Why FLUX?
Every day I go for a walk along the Schuylkill River Trail in Philadelphia. At the end of the walk, I stand on top of the cliff behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art, looking out toward the horizon.
Ever since I started this daily ritual, this feeling of abundance has started to flow through me. It feels like there’s a gravitational pull from the water, always tugging my body here first thing in the morning. And while I look out at the water moving and flowing, I remember how everything is in flux — always in motion and always changing.
I will never return to the same river twice.
Not only is the river always moving, but I too, on a physiological level, am changing each day. My cells are replenishing, my muscles are growing, and my creative capacity expands.
There’s a paradox though. As I walk the path, I’ve eliminated all freedom. If I go left, I’ll follow the river and drown to death. If I go right, I’ll get hit by a train and die tragically. And so the only path for me to walk is onward and upward toward the cliff, looking out toward the beautiful river. This is the perfect location to catch the sunset.
Ever since photographing in high contrast black-and-white, I’ve become much more in tune with light itself. I recognize that the way light casts itself upon surfaces, people, places, and things is always in flux and changing.
Light and life are out of our control.
And so my interest in photography lies in that lack of control — the surprise, the serendipity that lies within the magic of photography.
The way that life emanates through my camera’s lens and touches the sensor gives me an unrepeatable practice, a walk that becomes endless.
Now I can walk this same mundane lane every single day, pushing my rock to the cliff just to watch it roll back down again — and smile.
Photography, for me, has gone beyond my simple engagement with a medium itself.
It has become life affirmation.
My absolute fuck yes to life.
Beyond Good and Bad
I now recognize that there is no such thing as good or bad photographs.
I treat each photograph equally.
My personal duty as a photographer is simply to step into the stream of becoming, of evolution and change, through making new frames each day.
The archive is art.
Why Copy Paper?
I’ve recently started printing my work on cheap copy paper with my monochrome laser printer at home.
I feel like I finally found the output of the work that I’m trying to make.
I even printed the small JPEG large at 17×22 on proper luster paper with a Canon PRO-1000, which looked absolutely beautiful, but it was too perfect.
Now I’ve taken my small JPEG and compressed it even further into small PDF files that are instantly downloadable, transferable, and printable at home.
And I am personally blown away.
The texture and imperfection of these photographs sitting physically upon copy paper finally feels aligned with the spirit of the work itself.
Ephemeral Yet Permanent
Recognizing my flesh nature, my imperfect design, is what reminds me that I am divine.
Despite the fact that I have a finite timeline, and that I will and must die, I find something permanent and everlasting within the way that I experience life through photography, through light itself.
And so this is why I treat photography as a simple act of affirmation.
Clicking the shutter is me saying:
“I am alive.”
Photography is now my lifeline.
Maybe it’s true that Bresson died before he died physically. He gave up photography at the end of his life, which was his true death.
Now I treat each click of the shutter like it could be my last breath.
Why High Contrast?
The photograph is an instant sketch, an instant drawing.
When I consider the word photography arriving from drawing with light, this is what I seek.
Active self-expression through photography is unlike any other medium considering the physical nature of it.
Walking through the world, embracing the sights, sounds, and senses of embodied reality while photographing becomes a spiritual act.
While moving your body and photographing, you simultaneously exist within the realm of being and becoming.
Yes, everything around me and within me is changing, but for that fraction of a second that I click the shutter and say yes to the moment, I can simply be.
The photographs I make become fragments of my subjective interpretation of reality within the moment.
They are not meant to say:
“This is a fact.”
Through embracing contrast, grain, abstraction, and imperfection, I hope to evoke something emotional rather than merely descriptive.
Beyond technicality, beyond storytelling, beyond perfection in composition or geometry, the imagery I seek to create goes beyond language itself.
The Front Lines of Life
Photographers should focus more critically on traits that have nothing to do with technicality.
Instead of worrying endlessly about lighting and timing for storytelling, why not focus on curiosity and courage as the true measurement of whether or not you are improving?
If the photograph requires courage, if you’re photographing from your heart, then to me, that’s a successful photograph.
If you’re waking up each morning increasing your curiosity, propelling your body onto the front lines of life to make new frames, then you are already succeeding.
Photography has nothing to do with photography.
It has everything to do with the way that you engage with humanity out there in the open world, on the front lines of life.
This is not to dismiss the difficulty of making impactful frames, but rather to recognize that
In order to make great frames, one must first cultivate a great heart.
Why Compact Digital Cameras?
I don’t believe style emerges through color or black-and-white, nor through the content of one’s photographs.
Style emerges through consistency over long periods of time cultivating instinct.
Most photographers overcomplicate things.
But your style ultimately emerges through the way that you physically move your body through the world — through your intuition, positioning, rhythm, and instinct.
And the compact digital camera is the fastest way to make a photograph.
You click the button and move on.
No friction.
No hunting autofocus.
Just pure speed, simplicity, and instinct.
A small JPEG file is all you need.
By embracing compact digital camera technology, we can transcend the medium itself until the camera disappears entirely.
