This collection of photographs is from a period in my life between 2016 and 2023. Instead of the usual “travel photo” we often see, these are my attempts at capturing the mood of the place I was in, no matter if this was inside a plane cabin or on a New York City street.
I took thousands of photographs during these seven years. As the curator of my collection, I wanted to first and foremost portray the beauty that can come from moving through the world as an ordinary person. The resulting photographs emerged as the best representations of that beautiful, ordinary life in the years leading up to 2023.
A note about the text: I tried wherever possible to specify locations. I keep an extensive system to record the locations, dates, and even times of my photographs, but it is not perfect and I may have made mistakes. I hope the reader will understand that these dates and locations may be approximations rather than exact. Also, as a photographer, I find traveling physically to only be one half of the actual trip. The second half comes later, when I am reviewing my photographs and reflecting on the journey. That’s why I chose to include my thoughts here in lines of poetry. I hope you will come to see that travel is poetry—and photographs of your trip can serve as a form of language.
Dreaming
Tonight, when you dream, look for the following: a dark-haired woman’s face, a mirror, six wooden picture frames, an object too far away to know what it is, a man’s legs—and only his legs, a tree growing sideways, and a straight line in a body of water. When you find all of these, I’ll let you wake up.
Year: 2023 | Medium: Photography | Size: 653x498 (px)
Textures of Life
Walk in the city, in any old city, admiring the buildings, and you discover you are walking in someone’s mind. Architecture is the only time dreams are built into reality.
Walk in the city, in any new city, and you remember:
We used to live in the caves, beneath the trees.
We used to live in huts of straw. We lived in cabins we built out of felled wood.
Now where are we?
Reach out and remember where we are now:
Plaster, mortar, stone, stucco, exposed brick. Reinforced concrete and fiberglass, fireproof homes.
These are the textures of our lives. LEDs and asphalt. Grids and tarp. Miles of crowds stretching out into infinity. Walk in a public place, any bustling public space. Find yourself behind everyone else. And everyone else is watching something on the horizon. What are they looking at?
Year: 2023 | Medium: Photography | Size: 653x498 (px)
White
In ordinary life, white is the color of absence. You paint the walls white to create a blank slate, so you don’t distract from the art and photographs you will hang up.
A white car deflects heat and unwanted attention. A blank page, an empty screen—you wait to
fill these up. These are not meant to be enjoyed. In ordinary life, white means to wait.
But among the trees, in the mountains, in winter, white is promise. White blankets, white fills. In nature, white is not absence. White is the artwork.
White is the canvas of life.
Year: 2023 | Medium: Photography | Size: 653x498 (px)