The first camera Matthew Shiley ’26 held was his mom’s early-generation iPhone. He remembers wandering around his childhood home, photographing anything that caught the light just right: a lamp, a computer keyboard, the corner of a window. The impulse was already there, the desire to pause, notice, frame, and hold something still.
Years later, when he was handed his dad’s Nikon for a family trip, that impulse matured into something deeper. Surrounded by wildlife, Matthew discovered the joy of waiting attentively, almost like a quiet kind of listening. “I remember being surrounded by animals, and loving the process of waiting, just staying still and watching for something interesting to happen,” he said. That early discovery of stillness continues to guide the way he photographs today.
Matthew now photographs many different subjects: cities, strangers, street corners, and the familiar pathways of Swarthmore College. Even with this wide range, his process is rooted in the same instinct: a profound awe for the world as it is. Most of his inspiration comes when travelling. Yet, he rarely arrives anywhere with a fixed plan: “I usually have an idea of the kind of photos I might take: landscape, wildlife, architecture, but nothing too specific,” he explained.
Rather than planning his shots, he lets curiosity guide him. He described two approaches that shape most of his work: “One — walking around and photographing whatever feels visually striking” and “two — sitting in one place, especially in busy cities, and waiting for something interesting to pass by. It requires patience, but it’s fun when you have the time.”
This sense of spontaneity is what excites him most. “I really enjoy photos that feel spontaneous and unposed. I love when a photograph just unfolds on its own,” he added. At the same time, street photography comes with a particular challenge. Matthew is aware of how invasive a camera can feel. “The toughest thing for me is capturing people while remaining respectful,” he explained, which is why he gravitates toward images where faces remain less identifiable.
More recently, he has stepped into a very different visual landscape through the use of infrared photography. Infrared filters out visible light and reveals wavelengths the human eye cannot normally see. What attracted him first was the initial sense of visual confusion — the way an image can look familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
“It’s funny, because the first time you look at an infrared photo, you don’t quite understand what you are looking at, and that moment of confusion is what I like the most. Some objects turn blue, especially plants and humans, and the sky is tinted yellow. I don’t fully understand why,” he said with a smile. “You are seeing the world as your eyes could never show it to you.”
Even as he experiments with more surreal mediums, Matthew avoids letting these techniques become a distraction, leaning into his intuition to generate feeling. “If a landscape makes me feel something — whether that’s anxiety, contentment, curiosity — I will try to take a photo that captures that feeling.” When asked whether he intends for viewers to draw specific meanings from his work, he remains firm: “I cannot control what people feel. All I can do is take photos that feel meaningful to me and then let others find their own meaning in them.”
This philosophy appears across all his media. For instance, film photography changes the entire way he behaves behind the camera. “Film and development are so expensive now (about a dollar a photo) so you have to be intentional. When I look back, I often like my film photos more because each one was taken deliberately,” he said. The cost slows him down and forces him to decide whether a moment truly deserves to be captured. At the same time, shooting film means accepting that sometimes a moment slips away. For Matthew, that trade-off has become part of the discipline, and part of the beauty.
Then there is his tiny Kodak keychain camera, which he keeps partly because of the challenge it poses: “The resolution is awful, but the constraints make it really fun.” These small limitations, whether the cost of film or the quirks of a toy-sized camera, have become central to how he pushes himself forward as a photographer.
When I asked which photographs he would like us to feature for this article, he paused for a moment, then smiled. “I’ll let you choose,” he said gently, as if, with full trust, he was releasing his work to the world. For Matthew, part of the joy of creation comes from seeing what others notice in his work, what details catch someone else’s breath, what meaning arrives for them that he never intended.
In that shared act of seeing, his photography continues to unfold, not only through the images he takes, but through the stories others find inside them.
