What does it mean when we draw our own conclusions about a photo? Perhaps the story we make up is what we need to hear at the moment, or perhaps the thing that draws us into a photo is the story that unfolds in our heads. Maybe we need things to be more than what they simply are. Life is bleak without meaning behind even a leaf falling from a tree. Truth always seems to get in the way of things. The story of the photo might not be what was being played out in my head while shooting. Gary Winnogrand said, “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” I guess I am still trying to figure out why I photograph. A riddle I am unsure needs solving. It feels more like an urge, an impulse, a visceral feeling, an overwhelming sense of emotions that tells me I need to document this. It could be a memory for myself, or someone else, the way the colors of a room look in the sunlight. It feels tedious to go down the line of why I shoot. Is it aesthetics? Is it empathy? Care? Reason? Am I trying to speak, or am I trying to listen?
Some time ago I used to shoot fashion photography with a digital camera, but I longed to shoot my everyday surroundings. The way the light trickled in, the sweeping view of skyscrapers downtown, people running across a crosswalk. My digital camera did not hold the tone of what I was trying to convey. So I picked up an old film camera I found online for $30. It took some getting used to and understanding the mechanics, but my world came alive. For once, I did not have to contrive a scene to document, but I simply could shoot what my eye was already romanticizing in my head. Most often my shots were blurry, and they sort of still are now, and I found a softness in the sharp edges of life.
Geoff Dyer says in his book, The Ongoing Moment, “As always, the picture contains the answers to the questions it poses.” I wonder how much of what we shoot is subconscious. Growing up, my family had this brown box that held hundreds of family photos. I used to get a rush looking at all the photos of my parents growing up, in their 20s and 30s, building a family, living their lives. I suppose I just wanted my own brown box filled with hundreds of photos as an indicator of a life lived. The images I fell in love with, and in turn wanted to shoot were ones like a laughing couple, an offset photo of your aunt drinking coffee, or a nondescript and otherwise boring photo of a business you opened, or a restaurant you loved. These are maybe not museum-worthy photos, but in the museum of my life, they stand immortalized.
I came across this old post Andy Adams wrote on his substack last year on “making” an image or “taking” an image. You can read it here. He makes the distinction between constructing an image to tell a story and taking a photo of a story that already exists, so to speak, i.e. documenting it. Some people have a problem with a constructed photo, I think in part because it feels “untrue”. They want to freely fantasize that this image is real and that they could recreate it in their own lives, and when you tell them it was constructed they feel it as an assault on them. They have it in their minds that reality is not a construct. But maybe that topic is for another day.
I found the idea of a constructed image obvious in fashion photography because I used to build scenes from my head and shoot them with models. This interests me because I have a very distinct split in my mind of my photos, before and after fashion photography. Annoyingly it isn’t as clean of a line as that, as I was shooting film documentary-style photos alongside my fashion work, but for the sake of this essay, I will organize it as such. I realize now going through the images I will have to do a part two. So this will be a Part 1: B/A FP (before/ after fashion photography)
So let’s start here:
I have always loved this photo. This was shot at The Fens in Boston, formally known as Back Bay Fens. It was one of the first photos I took with a film camera, probably Hayden's grandpas or maybe the Minolta I bought on eBay. It’s out of focus probably unintentionally. But the sun was perfect and the timing of this person riding their bike through the sunlight spoke to me. It’s a lucky shot really, as I had no idea how to shoot on film back then. But I am grateful for it regardless. To me, I hear music every time I see it. I can see so many stories unfold along the trail of this park, the same way Hayden and I and Gordy would circle it again and again meeting so many different people along the way, imagining all of their stories. I think of college, hope, friends, and summers that never seem to end in the most sparkling blissful way. Time seems far away in this image, and maybe we can live in it immortally, this way.
This was taken in New York City, maybe somewhere near Tribeca or Lower Manhattan, I forget where. I like that I can see the sunset through the reflection of the building windows. I like that the entire frame of the photo is a zoomed view of the building, almost as if I cut it out from a larger photo to make a collage. If you look closely you can see glimmers of what’s inside some of the windows, a curtain opened a crack to see a line of light coming through, an overhead light on, a desk against the window.
I have a thing for candid, “amateur” photos, meaning nothing is symmetrical or composed “properly” and the light and focus are off. I like the juxtaposition of Hayden’s work shoes and outfit as he sits on a peeling-apart futon that once served as our couch. I like how his interface sits on the floor with his microphone, music lives here, it screams to me. Despite having to work a regular, sometimes soul-sucking job, music is always there at the bottom of his stomach, in his gut. I replace music here with literature and art and how it is also always in the pit of my stomach no matter what I am doing.
I also have a thing for photos of tables, coffee tables, and desks. The clutter of everyday life is so evident in these photos. A mission of iSpy. Each person will be drawn to something different in it. Everyone has their own coffee table clutter. This was ours at one point and remains true as our coffee table takes different shapes: music, books, pens and pencils, work-related things, cups and snacks, a hat, and whatever we were working on that day.
These three images feel like a set. The focus is centered on someone walking away. On the left is a woman with big curly hair walking four dogs on the streets of New York. I imagine myself as her in another life, one where I feel bold enough to walk four dogs simultaneously in NYC. I imagine her as a true New Yorker, born and raised. The dogs are all walking behind her like she is the leader of their pack. Her head is slightly tilted to one side, maybe I caught her in the middle of her flipping her hair.
