If you’re new here, I’m Cait, a creative laborer working in art and advertising.

I run a creative company called FLOWERS.

some pictures i took around towne lately.

nothing less, nothing more.

different leaves, windows rolled down, layers off, full park at night, bagel & coffee on the trunk.

a few pictures of the seasons shifting.

simple as that!

___________________________

If you missed it: FLOWERS, the creative studio I run, is has one of these now too. It is decidedly more focused:

FLOWERS

Alongside Rapha in the Austrian Alps

Familiarity comes from working with the same brand over and over for a long period time. A different level of creative freedom starts to open up. You spend less energy trying to understand or please the brand and more energy refining how to translate their perspective visually…

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22 days ago · 13 likes · Cait Oppermann

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📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between. Say hello!

Cait runs things at FLOWERS & BaseRate.

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the archive.

That’s ride or die vibes, thank you.

If you’re new here, I’m Cait, a creative laborer working in art and advertising.

I run a creative company called FLOWERS.

We shan’t and simply won’t acknowledge my gap in correspondence with you, my favorite people and the coolest people there are. That would be boring so instead I’ll provide some context for the gap and show instead of tell for the most part, which is my best way.

Ok this is crazy to say but, since my last time in your actual inbox, I started a YouTube channel….??!

It outlines some of my process as a photographer and director, my team, how and why we make the decisions we do before/during/after the process of shooting, etc.

It’s a lot of work but also a lot of fun? My favorite part of my job has always been collaborating with the team to make the best possible thing we can, so this new series is a look at that process.

Our first one was about a campaign I shot for Hims & Hers at the end of last year and the second one is about the process of making the book with IBM. I would genuinely love your feedback! Our next one is in the works as we speak (our work for AG1), so literally let me know if there are any specific questions you have about that project and I’ll do my best to work it in. (Seriously.)

My sweet little girlie Lizard (Lizzy) BraveGirl experienced her first time on set this year when FLOWERS produced and shot the first ever brand imagery and campaign for ResortPass. (I hear there’s going to be a Union Square takeover next month so if you see the work, send me a pic! That never gets old.) Lizzy did very well and mostly stayed in her bed or by my side, but did a little exploring and found scraps of food around catering at lunch which was probably huge for her in the scheme of her day.

I think she walked away more confident but very tired bc that was a lot of people and a big space. Congrats to her for that big win at the end of Jan.

Recently walked into Hightide, the Japanese stationery goods store, and saw the shirts we made for my book are stocked there. That shook me to my core! If you have one, please send a pic!!

I visited my friend, fellow photographer, photo director, and educator, Liz Renstrom’s class at the International Center of Photography called “Realms of the Field”. I love talking about photography and business and the business of photography and sharing the knowledge that I’ve amassed over my career to this point. There are so many questions to answer and knowledge to dispense that it feels nice to provide some of that for others to use in ways I wish I’d known I could when I was in their position.

One of my core beliefs in both life and in business is that when we all know more about money and the value of creative work, we all succeed. It’s not a competition, it’s a collective effort to retain the value of labor and IP.

My new desk:
I’m really really excited because I’ve commissioned my new friend Jeff, who made my custom projector shelf, to fix my horrible overflowing bookshelf. There have been many iterations and mockups.

The desk is the first install and the bench and shelves are coming within the next week. This will change my life and I cannot wait…

Not a particularly big update, but I set up a house account at one of my favorite places to hang out, Montague Diner, in Brooklyn Heights.

I have a special PIN and soon I will get a keychain. At the end of each visit, I’ll give them my PIN, and they’ll put it on my tab, to be charged at the end of each month. It’s suddenly the midcentury and I literally get to say put it on my tab.

WHICH LEADS ME TO AN IMPORTANT THOUGHT & QUESTION FOR YOU, readers:

Who else here is an early riser? Would you come to my Early Riser’s Club? It’s an idea I’ve had bc I love hanging in the morning and then jumping into the day. Lmk about this pls. NYC of course for this one but I’ll rise early and hang out over coffee wherever I go. I just need to find my fellow Early Risers. If this isn’t you, no problem. If it is, lmk?

Early Risers pls sound absolutely off if you’re out there.

There are, of course, so many more things to share, but we must leave something for the next few. And it will not be quite as long next time, I promise that.

Thank you again for reading - you are so cool for that and I’m grateful! : )

Cait

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the archive.

That’s ride or die vibes, thank you.

If you’re new here, I’m Cait, a creative laborer working in art and advertising.

I run a creative company called FLOWERS.

Surprise, I’m back and talking about taking pictures in museums, again!

My family went on an outting to the newly reopened Frick this summer.

If only I’d started working my way through The Gilded Age before going. The Gilded Age was my summer obsession and I didn’t want to talk about anything else. (Gildheads if you’re here, sound off in the comments. 🗽)

7 photos I took while exploring the Frick.

They have a “no photos” policy. I never abide.

