Just Pretend Everything Is Fine Photograph

Some would call me a street photographer; indeed, I do so myself, but the truth is I’m a documentarian. But I’m not interested in recording spectacle, not the rehearsed act, nor the invitation to observe. My lens looks to the opposite, a 180 degree turn into the assuming anonymous masses while they go about their lives. I point my camera at you. I’m here for the seemingly ordinary, mundane, fleeting moments that happen too quickly for us to register. The minute happenings that we fly by during our daily, self-absorbed lives or buried in our digital devices. I capture life, as it is at a given moment. I am not trying to find beauty or perfection; I’m searching for something real in a society that continuously shifts toward a synthetic truth. In this, I am forever bound, a slave to an instant so easily missed. There is no rehearsal, no set ups, and do-overs. There is that window of chance to fire the shutter or there is absolutely nothing. I cannot tell you what to see when you look through my work, I can only offer them to you and hope that you see something in them yourself. What they say to you is what they mean. Rejection of perfection. Digital photography has given the majority of the world access to a camera. A camera that captures clean, sterile, and even perfect replications of the subjects it’s pointed at. As precise as that image may arguably be, my process and my photographic work seeks to be imperfect, unclean, almost ugly and embrace the qualities that make 35mm film what it is, in all its grainy glory. Most of my work is shot on half frame cameras and developed in a soup of instant coffee, washing powder, and vitamin C, both elements enhance the natural grain structure of black and white film.