Closer (2019-2022)

These photographs were made across Southern California, San Francisco, Vietnam, and Hawaii between 2019 and 2022—years that span the pandemic and its immediate aftermath, when public life contracted and then slowly reopened. The geographic range is wide, but the concerns are consistent: how people occupy shared space, how they carry themselves when unobserved, what remains visible between moments of event. My eye was drawn to ordinary gestures in public life: people absorbed in tasks, pausing between things, moving through streets with varying degrees of awareness of the camera. Black and white carries most of the work, though color appears where the palette was inseparable from the moment. The photographs reflect a practice in formation, finding that the distance between photographer and subject is not incidental to the work—it is the work. They represent some of my evolving early street photography work.