The middle image was taken in Mexico City. There were so dozens of people on the busy street my mom and I were walking on, but tucked away was this alleyway where a father and daughter (or grandfather and granddaughter) held hands, walking home I presume. It feels like they found a secret path to cut across to their home, their bag full of fresh groceries. I imagine the little girl skipping by the end of the street.
The last image on the right was taken in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We were walking to a market. The focus here is the man further down the street lugging something over his shoulder as he passes someone sitting on the ground. But I also like all the other staggered people living their own lives. One is sitting down with his headphones on adjusting his backpack, one has his leg up against the window waiting for someone. There is so much life in this photo, so much movement, it feels like one could harmoniously join the scene.
I wonder if it’s at all possible for me to look at my photos without the memories baked inside of them. I wonder if it’s only the memories I like in some of these photos, maybe the actual content of the photos matters less because I am seeing them through rose-colored glasses. It’s hard to rip these photos away from who I was when I shot them, and when I look back at them I am really only looking at how I was feeling at the time, what my thoughts and dreams, and doubts were. Janet Malcolm once said, “Photography is naively believed to reproduce visual actuality, but in fact the images our eyes take in and the images the camera delivers are not the same. Taking a picture is a transformative act.” It feels like we photographers are always trying to chase something. It is impossible to convey the rush I get when I see something I want to shoot onto an image. There is so much nuanced context leading up to that moment. The transformative act creates a foreign image, and without the memory, I am lost to its beauty. A million different eyes will always see something different.
The image on the left (the black and white one) was taken in Durango, Mexico where my mom is from. This shot is of the farms the Mennonites have built there. They are immigrants from Canada. I still do not know why they chose to come to Mexico, especially to the small town my mom is from, but it’s where our grandparents buy their cheese from. Their buildings are always a contrasting sight to see. You can always spot their construction over the local Mexicans. We would buy our cheese from them and drive around their part of town and take pictures. They feel embedded in me somehow. The photo on the right (in color) is a photo of Hayden’s family’s land in Tennessee. It is so lush and green compared to the desert-like feel of the left photo. But both are family photos in a way, history, places we did not grow up fully in but remain a part of who we are.
I care little to construct or make my documentary photography conceptual. For me, it is an act of remembering. Which can sometimes leave my photos looking like “stock images”—plain, maybe flat images of a place. But inside the photo is the memory in my head, the memory I am creating as I snap the photo, that is the thing I am trying to save. Of course, only I am aware of this memory, I am the only one with access to it. And so, you may see something completely different.
Take for example the images above. The first image is a black and white photo of the Flat Iron building in Manhattan. I think this was the first time I took a photo of it. I fell in love with it when I saw it and have since taken many more photos of it, I can never stop myself. It might be a photo anyone could have taken and there are probably a thousand out there that look oddly similar but the grain of the film is perfect here, the angle of it captures its nose-like quality, and I am filled with the memory of when I stood in awe of it for the first time.
The middle photo is taken from an Airbnb Hayden rented for me in New Mexico for my birthday one year. It was a life-changing trip for me. One of those trips that determined which path I would take in a fork in the road. It was the first day we got there and there were talks of it snowing the next day. It was a cold adobe house and I can still feel how frozen my feet were as I took this.
The last photo is another black and white photo taken in New York. Hayden and I went to celebrate an anniversary, it was romantic and felt like a honeymoon. We lazily went to museums and got gluten-free pizza and sat in parks and read and wrote. I came across this moment as we walked by and it was too perfect not to shoot. A table for two looking out. Not yet a meal, but the possibility of one. I imagine us walking up to the hostess in the restaurant, asking for the table in the window.
Then there are the photos I call “simple pleasures”. They are the charms of everyday life. They are snapshots. They are the things that make life feel more romantic than it maybe is. They are the images of Hayden curled up on the bed sleeping while the light shines in, or corners of my friend’s homes, the food we have all shared, piles of laundry and stacks of shoes, flowers and more flowers, coffee tables and windows always gazing out. They are the self-portraits through the mirror, they are the mundane things, the ones we can overlook easily. They are the photos I end up taking too many of and could make books of. They are the crumbs that make up any life, the things that hold us up. It is an act of love to shoot. Selfish, greedy, beautiful love, saying I want this forever, knowing all too well we lose everything in life eventually, but not yet, not now. For the moment we have the photos.
I loved this! I also enjoy looking back at creative work and seeing the themes and subjects I continually return to. Reading this reminded me so much of the work of the poet Bernadette Mayer and her one month photography project where she used one roll of film everyday in July 1971 along with a detailed journal of each day. I’m obsessed with the intimacy and everydayness of her images and writing and think you would also love her! I can’t wait for part 2!
https://www.bernadettemayer.com/memory-1
loved this so much!! from another photographer and someone who also switched from digital to film and gradually found it so much more emotionally rewarding and eye opening to the beauty of mundane things, your essay said so many things that have been circulating around my mind too. I’ve been following your work on instagram for quite a while and always enjoyed your photos for their candidness, for how they portray life just as it is and all the seemingly insignificant scenes that you have such a great eye for, because they show that you really pay attention to the world around you. I’m excited for part two of this!!