Aside from being a beautiful place to see art (a Gilded Age mansion just across 5th Ave from Central Park), my one comment is that the visitor experience and flow of the museum was poorly executed. There was only one point of entry for all exhibitions, meaning those who had already shown their tickets had to join the line of newcomers and be waived through manually based on whether the guard remembered them or not. Considering all the thought, care, and money that went into the reopening, this made the experience frustrating and confusing for all moving through it… that is all!

I wish they’d have me for luncheon (*tips hat to fellow Gildheads*) to offer my opinions…!

If you missed previous editions of me Taking Pictures In Museums:

Or even the one before that where I took a bunch of photos in the Museum of Natural History here in NYC:

My book, IBM Research, is out now.

The book features my own work documenting the human side of IBM Research from 2018-2024.

Published by Actual Source books.

Deeper dive on the project and the making of the book coming soon.

Thank you for coming as always. I really appreciate it!

Reply to this email, leave a comment - the whole point is that we share some ideas.

I answer each one. : )

Cait

___________________________

If you missed it: FLOWERS, my creative studio, is now on substack.

FLOWERS

What FLOWERS can't show on IG (+ our tshirt collab with IBM)

FLOWERS is the creative studio of Cait Oppermann, known for our work in photography and image direction. We work with brands, agencies, and cultural institutions on commercial and editorial projects…

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10 months ago · 9 likes · 4 comments · Cait Oppermann

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📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between. Say hello!

Cait runs things at FLOWERS & BaseRate.

For BaseRate, we just interviewed with commercial photographer Clara Nebeling. Recommended reading for any creatives who bid on commercial work.

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the archive.

That’s ride or die vibes, thank you.

If you’re new here, I’m Cait, a creative laborer working in art and advertising.

I run a creative company called FLOWERS.

5 pictures from the citibike ride home the other day

My book is going to print this week

I’m so so excited to be getting closer and closer to my book coming out. I’m collaborating once again with some of my favorite people at Actual Source Books.

They've achieved my dream: being highly respected in Japan as non-Japanese people.

That is one of the most difficult things to do!

Actual Source also functions as a design studio and they actually did the brand design for FLOWERS.

Ahhhhhh they did such a good job. : )

ANYWAY!

The book we’re working on is being sent to print this week. (!!!)

I also like getting these photos from FedEx of the proofs and dummy arriving.
(Proof of proofs.)

A sampling of these :

That’s that about the book. I’ve been getting a couple of Qs about it and will have much more to share soon!

Still building software for myself & others

Also busy building and adding to BaseRate every single week. BaseRate is essentially a suite of software tools for creatives working in commercial photography and production.

We recently built a tool I now use almost every day.

A Production Budget Builder.

It has honestly been so freakinggggg fun to build something for myself and share it with others who also need it desperately.

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The process of making improvements and tweaking it literally never stops, which is different from my usual mode of working project to project on commissions.

Having to stick with something is usually incredibly hard for my ADHD-riddled brain.

The consistency honestly comes from me needing these tools badly myself, so there’s always work to be done because the work relies on it.

If you also work in the world of photography / advertising / producing shoots, I’d *love* to get your honest feedback. We also just opened up a 10-day free trial to anyone who wants to check out the tools for themselves. : )

Thank you for coming as always. I really appreciate it!

Reply to this email, leave a comment - the whole point is that we share some ideas.

I answer each one. : )

Cait

___________________________

📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between. Say hello!

Cait runs things at FLOWERS & BaseRate.

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the archive.

Ride or Die vibe

📯 Send to friends, if you want.

Leave a comment

If you’re new here, I’m Cait, a creative laborer working in art and advertising. I run a creative company called FLOWERS.

The art (What the Uline catalog gives us)

With this image, I’m convinced of the tape’s strength.

Mission absolutely accomplished. I get it, I like it, I trust it.

This page made me feel as though I have need for a Waterhog®.

I love the primaries represented in the first image, where it was intentional or not.

I also appreciate the inclusion of the heal on the Waterhog® Elite.

Surely, there are individuals who wonder “Should I feel fearful in a heel? I don’t trust those deep grooves.” Seeing this may help those in the workplace with this concern.

No need for this, just admiring the simple, unbranded produce box.

Everyone needs a tarp. Those traditional blue or gray woven tarps…I’ve seen them fray.
I can’t see this one fraying for a good long while.

Looks absolutely solid and the colorway is unique. Would it become an eyesore? That’s a question I can answer right now…

This one feels painfully obvious at first. Brat-coded drum that “stands out in the darkest warehouses” - it is screaming to be used by an array of vendors in ways I can’t begin to name.

That said, upon second glance, this is a spill kit. We don’t need all of that stuff. Just a great looking drum on its own. We’d be removing it from our proverbial cart.

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Here we go. We’ve found our “Brat” bin. But now I’m completely sucked in to the Hi-Vis Outdoor Crowd Control.

I have to say it seems very, very expensive if I’m understanding correctly.

One post with self-retracting belt is $360 on its own? The situation could be almost as easily handled with a cheap roll of Caution tape, definitely also in the catalog.

