Old Digitals

2020-2022

A little history.

I’ve been taking pictures for a long time.

By seventh or eighth grade, I started to view myself as a photographer, which I believed required intentionality. My thoughts on this have changed quite a bit over the years, but that’s what I thought at the time. That’s when I began taking photo classes.

By junior year of high school, I started taking seriously “art photography,” and with that self-appointed label, I had to consider what a photographer really was.

A photographer, I realized, is a documenter. No matter how edited or distorted a photo may be, there’s usually a linear thread the viewer can follow back to the “document”—to the real place or thing the photo represents.

That is, of course, if the work is presented as photography.

This body of work—mostly made during my senior year of high school—tries everything in its power to fight the viewer. It’s meant to be a wall. It’s meant to irritate. It tries to prove that the only way photography can be art is if it’s completely stripped of the very thing photographs are meant to capture.

I remember telling my senior-year photo teacher, “I don’t want anyone to recognize anything in my photos.”

That resistance to photography’s “truth value”—to the idea that it should faithfully represent something real—is still what drives my practice. These days, instead of fighting the viewer, I would say I’m more interested in tricking them.

Me at my high school senior art show.