My name is Mark Hearns. I am currently residing in Ontario, Canada. My academic background consists of a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Philosophy from McMaster University, but I plan to obtain a Master’s degree, most likely in some area within political theory, in the near future. My main interests of study include human rights, power and inequality in political systems and ethics.

I’ll get the three cliché‎s out of the way: music, movies and books. I actually think that you can tell a lot about a person by what they consume so maybe it’ll be a good way to describe myself to people. My musical tastes tend to gravitate toward stuff like Pink Floyd, Radiohead and Arcade Fire, but I try to be fairly open-minded. I do have a Rdio account if anybody is really interested in what I’m listening to.

I love the works of Stanley Kubrick, Christopher Nolan and Akira Kurosawa; but Wes Anderson and David Lynch deserve mentioning as well. If I have a favourite film then it’s Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with Lynch’s Mulholland Drive coming in as a close second. I’d also like to comment on television since good television today is capable of contending with the silver screen. Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica and Game of Thrones are truly stellar, surpassing much of what passes for cinema today. I suppose it’s for the best since I don’t think anybody actually wants to visit a theatre anyway.

My reading tastes tend to be old fashioned. I love Russian and French literature. I’d rather sit down with a Dostoevsky novel or some Camus if I’m going to crack open some fiction. Non fiction tends to be Enlightenment era philosophers such as Kant or Rousseau or something political theoryish. I consider Nietzsche and Marx to be two of the best writers that history has known and they’re simultaneously two of history’s most misunderstood writers; funny how it works out like that. I’m still debating whether I should write book reviews on this website.

I consider photography to be my most creative hobby. I picked a camera up for the first time in 2007, but had spent almost six months studying the basics of photography before I started to shoot. I sometimes think that it’d be exciting to be a war photographer — at least until I am shot or forced to watch somebody else get shot — and I would love some sort of job where I can combine my academic interests with my photography to “make a difference”.

The purpose of this website is to be a place for me to publish my photography and writing. I’ll try to update at least once a month, but I won’t keep myself to any concrete schedule lest I burn out and ignore the website completely. I imagine I’ll jump between bursts of photography content and then, when I need a break from it, writing content.