch. (im self aware at how stupid I sound, but I would like to challenge you to sit down and think of artists who have managed to capture California’s temper with tact, grace, and accuracy. Its a harder than one may believe.

Riveria, released in November 2025, is an album that highlights Los Angeles’s social architecture, highlighting its unresolute fairness, and its volatility. A theme Dillon has seemingly been concerned with for the past decade of his career, both within his music and photography.

While working with non autonomous motion sensor devices isnt necessarily unheard of (think of Nine Eyes of Google Street View, in which Jon Rafman isolated screenshots from google street view, compiled them within the mediums of blogging, PDFS, or large C prints for galleries, and this was back in 2008 when google street view was relatively new technology, only evolving from a Standford research project 3 years earlier), the particular nature of California being captured from an unbiased lens is and always be of the utmost interest to me. As I said, California’s transgressive, provoking temperament, with all of its unrelenting beauty and simultaneous hostility, has been infamously difficult to capture, and it is a skill, if you could even call it that. It's admittedly a feat I have been trying to ace in my writing. Sometimes its easy, describing the sunset strip with laughter bellowing out of hotel lobbies with tan legs seemingly carrying it, that feeling you get when there isnt any traffic on the 101 as you mose past the Cahunga Pass, aware but not really of the conquistadors and their fossilized scapula bones acting as the crutch for an indistinguishable glamour and flagranceness that has an origin, but only if you think of it distinctly, and intentionally.

Othertimes, it's impossible to describe. You find yourself in these organic markets based in the hyperreal, you’re cornered by Los Angeles’ lack of grit, its astonishing commitment to be beautiful to the point that it’ll never acknowledge the dirt under its nails.

Three months before the interview with Noah, I had been reading Baudrillard on the idea of the photograph as a simulacrum, and Roland Barthes theory of semiotics, they pose a rather simple question with a nearly impossible answer: Is a photograph a simulacrum, truly? Is it a signifier of what was? Or is it the signifier?

It doesn't feel cut and dry enough to simply refer to a photograph as a simulacrum; it is, after all, at a real moment being captured. However, the idea of objectivity becomes a rather tricky thing to distinguish within the medium of photography.; it accosts the very notion of objectivity the moment the photographer photographs the photographed. The signifier signifies, and is signified. It is a moment that has been perverted and skewed due to one's own predelctions on what the best “frame” would be, the best “pose” to be sanctioned, and, in more contemporary standards, I suppose what the best Lightroom preset would be, which aspect ratio you are choosing for your Instagram carousel.

These penchants of taste obliterate objectivity, which is critical in the equation of distinguishing whether something (in this case, a photograph ) is a simulacrum.

Noah’s project (so far) has positioned cosmopolites in fast food drive-thrus, families sitting at the tables outside of Whole Foods, the bustling Macarthur park intersection we have all seen a guy with a needle hanging out of his vein (not hyperbole) at, and, naturally, the sex workers lined up on Figueroa Street.

He initially previewed part of the project on his instagram which was met with immediate critique, all arms geared and ready. The obvious and most pressing critique was inclined towards the use of sex workers. The assumed notion that Dillon was jeopardizing the safety of sex workers by photographing them and also by proxy exploiting them, which initially confused me for two reasons:

The sex workers' faces were infact censored, or if not censored, not even in frame. Given Dillon's portfolio, which is often set in a liminal space, highlighting a subject, the censorship felt indisputably intentional.
A more arduous question: are the photographs actually exploitative if Dillon did not press the shutter release?

My initial response, and current response: no.

Ash: When I look at your old photography, its very clinical, very oblique. There's no frills. Its usually just a person, sure, maybe they’re posed in a weird way, they’re in a clinical backdrop, sure, but this is above all else still a portrait.

Noah: Right.

Ash: But to do that kind of work, and then eventually do this trail cam project involving sex workers, and censoring their faces… it feels intentional. And almost like… maybe the word ‘love letter’ would be wrong, but it feels like a sort of respect for these people are their role in shaping the cultural infrastructure of the city. The acknowledgment… is maybe what feels romantic or at least tender.