The compact camera becomes the closest thing to not having a camera at all — the pure extension of the body, the eye, the heart.
And through wandering the world with this ability to instantly create from instinct, you arrive closer to authentic self-expression.
Why Chronological Order?
One thing I’ve started doing is stamping my photographs with the exact metadata of the time and date they were created, arranging everything chronologically.
Once again:
The archive is art.
There are moments while photographing from this pure and present state where I feel as though I exist outside the passage of time.
And so the act of stamping the exact date and time onto the photograph becomes meaningful to me — a fragment within time itself.
This idea feels liberating.
To arrange everything chronologically removes the friction of trying to say something monumental.
Yes, we could spend thirty years selecting fifty photographs and curating ourselves poetically through perfection and scarcity, but this is not how we experience life.
We experience life through becoming.
Through change.
Through flux.
And so this is how I seek to share photography — as a stream of becoming unfolding chronologically without excessive design.
Why Remove Control?
I also enjoy the idea of extreme creative constraints.
From the technical workflow to the philosophy to the final output, I’ve locked in the rule that every issue I create will only ever contain thirty-six frames.
I enjoy allowing the sequence to emerge naturally through stumbling through life itself, paying homage to the tradition of 35mm film photography.
But what truly interests me is the lack of control.
I’m not in control of whether the light is beautiful.
I’m not in control of the conditions.
I’m not in control of whether or not I’ll encounter something extraordinary.
What I am in control of is cultivating curiosity and courage — the willingness to move my body through the world each day making new frames.
And so by removing the obsession with control — by wandering without destination, by not using the viewfinder, by relinquishing perfectionism — I arrive at a strange form of creative freedom through creative constraint.
What fascinates me most about photography is that light itself remains outside of my control.
A lot of times the photograph is not what I saw.
The photograph is what I didn’t see.
My two eyes do not have a shutter speed.
And so when photographing from pure instinct, relinquishing control, I surprise myself each day when looking back at the frames.
This increases my curiosity to return the next day and continue playing.
Why Is the Archive Art?
The archive itself is important because we now live in an existential time for photography.
With artificial intelligence, image generation, manipulated metadata, and synthetic realities becoming increasingly normalized, where does the role of the photographer intersect?
My personal response is radical openness.
To present everything.
To stamp photographs in time.
To arrange them chronologically as an archive.
This is my rebellion.
My way of saying:
“This was real.
I, a physical flesh creature, was here.
And this was worth remembering.”
Why the Bureaucratic Aesthetic?
The final presentation of the work exists within manila folders, adopting the aesthetics of bureaucracy as a critique of modernity itself.
The work is intentionally mechanical.
Everything organized chronologically and automatically through metadata gathered from the archive.
The physical object is stapled on the left side with exposed staples. The title, date, and photographer name appear small in the top corner. Blank backs. White space.
The work resembles an ordinary bureaucratic document that someone might carry into an office meeting.
But instead of organizing abstraction, I’m organizing lived experience.
Fragments of light.
Moments of existence.
Proof that someone physically stood here.
Bureaucracy vs Merit
I recently quit my job.
It felt like a pure calling. I had never felt such meaning in my life.
For nearly two years I was designing gardens and physically laboring all day in a seasonal position. I genuinely loved the work. There was something deeply fulfilling about physically shaping the environment around me with my own hands.
A full-time opening appeared, and for the first time in a long time, I thought everything was finally crystal clear. I thought I had finally found my place within modern society. A job I could genuinely do for the rest of my life.
And so I went all in.
I went far beyond my actual responsibilities. I wasn’t simply watering plants or maintaining the grounds. I was redesigning sections of the park, creating long-term proposals, measuring plots, calculating soil requirements, planting neglected greenhouse plants directly into the earth, and physically restoring sections of the space almost entirely on my own.
Despite this, when I submitted my application for the full-time position, it was declined.
The reasoning had little to do with the actual quality of labor or dedication. Instead, it came down to categories, qualifications, points, and bureaucratic systems that didn’t properly recognize the reality of the work I had already done.
And that experience deeply affected me.
But what affected me even more was what happened near the end of my time there.
I remember sitting in the hospital after getting poison in my eye at work. The doctor told me to avoid dusty environments for a period of time, yet the next day I still found myself shoveling snow and being questioned about productivity.
What disturbed me wasn’t even the labor itself. I’ve always loved physical work.
What disturbed me was the feeling that the paperwork surrounding the injury seemed more important than the actual human being experiencing it.
And that realization stayed with me.
It made me realize how much of modern life exists within abstraction.
Paperwork.
Screens.
Meetings.
Management.
Systems managing systems.
Meanwhile, the actual physical world — the tangible reality of making, building, growing, repairing, carrying, walking, photographing — often feels secondary.
And so in many ways, FLUX became my personal response to that feeling.
A desire to reconnect with embodied reality.
To move my body through the world each day.
To walk.
To photograph.
To physically engage with life itself again.
Because ultimately, photography for me is not about escaping reality.
It is about returning to it.