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.