In any case, I don’t need this either but my mind wanders to what kind of authority this gives a person.

Which leads to my next thought:

Uline is a place where you can buy Stop signs.

Once again, I have no explicit need, but the mind wanders…

Thinking of installing Stop signs where I please.

I look through this catalog each time it arrives.

I didn’t request it and I detest getting a wasteful slab of paper in my mailbox.

But without fail, each time, I open this tome and fantasize about what I could do with it all.

Now is where I have to tell you something.

Uline is sadly not our friend, despite having exquisite inventory of industrial products and more.

While I don’t care to know the finer details, I leave you with this Instagram dedicated to their takedown.

This ain’t good, mama! ^^^

Lastly, look at this rather direct video Refuse Uline made.

While we musn’t patronize Uline for the good of the nation, the catalog is a revelation and a gift.

We must separate the art from the artist.

That’s literally all.

Thank you for coming as always. I really appreciate it!

Reply to this email, leave a comment - the whole point is that we share some ideas.

I answer each one. : )

Cait

___________________________

📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between. Say hello!

Cait runs things at FLOWERS & BaseRate.

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the archive.

Ride or Die vibe

📯 Send to friends, if you want.

Leave a comment

If you’re new here, I’m Cait, a creative laborer working in art and advertising. I run a creative company called FLOWERS.

Egon Schiele

I was in Vienna last week for my brother’s wedding. It was beautiful and brought me a lot of joy. <3

There was also a massive exhibition of the later works of Egon Schiele (one of my faves) at the Leopold Museum!


Here are a bunch of close ups of hands.

Have you ever seen so perfect a signature as this?

Powerful enough to make me rethink everything!

A signature is truly just a design…I need to work on mine badly.

Anyway, genius.

A few other pieces I loved:

Great hands here too. He was always doing stuff freakily.

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Ok full size of this newborn baby because it’s too good.

During the war, he worked at a POW camp and then in the storehouses away from any action. He was encouraged to draw when he had the time and so he drew what he had in front of him.

One of those hands above is actually from this Russian POW. ⬆️

Schiele’s comparatively chill war experience was kind of like a forced residency, if that’s ok to say!

Anyway, it is always a pleasure to see your favorite works in person.

And finally, some photos I took on the short walk to dinner the other night.

Being in a place that isn’t home helps in remembering to get the camera to play a little.

Thank you for coming as always. I really appreciate it!

Let me know what you think!

Reply to this email or write a note. I answer every one. : )

Cait

___________________________

📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between. Say hello!

Cait runs things at FLOWERS & BaseRate.

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the archive.

Ride or Die vibe

📯 Send to friends, if you want.

Leave a comment

If you’re new here, I’m Cait, a creative laborer working in art and advertising. I run a creative company called FLOWERS.

The customer is…me

Many many years ago, some of us photographers starting out used the Getty Usage Calculator to calculate usage fees for photography. It was clunky and contained ad placements that don’t really exist anymore or have changed form drastically. Still, back when I was first starting out, this is where many of us got our general ballpark ranges from which I personally took with a large handful of salt.

There’s also this very very silly one that is really confusing and looks unchanged since ~2006, give or take. Mostly it was too confusing and I had no idea what it wanted from me.

As a commercial photographer in advertising, I was and still am constantly calculating usage fees and day rates based on the many different types of jobs and ad placements that come across my desk. It’s time-consuming and frustrating and relies heavily on several extremely nuanced factors.

Pricing is a complete unknown to most, including many of my friends and peers who would text me constantly asking for pricing advice. The thing is, it all really depends on a lot of things.

I really wanted a tool that actually worked and, obviously, waited for someone else to build it first or fixed the outdated ones. Then no one did.

Finally, I asked photographers, “What are the biggest mysteries of the industry you wish could be unlocked?”

This was a sampling of the response, which I expected:

I knew these were going to be the answers that came back, but it was exactly the type of validation I needed that this idea should be realized.

So, I built BaseRate for myself initially, with help from two developers over the past five months.

When I casually mentioned it to fellow photographers, each response was immediately, "Wait….I want that. I would use that all the time."

And here we are!

Starting small, fixing bugs first

In my last High Thought, I gathered some emails of those of you who were interested (and many of you were, thank you!) to roll it out first on a tiny scale.

Instead of a massive launch, I then trickled out BaseRate semi-secretly on platforms like Instagram Threads, lol.

Why? Because it’s sort of a ghost town, which is a safe space to work out the kinks on a product with a few bugs after deployment. This smaller audience helped identify those bugs before expanding to a larger market, which I’m approaching slowly!

Which brings us here, where I thought it could be interesting to chronicle the process of building something in a new medium.

Ironically, as a photographer using my own images in the mockup ads, I don't need to calculate usage fees for my promotional materials - an absolutely fun cheat code for me!

Good challenges

There have been many, many revisions and unexpected hurdles throughout development. Managing people and the entire project solo has been exhausting at times, but so many unique learnings have come with it.

