By @JustinWetch

Sean Mundy's parents bought him a little digital Polaroid for a school trip to New York City. Probably a two-megapixel camera, not very good even for the time, but it was his. He shot the entire trip. On the bus ride home, he found a menu option he didn't recognize.

"I learned what formatting means on a camera," he says. "It basically just wiped my entire memory card."

Every photo from the trip, gone. A hard lesson, but the camera stayed. He was maybe fourteen, already bringing it everywhere, already looking at DeviantArt and Flickr and finding surreal conceptual self-portrait photography that made him want to try something beyond party snapshots. He started going into the woods near his parents' place and taking what he calls "cringey self-portraits," pushing himself to be comfortable doing weird things in front of a camera with the possibility that someone might walk by. That discomfort became a practice, and the practice became a career.

Sean was born in 1991 in Montreal and never left. Only child, both parents in bands, his dad painted for a while too. Art wasn't treated as something special or mystical in their house, it was just what you did after work. His dad would come home and practice bass or prep for a show. When Sean started making things, nobody questioned it.

He got the best of both worlds: city kid during the week, cottage country on weekends and summers. Bikes in a small town up north, lakes, bonfires, stars. He used to think his influences were purely internet-based. The older he gets, the more he recognizes Montreal's brutalist architecture and concrete dreariness showing up in his images without him having consciously put it there.

The darker media called to him early. Devil May Cry. Stephen King's Dark Tower series at fourteen. Neon Genesis Evangelion, which his parents bought on VHS thinking it was in the same lane as Pokémon and Dragon Ball. It wasn't. He grew up Irish Catholic, religious enough to have a priest in the family, and eventually left the faith entirely. But the iconography stayed as visual source material, not because he believes any of it, but because religion is "a pervasive theme throughout human history" worth mining, and on a base level, it's just cool.

Sean's process starts with what he calls "a very bad doodle," the most rudimentary sketch of a concept. A person with a black flag dripping down. A figure standing in a flooded room. He doesn't need the fine details yet, just the skeleton of the idea, and from there he builds outward through constraints: perspective, palette, composition.

Only what's necessary goes into an image. Neutrals with pops of color, because every additional color is another element of content, and content should be deliberate. Production eats about 60% of the timeline, the actual shooting is maybe 10 to 15%, and editing fills the rest. He always shoots for the edit, because he's learned the hard way what happens when you assume something will work in post without thinking it through.

He knows this makes him rigid. He's trying to loosen up, deliberately expanding his palette, attempting compositions that don't default to symmetry. "I'm too young to only do one kind of art," he says, "and I think a lot of people do themselves a disservice by thinking that they have their vision nailed down when they're less than 20 years into their career."

Sean uses himself as the subject in most of his images. It started practically: he's shy, the process feels vulnerable, and communicating a vision to someone else takes him further from the work rather than deeper into it. He's always available. He gets as many tries as he wants. But it became something more principled over time.

He deliberately strips identity markers from his subjects. If a friend he's photographing has tattoos, he removes them in post. Faces are hidden or turned away. Clothing carries no context clues. He doesn't want viewers wondering about a character's background or story. The figures are placeholders, blank slates for projection.

"Their individual identity is not important," he says. "What they are doing in the image and whatever context they're adding is way more important than how they look."

The concepts he probes are similarly open: isolation, collective consciousness, blending in, groupthink. He picks a word, a theme, and pulls it apart in as many directions as possible, the way a songwriter might take a single feeling and build a dozen different soundscapes from it. He's not telling stories so much as setting scenes. A flooded room with a figure who seems to have given up. "A very dramatic rendition of an everyday feeling," he calls it. Dystopian imagery deployed not for spectacle but to make internal states visible.

Then he wanted more. He noticed that his images existed together visually but not narratively, series held together by shared motifs and compositions rather than actual story. Lumans was his attempt to change that.

The premise: a post-apocalyptic world where the sun has started to dim. Crops fail. Over thousands of years, humans evolve to digest a mysterious light that emanates from the ground. The images depict characters foraging for light, lining up to receive it, existing in the strange quiet of a civilization that adapted to its own collapse.

What mattered was that the concept preceded the visuals. An image could look completely different from others in the series, as long as the idea aligned. He has a second part in mind but keeps putting it off, caught between the pull of revisiting something he cares about and the feeling that the time could be spent on something new.

Both of Sean's parents are musicians. He plays guitar, bass, a little piano, sings, and says drums are his strongest instrument. He composes in Cubase 6, a twelve-year-old version of the software, because it's stable and he likes it. He has an instrumental rock project on the side.

Music is where the fluidity lives. With his camera, he doesn't shoot without a concept sketch. With a guitar, he can accidentally make something nice. The experimentation that he has to force in his visual work happens naturally in music, and he's been trying to let that looseness migrate across.

"If someone, gun to my head, was like, 'You can only do one thing,' I would probably pick music," he says. "I've never gone to a gallery and had a piece of art make me cry. But if you put the right song on, immediately it fires certain synapses in my brain and I'm back to being a child."

He has too many visual ideas to stop, though. So both practices continue, two sides of the same coin with different temperaments, the visual work methodical and controlled, the music fluid and instinctive, each one slowly teaching the other what it's missing.

When people see Sean's work and then meet him, they're often surprised. The images are dark, austere, brooding. He's a chill, chipper person who cracks jokes and tries to make people smile.

"I am not my art," he says. "I'm the thing that makes the art."

Supporters: @gmCoffeeNFT, an artist and collector whose repeated support Sean finds humbling. And @tanamarieco, who organized a group show in New York City last year that included his work.

Artists inspiring him lately: @haydclay, for conceptually tight series that keep expanding without becoming stagnant. Brooke DiDonato, a photographer he came up with on Flickr whose work makes him feel like shit and inspired in equal measure. And James Blake, for being immediately recognizable while always doing something new.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @seanmundyphoto recommends @louisdazy, @VioletBondArt, and @MuhjuArt.