Herb Sundays 186: Noah Kalina

The beloved artist and photographer shares a playlist for the end of the world.

Sam Valenti IV and Noah Kalina

May 17, 2026

Herb Sundays 186: Noah Kalina

Playlist: Apple Music / Spotify

Art by Michael Cina. Photos by Noah Kalina.

“These songs cover a lot of ground genre-wise but I think of them as emotionally compatible. This is a collection of songs I edited down from a much larger playlist I’ve been adding to since 2016, the year I consider the beginning of the end. The tracks range from 2009 to 2024. I’d like to think it tells a story played through, but can also just be shuffled up. It’s sometimes bleak but not without a little bit of hope.”

- Playlist for the End of the World by Noah Kalina for Herb Sundays

Noah Kalina (noahkalina.com) is an artist and photographer based in Lumberland, New York. We have met over the years, but largely through email and in contemporary refractions of a friendship. When Matthew Dear lived upstate, he was right around the corner from Noah. I wish I had spent more time there and with him.

A teacher in the 90s told me all stories were man vs man, man vs nature, or man vs himself. Noah isn’t a “vs” person but his work hits all three. Self-portrait by Noah.

Apparently, the oldest surviving photo is from 1827, so 200 years later, why is the humble photograph still the reigning champ? Who’d have thought? The history of photography is as much about the story of technology as it is about the history of people. Once seen as the ideal document of an objective truth, every photographic image, old or new, now raises a minefield of questions.

Learning how to describe what makes a photographer good is always tricky. While other artists, people like Amalia Ulman or Jon Rafman, have played with the would-be fraudulence of images, the former with performance, especially in the age of social media, and the latter with the incredulity of art in the age of AI, Kalina’s work is less pointed in its critique. I’ve covered shooters on here before including roe ethridge (Herb 170) and Ari Marcopoulos (Herb 90) and each photographer I love for different reasons.

Noah’s work is about pictures, of course, and it’s also about time. Kalina’s era is inherently enmeshed in the story of the internet and how our immersion in it has shaped image-making. It takes an artist to make sense of all this, and Kalina wrestles with it lightly, more bemused with the permanence/impermanence of his own pictures than trying to prove a point. His journey from Flickr to YouTube to Instagram, as well as his career, veering between personal and for-hire work, is part of the story.

For me, Kalina’s work hits a very specific place. His portraiture and editorial work are vast (see his tearsheet archive), but his portraits don’t aim to reveal a raw psychic truth of their subjects’ essential nature. What Noah’s work does for me is transport me. I feel immediately moved to that place, that feeling in the air. Maybe akin to the heightened moment of a Jeff Wall image, or a Todd Hido image at night, but something less obtuse or manufactured.

There are Kalina trademarks: The wide-angle shots of a person in nature, the lonely but peaceful studio scenes, the bundles of blankets on beds, affecting a living sculpture, an avatar for a moment already gone. I think Noah’s work with places and objects is among his best, a skill acquired over years of shooting restaurants in NYC. He has an uncanny knack for capturing the emotional volume of space. Earlier this year, Kalina’s photos of a retro Pizza Hut hit the cover of the New York Times Arts section, images that aged restaurant historian Rolando Pujol was moved to call “stunning.” His image at dusk takes me to after-school restaurant runs or summer vacations after mini-golf in the gloaming of Northern Michigan. He breaks down his thought process painstakingly but unfussily on his Patreon.

The Noah Kalina Newsletter

Newsletter #195 - The Good Old Days

Last week, I photographed a Pizza Hut in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania for the New York Times…

3 months ago · 64 likes · 14 comments · Noah Kalina

Kalina’s recent evolutions include his profound Hotline YouTube show (part call-in advice column, part Joe Pera-esque meditation), and beautiful vibe-coded archives of his work. Unmarked and in no inherent order, you encounter each image without prejudice, your brain filling in the blanks (Is that Zuck? What was that nude for? Hey, that’s my friend Alex), and more. Ambient video has also entered the picture, and I’m writing this to the nature sounds soundtrack of one of them, a little bit of the woods in the city. Another recurring character in Kalinaland is a black walnut tree, almost a family crest for him, one that will hopefully outlast us all.

Noah’s gesamtkunstwerk is a covenant with pictures, video, and the internet, a series entitled Everyday. One self-portrait every day since he was 19 (January 10, 2000) and its subsequent video slideshows can be counted amongst the most staggering artworks of the age, but it didn’t feel that way at first. In its durational nature, against the backdrop of tech’s dominance in our lives, the piece reveals different truths every few years. It’s indebted to artists like On Kawara, of course, and forms a process that's now both banal and sacred for Kalina. When they stop, or when Kalina stops, upon his death or inability to take a portrait and/or upload it, we will mourn. An avatar of our own lives, too, or the most examined/recorded life we know, extinguished.

Noah has said:

The most interesting thing about this project is when I first published the still photographs on a website (around 2002) people HATED it. Nobody understood it. I’d say 90% of the feedback was negative. I’d get emails telling me that I was a narcissistic asshole.
Once it turned into a time-lapse, the reaction completely flipped. I suppose it was easier to see what was going on. People definitely respond to the dedication. I also think it forces people to confront their own mortality. We all know how this ultimately ends. (link)

Just the ability to take and upload a photo every day in 2000 was novel enough from a technical standpoint, with the cost of the photo reduced to near nothing (storage space was the kicker then, and seemingly now again), the work takes on a different hue in every epoch. Maybe five years ago, I would have said that the work was about daily habits or about being present, maybe a trendy Stoic idea of not letting a day pass without reflection. Or maybe it was a meditation on the volume of images we now stare down, almost as a burden: the photo used to be this fleeting memory we somehow captured and retained, and now it is omnipresent. How can we know ourselves if we’re constantly confronted with ourselves? As middle-aged people (Noah’s riff on Faith No More’s hit of the same name is excellent), it’s obviously also about the rapacious speed of time and the pain of aging. As he told Michael Williams:

It is a part of my daily routine. I just do it. I don’t really think about it. It takes me about 20 seconds a day. But it’s still very much a project. Once a month I load all of the photos on my computer, upload them to everyday.photo and confront what I look like, how I’ve changed and how I am getting older. It’s truly horrible.

Today, I’d say this work is about the nature of digital relationships with people we both know and don’t, how they blur together, and how the parasocial aspects of seeing faces have replaced all others in terms of volume and speed. Just seeing a face this many times, becoming a video, is profound. If recognition is now the marker of success for celebrities, being seen and known, this work establishes an immediate, inescapable relationship to the subject. No human, not even a spouse, can attest to this level of lifetime access. The implications are profound. Noah keeps on shooting.