I haven’t been so hands-on with a project in years, thinking about it for about 60-70% of my day. It’s amazing the lessons that can be learned from being a beginner and letting things break after working in advertising at such a high level for a long time.

I’m relearning the skill of extreme experimentation, which is hard for me as a control freak building in public. I love taking risks, but I usually do those things behind the scenes and reveal the big switch later. This time, I’m liking the idea of pulling back the curtain on the process a bit through the early, messy growth of this project.

Unlocking industry gates

The pricing information photographers need isn't widely available. And that's deliberate. Having been represented and having an agent for six years (2017-2023) before leaving to go completely independent and start my own studio, I recognized that pricing uncertainty holds many photographers (and creatives in general) back, particularly those without representation.

BaseRate gives photographers more autonomy by giving them information. By democratizing access to pricing tools and frameworks, I'm aiming to help solve what I've found to be the industry's number one problem: knowing what and how to charge for photography in advertising.

I would love for you to check it out, poke around, let me know your thoughts! Photographers - reply with your feedback! I’m truly all ears.

Many who read this are not commercial photographers, but do encounter pricing uncertainty at work. If that’s you, I’d still love to know about your industry’s pricing gates as well. BaseRate may one day be able to solve more of these problems and I’m curious about all of them. Human (creative) labor in particular is really interesting and important to me especially these days as we witness the rise of AI at work and throughout our lives.

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I always see this particular venue (High Thought) as the antithesis to other platforms in that a lot of times, a comment or email reply gets a great discussion going. I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, questions, bug reports.

Creatives in other industries:

What is your experience with pricing uncertainty?

How have you navigated that?

Where do you get your info from?

Thank you for coming as always. I really appreciate it!

Cait

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📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between.

Cait runs things at FLOWERS & BaseRate.

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the (small) archive.

Ride or Die vibe

📯 Send to friends, if you want.

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If you’re new here, I’m Cait, a creative laborer working in art and advertising. I run a creative company called FLOWERS.

If I didn’t show these photos to you, they’d get lost in the computer. Seems like a waste to take pictures I only look at myself. I want to show you some pictures I took in an archaeological museum on a Greek Island.

I have a strong fascination with museums and how things are displayed. I’ve previously shown you a bunch of rocks from the Museum of Natural History in New York.

But first, I want to show you some pictures I love by one of my favorite photographers, Thomas Struth.

He’s made many vastly different bodies of work over the years, but I always remember him for his photos of people in museums. There is a particular kind of theater to them. As museum-goers, we are on stage and the work is too. Down to how we perform walking through the galleries, appreciating the work, using quiet voices.

The photos I took in the archeological museum are nothing like these! I just love this series so much that I had to share.

The photos I took in the Greek archaeological museum are actually very different in that they lack very many people at all. In fact, I imagine this museum gets visited rather infrequently by tourists compared to the ones Struth visited.

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I love a museum on a budget.

You can really see all of the ways that budget is put to use preserving items from antiquity in simple ways. No grand posters or huge placards, just a small institution doing what they can with all of these relics the island has been left with from thousands of years ago.

And that’s really that.

Similar thinkings on how art is displayed, etc:

Projections & Garry Winogrand @ the Brooklyn Museum

My friend, Framer John

To the photographers out there, I’d love to personally invite you to early access for the software product I’m building. It’s called BaseRate and it helps photographers (and anyone else working in photography and advertising) accurately and independently calculate licensing and usage fees.

If you want to be on the list for our *closed beta*, join the early access list here.

Thank you for coming as always. I really appreciate it!

Cait

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What is High Thought?

📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between.

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the (small) archive.

Ride or Die vibe

📯 Send to friends, if you want.

If you’re new here, I’m Cait, a creative laborer working in art and advertising. I run a creative company called FLOWERS.

In Cal Newport’s book Slow Productivity, he talks about the idea of seasonality. Not trying to do everything all the time, but instead working in different ways on different things at different times, depending on what’s going on in your world. Newport’s a professor, so he uses the summers to write and ideate on new work, when he has a break from the structure of the academic schedule.

He also breaks down Slow Productivity into 3 very simple ideas:

It’s a daily struggle to focus on doing fewer things when it feels like there are so many things to be done. Sometimes that just means focusing on one “mode” at a time, if I can.

I switch between modes of collecting, sifting, and making.

Right now I’m in “sifting”-mode.

I’m looking at things I’ve collected, scribbled on notecards or my journal and am deciding what they mean and why I collected them.

Coming out of a collecting-mode in Japan, I’m sifting through what was collected as a way to internalize and glean what jumped out at me most or what I want to cement a little deeper in my brain.

As usual, I scanned a bunch of things to get them off my desk and into 2D form.

I’m not making anything yet, but the sifting is really fun:

Still sifting, we will see! Perhaps something from here will follow me into my making mode, perhaps not. The collecting and sifting is a meaningful process for me regardless. I’m a collector of things and I like to see the things I’ve collected in my notebook like specimens. Removed from all other context, it’s easier to be objective about what I liked.

