I Didn't Become a Photographer. I Slowly Stopped Being Someone Else.

The story isn't how I became a photographer. It's how I stopped pretending I wasn't an artist.

I’ve told people, and myself, that I became a photographer in 2021. As time passes, that sentence feels less and less true. I never chose to become anything. Instead, I’ve spent my life moving through a series of artistic transformations that only became clear in retrospect. Photography wasn’t so much about the beginning of one life as it was about the gradual end of another. Time would reveal this to me.

Art is a force of nature. It’s a cataclysmic event that brings change with it. For instance, I can’t even say that I ever consciously decided to pursue photography. Up until early 2023, I had a successful career as a production sound mixer, working across film productions, commercial campaigns, and alongside all kinds of talent. The next thing I knew, I was beginning to photograph paid client work. None of it made sense. I was simply pursuing an impulse. Looking back, I think art has always left me little choice in life. It has a way of gradually dismantling one version of your life before you’ve realized another has already begun.

Back in early 2021, I took my first walks with a camera. The city felt strangely suspended. The streets were quieter than I’d ever experienced them. Some storefronts remained boarded up, businesses had disappeared, and walking through the city felt like moving through a desolate town scene straight from a movie. It was both surreal and somewhat beautiful. At the time, I still believed the city was simply passing through a difficult chapter. I couldn’t have known how profoundly the government’s response to COVID-19 would reshape New York City, the film industry I worked in, and ultimately the direction of my own life. Until then, my life had revolved around music, filmmaking, and sound. I didn’t know street photography existed as a genre. All I knew in terms of image making were films. There were no photographers I was trying to emulate and no expectations about what I was supposed to make. I was simply paying attention.

Taking photographs while walking in the cold crisp February air is how I remember one of my earliest walks across the city. I’d stumble upon moments of stillness, isolation, beauty and sadness. My naivete in the field showed me quickly that strangers might spray you with Lysol if you put a camera in their face. That was my first real street photography lesson. To that man’s credit, he actually sparked my interest in photography further when I realized that a camera changes the way people see you.

Art begins as a feeling. And that feeling, when at the height of its power, manifests itself as a sensation of absolute freedom. It is freedom of self, freedom of expression, freedom of movement. Freedom of the mind. Ideas that come don’t only obtain a place to exist; they develop a right to be. Ideas have a way of accumulating. One attracts another until they become something dense and sticky—a goo that’s all but impossible to ignore. The goo becomes so overwhelming that bodies become vessels for creativity to move through. Photography became the outlet. It was of little consequence who I was at the time. Art in the shape of street photography took over. Every day became a new reason to head out and shoot. I found myself walking the city almost every day, photographing it for hours on end. Uptown, downtown, midtown. Daytime, nighttime, every season. Photography infiltrated the fabric of my existence.

It wasn’t until recently that I realized this wasn’t the first time art had reshaped my life. I recognize art as coming in cycles. Each cycle has an apex. Each apex brings a shift in momentum. At every change in momentum, the goo starts building up, taking over as it oozes out of every mental orifice. It feels just like it sounds.

What happened to me with photography in early 2021 was not the first event of this kind, it was just another iteration. Another art cycle taking place, another cataclysm of the self. Film didn’t replace music for me. Nor did photography replace film. Each was simply the latest expression of the same creative impulse finding a new form. A new medium. Now that it’s happened several times in my lifetime, I’ve finally learned to identify it. I didn’t become a photographer. Forces beyond me gathered momentum and as they changed me, I slowly stopped being the person I was before.

This was also no ordinary shift. There was one considerable element that made my latest shift different from previous ones. All through 2020 to late 2022, the collateral effects on social dynamics caused by government shutdowns, social distancing, work from home policies, and vaccine passports, all played a significant role within the shift. Not only did I witness the film industry I worked in pushed to the brink of collapse but my role as a production sound mixer was transformed. Productions started consisting of skeleton crews and new roles came to be such as on-set COVID compliance ‘officers’ with portable PCR-testing machine stations. I remember, and maybe you will too, waiting for the vaccine rollout to get rid of the need for constant testing and masks. But that never seemed to happen. At least not the way I would expect from a common sense perspective. These were the hardest times for me to be working on set. Not only because masks impeded my ability to build real connections with new people but also the physical and psychological exhaustion of being cooped up on a set all day covering your face. This new order required not only proof of vaccination to work but it was mandated that I get swabbed (rapid test) the day before I was to be on set, at the crack of dawn on the day of, and then again upon arrival on set by the production’s compliance unit. By the time I left set each day, I had less energy for the work I was being paid to do, and more desire for the work that was steadily becoming impossible to ignore.

Filmmaking is a craft. It provides a wonderful environment to develop artistically. As for complexity, it’s full of moments where you need to work creatively to find solutions to practical problems. It’s highly stimulating. However, with that part of the industry shut down due to the pandemic I was increasingly called to commercial sets to work with celebrities, influencers, and other prominent performers. However, these sets were no longer the intricate webs that film sets were. They were transactional productions that required very little of me creatively. And with social media on the rise, the work turned simply into high value production content-making. My role there, important as it was, became increasingly less challenging. Photography, which had been a hobby, developed into something much deeper to the point where I started feeling unhappy and creatively stagnant with my current production role. My soul was hungry. At the time, all I knew for certain was that being out photographing in the streets was the only time I didn’t feel lost. Time on set felt endless; on the streets, it nearly disappeared.

By then, the city wasn’t the only thing that felt suspended. So was I. Everything once familiar had shifted. The world had changed rapidly, and so had I. Photography was the one thing keeping me grounded. The more photographs I took the more I started learning about myself. I began to question who I was, where I wanted my life to go, and what kind of work belonged in that life. Every morning I’d wake up with new questions. The biggest question of all was whether I was willing to give up the career I’d spent nearly a decade building for what still felt like a dream. And only through photography was I able to start tracing how I’d gotten to this point. I could finally recognize the person I’d been becoming. I was a detective investigating my own case.

I didn’t become a photographer. Time uncovered someone who had been there all along. I began to understand this the moment I observed the world anew through a viewfinder. What I saw revealed more than just the world surrounding me. It made me realize that for some time I had been introducing myself as someone I had already stopped being. It’s a strange realization that sometimes our lives don’t change in a single decisive moment. Sometimes change only becomes visible in retrospect, the way an image slowly appears during a long exposure.