Photography
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.
Confusion: The Birthplace of Understanding
Photo made 2023; Poem written 2016
“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go
out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.” - Bruce Lee
A weekend at New York Martial Arts Academy, Brooklyn, during the Sifu Chris Kent Seminar
Photography was that first tool of self expression that overtook me with its undefinable power to transform and cleanse the lens of my internal perception. It is a tool that can both refine or reinforce, depending on how it is used. If used in what I believe to be its higher purpose, photography can help you feel more fully grounded in the life you’re living, or even free yourself from your present reality, if that is what saves your soul in the short term. For me, photography helps me to see more clearly - not externally, but internally. The act of photographing, allowing me to re-see what I thought I knew, helps me to feel more involved and at one with the life around and within me. It is very easy to detach so intensely that the very experience of human-ness feels foreign, and while I find that helpful when clearing my mind and connecting to that higher spirit, it is not a state I wish to constantly exist through. In day to day life, I want to feel everything, to feel embedded into the very fabric of life that is all around and within me, to find no gap or separation between the seer and the seen.
What are we but eternity, wrapped in the disguise of passing time.
And under the chaos of life, when I slip beneath its surface, the light, it calls, just as it did before, not urgently nor demanding, but softly, gently, reminding me that while I may momentarily flirt with human form, the light it is always there, waiting to bring me back home.
Self-Portrait at the Laundry Mat, Astoria, NY (2023)
Night Light scenes from my apartment in New York City, 2022
I had nearly forgotten the quiet incubator of taking the time to do nothing in particular.
Sometimes I don’t want to translate what I see, so I choose to see without the desire to capture. I’ve seen more than what my camera has documented. What I have translated with my camera is a fraction of the pictures my eyes have witnessed.
Eight moons encircled us in the night sky above
As I stood in the heart of a familiar forest.
Every pearl slowly revealed herself after the last,
Clear yet veiled by a familiar mystic design.
The radiance of a boiling star passed as she spoke,
“true wisdom lies beneath the illusion of distinctions.”
We awoke in the luminous shade of Crescent street,
I could not find the moon for she became me.
She Dreamed of Eight Moons (I and II), 2022, Limited Edition Lenticular
Photographs, Multiple Sizes Available, Shop HERE
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.
While I undoubtedly believe each image should be strong enough to stand on its own, I love the way image pairings can highlight aspects of one another such as form, scale, texture and shadows. While each independent, the two images simultaneously work as one, bringing out potentialities in one another that were otherwise latent energies. The diptych pairing is especially interesting to me above all as it seems to so naturally speak to the nature of relationships: to be unified as one and yet still remain two independent entities. In a divine diptych, one image does not overpower the other, it is a delicate balance that is ever in a beautiful, lively dance of flux. The two images are sharply distinct from one another and yet somehow birth a third form together, a form of unity. The two individuals have no hierarchy nor seek to make the other conform to one’s own characteristics. They enhance and support one another when together, while standing on their own when separated.
A weekend at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, New York
The Shape of The Moon (Self-Portrait, NYC, 2022)
She is vulnerable yet indestructible, resilient and soft, visible but hidden, shrouded in a luminous mystery of her own soul’s design. The moon lives alone in darkness yet loneliness nor fear overtake her. She journeyed through hidden worlds to find the all knowing light of love, and in the end she discovered that what she sought was in herself. The moon does not seek, but reveals, does not attach, but flows in the tides of her own gravity. So I took up the path to search for her light, only to feel her warm presence glowing from my soul.
(Published in Helix, Issue 06, 2022, Istanbul. View excerpts from this publication below and view the full virtual issue here)
Excerpts from Helix, Issue 06 (Left image is available for purchase as a print here)
Sometimes a closed door is not a closed door, but a request of patience. Is the dream you seek worth the wait? True, you cannot sit around expecting the dream to come to you. But oftentimes, attentive non-action proves more fruitful than action. And perhaps during the moments of patience life requests of you is when you truly begin to live, for the inner workings of ones emotions and the subtleties of deeper understandings reveal themselves only when the heart is quiet. The desire to tear the door down or pick the lock is of the ego and can only end in suffering, while the patience to wait for the door to open at the proper time is the way of the heart. So until then, you sit, watching the light dancing under the door, reminding you that the most divine revelations are worth lifetimes of patience.
From the series Traces of Being (Prints available for purchase here)
Eight moons encircled us in the night sky above
As I stood in the heart of a familiar forest.
Every pearl slowly revealed herself after the last,
Clear yet veiled by a familiar mystic design.
The radiance of a boiling star passed as she spoke,
“true wisdom lies beneath the illusion of distinctions”.
We awoke in the luminous shade of Crescent street,
I could not find the moon for she became me.
From my newest series She Dreamed of Eight Moons (Purchase prints here)
Print available for purchase here
A crow landed onto a knot of loosely hanging wires,
his head cunningly in search of the mother.
Seeing no one, he darts into the tiny makeshift nest
tucked between an apartment window and rusted security bars.
The innocent white egg stands out against the thief’s black coat
as he flies through the twilight, noticeably conscious of his guilt.
The mother returns, still as a just-shattered heirloom
before collecting her pieces to race out in the direction of the crow.
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
Never will I not believe
That love is found in little things
