SUNRISE, SUNSET
A retrospective show of early work, 2017-2022.
Exhibition at Good Dad Studios in Austin, Texas. January 2025.
“Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset//Swiftly fly the years// One season following another// Laden with happiness and tears.”
When the conditions for a photograph feel right, it is like a setting sun coming into an old empty house. Quotidian things grow larger than life, take on new form and dimension. The first time I had this “feeling” was in the movies and books of my childhood watching Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Fiddler on the Roof, WestSide Story, Franco Zeferelli’s Romeo and Juliet. Although I did not think of it then, these early works were the first time I encountered my own capacity to behold something beautiful. I loved these films dearly, like good friends. They are why I search for cinematic images around me today. Our capacity to behold—each according to our own nature— connects us to the best most holy, place in ourselves. When I have been at my lowest in life, full of loss and unreturning, this capacity to behold has saved me, reminded me that there is something within me, within all of us, that loves the world. For my mother, it was the sight and smell of oil paint and the way a silver clasp pairs with a turquoise rock. For my father, it is watching may flies be born and die within minutes on the surface of the Delaware river. I myself feel most alive at golden hour. That is when nature has made for me all sorts of entertaining puzzles of light. Shadows become long and trees soft; the sun peaks through corridors sending red flecks into my eyes before descending and turning the world a deep, feeling blue. Mysterious, why does light make me feel so much with its coming and going? To be a photographer is to contend with loss always, to see living things pass before your eyes and collect their fossils. A photo becomes haunted every time someone passes away, every time a lover leaves. Then there is the missed click of the shutter, the contaminated roll of film, the focusing error, the perfect image you made in your head walking down the road one day without your camera. I am afraid of all the images I have never made and will never be able to make. But I put my faith into movements of light and trust it will bring what I see into alignment once again, igniting my fantasies for a second before disappearing around the bend.
