Leadership Quote by John Sexton

Magic, here, isn’t a misty mood; it’s an argument about attention. John Sexton describes an almost aggressively unglamorous subject - a power plant, presented in the standard-issue 8 x 10 format - and calls it “quite magical.” The provocation lands because it refuses the usual hierarchy of what deserves aesthetic awe. We’re trained to find beauty in mountains, faces, ruins. Sexton, speaking as an educator in a workshop setting, is pointing to a different curriculum: wonder as a skill, not a lucky accident.

The specificity matters. “Single 8 x 10 photograph” signals restraint and deliberateness, the opposite of today’s infinite scroll. A lone print demands a slower kind of looking, and Sexton’s reaction models what he likely teaches: the photograph’s power isn’t only in its subject but in the act of framing, selecting, and honoring the ordinary. The “general manager” detail adds a quiet twist. This isn’t an artist romanticizing industry from the outside; it’s an insider offering an image of his own infrastructure, his daily environment, as something worthy of contemplation. That collapses the distance between labor and art, between the pragmatic and the poetic.

Subtext: institutions run on invisible systems, and so does culture. A power plant is literally the machine behind the light. Sexton’s “magical” response hints at photography’s sleight of hand: it can make the hidden feel intimate, and turn the utilitarian into a site of reverence without pretending it’s not steel, wire, and work.