Distance

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Where your focus goes, energy grows.

I Sit Quietly In The Chair

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I sit quietly in the chair
While my nail technician
Paints this beautifully soft,
Pastel purple color on my
Nails, and I can’t help but
Think: I love these bright,
Simple-minded colors, because
They contrast the complexity
Of soul entangled beneath
This flesh of mine.

 

Absence / Presence

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I was once engulfed in the depths of absence. The piercing light returned my soul to presence. Yet every so often I catch a glimpse of the underground. The shadows remain to give form to the otherwise obscure nature of eternity. One cannot be known without the contrast of the other.

Winter in Astoria, Queens

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Orange to Black

Orange to black

Skipping on the sidewalk

Of the cosmos -

Where is the light?

She has gone from me

I saw her on the kitchen counter

I found her peering

Through the window

But now it is grey and flat.

I search the skies,

Windows and kitchens,

She has grown sick of

This artificial jungle.

I cannot blame her,

So have I.

Referent / Remnant

“Referent,” a term coined by Roland Barthes. It devalues the photo, exists concretely only on the plane of theory. His example of the reaction of people not wanting to cut up pictures of someone they love leaves an unfulfilled sensation within me, it lacks humanity, it denies what is so essential and special to human nature. I wouldn’t cut up a photo of my mom because it’s her image, it’s a remnant of who she is and I assign the remnant’s value based on my own set of beliefs, experiences, etc.. Referent or not, this theory does not alter my values, feelings and affectve experiences from photographs. The theory of the referent is mere intellectual play, a clever trick of the mind.

For me, I feel ‘remnant’ is a more fitting word. By acknowledging the photo as a remnant, we know the original experience is the core experience, but the remnant allows the experience to live on despite its fleeting nature. The remnant is not devalued, but treasured for its magical power to transport us into another experience of the present moment. It’s a reminder of what was, what state of mind we were in, what we felt in that moment. The remnant brings what was into what is happening now. Without photos many memories would be forgotten. Photographs have the capacity to promote inner reflection, if only we tap into feeling more and thinking less.

Warmth

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Warmth is a state of inner being: when what remains dark is no longer hidden, where the walls of fear crumble and armor of defense drops, to reveal an angle of my soul that is among the most representative facets of who I am at my truest.

Photographs taken in Queens, New York, recently added to the series Traces of Silence.

Think Less, Feel More

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The more time that passes from my studies at grad school, the more I am drawn to the simple. Not the theoretically complex simple, not the complex masking itself in veiled simplicity, just, simple. It was necessary to learn theory and history, to be so inside the ‘mind’ of it all, but I have become increasingly disinterested in making art that ‘challenges’ the medium or even makes the viewer think in any way. There are enough things in this world that make us think and keep us locked inside our well-furnished minds - what I find is an increasingly dwindling space of experiences that makes us FEEL. I hope for my photographs to make you feel something, maybe peace, something unexpected, maybe it enlivens a long forgotten cob-webbed memory, maybe something similar to what it conjures within myself, maybe nothing at all, maybe the sharp pain of apathy.

Anything to help you feel the fullness of what it means to be you, alive and breathing through those lungs - with your own thoughts and memories and ways of looking at the world; With your own unseen universe that I can only imagine how cavernous and wonderful it is. As Robert Frank so succinctly put, “when people look at my photographs, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

I am in the process of re-learning how to think less, and feel more.

Someone In My Dream Asked Me What Your Name Was, 2023, from the ongoing series Traces of Silence

A Quiet Fall

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I make photographs that I hope carry a feeling, a feeling you may resonate or empathize with, whether it mirrors my own feelings or not. I see my photos as passing glimmers that offer a kind of fissure into my innerworkings. Of all seasons, my soul feels akin to fall most of all - it is quiet yet alive in all its vibrancy, it is dying and yet ever becoming, alive in a ceaseless state of transformation.

 

The Invisible Scrapbook

Aging is strange for nothing else than to realize the scrap book is not crafted by pictures we make, but rather collaged by the very act of experience; in all its beauty and pain, in its dark caverns of apathy and towering cliffs of wonder. We become how we perceive. Scrap books are not photo albums, but the impressions, memories and feelings invisibly marked beneath our own flesh. (From Instagram)

 

Personally Impersonal

No one can understand what I have experienced unless they have experienced it in their own way. To meet the abyss of emptiness in its fullness, to be completely obliterated by death. This is why I change so often, because who I really am is that emptiness. I don’t feel tied to parts of my personality. Those traits are malleable, whose roots stretch back to nothingness itself. I am not my personality, I merely have a personality. Why? Because you can’t play the game without one. You cannot exist in culture and experience the game without being someone. But when I’m home, when I’m alone, when I’m with people that I trust, I don’t have to be anyone. I become just being. - written 5/21/2021