Howdy

In my last post, I mentioned I’d had an idea to make a narrative film and had begun shooting some scenes. In the weeks since, I’ve filmed more, mostly finished the script, and began putting feelers out for additional casting. It’s become a wildly gratifying project. I hang out with a bunch of photographers, and everyone nearly always has a camera hanging somewhere from their body. It’s typical to document the time we spend together and each other, and over the last year, I’ve gravitated more and more towards capturing that time on video rather than the still photography most of us generally shoot. I’ve gotten more comfortable with my camcorder and am starting to figure out cooler camera angles, but making a movie (however small) has been an awakening. I write, and I take photos, and sometimes I make paper collage and books and drawings and things. I’ve been doing those things for nearly my entire life, which creeps closer to half a century, and even though I am always learning more in those pursuits, the pursuits themselves are no longer new. I am comfortable in those spaces. But video is new to me as a whole, and I have never made a movie before. I can actually feel little cells activating in my body, tiny parts of me that have never been used before waking up to have their moment.

I wasn’t sure if I’d write an actual script for this film, or wing it as I go, but Sunday I googled what screenplays look like and wrote one (I employed format standards at my own discretion, but it mostly looks like it’s supposed to). I created two additional characters to the one I play, one of whom I’ve already cast (the easier of the two to fill) and for the other I am getting closer. Much of the film takes place in my own apartment, with the main character (moi) alone, so I’ve managed to get much of those scenes filmed. The rest of the story is told in flashbacks, and shooting will begin once the rest of the cast and crew is set. It’s a very small production—three total actors including myself, one additional cameraperson for a scene or two, a couple friends to contribute music. I plan to have filming wrapped by March for weather purposes (the story takes place during winter), and fully completed shortly after. I might write a little bit on what the film is about in later blog posts, but will leave it for now.

In other writing news, I’m currently working on editing some chapters of my novel. I went on a Hinge date with a guy last summer who was not a love connection, but did leave me with a great bit of writing advice. He was a writer also, and working on a fantasy novel of some sort. I have a habit of heavily editing as I write. Getting the words right bolsters me, I think, reminds me that I’m a good writer and that it’s worth it to keep slogging away at this massive project. So I spend a lot of time rereading what I’ve written and perfecting it. It takes a long time to churn out a page. The Hinge date wrote a whole book without stopping to edit anything along the way. I could never do that, and wouldn’t want to—doing some edits as I go helps to keep things clean and reminds me which details I’ve used—but it did inspire me to edit less. I gave myself four-chapter writing blocks, meaning I have to complete four full chapters of new writing before I can go back and edit anything, and it’s helped move the story along. I completed the most recent four chapters a couple weeks ago, and am currently allowing myself some editing time before I move into the next four.

And in the world of still photography, I began shooting a double-exposure project that I might have the opportunity to show in a gallery space this spring. I don’t want to say much about the project yet, or where I might show it, but I’m sure I’ll have much more to add in the coming months. I started experimenting with double exposures last year and think I may have gotten a strong enough handle on what I’m doing to get the results I want in this new project. I’ll stop there, and leave you with a collection of rodeo photos shot last summer in Doswell, Virginia.

All photos in this post were taken on 35mm, 3200 ISO film; I forget which stock, Kodak or Ilford. Thanks for reading, you’re beautiful.

100 Years is Not Enough

Since launching this blog, I’ve tended to mostly create posts surrounding a particular collection of photos, almost like an expanded Instagram post. In recent months, I’ve thought a lot about how I want to use this space. I’ve bounced around a bunch of different ideas, and one thought I keep coming back to is wanting to blog more often and more regularly. I am always making something—the last year or so has been one of the most prolific periods of my creative life—so I have plenty of work to share, but I also want to use this space in a more personal sense than I have been, updating those who are interested on what I’m up to.

I’m up to a lot. It is seventeen days into the new year, and already I have made two short films (you can check them out here), plus a new installment of My Friend the Artist, an interview video series I began last year, featuring my friend Dylan McMahon.

I also made a new zine with a mini-memoir format, a first for me. The zine contains the true story of an entanglement I had with a boy in my twenties, and is mostly text with a few pages of actual photos from that time. I also wrote the first draft of a new story, also about a man from my past, that I plan to make into another issue. I’ve written about myself in lots of different formats over the years, and made autobiographical photography, but I’ve never told such detailed, personal stories and then made them available to the public like this before. It’s a new endeavor for me, but one that feels right, and maybe like the place these stories are meant to live. When I used to do a lot of spoken word and slam poetry, I would write scores of poems about all the heavy baggage of my life: traumas and abuse and bad relationships and mental illness and dysfunction. Then I would get on a stage and stand in front of a microphone and read these poems to a room full of friends and strangers. We had a saying in those rooms, “Leave it onstage.” The stage was a place I could set down all these heavy things I carried around with me, and leave them there. Maybe these zines can be like that for the stories within them, a receptacle to keep them so I don’t have to.

