Community Commission Tier

My contribution to Obscura’s Community Commission examines American life in 2022 through the lens of California’s Imperial Valley. As an irrigated desert with extensive renewable energy projects, bordered to the North by the environmental catastrophe that is the Salton Sea and to the South by the towering new US/Mexico border wall, the valley is a study in contradictions and a fascinating place from which to examine a variety topics and issues that the we continue to face - environmental degradation, immigration, education, employment and the effects of the pandemic on daily life to name a few. My approach is broad, but has a tendency to zoom in on the experience of youth and how they have been affected by the past two years, the myriad decisions in which they have had no say, and their dwindling opportunities and options as they enter into adulthood.

For this commission “Two Years After the Storm“, my photography has been a documentation of Los Angeles while aiming towards the stories of adaptation within the modern human race.

My ideas in looking at Two Years After The Storm is a concentrated eye on the humanity beneath the glitz. Los Angeles, and other cities, have been hit very hard by the recent wave of viruses and homelessness and the citizens are trying to cope the best that they can. Looking at faces, places, and spaces to uncover the stories that reflect our reality.

The storm wrought by the pandemic in Los Angeles was close to a category five hurricane, figuratively speaking. Building on one of my current bodies of work called “Telotypes“, I photographed the visible manifestations the storm left in its wake, while bearing in mind the enormous and therefore precarious material reality of Los Angeles. Because I moved here just before the pandemic–in October 2019, the pictures are also imbued with emotional responses to a city that I instantly fell in love with for its astonishing impact on the landscape and people's psyches.

The long and winding roads of rural West Virginia led me to hidden hollers and seemingly invisible sights. I hiked through mud and snow, open to the quiet wilderness, exploring the deep feelings of this historical time from one of the many tucked away experiences of the American narrative. What was once symbolic of prosperity and pride is now left to ruin. Generational homes and farms that held warmth and memories within hand-built walls are collapsing. Lost in memory and forgotten to time, they wait bracing to the Earth. What is left behind is the evidence of people. The Americana of days gone by simmers upon embers of hope, warming the pandemic winter.

For the past two years, I've been boarded up while fighting for my life from cancer. Because of that, I didn't get to see most of my friends for over two years, which is where my idea for this commission was born. I traveled across the U.S. to see friends I hadn't seen in a long time due to the pandemic and my health and collaged them into stories to tell the common viewer what emotion was behind it.

In “Two Years After the Storm“ I explored the theme of loneliness and isolation that many of us have lived through during the pandemic, and how it has affected us collectively and as individuals. I did this through a series of portraits documenting close encounters with people as they described the fruits of their time in isolation and the loneliness felt in a world where we are masked up and distanced from each other, but still desperately seeking intimacy and human connection amidst the “storm“.

For this commission I’ve focused on capturing the experiences of boys and men and how they’ve adapted to the last two years in and out of isolation.

My photography is the product of my desire to capture the perfect moment that communicates the reality of our life as much as possible without saying a single word. In “Two Years After The Storm“, I flew to New York for this purpose, taking my camera with me to the most common sites that people pass through on a daily basis, to observe ordinary life and the defects, to discover beauty in the midst of them. Portraying day-to-day actions of people of all ages, the role played by the city's architecture and its deterioration.