With Love, The Bedroom Floor was, you guessed it, taken from the floor of my bedroom. While sick with COVID and quarantined in my room last month, I took on the massive challenge of doing a (pre) Spring Cleaning, going through all of my belongings, memories, and highly unnecessary collections of things "I might need someday." For the first four days, I sat on the floor and stared at the same piles of junk—burning painfully bland silhouettes into my brain. Yet, by about day five or six, I began to notice the interesting ways light from my window would hit my closet door in the middle of the day. The time of day I'd usually be at school. Or how the stacks of books and piles of old drawings and papers created exciting textures and shapes. In those long hours of boredom, I had to choose whether to wallow in my solitude or try and change my perspective. Taking this photo at that moment made me realize that in just a few months, I'd be packing my things up and moving across the country. In September, I'd have new piles of junk to look at. I'd have new, painfully bland silhouettes and be starting new collections of unnecessary things. So, With Love, The Bedroom Floor is a farewell to this very sacred and finite time in my life. Never again will I experience this room or this spot on the floor the same. Thus, this image celebrates all the mundane and seemingly trivial things that define my coming of age. And ultimately, as I change and grow and start new chapters, these things in my room will remain steadily the same as a small reminder of who I am and who I would like to become.

Talk Soon Beam is dedicated to my little sister Paloma, but to me, Beam. The name was born out of my inability to say Paloma in my young age of just 20 months when she was born. It started as, “baby ma” then, “Beamah,” then just, “Beam.” 

As I say my farewells to home in Seattle what will undoubtedly be the most tragic is parting ways with Paloma. She has been my photo walk buddy, second eye, and often my subject in the five years since I started taking photos. Thus, I choose to honor her immense role in my artistic journey as I conclude my time at Youth In Focus. 

I tell Paloma to pose as though she is Bigfoot and has just been spotted by the lens of my camera. As a filmmaker I attempt to develop in my photography, an authenticity of life, movement, and perhaps a world within the image. In Talk Soon Beam I channel the coming of age, carefree vibrance of 1980s romantic comedies and the grungy angst of the 1990s and early 2000s. Initially this image was shot on medium format film however I thought the rather intense crop added to the cinematic influence of the image. 

As for the doubling technique seen, it was, to quote Bob Ross, “a happy accident.” I had accidentally moved my paper while working on a test strip for the image and simply couldn’t resist recreating the “mistake” in the final print. 

To my little sister, how lucky am I to have grown alongside you. Talk soon.

‍

These days there seems to be something more to the average things in life. The beautiful things seem incredible and intense, the scary things are even more frightening. I suppose that’s what happens when you stare at bedroom walls and computer screens for the better part of two years. I’ve missed looking at the world as I have in this photograph. I tried to focus on the natural patterns and textures that the Earth has created. By exploring the detail rather than the figure as a whole I am gifted a new perspective that challenges the way our eyes perceive these seemingly average objects. A perspective I never knew a simple tree could give.