John Sykes
I began art and photography desperately hoping to become Ansel Adams. I grew up in the woods and tried to capture that beauty with my camera. I tended toward what could be called “intimate” landscapes. I was surround by lovely scenery, just not sweeping dramatic scenes. So my early images were usually more compact, graphic and stark. I became a newspaper photographer as a way to earn a living and the landscapes became fewer and fewer. I learned as a photojournalist how to quickly distill what I saw into a striking image… sometimes.
I was something of a landscape purist, shooting everything full frame. The journalist ethos meant not manipulating my work. But digital photography changed the game. I embraced the malleability of digital in my personal work, creating complex collages. These seemed to reflect my inner conflicts; many of the images are a bit disturbing.
Now I do everything. Straight landscapes, lively portraits, serene digital and odd, absurd digital. It’s my way.
Artist Bio
John Sykes is a Little Rock-based photographer and visual artist, with over 40 years of professional experience. He spent 35 years at the ArkansasDemocrat-Gazette, most of those years as chief photographer. Originally from Heber Springs, he first became interested in photography through the work of Golden Age photographers such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Paul Strand. During his newspaper career he covered a variety of events, including Bill Clinton’s first inaugural, a Razorback basketball Final Four, several bowl games and innumerable press conferences. Sadly, he also covered the tragic mass starvation in Somalia. Now he’s working as a freelance photographer, hoping to specialize in portraiture. He and his wife Caroline live in downtown Little Rock. He has two children, two step children and two granddaughters.
DOG WITH GUITAR — DOES ABSURDITY TELL THE STORY?
By Phillip Martin
Philip Martin has been a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette since 1993. In that time, he has won more than 100 regional and statewide journalism prizes, including
five Green Eyeshade awards, published six books and released eight albums of original music. He appears weekly on “The Zone” with Justin Acri and D.J. Williams on 103.7 FM in Little Rock.
I’ve known John Sykes for more than 30 years. I own some of his work. Which is partly why I keep circling back to “This Machine Kills Katzen,” one of his “Psykographs,’’ on view at Boswell Mourot Fine Art in the exhibition “Ooh La La/ Photography of John Sykes.”
The image makes you laugh at first: a dog-headed man in a red plaid shirt holding a glossy black guitar, its body inscribed with the phrase that riffs on Woody Guthrie’s famous declaration. Guthrie’s guitar promised to kill fascists; Sykes’ threatens cats, the eternal rivals of dogs. It’s silly, absurd, the kind of thing you’d expect to see doodled in the margin of a high school notebook.
Article from Arkansas Democrat Gazette
Sept. 25, 2025
But the longer you look, the less it feels like a joke. The slogans behind the figure — “There’s no way like the American way,” “You are leaving the American dream,” “Why can’t you give my dad a job?” — pull the laughter tight in your throat. The dog’s green eyes, glowing and serious, insist that you take the image seriously, even as you chuckle. It’s parody and elegy in the same frame. That doubleness has always been Sykes’ subject.
In spring 1990, when Sykes was shooting for this newspaper, when we still ran film and had a darkroom on site, Arkansas made its run to the Final Four in Denver, Nolan Richardson’s 40 minutes of hell turning the whole state into believers. Sykes was there with his camera, catching the Razorbacks’ improbable rise under the television lights.
A week later, he was in Sherwood at a house fire, watching the roof sag while neighbors in bathrobes clutched their kids. The contrast seems almost too neat, but that’s his career: Spectacle and tragedy in the same week, sometimes the same day, his photographs asked to carry both.
Sykes, born in central Florida, moved to Heber Springs when he was 3. His father was a truck driver, his mother a homemaker. It wasn’t an artistic household in the ordinary sense — no brushes in jars, no canvases leaning against walls — but there were books. His parents read constantly. Will Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy” sat on a shelf, and when John was young he opened it, read it without fully grasping it, but understood enough to know that the world was bigger than the town library and the hills beyond the river.Will Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy” sat on a shelf, and when John was young he opened it, read it without fully grasping it, but understood enough to know that the world was bigger than the town library and the hills beyond the river.
That curiosity became the spine of his life. He taught himself photography with Time-Life books, the beautifully printed manuals that were both instruction and aspiration. He commandeered the family kitchen after dark, turning it into a makeshift darkroom. He learned how to mix chemicals, to wait for the image to emerge from a blank sheet in the tray. He learned patience, and that craft was a barrier as much as a key — getting a good print was difficult, expensive, messy, which is what made it valuable. He grew up looking at Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, Edward Weston, all the apostles of “straight photography” — the discipline of showing the world exactly as it appeared, sharp and unaltered, clarity as truth.
By 15 he was shooting sports for the Cleburne County Times, one of two weeklies in town. Later he moved to the Arkansas Sun, run by younger people, less formal, more experimental. He took photos, he wrote stories. He learned how to listen to an editor, how to deliver on deadline. He went to college but couldn’t stay there; the pull of photographs was stronger. He married, moved to Little Rock, worked again for the Sun under new ownership, went back to school, dropped out again when his wife became pregnant and he needed steady work. He applied at the Arkansas Democrat, missed out on a first opening, then landed a spot. He went on to become a mainstay of the Democrat-Gazette.
