Commercial Work
Personal Projects
Commercial Work
Personal Projects
A selection of my personal photographic projects over the years.
My style has naturally shifted with time — in both subject matter and technique — but one thing has stayed the same: I’m drawn to moments, people, and places that feel singular.
Nostalgia has always been a quiet undercurrent in my life. Photography has become a small, personal way of leaning into that feeling. It lets me linger a bit longer; helps me make peace with time.
POLAROIDS
Anthology Series
It started with an old SX-70 someone handed me years ago. It looked like a relic, something rescued from the bottom of a drawer. I loaded a pack of film and pressed the red button. The camera sighed, and a white square slid out. I didn’t know it then, but I’d just found a new way to see. Digital had made me impatient. Everything fast, bright, and polished. You could take a thousand pictures in a day and still not remember any of them. Polaroid was the opposite. It made me wait. It punished hesitation, rewarded instinct. There’s no second shot, no undo. You choose, you commit, you watch time and chemistry decide whether you were right. The first months were chaos. Half my frames were ruined, underexposed, blurry, burned... The colors bled like old postcards. Every photo was a small argument with the universe: you try to trap a moment, and the moment fights back.
People react differently to that camera. When you raise it, they pause. They stand straighter. They understand that what’s about to happen will exist in the world. They look at you like they’re being seen for real. I began carrying the Polaroid everywhere. Shoots, dinners, long drives through the desert. The camera became a companion. Polaroids changed with time, fade, warp, lose their balance. I like that. On commercial sets, the SX-70 is a strange guest among the cables and lights. When the print slides out, everyone stops. The assistants, the stylists, even the client... silent for a few seconds, waiting for the picture to appear. That silence feels holy. One of my favorite photos is from a gas station outside Barstow. A woman smoking, the wind catching her hair. The film was cold, and the colors turned strange; blue skin, violet sky. It looked nothing like what I saw, but everything like what I felt.
I’ve shot hundreds of them by now. Some live in boxes, others in the hands of people I barely know. A few have vanished entirely. The film stock itself is mercurial. Too hot and the colors melt into honey. Too cold and everything turns the color of the moon. Each pack carries its own personality, its own bias toward pinks or blues. The factory tries to standardize them, but they never fully succeed. You press the button, and the circumstances answer back: sometimes kind, sometimes cruel. You can’t fake your way through it. If you’re impatient, it shows. If you’re overthinking, it shows. The process demands faith.
hgh
The Polaroid camera has a way of introducing me to the right people at the right time. There was the night in LA when I ran into a girl named Angela outside a bar in Echo Park. She asked what camera I was holding. I told her it was a Polaroid, and she said she’d never seen one work in person. I took her picture under a neon sign that said Vicious. The photo came out crooked, her face half lit, half swallowed by blue. She laughed and said, “That’s exactly how I feel.” We became friends after that. We still joke that the camera picked her for me, not the other way around. It’s like a small, unreliable compass that points toward connection.
Each still carries its own fingerprint, and the distance between photographer and subject bonds by chemistry. I liked that Susan Sontag once called the Polaroids “a handy, fast form of note-taking.” That line feels exactly right. I’ve never thought of them as art objects, not really, but as fragments of thought: quick, imperfect observations before the world shifts again. Sometimes they’re sketches for a future image; sometimes they’re the only version that matters. I use them the way writers use a notebook, to trap a tone, a color, a feeling before it disappears. Later, when I look back at them, I can trace where my head was...
I think I’ll keep taking the Polaroid with me when I travel. I’d like to photograph more strangers; people I meet by chance, people I’ll probably never see again. I want to keep using it that way, as a reason to start conversations, to sit somewhere longer, to look a little closer. But I don’t want to keep building a loose map of faces and places with no direction. I want to start shooting with more intention, maybe think in terms of a series, something that connects the images... Not just collecting moments, but following an idea until it becomes something larger.
.hhhhhh
Channelling my inner Roland Barthes, I’d argue that in a Polaroid the punctum is magnified by the very instability of the medium. The studium belongs to intention, but the punctum belongs to chance, and in Polaroid photography, chance becomes the co-author. Every still exposes the limits of control and the fragility of representation.
.
.