20/2020

2020

Exhibition: James Black Gallery, April 23rd - 30th 2021

At first glance photography can seem like a purely external process; a way to record surroundings and create memories. While this remains true in the practical applications of image making, through my experience and practice I’ve learned that photography has im- mense power to bridge the gap between the external world and the subconscious mind.

I started taking pictures when I was 15, and now at 28 having thousands of photographs to look back on, I’ve been able to retrospec- tively see the visual metaphors present in images and how they correlated to my mental state at the time of capture. My research and attempts to understand this process began to deepen as I worked on an exhibition of photographs taken over the last decade. That exhibition was set to open in March of 2020.

Lockdown came, and we learned to fear the people and air around us. We were forced inside as the world outside changed. I tried my best to continue photographically documenting as I’ve always done. As the year progressed and my access to the external world and people that once drove my work shrunk, I had to become more aware of not only my immediate surroundings, but of finding liberation within. I tried to turn the camera on myself and the results were of little interest to me. I needed to look further than what a mirror could provide, I needed to go inward.

At first I tried exploring the the delicate intricacies of shape and stillness, then the textures and viscerality of intimacy, sex, and love. Visually the images got darker over the course of the year, with the blacks of shadows engulfing my subjects. However in these moments I wanted to find the light, and I wanted to experience my subjects finding that light in their own way. I no longer wanted to just photograph people; portraits as I knew them became too surface. I want to see beyond what flesh is holding in and how I can connect and create space apart from my physical external world. These 20 images made over the course of 2020 are just the beginning of that exploration.