How the past influences our future
A quick newsletter update and a little bit about my very first solo show that opens this week.
I wanted to start off by saying that I hate that I haven’t been as active on here as I would like. Learning my new rhythms as a freelancer has been tough, and I’ve honestly been really busy editing, shooting, and getting everything I need done for my upcoming solo show.
I wanted this to be a much more regular newsletter but I also wanted to be out on the streets photographing more regularly as well. With a lot of my shoots and events happening on the weekends, it’s been tough to find that rhythm. I think I want to set better expectations for myself and for the people that read this newsletter. A lot of what we put online can become a chore once it is forced into a certain time frame or schedule, and that’s the opposite feeling that I wanted when creating newsletters. So I think I need to evaluate the structure or the goals of this newsletter moving forward.
But now to get to the really exciting topic that I wanted to talk about. Tomorrow I’m going in to hang my very first solo show that is happening at Public Works Art Center right here in Summerville. I’ve had this project in the works for years after my grandfather passed away in 2018, and I inherited his photo archive. To get to the point where tomorrow I‘m going to hang his beautiful photographs is so surreal to me.
To give a bit more context about the work and the show, I’ll start by giving you a bit of backstory on how I became a photographer myself. When I was around 13 years old, my grandfather gave me a 35mm SLR camera and taught me how to use it. Throughout my entire life, though, he always had a camera near him, and he documented everything. He photographed interesting things he would see out in the world, our family, my grandmother, everything really. Whether it was subconscious or not, his relationship with photography had a huge impact on me and how I fell in love with the medium. To this day, I feel the impact of his work, and his vision continues to show itself through my own photographs. And the fact that he documented every aspect of his life is something I can deeply relate to. He was a collector, and I feel like photography was an extension of that. That idea of collecting moments as a way to reflect on later is something I do daily.
This show is a collaboration with his slide film, which I inherited after he passed, and the similarities I found while going through these hundreds of slides.
I wanted to talk briefly about the editing I did for this particular show and how the work I ended up printing was honestly not what I had expected. There are way more recent photographs of mine from France than I ever thought would be in the show. But I feel so confident in the edit, and I’m so excited to finally show these 18 photographs in print.
This edit has a lot of very obvious visual similarities in the work that I was conflicted with at times. I never want to spoon-feed the audience into thinking or feeling a certain way. I like interpretation and discovery when viewing new photography work, and I like when multiple people take away completely different things after viewing a show or a photobook. I think that’s one of the most powerful things about this medium.
For instance, the pair below felt too obvious at first. But the longer I sat with some of these pairs, the more I realized that I’m not really spoon-feeding the audience; I’m showing how his vision really comes through in the work I make today. It’s so subconscious to see so many obvious pairs, whether graphically like the one below or more conceptually like his work from Taiwan, which felt like work I would make on the street if I were in his shoes.
Once I shook off that mindset of being too obvious, my entire sequence changed from wanting to include only all my favorite street photographs from the past five years and only print what I consider my best work to thinking about the concept of his vision coming through in my work regardless of subject matter. So, I ended up including photographs like this one below.
It’s just one of those photographs I made to remember a very, very happy time in my life. Being on this rooftop pool in Marseille, having it all to ourselves, and just being so happy with Ariel at that moment. I wanted to preserve that feeling forever. I realized this was what I was chasing. This was never going to be in my final selection, but to me, it resonates with the same feeling I got when he traveled around the world with my grandma. He would simply document where they were or what they were doing, and I wanted to show that same aspect of my own work that I make of/with Ariel.
I felt so free and happy when I made these shifts in mindset because these selections allowed me to communicate the aspect of this project that I’ve always wanted to share with others: the celebration of photography as a way of documenting moments in time and how everything in our past influences what we make today.
I have to believe that his work has subconsciously spoken to me since I discovered it, and I have to believe that everything we experience and ingest has some impact on the current work we make.
So I learned a lot through this process and through every decision I made about the sequence, the size of the prints, how they were going to be framed, what the flow of the room might be, what to emphasize, and what to let subtly speak. Everything we do as artists could be refined, especially looking back on the work, but this process has taught me to loosen my grip on perfection and allow the ideas and concepts that I wanted to communicate to guide me above all else. To simply celebrate the beauty of photography and not get hung up on perfection, but to showcase how one artist can impact another decades later.
So, with all that said, I’d love to invite anyone in the Charleston area to come to see the work. Public Works is an amazing gallery! I am so fortunate to show this project for the first time in this space. They are a free-to-the-public non-profit art center that truly does so much for the local arts community.
The opening reception is on May 16th (this Thursday) and starts at 5:30 PM.
I would love to see you there, and I would love to show you this work in person. xoxo