For me photography means capturing a moment in time, a moment that deserves to be remembered, a moment that appeals to my visual senses, and through the light reflected off the things in front of me, I try to express the best version of myself.
These moments deserve to be remembered. I want the people that look at my photographs to see the beauty in the relatively small part of the world that I capture. My photographs are made up of the events of life that are both capable of expressing my humanistic viewpoints, and simultaneously look good in photograph form. This is extremely hard to find. I need to go out every single day to search for them, and if I try my hardest I can usually get one good photograph a month, that’s not very much. Street photography is really fucking hard. It’s hard to see the place that you live in as beautiful, it’s hard to see the potential for a photograph in the lives of normal people, and it’s hard to capture that split second where all of the visual forms lineup to convey my personal statement. Most of the time I can’t do it, or I won’t want to. But if I spend too much time doing nothing I get upset, and it’s only through creative acts that I remember that my life is about more than just physical needs and base desires. Photography is just one way that I choose to express myself. Skateboarding, talking with people, spending time with family and friends are all necessary in order for me to feel whole. Photography is just my labor of love to show the world, and more specifically the people that make up the world, how much I appreciate their existence. I don’t ask permission to take people’s photographs because that would be the antithesis of what I’m trying to present to the viewer. In a world oversaturated with fancy presentations and curated newsfeeds I feel as though our society needs to appreciate the beauty of just “being” and to remember that all of life, even the seemingly banal parts, can be fascinating if we have the right mindset when viewing them.
My art is an expression of my best self. To be honest I rarely appreciate the things around me, I’m cynical, I get annoyed at the trash at the side of the road, and I often focus on all the shitty partisan politics and how it seems like the world is going to hell. But when I can truly make a good photograph I don’t think about anything negative, I’m only thinking about the lives of the people around me and how wonderful it is that we all live in such a peaceful place and how wonderful it is that I was born with the ability to see. I was born into a family in Canada, I have enough privileges and free time so I can spend hours flaneur-ing around town making art for myself and others to appreciate. Photography is my way of creating something that says that I was here on this earth, that I loved the people around me so much that I tried my hardest to create works of art that show the beauty of the people and the world that we live in.
