Long Island City, Queens [Aug. 14, 2022]

Yesterday I walked from Williamsburg, Brooklyn (grabbed pizza at the delicious L’industrie) to Astoria, Queens. It was later in the day, and it was magical to watch the light morph all around me, creating deep shadows and highlighting the vivid colors of building facades during golden hour. The entire concrete world was defenseless against the divine power of the ephemeral light, and there was something soul stirring about this: as if the universe was visually saying ‘no matter how built up your temporal egoic constructions become, they are powerless in comparison to the eternal nature of the soul’. Here are just a few images from the walk.

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Between The Moon and Star

Print available for purchase here

We shared a joint in the alley next to mine
It was late and there was a quiet breeze
I named him a star and he called me the moon

To Collaborate With the Unknown

It’s important to know how to manually control every aspect of a DSLR camera if someone is going to call themselves a photographer. In full manual control, you are in charge of every aspect of the image, start to finish - shutter speed, focus, color balance, ISO, aperture, everything. To be able to manage all of these factors simultaneously is vital to being a photographer and requires time and dedication. However, anyone can eventually learn all of these tools with time as these are all learned techniques. But that was never really my end goal in pursuing photography even as a teenager. I knew that if I wanted to make something that was truly my own, I would have to become an expert of these rules so I could intelligently bend or even discard them later on to fit the desires of my own inner, creative voice.

I have found and discovered my own creative voice through several different forms of photography including the use of lenticular technology (particularly in my series Luminous Visions) and combining text with my images (such as in The Return to Earth (NYC) and The Poetics of Being). Lately I’ve been wanting to go back to the basics - instant film.

I find instant film to be a mind opening creative process, it is a kind of mental process of surrender - surrendering to the unknown, collaborating with the unknown, because anything can happen with instant film. For this reason I recently decided to buy the discontinued Fujifilm SQ 6 that allows me to take square format double exposures. The double exposure function is what really sparked my curiosity. We all know instant film as this inherently nostalgic, retro format of image making. Instant film is not a medium people think of when considering ‘fine art’ and that is part of why I like it so much, anyone can shoot on instant film without any photographic training at all. With this kind of film, it becomes less about the technique and more about the act of seeing itself. In this way, the film almost becomes a remnant of that moment of seeing while also becoming a new experience in itself. I have had so much fun playing with instant film and I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

Images made around Queens (mainly Astoria and Woodside) and Manhattan.

Inner Silence Amidst Outer Chaos

~ THIS POST MARKS THE ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY FOR BEGINNING THIS ONLINE JOURNAL ON JUNE 7, 2021 ~

Up until very recently, I have been accustomed to life in small towns: Nature greets you at your back door, silence is a reliable friend, and the only chaos to be found is the neighbor’s dog escaping their fence. Nature was always the main event, whether it was a hike through the woods, going out on the boat or hitting the beach. Mims is the small town of Florida I will always call home, and I love knowing that few people have ever even heard of it.

From the series Transitional Chaos (2022)

In a small town, it is second nature to discover inner stillness as there is not much to do on the external level. This lack of external stimuli inherent of rural environments holds a mystical capacity for unlocking the inner stillness within oneself. Having grown up with this kind of innate solitude as my baseline of being, it has naturally become a cornerstone to my sense of personal identity.

Now, having been in New York City for almost a year now, I have undergone innumerable internal crises related to my relationship with internal silence. I have lost and found that familiar inner stillness countless times in the city, however, when I have found it, those moments are far between and extremely brief. Where once the inner stillness was my center of gravity, it has now become a fleeting acquaintance. Living in the largest city in America has made me realize that I took the familiar ease of inner silence for granted. I assumed that my inner peace could pack up and travel with me anywhere I go. While this sentiment is in fact true, it holds a caveat: the louder the environment gets, the more conscious awareness I must give to the inner stillness in order for it to stay. If I want to keep inner peace as my baseline of being in this city, I will have to give more attention to it. Without attentive awareness, inner stillness becomes wilted like an unwatered plant.

From the series Transitional Chaos (2022)

My natural reaction has been to blame the city as the reason for my feeling more stressed, ungrounded and less centered. While the city environment has unquestionably played a vital role in this internal struggle, it is not the city at fault. Ultimately, it is my own actions and lack of conscious awareness that has brought me to where I am today. If anything, I must thank the city for exposing my faults and weaknesses. To get back to my center of internal peace, I must devote more effort and care to mindful engagement with the present moment. I will take the city as a test, a test to expand and deepen my mindfulness, because I know that if I can find my inner peace here, I will surely be able to nurture it anywhere.

From the series Transitional Chaos (2022)