While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids to outlast us all.
Susan Sontag
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I started taking photos in the sixth grade, with a point-and-shoot camera that was long and slim, which took 110-size film that looked like a normal roll of film caught in the middle of mitosis. I bought it so I could take photos of my friends so—in the words of The Kinks—I could prove that they really existed. I wanted to be the guy who everyone else envied, dating Sarah Cary or Erin McCammon, despite the latter standing well more than a foot above me. There were photos of field trips, the girls I liked, and, subsequently, their nascent breasts (as a laugh, of course). I’d snap my friends making stupid faces and doing stupid things, like Philip Higgins pretending to be eaten by a mural of a whale. I socialized, mingled, oozed charm and smarts, both bookish and street, amidst the fury of snapshots. At the class party at the end of the year, I walked away with titles including, but not limited to, “Most Likely to Succeed,” “Cutest,” and my personal favorite, runner up for “Class Clown.” My artistry with a camera extended only as far as narcissistically taking a photo of myself in a bathroom mirror of the Hampton Aquarium, resulting in the flash exploding in all different directions around my then pre-pubescent body like white light through a prism. I didn’t realize it then, but I realize now that this was the beginning of my life as an observer, a voyeur, an outsider, standing on the perimeter documenting the lives of others.
Divorcing myself from my photographic interest in the ensuing years, I attempted to not stand on the outside, to assimilate and be on the other side of the lens. I put together a scrapbook of photos of myself, either in groups, or the lone 11 year-old subject leaning against a bright blue wall, playing a harmonica. I set it alongside my camera as a collection of moments of my life up to that point. I limited my gaze to the purely picturesque scenes of family vacations to places far from my suburban Virginia home like Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Maine, and Intercourse, PA. On these trips, my nuclear family would often stay with members of my extended family who wore their cameras as accessories to their outfits, constantly snapping photos of their infants and toddlers doing any-and-everything. It didn’t matter, every moment was an opportunity for adorableness. Topping off the week we spent together was, without fail, the cloyingly posed group photo on front porches up and down the Northeast. We posed, therefore, we were. I never realized how much this bothered me, and not just for the time it took away from my freeze tag or Frisbee throwing, but also the lack of artistry and verisimilitude that photographs can possess.
Thirteen years later, I stumbled across my grandfather’s old Honeywell Pentax in my parents’ house. The body was in good shape, a little dusty, but the lens was cracked. My mom had been using it for a while after my grandfather had passed away and put it down in favor of a new, sleek digital camera that makes uploading and sharing a cinch. Oddly enough, a friend’s father who knew I was interested in photography generously gave me an old leather bag full of Pentax equipment including a malfunctioning body, but probably half a dozen lenses for a Honeywell. I took my grandfather’s body and added one of the donated lenses, hitting the streets of New York in search for snapshots, not of friends, not of family, but of perfect strangers and perfectly strange situations.
As I navigate the city now, I keep my finger on the shutter as I head to work or just aimlessly wander through new and familiar neighborhoods alike, waiting for the right moment, the right scenario to catch my eye and then snap. At first, being in New York City with an old SLR camera hanging around my neck made me feel like a tourist, hesitant to take photos of anything but the requisite buildings and landmarks. Embracing my anonymity in a city of eight million, I have gotten bolder with capturing the “social landscape” (as I could only dream to compare my work to that of Winogrand, Friedlander, and Eggleston), of which the photos shown here are examples. In doing so, I hope to do exactly what Sontag mentions above, as fatalistic as it sounds: to create images that will outlast us all and serve as not only references to our collective past, but also as tokens of the humanity we all see on a daily basis, about which we usually never think twice.