Noah: No, totally. Its an homage to the streets; whatever you’d want to call it. Though that part of the project was very small. There are 1.1 million images from that project, and those were around 20 of them. I get why people feel the way they do, because I am who I am. Im in this fucking band. But at the same time, I cant help but wonder if an artist-artist put this project out if it’d have the same reaction. Like ‘Oh he’s down there exploiting women’...

Ash: A) I don't think it's as transgressive or unethical as people believe it was. B) I find the reaction insanely humiliating and condescending to the sex workers who were actually photographed. Like what? It's so taboo and insane they were photographed, I guess existing, and this sort of inherent implied notion of exploitedness at their existence felt a bit,, I don't know, mean? And if exploit is synonymous with existence for them thats… an entirely different conversation. One beyond you or I.

Noah: Right. I viewed it as the rawest form of capture, I mean I didn't even press the shutter, its a mechanical apparatus. I figured this was the truest way to capture it and what these women offer undeniably to Los Angeles. It’s literally just basically the Google Street View of Fig Street.

Ash: You’re kind of just simply documenting it.

Noah: It kind of proves your point of ‘if this thing that is happening is so okay, why is it not okay to see it from this context?’

Ash: I just don't understand what aspect would need to be added or removed for it to be okay

Noah: You know, that's the project; the multi-hyphenated of it all. That's all it is. It's this is happening here.  This is happening here. Like, look at the portrait of the city through a secondhand mechanical apparatus that is like taking portraits of these truly portraits of these people, but removed from the photographer's hand because that was the entire identity of the project… which, if my hand is on the camera, you get into all the ontological issues.

Right, like, you know, all of the photographic theories of talk about whether it's like the camera, the idea, or whatever it might be, stepping away, physically, was me trying to divorce all these aspects. Yes,, I'm still choosing the angle and the location or whatever, but it's in my head, it was the furthest away I could get from the closest I could get to true abstraction, as ethically, artistically as possible.

Noah and i then began to discuss the infamous 2014 “incident” in which Richard Prince, famous painter and photographer, took a screenshot of then- Instagram model, Emily Ratajowski’s grid post in which shes posed scantily clad on a nondescript beach and then displayed it in his gallery show “New Portraits” . Emrata had a career in modeling, brief cameos in Fincher's The Social Network and Gone Girl, but at the time was known overall as this picturesque woman your high school boyfriend was definitely jacking off to, much to your dismay. Not to disparage her, or discredit her. But this was indeed the cultural understanding of her circa 2014. (Emily then took a photo of her in front of said screenshot and then sold this as an NFT in 2021)

“New Portraits” marked Prince’s return to portrait photography, a renewed excitement sparked by his secondhand exposure to social media through his daughter.

“I asked my daughter more about Tumblr. Are those your photos? Where did you get that one? Did you need permission? How did you get that kind of crop? You can delete them? Really? What about these “followers?” Who are they? Are they people you know? What if you don’t want to share? How many of your friends have Tumblrs?

What’s yours is mine.”
Prince, 2020

Prince became fascinated with the idea of Instagram, particularly the ownership of the image, which has been a question since the inception of photography, and will be until its death : Who owns the image?

Is it the photographer, for their ontological keenness to a moment? The subject for creating that moment? Some intangible third space where the photographer and subject retain this harmonious yet ultimately unrealistic dual ownership?

Prince included unaltered screenshots of many distinguishable faces: Kate Moss, Kim Kardashian, Selena Gomez, Kim Gordon, and, infamously, EmRata.

This sparked immense outrage on Emily Ratajkowski’s end, and her supporters, who viewed this simply as a Prince merely claiming Ratajkowski's image as his own; yet a new contemporary discourse opened about the unvarying question about the semantics of photographic ownership.

