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joseph squier

1. Making Meaning from the Fragments

I was never supposed to be an artist.  

In school, I was tracked into math and the sciences — what we now call STEM. I had a natural aptitude for tests and could sit quietly in my seat, which seemed enough to determine my path. Ironically, I was dyslexic, had trouble focusing, and daydreamed uncontrollably. But I masked those impairments. Being a “good student” was one of the few reliable ways I could please my parents, and I learned to perform that role with precision.  

My home life had trained me for this kind of discipline. I was raised in the American Midwest, in a landscape of long shadows and flat fields — terrain that seemed, in its quiet, to hold a kind of invisible tension. That same tension lived in our house.

Both of my parents struggled with mental illness, and with my stepfather as part of the picture, so too did violence and distance. My mother, often overwhelmed by her own pain, swung between depressive withdrawal and manic intensity. What might have been a refuge became instead a place of instability and fear.  

In that chaos, I found something essential: a refuge in imagination. I developed an early ability to detach, observe, and invent other worlds. If the one in front of me felt uninhabitable, I could construct another — one made of images, rhythm, form, and narrative. These inner landscapes didn’t erase what was difficult, but they gave shape to it. They offered the beginnings of coherence.

  That instinct — to observe, to reframe, to build meaning from memory — has followed me ever since. But for a long time, I didn't know that what I was doing was art.

I started college as a biochemistry major: successful, but not happy. My classes were entirely disconnected from anything I felt. I kept performing, until I couldn’t, and then managed to flunk out in one spectacularly disastrous sophomore semester. My parents were shamed and devastated, but I secretly felt freed.

  I begged my way back into school as a psychology major, hoping to find something that felt more human. And then one afternoon, purely on a whim, I walked into a camera store and looked through the viewfinder of a 35mm camera. It felt like coming home. From that point forward, I had a new secret: I wanted to be an artist.

  I finished my psychology degree — barely — and found a low-level job as a graphic design technician. I was underpaid, but I carried a master key to the darkroom, and I got to orbit the periphery of a creative life. For two years I spent my days working, and my nights and weekends making pictures, slowly building a portfolio.

The only MFA program I applied to was the one I’d dreamed about at the San Francisco Art Institute, where Edward Weston and Minor White had helped define a tradition of art photography as a soulful amalgam of quest and inquiry.

  When SFAI’s spring admissions process for the coming fall got delayed, I quit my job, flew to San Francisco, took a bus downtown, and stood in a payphone on a city street to call the school. That’s how I found out I’d been accepted into their MFA program.  

That decision — an instinctual leap into the unknown — changed everything. It wasn’t just a shift in direction; it was a declaration. Art was no longer just an internal refuge. It was now my method, my philosophy, and my path forward: a lifelong attempt to give shape to the fragmented texture of experience, to create something that could hold both clarity and contradiction. 