Kin // New York
Kin is a personal project that explores notions of time, home and ideas of family. At the outer-most layer, it’s an attempt to understand what connects people to a given place. But it’s also a way to viscerally consider my own concept of belonging from within a somewhat nomadic existence in an expansive world. I began documenting my life in a moment of significant, unsteady transition, as I hid out with my family in Central New York for a few months. As a way to break from stale routines and shift my perspective, I initially used only the camera I first learned to take photos on, decades earlier in high school.
I tend to dwell a lot on time. As neuroscientist Abhijit Naskar said, “Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space.” Despite its remarkable ability to heal, it can also feel nearly criminal. Knowing its suspended moments can only retreat further into the recesses of one’s mind — and that we’re more or less powerless to stop this slipping — can break our hearts into more pieces than we can count. The more years I spend as a photographer, the more I realize my relationship with the still image is less about the medium itself and more of a compulsive fascination with memory. As a kid, my dream superpower was perfect memory, an ability to recall moments from the past as clearly as they felt in the present. I’ve come to understand that I document the world, in large part, as a way of visually hoarding those memories, both collective and my own.
Kin // New York
Kin is a personal project that explores notions of time, home and ideas of family. At the outer-most layer, it’s an attempt to understand what connects people to a given place. But it’s also a way to viscerally consider my own concept of belonging from within a somewhat nomadic existence in an expansive world. I began documenting my life in a moment of significant, unsteady transition, as I hid out with my family in Central New York for a few months. As a way to break from stale routines and shift my perspective, I initially used only the camera I first learned to take photos on, decades earlier in high school.
I tend to dwell a lot on time. As neuroscientist Abhijit Naskar said, “Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space.” Despite its remarkable ability to heal, it can also feel nearly criminal. Knowing its suspended moments can only retreat further into the recesses of one’s mind — and that we’re more or less powerless to stop this slipping — can break our hearts into more pieces than we can count. The more years I spend as a photographer, the more I realize my relationship with the still image is less about the medium itself and more of a compulsive fascination with memory. As a kid, my dream superpower was perfect memory, an ability to recall moments from the past as clearly as they felt in the present. I’ve come to understand that I document the world, in large part, as a way of visually hoarding those memories, both collective and my own.