I'm curious if any of you have special tricks navigate to navigate changing creative rhythms? Perhaps your own version of 'mode-switching' that helps you stay productive/reflective/inspired?

Thank you for coming as always. I really appreciate it!

Cait

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What is High Thought?

📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between.

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the (small) archive.

Ride or Die vibe

📯 Send to friends, if you want.

If you’re new here, I’m Cait, a creative laborer working in art and advertising. I run a creative company called FLOWERS.

I recently came back from my 4th trip to Japan and it was by far the best one yet. 🥹

Took lots of photos on my phone, on my camera, wrote a lot in my notebook, collected a lot of trinkets, shot a lot of videos. More to come there, still sifting through it.

In the meantime, here are some pictures I took.

Thanks for looking!

I’ve been a little MIA. Hoping to pick back up a bit more now that I’m back from Japan and getting into a schedule again. : )

In the background, I’m working on some software that I’m very very very very excited so share with all of the very High Thinkers soon.

Ok have a great day!

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What is High Thought?

📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between.

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the (small) archive.

Ride or Die vibe

📯 Send to friends, if you want.

A question I’ve pondered for a while and want to put to you, readers.

Why do so many artists not list their individual works for sale with prices?

I know that there are certain industry standards in the commercial gallery world that just "aren't done."

But why do individual unrepresented artists not list their work online with prices?

Not everyone wants to sell their work, but there are plenty of people who do and advertise this online.

In 2025, I wonder if “email for prices” is still an effective way of doing things.

It adds an awkward and largely unnecessary hurdle to purchasing by adding social friction to an already shaky transaction:

Art is not a “necessity”, so if you take away the option of an impulse buy, you take away a huge opportunity for the sale.

(More time for a buyer to talk themselves out of writing an email that has more social risk than one with no social risk, such as asking about store hours or sizing.)

How many people are discouraged from inquiring about an artist’s work because they have no idea they should expect $500 or $5,000 or $15,000 for a piece?

Pricing is especially subjective when it comes to artwork, so this fear of not even being in the same ballpark adds to the immense social friction of having to inquire.

If the price comes back way, way higher than expected, one fears having to say, "Oh, I'm okay…bit out of my price range. Thank you!" This is cringe for everyone, even though everyone is right.

There’s a huge disparity in what someone may be able to to spend versus the value an artist might assign to the piece, meaning the social risk of feeling as though you are insulting the artist by not buying in end is very high. And it’s common for artists to feel uncomfortable coming in too high or feel impostor syndrome, so they take sell themselves short.

This is an interaction that both parties hate.

So my guess is that less people ask?

I wonder if more artists wanting to sell their work would be able to better make sales with price tag on each piece.

No judgment if it’s high.

Some people will buy, some people will not. But that was always the case.

At least buyers could know and could decide for themselves at a distance with no added social friction.

I’d love to know if anyone has had experience or thoughts or counterpoints to add.

Completely unrelated…

Below are some scans I made of my notebook the other day.

Thanks for reading.

Cait 🌸

p.s. 2 photos I have saved on my computer:

Ok have a great day!

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What is High Thought?

📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between.

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the (small) archive.

Ride or Die vibe

📯 Send to friends, if you want.

There are several pictures I think about all the time. For whatever reason, they rise to the top again and again.

I’m going to take you through three that live in my head.

1. Gus Powell - from Lunch Pictures (1998 - 2007)

Stuck in my mind forever. <3

Gus Powell’s street work is some of the best from an interesting transitional time in photography, camera awareness, and New York. A layered, compositionally masterful photo I think about all the time.

2. This picture, date unknown.

Judging by the look of the 00s photo quality and what they’re wearing, I’m gonna get it’s ~ 2006 or something.

I bring it up in conversation about once a year, sometimes more. I love it so much and wish I knew who took it. Every time I cheers with beer, I’m mentally here with these people.

3. Wolfgang Tillmans - Lacanau (self), 1986

This perfect Tillmans variation on a theme: Adidas shorts.

Wolfgang Tillmans singlehandedly made Adidas shorts gay-coded AND part of photography culture / canon.

A close friend of mine (who is fifteen years my senior and extremely accomplished in his own creative business) happens to own one of these *canonical* Adidas shorts pictures (above) and it’s on display in his apartment.

I love it. Not my top of the series (Lacanau), but I love it so much:

The reds clashing 👍

The purplish, red hues looking kind of disgusting together 👍

The sheen of the shorts on the dull towel 👍

The 3-stripe edge of the shorts following the edge of the towel too perfectly that it feels wrong, but also right? 👍

The almost invisible edge of the white wall they’re drapped over, layered against the wall behind 👍

A straight photograph that reads almost as collage 👍

Oof.

If I ever had the funds to buy a Tillmans, it would be one with Adidas shorts.

Magritte owns the green apple, Tillmans the Adidas short.

Thanks for reading.

Cait 🌸

p.s.

Other iconic Adidas vibes from WT:

This is what I think about! See you next time!

Share High Thought

What is High Thought?

📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between.

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the (small) archive.

