Exercising my photographic eye, I would pick something at random and mentally compose an image of it. There was one apartment building between my apartment on Thomas S. Boyland Street and the Chauncey Street J train station that I would see all the time but couldn’t figure out how to photograph. It was a brick building painted red, with the left side trimmed in black and the right side trimmed in white. Then one day I had a eureka moment. If I could just line up the lamppost across the street with the center of the building I could make an image that expresses how I see the building, with its contrasting details plastered onto a bright red canvas. But there was still an issue with the frame. I needed to shoot vertically to include the full figure of the lamppost, an integral element of the structure of the photo, but then I would lose the far left and far right window sills. If I shot horizontally, then I would lose the distinctness of the lamp itself. So I shot both, laid them on top of each other in the edit, and with that I unlocked a world of composition outside of the standard rectangle of film and digital photography.

From that point on my eyes have always scanned the environment for shapes and structures that either couldn’t be contained by a standard frame or whose form described its function, so that by using multiple exposures and compositing them together a new point of view of this object or building or island or staircase would be revealed. Then covid came, my Funny Faces project moved online and my subway riding slowed way down. But I had a new way of seeing my city and my world. At first, I only took my new aesthetic to my neighborhood’s buildings and onto the subway (when I had somewhere to go during lockdown), but then I began using it to show how I see everything around me. From small scale items like a winter shrub to large scale objects like bridges and mountains.

I’ll use this substack to share my photos and offer my perspective on the built environment. Cities, public transit, water infrastructure, animals, and the natural world in which it all exists are the focus of my camera. Their processes, histories, longevity, and sustainability are the focus of my work. Thank you for reading, looking, thinking, and subscribing!