When Sam Judge transferred to Parsons to complete a BFA in the Design History and Practice program, he was looking for a place where he could bring together his interests in film and visual culture. After beginning his degree in film and media studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, he transferred to Parsons, drawn by the possibility of exploring visual storytelling as it is used in fine art, publishing, media, and technology. The interdisciplinary approach of the Design History and Practice program, combining theory with hands-on making, was the bridge he’d been seeking.

“I’ve kept a photographic practice since high school, but I was also drawn to subjects outside of photography,” Judge explains. “When I realized I didn’t want to pursue film, two impulses—making images and thinking critically about them—became my focus. Parsons gave me the space to do both, and the interdisciplinary environment let me shape the kind of practice I really wanted.”

In the class Monoprint and Book Arts, Judge experimented with narrative and sequencing through additive and subtractive printing processes, lithography, and watercolor monoprinting. These methods taught him to think about the ways in which imagery acquires meaning over time. Judge also found inspiration in the classroom of Arnold Klein. “I took several of his courses,” he recalls. “They were presented as ‘grammar classes,’ but they opened into philosophical questions through grammatical analysis. We weren’t just reading philosophers’ we were reading economists and writers like Thorstein Veblen and Herman Melville. That interdisciplinary approach really resonated with me.” One text in particular stayed with him: Art as Experience by John Dewey. “It completely reshaped how I think about photography, both as a viewer and a maker,” he says. “It still offers a guiding principle for me.”

Judge also names instructor Tom McGlynn as one of his most influential mentors during his time at Parsons and beyond. He describes McGlynn’s approach as having its own “grammar,” a conceptual framework that he learned to interpret and then challenge. “He was incredibly supportive and gave me valuable feedback on my thesis,” Judge says. “He continues to be an influential advisor on my work even after graduation.”

Judge’s senior thesis, Vital Images, examines the relationship between “artful” photography and everyday, vernacular image making, focusing on the ways people use photographs to construct and communicate a sense of self. “I was interested in how a casual photo taken at a scenic overlook or a selfie posted on Instagram becomes an expression of interiority shaped by social conventions: what someone finds flattering, how they compose the frame, what they choose to share,” he says. “These images function as traces of how people see themselves within a particular context. Once you remove the market’s role in defining what counts as ‘art,’ the boundary between everyday images and fine art photography becomes far less rigid. This was an analysis of the reciprocal relationship between fine art and vernacular image aesthetics, with the end goal of blurring the division of the two, as they pull from one another.”

Judge’s interest in balancing critical theory with practice became the foundation of a multidisciplinary career in creative publishing. Today he works as a freelance photographer, retoucher, and editor of Parcel magazine (formerly Pony Express), an independent art and culture publication. He oversees the magazine’s visual identity and layout, designs print and promotional materials, manages production, and helps shape its curatorial voice.

Judge’s connection to Parcel runs parallel to his earlier work at Gagosian, where he interned in the gallery’s Image Archives and Production department. There he assisted on photoshoots and in post-production workflows, retouching images, generating to-scale mock-ups, and managing digital assets. “This constellation of skills enables me to play a variety of roles in creative publishing,” he says. He now collaborates with Gagosian on special editions of the Gagosian & zine series through Parcel. 

Judge’s professional path also intersects with the ideas he explored in his Parsons thesis, as his work on Vital Images left him skeptical about the way galleries function. “I struggled with the idea of curators acting as arbiters of what counts as ‘art’ or ‘not art,’ often shaped by the market and a hierarchical canon,” he says. “It felt like a kind of dogma that ignored the generative, embodied experience of looking—which, to me, is the whole point of art.”

Judge notes that the work he does documenting photographs is intentionally impersonal and largely standardized, even if his decisions shape the final images. Because the images of the photographs function more as records than as artworks, there is little room for creative input or personal expression. Judge thus does not view this work as part of his personal artistic practice. Still, he sees overlap in this work with the concerns of his thesis. Both his own creative work and the images he produces for galleries engage, though in different ways, with the idea of the archive. At large institutions, documentation images often become part of the artwork’s historical record, capturing it at a particular moment. “My thesis placed a lot of value on archives as expressions in themselves,” he explains, “so even though the work is impersonal, it still connects to questions I care about.”

Reflecting on his time at Parsons, Judge points to the BFA Design History and Practice program’s breadth as essential to his evolution as both an artist and thinker. “The interdisciplinary structure of the program provided me with a critical foundation which informs how I approach photography, editing, and my growing interest in documentary imaging to this day. It also helped me sustain a deep interest in learning.”

Judge’s work—from printmaking to creating image archives, from gallery documentation to editorial design—reflects the belief that visual culture is not bound to a single medium but is built through ongoing dialogue between materials, technologies, and ideas.