Noah: It's about how good of an artist you are, and that determines the ownership also. Because I was thinking about it…like the Em Rata thing.  Like, yeah…she doesn't have more power claim than Richard Prince, but like, let's say somebody else did it to her. Like…no, Em Rata definitely, like, has the wherewithal in the control to take that, the power of the image back, just by the virtue of the fact she's able to rile up a bunch of people on social media and write a New York Times bestseller about it. Right? But Richard Prince doing that to these people, just his little action created New York Times bestsellers, created millions of dollars of lawsuits, created like cultural conversations, and new American laws that will last until the end of time, you know? So clearly, it was a very important thing to have been done, you know? Its a new discussion.

Ash: So what role does ownership play in your relationship in the trail cam project?  We keep going back to that (initially the interview pertained to the ironic prevailing status quo surrounding Dillon and his counterpart Chandler Lucy. That's for a different day)

… but I think that's also a testament to how good the project is. You did say once you take an image, you own it. How does this transmorgify with something an image, that you didn't hit the shutter button to take the photo? You know? That's why I think it's even more's it's even more absurd that people have an issue with it because it truly is the most unadulterated image in a sense.

Noah: There's a camera there. There's another one there. (he points to two surveillance cameras in the studio that I embarrassingly was not aware of)

Like, we're under surveillance constantly, like mutual surveillance all the time. But people can't do anything about it. But they can do something about it if it's like this guy with the camera strapped to a pole on Hollywood Boulevard, and I’ve been that guy. So o then you address the path of least resistance to express your frustration about this 1984 state that we have.

He pauses

It's not even like mine at that point, and it's not there. It just is.

Noah seems aware of the context, the palpable viscosity of the ethical hesitation surrounding conversations on sex work and surveillance. The dilemma of obtaining these images, particularly of the sex workers. It is something that should be approached with tact and grace. This much is evident to even the most barely sentient person. These women’s livelihoods depend on anonymity, the objectivity that their existence demands; they need to be simultaneously everybody and nobody to somebody. This is their job.

Dillon's job, with the trail cam project, is to capture the most objective, the unbiased, the completely neutral, the least perverse (using this word in the literal way, the perverting of something, the transmutation of something, the changing of something) image possible. By photographic theory standards, this is nearly impossible. To even attempt it is daunting.

When reading Baudrillard years ago, I felt succinct enough to confidently regard all photography as a simulacrum. Think “New Portarits” by Prince. That is a simulacrum. A screenshot is a simulacrum. (IS IT? We will re-address in five years. I'm kind of working on cracking that)

But projects like Dillon's Trail Cam project, and Rafamns Nine Eyes call this into question.

I have read hardly anything separate from Sontag’s essays on photography, Barthes’ on "Ça a été" (French for this-has-been), and re-read Simulacra and Simulation. I have been at a loss. Photography, especially in the contemporary, is an untamable beast. Hard to know where it will move next. Your finger can never be on the trigger. Not fully, at least. A new ethical dilemma, a new composition of ethics and morals, a tricky equation revolving all of these buzzwords arise every day as the medium expands alongside its technological counterparts.

The closest I have felt can supplement such contemporary facing projects like Rafmans and Dillons; Rosalind Krauss’s concept of indexicality.

It differs from Baudrillardian thought and Barthes' theory of Semiotics because it acknowledges the real, it preserves the nuances that can often alienate and be exploited by photographic theory standards

Krauss argues that a photograph is an index (the Latin definition being literally ‘ the pointer’), a pointer to a real moment. It is not mimetic. It is proof of reality. An index is an undeviated debossment of the real. I have found this to be the only way to digest autonomous motion capture projects, with their newfound autonomy and subsequent objectivity.

It feels sacrosanct to the moment. The deer captured in the Cahuenga Pass are real. The denizens at the Mcdonalds on Alvarado Street drive-thru are tangible. Those women are real; that moment was real. That moment happened. And in the most unobscured way, it has been attempted to be captured.

It is an effigy for reality.