January through March 2022


Top, left to right: Blake, Drew, Tomi, Derek
Borrom, left to right: Grace, Margo, Finn
Emmett at his show, Millenium Film Workshop, Brooklyn
Left to right: Flip, Margo, Sean, Derek, Harris
Flip and Harris
Bottom:  Ian and Bridget
Zach, Emilio, Pete
Arto and Victoria
Outside 169 Bar
Emilio, Pete, and Alina outside Mister Fong’s
Emmett and one of Brian’s sculptures
Clockwise from top: Ryan in Williamsburg, Michael in Home Depot, Mom and I in the car, hangin at a bar in Brooklyn
At Industry City
Ryan at the diner, Sunnyside, Queens
Ryan at Lucky Dog
Ryan in his apartment, stuffed to the gills with books
The angle of incidence and refraction
In the beginning of March I’d written that piece of writing in my phone and later made some finishing tweaks to it. February had brought the reopening of old wounds. So I begged not to be bent so much as to break. Not only this, but also to be a force of good, to effect things around me beautifully, or to at least take some photographs. I felt fragile. I flitted around the city to bars and functions with my camera around my neck and forced myself to be around others, at times having conversations at only 80% attention because the other 20% was somewhere else, anxious, searching. I wonder how many people thought I was an idiot during these encounters.
This would continue until April. I smoked, I drank, laughed with the gang. One night we left Mister Fong’s and climbed the fire escape of a nearby building because I implored everyone to get to a rooftop. Tucking one of many collins glasses full of gin and seltzer from Fong’s into my peacoat pocket, we climbed up four floors only to find the ladder didn’t reach all the way up to the roof edge. We climbed back down, drunk and jolly and undeterred. I convinced everyone to go to the beach. So in the middle of February, an hour and fifteen minutes later we clicked down the boardwalk, bitter wind occasionally gusting in our faces, breaking up the wild quiet. Walking with Emilio and Zach, I told them how different this place is in the winter. Eerie and beautiful, temporarily hollowed of its pulp.

If I could barely hold myself together, I hoped to be of use to others. In company, in jubilation, or at least in being a prism that they could shine through, etched into the emulsion on my film.