Ride or Die vibe

📯 Send to friends, if you want.

I spent my second Thanksgiving in a row in London.

A fun tradition I’ve established by mistake but enjoy very much.

For a week, I spent nearly all of my downtime in various pubs. Reading, drawing, thinking, observing.

Pubs are perfect establishments for doing these things in the afternoon or early evening.

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Labeling My Sharpies

I label the tops of my sharpies so I can grab them faster. I kept grabbing my Pentel Fountain Pen when I wanted my Sharpie.

When something like this keeps happening, I make one of my creations.

As you can see, they look very similar from above.

Almost everything in my home is customized to my liking in this way.

I was planning my to-dos the other day and made the freakiest “S”.

That’s all about that!

Research: Flipping through books

Some spreads from a creative project I’m working on for a brand.

I love to flip through books. There are a lot of things you won’t find on Are.na or Cosmos.

Books are goldmines of context and it’s wonderful to hold a big stack of pictures.

I could do a whole deep dive of photos of Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali. He was such a collaborative participant in photographs throughout his career.

I think he understood the power of photography better than his contemporaries at the time. Let’s go there soon but not today.

I accidentally went viral on Substack. I didn’t really like it.

Against my better judgment, I posted a note here on Substack and promptly logged off.

When I returned, this happened.1

Turns out a lot of people agree and some people feel conflicted. There are also people who love Elon sooo soo much. Still, lots and lots seem to be leaving Twitter.

Two thoughts:

1. I have publically despised Amazon for a long time.

I urged my closest friends and family, to their great annoyance, to cancel and that it’s wonderful over here. The water’s warm!

I left Amazon many years ago because of the idea of Jeff also being in our homes through speakers and light switches, in our Roombas that map and store our floorplans, etc.

It just really didn’t sit well with me, in addition to all of the other anti-union goings-on, it goes on and on.

Amazon is my one big corporate nemesis. Over the last decade, I’ve politely and professionally (and non-confrontationally) declined several commercial projects with them.

It doesn’t make me a hero by any means and it’s certainly not why I say it. I don’t pass judgment on artists who work with Amazon either.

I only want to relay that it does feel good to know where some of my personal lines are.

Community is more and more and more important following the election.

Local businesses are where community congregates and thrives and builds, ACROSS age groups, socio-economic classes, ethnicities and genders.

The local coffee shop is where my dog and I see the other dogs and their people who remember our names.

As a small business owner myself, the Amazonification of the world is at odds with our mission and commitment to our own people, how we treat them, our impact on our planet, sourcing from within.

In the years since I canceled Prime, I have saved (fr, SAVED) so much money.

I’ve thought more critically about where my money goes, too.

Just as our votes are important, we’ve collectively learned that money (particularly divestment) often speaks loudest.

Lastly, it’s fair to say that Twitter / X is now effectively a platform serving as an unofficial communication arm (platform) of the incoming D.T. administration. Elon is more powerful than ever.

Whether one likes it or not, that platform’s algorithm is increasingly engineered and wielded with that in mind. His turf, his rules.

Change is hard. Leaving platforms and changing your lifestyle (Amazon is a lifestyle, it touches every aspect of many of its customers’ lives.) is hard. That does suck.

There’s no right or wrong way to do things but I’m happy to share ways it sucks less and less after the big jump, if that’s a topic of interest. That offhand Note response certainly makes it look that way!

2. Substack is officially a social network.

I came across this post from Indie Hackers on Substack’s growth tactics. A lot of us came here to escape the algorithm, but Notes and Followers are the same thing again.

The appeal of email is that it’s an *owned* channel, giving creatives of all kinds the ability to reach their audience directly, without relying on an ever-changing algorithm steered by incentives that don’t align with our own.

Going “viral” on Substack did not generate new subscriptions for the most part. Very very very few relative to the Note.

I’m not keeping track and I objectively do not care about the HT audience size, but rather the quality. However, it does give me pause considering Substack’s hard, hard push for people on the platform to use Notes and drive followers, not subscribers.

I did generate a lot of “followers” but a small handful of subscribers (hi, welcome!), but followers are only reached if posted on Notes, not if I send one of these.

My read is that this is a clear way to inch us toward platform dependence.

(Substack people: Remember to export your list once in a while. If you ever lose account access to Substack or the platform takes a nosedive, your readers go with it!)

I’d be sad if I lost a way to reach all of you cool, smart, hot, interesting people.

Anyway. That’s all on that!

Speaking of, there are some new people here (not from going viral lol) and I’d love to know more about who you all are. And if you’ve been here a while, tell me more!

Humbly,

could you…

…take 60 seconds to answer these 4 questions?

It will make High Thought better for us both. (That’s you & me.)

I’m curious to hear what you all think. Share your thoughts, reply to this email, stay off this app, make some art?

Thank you all for reading as always. I appreciate it!!!!
xoxo

Cait 🌸

The Four Questions - subcribers only! (smart cool hot people)

Share High Thought

What is High Thought?

📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between.

@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the (small) archive.

