Double Exposure

Despite many of my favorite historic photographers being into experimentation with different photographic processes, I’ve never had much interest in it. I always felt like that kind of work required the kind of vision that was talked about with “previsualization” or that it needed to be something done with chemicals and darkrooms to have merit.

This way of thinking is something I’m working really hard on letting go of. I’ve let this fear of “not being taken seriously” keep me paralyzed for most of my life. It has shaped the kind of work I permit myself to make and also the ways I’ve permitted my self to work. This runs directly in parallel to other parts of my life, where I’ve often modeled and molded my own behaviors, communication, and habits to fit into an acceptable form.

For a very long time I had to do that because it was legitimately unsafe for me not to. In my everyday life, it still isn’t always safe for me not to actively suppress my personality. Over the past two years I’ve seen my photography as somewhere I can hold onto it, and by working on rooting out that fear here, I’ve gained a better control of the fear elsewhere in life.

I’ve grown in my confidence as an artist a lot in the past several years. I am making a lot more work that I feel is pushing my own boundaries. I feel like that is the hallmark of those times where my work is most satisfying and enduring.