Who?
I am a dude living in NYC for the past four years or so. I work a day job at a museum in Brooklyn to pay for rent and film. I feel like I embarrass myself constantly. I am a member of the New York City Street Photography Collective, an in-person group where I can find a sense of much needed community offline. I am really bad at putting things in the mail.
What?
It’s in the photos, hopefully. The best way I can describe what I look for is an evolving mental checklist and triggers that act as a starting point. It’s a set of hard rules and shaky clichés. Someone lighting a cigarette, anything at all in the air, something I’ve ripped off from someone else. It’s challenging to overcome the cliché factor or expand on it. We all know what a certain photograph looks like. I’d love to hit an enlightened state of not thinking beforehand but I am always over thinking things. Particularly this interview.
When?
After work, lunch breaks, and weekends. Anytime that my laundry situation is acceptable. I try to take photos more or less equally at night as well as day. Particularly during the colder months I ask myself, why should the day end now?
Where?
It’s been said so many times in so many ways. The best part of photography is you kind of have the agency to go anywhere and enjoy it. Pocket full of film, something, something. If we’re being honest, Midtown Manhattan or Market Street doesn’t seem crazy appealing to spend all your free time in on the surface, but it’s where I run into friends regularly. Or catch a cup of coffee. It feels like a secret clubhouse made of 25 blocks.
Why?
I don’t have a solid esoteric reason for doing photography. I do think a lot about what success looks like to me. Not a monetary or fame sense of success, but what do I want photography to mean to me at the end of the road. I think more than ever it’s so easy to get trapped in superficial short term measures of artistic self-worth. I want to play the long game if I can, at least to have something to look forward too. I would like to make a couple monographs in ten years. I would like to meet people I admire and hear how they think.
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