Ride or Die vibe

📯 Send to friends, if you want.

High Thought is an intimate infusion of (high) thoughts that are a mixture of frivolous and (sometimes) profound if I’m lucky. Written with consideration for those interested in the creative process or personal peek behind the curtain into a particularly chaotic (fun) brain room.

(The best experience is on the website, in my opinion!)

🌸 Good morning/afternoon/evening, depending on where you are in the world. : )

Failure = Learning A Lot *Really* Fast

It’s been a little over a year since I founded my company, FLOWERS. The journey has been honestly transformative for me and my practice as an artist. I’ve taken on all responsibilities in the company, including areas where the learning curve was steep and frustrating but invaluable to know inside and out. The experience has been incredibly eye-opening because it’s accelerated my understanding of my strengths and weaknesses.

I’ve come to see business-building as a creative act.

Read more

High Thought is an intimate infusion of (high) thoughts that are a mixture of frivolous and (sometimes) profound if I’m lucky. Written with consideration for those interested in the creative process or personal peek behind the curtain into a particularly chaotic (fun) brain room.

(The best experience is on the website, in my opinion!)

🌸 Good morning/afternoon/evening, depending on where you are in the world. : )

“WELCOME BACK PUMPKIN”

Readers, I’ve been absent and I do apologize for it. It’s been a busy season which is great for work but detrimental to all that gets worked on in the background, including High Thought. I hope to remedy this swiftly because I like this place. : )

Fall is truly here. As I get older I appreciate the change of seasons more. This time of year makes me wistful…school time, summer is over. I have tried to shift my mindset toward a reality in which the cool breeze is nice. I think it’s worked because I’m finding the cool breeze is nice.

“WHAT I DO” / Pictures of Cars

“What I Do” - It is truly the big question.

I took a few pictures of cars on a 20-hour layover on Santorini, shuttling between islands on a job last month.

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High Thought is an intimate infusion of (high) thoughts that are a mixture of frivolous and (sometimes) profound if I’m lucky. Written with consideration for those interested in the creative process or personal peek behind the curtain into a particularly chaotic brain room.

(The best experience is on the website, in my opinion!)

🌸 Good morning/afternoon/evening, depending on where you are in the world. : )

Delete the substack app

and take back your time? (If you want…otherwise go off!)

For me, the endless feed of clickbait is feeling familiar in ways that don’t make me feel good.

I deleted the app a few days ago because I realized that it brought absolutely nothing to my experience of enjoying corners of the internet with a little more depth. I had found myself opening the app and scrolling through Notes, which brought me no joy and only wasted my time with what had risen to the top across the platform, which tended to be things with clickable titles. That is lovely, but it isn’t why I’m here, personally.

This is me making my case for High Thought’s allergy to the perils of social media’s endless loop psychology. HT is decidedly unambitious when it comes to numbers, which are less and less helpful these days in determining quality or what may be worth stopping to look at.

In that spirit, I would like to present a few photos I took at the Museum of Natural History here in NYC in back February.

I had fun. I love rocks.

Thanks to you all for being here to witness these rocks with me, that’s all I ask. If no one else shows up, idc!

xoxo C

Share High Thought

What is High Thought?

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the (small) archive.

Ride or Die vibe

📯 Send to friends, if you want.

📸 @flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

High Thought is an intimate infusion of (high) thoughts that are a mixture of frivolous and (sometimes) profound if I’m lucky. Written with consideration for those interested in the creative process or personal peek behind the curtain into a particularly chaotic brain room.

(The best experience is on the website, in my opinion!)

🌸 Good morning/afternoon/evening, depending on where you are in the world. : )

I truly hope everyone is having a lovely week thus far.

As with so many people, I love the Olympics. I love sports, I love the stories, the world all clued into a collective event. So many things about the Olympics are bad and fueled by money and greed, but I love watching athletes and people trying hard at hard things.

One thing I wasn’t expecting was so many Minions? There were soooo many Minions involved in the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics. I loved it the other night but then again, I did hit the j. The pics gathered on my phone now are less charming to me!

🏹

I’ve also been enjoying learning about the nuances of the lesser-known (to me) sports, like archery, for instance. I watched the medal showdown between China and South Korea and became obsessed with the “intimacy” between archer and the bow.

That line/smudge to me is perfect.

Read more

High Thought is an intimate infusion of (high) thoughts that are a mixture of frivolous and (sometimes) profound if I’m lucky. Written with consideration for those interested in the creative process or personal peek behind the curtain into a particularly chaotic brain room.

(The best experience is on the website, in my opinion!)

🌸 Good morning/afternoon/evening, depending on where you are in the world. : )

Cape Light

I pulled a book I love off the shelf the other day. A floppy old paperback called Cape Light by one of my favorite 20th-century greats, Joel Meyerowitz.

These variations on a theme

are very nice.

Light is so crazy (genius to say) and the sky takes so many forms.

I love this picture so much. The horizon line and the top of the chair…the perfect pinkish red jacket resting perfectly on top of both. Those colors and that balance of the horizon line is dopamine spitting somewhere deep, deep in my brain.