He covered Clinton’s first inaugural, flew into Somalia with the Air Force during the famine, saw things he can’t forget. He went to football stadiums roaring with noise. He stood in burned-out kitchens, shot wreckage of car accidents, press conferences in fluorescent-lit rooms. He recorded weddings that weren’t his own, funerals that weren’t his family’s. He saw Arkansas at its most mundane and at its most spectacular, and his camera was steady in both. Photography interested him enough to swallow his whole life. Journalism gave him the ethic: Don’t move the Coke can. Show what happened.
He spent decades adhering to an ethic that insisted on honesty, on transparency, on never manipulating an image. That ethic is noble, but also limiting. When digital photography arrived, Sykes found himself free for the first time to break those rules without guilt. He began making what he calls Psykographs, a term he coined. It’s half pun, half manifesto, and it signals a rupture.
Psykographs are digital collages, photographs broken and reassembled, sometimes mistaken for drawings or paintings. They allow him to add, subtract, shift, re-arrange until the image feels truer than truth. They are, in some sense, what happens when a man who has been studying straight photography for 40 years suddenly gets a hall pass.
“This Machine Kills Katzen” is one of those.
The dog’s face saves the image from being a cartoon. William Wegman’s Weimaraners are famous, art-world jokes that became their own genre, dogs as models in human drag. Sykes’ dogs are different. They’re his companions — mutts, soulful, earnest, that sit at your feet and stare at you until you share your sandwich. In “Katzen,” the dog’s eyes are green, uncanny, but also deeply serious. The guitar is held carefully, as if it’s fragile. That sincerity undermines the parody. It insists on weight.
Sykes has always been drawn to the absurd, but the absurd was already flickering in his straight photographs. Consider an image from Vino’s in the early 1990s, a double exposure that turns a pizza joint and music venue into a fever dream, the young faces doubled and blurred, one world spilling into another. Or the girl with her face pressed against a storefront window, light and reflection bending until she seems half inside, half outside, held in suspension. These are journalistic photographs, filed and printed, but also premonitions of the work to come. They hint at how Sykes was already testing the edges of documentary truth, already attuned to the ways photography bends reality just by existing.
The Psykographs amplify this impulse. “Katzen” sits lighter, funnier, but carries the same ache.
Think about Guthrie. His guitar slogan was deadly serious, a weapon against fascism. Over the years it has been adopted, parodied, commodified. Pete Seeger painted it on his banjo. Billy Bragg carries it forward. Springsteen has gestured at it, though with less fervor, more nostalgia. The idea that art can kill an idea is both powerful and absurd, and Guthrie knew that.
Sykes knows it too. By swapping “fascists” for “cats,” he’s showing us the slipperiness of slogans, the way they can be bent until they lose their power. He’s making fun, but also mourning the way protest can be neutered into decor.Sykes knows it too. By swapping “fascists” for “cats,” he’s showing us the slipperiness of slogans, the way they can be bent
until they lose their power. He’s making fun, but also mourning the way protest can be neutered into decor.
It’s important that he comes out of journalism. Because you can’t read “Katzen” as just a joke once you know he spent decades showing fires and funerals without distortion. He earned the right to bend the truth, because he spent years never bending it. His collages are honest about being dishonest. They show you the seams. They admit their absurdity. That honesty makes them trustworthy in a way the slogans aren’t.
Sykes is modest about his abilities as a street photographer, but he’s always watching. He caught a woman in Hell’s Kitchen giving a peace sign while her dog relieved itself, a moment of absurdity and grace. That sensibility is what drives the Psykographs. He isn’t trying to be clever for its own sake. He’s trying to show what he sees, even if it requires tearing and pasting until the image feels right.
When you look at “This Machine Kills Katzen,” you see a man who has carried cameras into stadiums and famines, into living rooms and rubble, and who now allows himself to lie in order to tell a deeper truth. You see Arkansas, America, slogans, jokes, dogs, guitars, all colliding. You see the absurd and the serious locked together, each making the other sharper.
That’s why the piece belongs in conversation not just with Wegman or Guthrie but with the larger American tradition of satire and lament. It’s kin to MAD Magazine, to Robert Frank, to David Lynch, to the absurdism that sneaks in because reality itself is absurd. It’s part of a lineage of artists who refuse to let the slogans stand uncontested.
I keep coming back to the green eyes of the dog. They look at you with a mix of accusation and trust, like a companion who knows more than you think. It insists you take it seriously even as you laugh, that you admit the absurdity of protest and the
seriousness of despair. That’s the long look: a piece that starts as a joke and ends as an elegy. A dog with a guitar, a riff on Guthrie, a collage of slogans. An Arkansas photographer who spent decades showing us the world as it is, now showing us the
world as it feels.
John Sykes’ work is on display at Boswell Mourot Fine Art in Little Rock in the exhibition “Ooh La La/Photography of John Sykes,” through Oct. 11.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com
Inquiries
For pricing and availability, contact Boswell Mourot Fine Art at boswellmourotfineart@gmail.com or by phone 501.454.6969.