Issues of Fires are $10 each and can be bought by emailing me or using the contact form on my About page (or text or DM or whatever).

I’ve also photographed a couple new Barbie shoots (film hasn’t been developed yet) and made ten or so Valentine’s Day collages out of old Playboys and sixties housewife magazines and biker magazines. I’ll share those on Instagram in the next couple days and make them available for sale. I started planning a new double exposure concept, and will probably begin shooting in the next few weeks. And maybe the most exciting of all, I began my first attempt at making a narrative film (fictional film, non-documentary).

Since my uncle gave me my Sony HandyCam camcorder last Christmas, I’ve mostly filmed my friends and documented the things I’m doing. Over the summer, I began experimenting with filming more random scenes—the way the sun hits a brick wall, bees buzzing around flowerheads, leaves against a blue sky—with the idea I would patch together some sort of conceptual film, my first idea outside of documentation. And then recently, it occurred to me I could make a fictional movie, with a story and characters and some sort of script, and almost immediately got to work.

Right now, the film is more about a feeling than a thing that happens, but the action is coming together. I’ve shot a handful of introductory scenes, starring myself, mostly in my apartment, but I think there will be one other character. That’s maybe the most intimidating part—that I’ll have to explain the project to someone else and help them understand the role I want them to play. I’ll have to figure out who will play this additional character, a delicate decision because they will be playing my love interest, and like so much of my work, this project is based on a true story. The feeling the film is about is one that I have felt.

I’ve done all of this in the last two weeks. When this creative uptick began roughly a year ago, I was grateful for the motivation and endeavored to ride it while it lasted. It feels it’s only grown. Sometimes I feel unable to stop; there are so many ideas inside me and I feel so driven and energized to realize them. Today I had the thought that if I lived for 100 years, it would not be enough. At 42, I feel like I am only beginning.

Here are some self-portraits I shot on a digital camera the other day. The final shot, a closeup of my mouth, is what inspired the double-exposure project I mentioned above. More to come on that. Thanks for reading, you’re beautiful.

Surf's Up

In 2023, my friend Parker and I started saying, “Surf’s up,” at the end of every voice message we sent each other. We send a lot of them, and long ones—sometimes fifteen or twenty minute monologues about how we are and what we’re doing, and sometimes about nothing at all. I don’t remember how we started the surf’s up thing, except that one day one of us said it, and decided from that moment on to always say it. Sometimes when things are not great we end our messages by saying, “Surf’s down,” or if things are hectic we might say, “Surf is wild,” or some other variant while chuckling grimly.

Somewhere in the origin of this habit is the fact that also in 2023, I took several day trips to Virginia Beach to photograph surfing, and some of my friends (including Parker) came to associate surfing with me, even though I have never surfed myself and have no plans to. I started photographing surfing in 2022 because I love the ocean and I liked to photograph skateboarding, and it made sense. My first season on the beach felt like the beginning of a new passion, but that momentum petered out when I returned this year. For one thing, I started too early, driving out to the jetty in the spring before the Mid-Atlantic has seen any waves—those don’t show up around here until late summer or fall. I loved waking up at 3am and making the two hour drive to catch the sunrise glittering across the low waves, but not much action to capture. In August I repeated last year’s journey to ECSC, an annual surf competition held at Virginia Beach. Both years I booked an Airbnb for a four days and woke up before dawn to photograph the competition and the sunrise, but this year felt grueling despite the fact I booked a nicer room, closer to the jetty where the competition took place, and could easily walk to more places than last year. The heat was oppressive and a casual walk down the strip to find lunch wiped me out. My favorite parts of the trip were lying in my air conditioned room, taking a nap. I felt less invested in the surfing, and the photos, the whole reason I’d come, which could have been the weather, or could have been because by August, I was already kind of over it.

I think I took something I had an interest in and tried to do too much of it. Or rather, I did a higher ratio of it than my interest in it allowed. I do like to photograph surfing, and I do like to wake up early and drive to the beach and watch the sunrise, and learn new terms for things I didn’t know anything about before. I just don’t like it enough to do that every month for most of the year, which is what I did in 2023, and wound up with eight million photos of the same surf shot on the same stretch of beach over the same golden/purple/hot pink sunrise backdrop.

In 2024, I am sure I will kill at least one roll of film in that same setting, but if I’m being honest, probably not more than one roll. I think that’s a closer-to-the-truth ratio of action and interest. And now, on this last day of 2023, tired of scrolling through the folder on my iPhone of photos I haven’t posted yet and being affronted with a wall of water and surfers, I am dumping a bunch of them here, to leave them behind once and for all. Parker and I will still say “Surf’s up,” at the end of all of our voice messages, because we like it and we think it’s funny and it’s too late now. And I will still make that 3am drive to catch the sunrise, but I will wait until the season is right and the waves are in fact up, so I can cherish it.

Here are all the shots I do not want to take with me across midnight.

Looking back on these as I posted them here, I concede these are all actually really dope shots. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful. Happy New Year.