So seventies. Everyone is wearing rich, beautiful jewel tones. A gorgeous party palette to shoot. Lucky Joel.

It’s not easy to get light to look this way on film. Idk how to put it. But the light spilling on the field in the background is at least a stop difference in my view from the bottom of the picture yet the figure feels so accurately rendered in the softer light. The yellow in the shirt is such a nice counterweight to the sky and the gold of the dirt in back. Red is my weakness. Red, to me, belongs in almost every picture. What a crazy thing to say. I say dumb things like that all the time, I just really really REALLY love red in pictures.

This Cumberland Farms picture’s greens reminds me of one of my favorite diCorcia photos from Hustlers:

Dusk is sublime in real life and in photos. One of my favorite learnings in photography was shooting with fill flash at dusk, when the sky and your light source are perfectly balanced. It doesn’t last long, but it’s so pleasing when it hits just right. Equilibrium/dopamine spitting.

Shooting at night and in the dark is underrated.

Anyway,

A picture that I love that isn’t pretty. This coffee table is so ugly. But it works perfectly in this picture. The color of the sand matching the frame and the water matching the glass. The type of picture I’d skip over if I were flipping quickly but it’s just perfect. I imagine the coffee table wants so badly to be the ocean and sand, literally from whence it came. Nope, it’s just an ugly ass coffee table made pretty only by this picture.

Another picture one might flip past quickly. But those shutters and the light coming in and buttering over the bevels and formations in the wall. The striations of silt from over the years mimicking the columns and horizontal lights of the shutters.

An anomaly in the book for me but I love this picture. The shadow, the highlights in her face showing the heat of the day, the swimsuit tanline, Joel’s own shadow. I love it.

The last several pictures did not have any red and yet they’re great. Contradiction is so fun and we must surrender to it to be free.

In the front of the book there’s some interview text which I hadn’t read before.

I like a few of the ways he describes things. Like why he moved from black and white to color and the feeling of being compelled to take a picture as “something that you can't quite handle that possesses you.”

As a neurodivergent, synesthetic, on-sensory-spectrums person…color really is a sensation to me. “Color plays itself out along a richer band of feelings - more wavelengths, more radiance, more sensation.” Perhaps it’s that combined with my deeply Taurus POV that I want it all to be rich, indulgent, challenging (!!!) and knocked backward by color, even monochrome subjects shot on color film scream about color’s absence in a way reinstates its importance through subtlety.

I love learning about how artists feel color or light or whatever it is that knocks them over. Photography is also a deeply, deeply solitary medium for the most part. We spend a lot of time looking, thinking, looking, reflecting, tweaking, looking, getting lost in pictures. I’ve been reading a bit about world-building recently and in some ways, pictures are little worlds proposed by a photographer for some reason or many.

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A little tower of things I have saved on my computer:

I really, really appreciate it.

Have a good weekend, freaks! 😈

Cait 🌸

If you like this Substack, feel free to share with those who you think may also enjoy it. Love you all. : )

Share High Thought

What is High Thought?

📑 General idea behind High Thought here.

*or*

📚 Past editions in the (small) archive.

Ride or Die vibe

📯 Send to friends, if you want.

📸 @flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann

High Thought is an intimate infusion of (high) thoughts that are a mixture of frivolous and (sometimes) profound if I’m lucky. Written with consideration for those interested in the creative process or personal peek behind the curtain into a particularly chaotic brain room.

(The best experience is on the website, in my opinion!)

🌸 Good morning/afternoon/evening, depending on where you are in the world. : )

It’s summer in the northern hemisphere. What a beautiful thing for our brains.

I’ve been trying to spend as much time outside as I can while I have the time at home. Lizzy and I love to get up early and go outside to work before it gets too hot. To be honest, I cannot speak for her. She hasn’t told me this. I, personally, love it.

Unseen stuff

What do you do with the hundreds of thousands of photos taken or pieces of art made? The ones that pile up on our phones, hard drives, cloud(s?), notebooks?

I wonder a lot about my intrinsic drive to make things, save things, and remember things. It’s as strong as my desire to sleep at night and wake up in the morning but I’m not sure why. What was it like in New York in the 70s when artists were making work and none of it went on Instagram? It stayed physically in their studios, people had to come see it, it had to be photographed, distributed thoughtfully.

I make a lot of photos and drawings and collages instinctively and they live in my notebook or the cloud or my computer. Sometimes I only look at them once and never again and that’s fine. I do want to see my friends’ sketches and iphone photos and little collages. I honestly dream of collectively decommodifing what we put online and expecting nothing in return, just sharing and showing each other what’s going on in a way that takes the pressure off the work to “perform” and just let it be.

In that spirit, here are a few things that can just be, maybe?

When I leave my apartment, sometimes I’ll give myself a little photo challenge. Try to make photos…in my own neighborhood, on an errand, in a boring place, when I’m feeling anxious and need to clear out my head.

Here are a couple recently:

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