About.

I photograph the shows, games and places I end up in, and keep a journal of them here. It’s documentation of my own life, taken about as seriously as I’d take anyone else’s.

Franklin, TN → Chicago · hello@heartslibrary.com

Cody on the green steps of Monet’s house at Giverny, roses on the trellis above — Giverny, France

What I shoot

Small rooms with loud bands, mostly. Ballparks. Gardens and zoos and whatever is out the window of wherever I’ve just moved to.

Most of it comes off a Sony RX100 VII, because it fits in a jacket pocket. Some off a G Master lens. A lot off a phone, at the wrong hour. A frame either held something or it didn’t, and the gear has never once been the reason.

Cody Heart in a Cubs cap, close, on a bright afternoon — Nashville, Tennessee

Cody at a wooden railing at golden hour, a castle on the rock behind him — Universal Orlando, Florida

The point is to shoot it, and then to write down what happened.

The whole of the method

Cody and his partner at the top of the Eiffel Tower, Paris going pink behind them at sunset — Paris, France

How I got here

I drew sports stars as a kid and studied illustration at California College of the Arts. Then years of labeling data sets at Postmates and Twitter, and designing internal tools for healthcare. All of it was practice at attention. The camera is where that finally went — it asks less of me than drawing did, and it goes where I go.

Cody and his partner in red aprons at a pasta class, holding up a sheet of fresh dough — Making pasta

Cody and his partner beside a Halloween parade sign at Walt Disney World — Walt Disney World, Florida

The geography

Every move has changed what I end up pointing a camera at.

A short atlas

BornLos Angeles, California

SchoolOakland → Berkeley → San Francisco

Late 2021Manhattan, New York

2023Nashville, then Franklin, Tennessee

Next yearChicago, Illinois

Cody and his partner on a bridge over the Chicago River in winter, the Wrigley Building behind them — Chicago, Illinois — scouting

Why this site

Working in technology means wondering whether the systems we build have empathy. Mostly they don’t, and that matters more now that AI is being deployed where substantial civilian death is expected. You can write a constitution for a model. You cannot write empathy into one — empathy takes time, and time is the thing being optimized away.

I’m not claiming a photograph fixes that. But it takes time to look at something properly. So this site keeps track: a page per outing, the writing sitting next to the frames. It’s what gets me to carry the camera.

— Cody Heart

Write back.

If a photograph changed how you see something, I want to hear about it — hello@heartslibrary.com. Every frame here is free to download for personal use; for anything commercial, ask first.