I was paired up with writer Sheila Heti, a favorite of mine, to make photos that were in conversation with her project, “Alphabetical Diary”. She took diary entries from a 10-year period of her life, digitally alphabetized all sentences A-Z and created new entries. This project collapses time while expanding on a portrait of Sheila by her current self made up of her past selves. This project questions the truth behind record keeping and the fiction behind the self through deconstruction and reassembling.

A Diary in Alphabetical Order

Vieques, Puerto Rico

"The body is the medium for LGBTQ+ dancers—a prism through which to tell their stories, to demonstrate lives worth living in an often hostile world. Yet dance remains a bastion of heteronormativity, often reinforcing gendered, patriarchal norms. As LGBTQ+ bodies continue to be the focus of politics and legislation, these dancers’ work becomes prescient, inviting us to reimagine what it means to exist in the human form—and by extension, the social structures like race and gender that seek to govern it." - Coco Romack on our book 

 which looks at queer artists using movement across twelve chapters. You can order the book 

Dance

Portraits 

I experimented with addition and erasure of light by using layering and fragmentation and created an impossible space, made possible by the use of the camera. Utilizing an analog film camera ensured that aspects of the final image were left up to chance, enabling me to test the boundaries within the photographic medium. This way of building information denies the viewer an unobstructed view. Instead of capturing one moment in time, I captured several over the course of a few minutes, reframing the concept of “the moment”.

Now, Now

Zeit Magazin // Holocaust survivor Ruth Muschkies Webber shot for a story on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

Ruth Webber for Zeit Magazine

In “Almost Touching,” hands are severed, faces are missing, and the texture of skin is submerged in color and shadow. To me, these images mirror the logic of getting to know others. So often, we say the opposite of what we mean and truth emerges from the margins.  My work inquires about how we see and know others, and how we reveal ourselves to strangers, lovers, and friends while simultaneously questioning what authenticity means to one’s own identity.

“Almost Touching” is full of missed connections and misleading invitations. Like people, photographs begin to reveal themselves only when we identify their illusions. For this reason, skin and materials work together to trouble the surfaces of the images. Though “Almost Touching” is a body of work that strives for intimacy, it offers only clues and intimations: disembodied limbs and unmet gazes. But you don’t need to meet a person’s eyes to know something about them—anonymity does not render a body inexpressive. We know this intuitively from our relationships to others: vulnerability rarely comes in the form of a declaration—rather, intimacy emerges from the interplay of what is shown and what is concealed.

Almost Touching

Sheila Heti for Zeit Magazine

Beach Reads

Slime for New York Times

Jacob Riis Beach has been known as a queer haven in Queens, NY since the 1940s. The conditions that allowed for this place to become what it is stem from its location: the undesirable periphery of the Neponsit Hospital. At its core, 

 is a time capsule that aims to capture the people who visit this beach, as well as the remnants of violence, destruction, celebration and resistance dotted along the landscape.

The Neponsit Hospital, which was abandoned for over two decades, provided a sene of safety and a literal physical barrier. Having been demolished in Spring 2024, questions surrounding the future of this queer enclave have arisen.  

Through what’s washed up to shore like seaweed, dead jellyfish, shells and foam and then retreats back into the water, the ocean is a place in which the passage of time feels especially present. Sand has been eroded, reformed and in constant movement for millenia, creating this consistent reset. Sand lends itself to a malleability, for which its been exploited to advance projects dealing with capital and growth, but something this work questions is how much nature can truly be controlled.

In the same way that meiosis, a biological process that is simultaneously generative and destructive, creates new cells through tearing itself apart in order to lead the way for the next cells and generation, the conditions that allowed for this queer beach to exist are being torn down and replaced by something new. This doesn’t mean the queer haven will cease to exist – instead it will regenerate because ultimately queerness is the process of shapeshifting. For the past eight decades, functioning on the margins meant finding pockets of liberation amongst ruins in this constantly shifting shoreline.

This tension of simultaneous addition and eradication of land is at the crux of this project. The violence at the center of the building’s slow erasure is intertwined with the uninhibited freedom and joy that beachgoers experience. 

 speaks to tenderness, sexuality, intimacy and resistance inside of a larger story that aims to disassemble or disrupt that.

The People's Beach

Phile Magazine

Eartheater for Subbacultcha

Faces Places

When asked, in early October 2022, to make a portfolio for a magazine that centers on food, I hesitated initially. Though historically I've been a person who is elated by seeing, smelling, tasting, making, and consuming food, this request arrived at a particular moment when suddenly I wasn't, where my relationship to food transformed into a tool solely used for survival. With the absence of my familiar connection to food, it felt pointless to make photos of it, but then I realized, perhaps it was the best time. The anti-food photography photograph — it felt like a rebellion: a boring picture of a boring piece of toast, with 1-3 ingredients on it.

It was a daily practice I was capable of holding onto. Repeating itself ad infinitum, the act of documenting my toast every morning became some strange form of intimacy. There is something about the mundane, the quotidian, that’s always seduced me — after all, that’s where everything ultimately stems from, right? By utilizing the Polaroid as my tool, the white bordered square frame lent itself to sameness, echoing the repetition of the daily toast. The toast and Polaroid function in a similar fashion — because of their immediacy, there’s a slight chance inherent to their roles, with variations in color, tone, vignetting and ingredients.

I had just gone through one of the more harrowing transitions in my life and for several months, I don’t think I went shopping for anything other than bread, butter, eggs… and the occasional green if I was feeling particularly less maudlin (as my 91-year old Bronx grandma would say) that day.

At home in solitude, I was only a witness to myself, no one around to mirror or bounce off of. I’ve forever been obsessed with identity and what makes us “us”, or if that’s even a thing to begin with. We are informed by the people around us — would the idea of a self image even exist if it weren’t for consumption, being witnessed and needing to respond to the energy of others around you? How did I get here from toast? How could I not?

Heartbreat Toast

By the Water

Polyamory for New York Times

Dover Street Market Market Monolithic Magic

at The Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, 2019



Installs

Bath Houses for The New Yorker

Deli Girls for Subbacultcha

Dyke March for Vogue

is made up of photographs that capture viewing panels of construction sites in New York City. In 2013, the city instituted a law in which the emerald green plywood walls surrounding each site required a square, diamond, triangle or circle cut out of it in order to provide transparency to passersby. Images of overgrown weeds seen through hazily graffitied plexiglass, chain link fences and metal bars and remnants of human presence behind these makeshift “windows”, urges viewers to investigate these boundaries, and stop to look deeper into something that blends into the landscape of the everyday.

Construction sites are a space of dismantling and rebirth. These photos are markers of a time and place, taking a final look at the space between destruction and regeneration, between neglect and luxury. While the viewing panels are a small part of the development of the city, the repetitive nature of the photographs speaks to a much larger story about transformation in New York. Photographed at various stages of demolition and construction, the viewing panels become portals to the boundary between public and private through the obstruction of the wooden walls. They become voids: the erasure and envelopment of space.

The Views

40 Years in the American Landscape for J. Crew

In July of 2012, my partner at the time and I embarked upon a two and a half month-long backpacking trip across Morocco, Turkey, and several European countries with the intention of creating a book of photographs. What emerged from the pictures became evidence of each others’ perspective on our own relationship between one another, comfort and discomfort, curated experiences versus self-created ones, and expectation versus actual experience. Throughout the trip, the only consistent form of structure was the company of one another. Time became elastic and weeks departed from what our knowledge of a “week” meant. 