This site is currently under construction. Though the blog is active semi-daily, the portfolio has been mostly archived and will only showcase newer work—anything done before 2020 will remain offline. As I’m currently working on a variety of new projects, there will be significant updates throughout the fall and winter. (There will also be a regular front page directing to the portfolio instead of the blog, but due to the fact writing is the only really active part of the site right now, I keep it on the front page.)

Anyway, thanks for visiting and hopefully the actual content of the site will be up sooner rather than later.

One project I always loved was The Dissonance Polaroids, an abstracted instant film series I worked on from 2013-2015—three from the original batch can be seen above. I’ve returned to that with a refined conceptual approach and put the first results online to view. I am doing this new volume as four-image sets and will likely update the gallery when five new sets are complete.

Alvarado and Sunset

Alvarado and 8th

I remain intrigued by photographing intersections while I’m waiting on the light—although I will say since moving to Westlake I am amazed at how many people on foot or scooter or bike just do not care about what light is which color at any given time.

HEART Trio tonight at Zebulon

Saw the HEART Trio of William Parker, Cooper-Moore, and Hamid Drake tonight and it’s one of those performances that can’t be put into words. At one point Cooper brought out what looked like a two-by-four with a string lined between two blocks of wood and hit a bass tone so deep that it shook us in the front row. I mean the guy was playing hand-made, one-of-a-kind instruments that looked like they’d been assembled from things found on the side of the road (and some of them were), but damn if these guys couldn’t play.

The show wasn’t sold out, so that means under 300 people in a city of eight million saw this incredible performance. Which is fine, different strokes for different folks. But it’s such a cool thing to live in a place where on any given night I can go to a club and sit in the front row as some jazz legends blow my fucking hair back with some improvisational music that has no counter.

After the show ended the guys talked about the instruments they played and how they related to the history of music and really brought their performance full circle into shifting from hearing those relationships in sound to comprehending them through language. This was music that seemed to transcend the bullshit of the world and tap into something pure. Absolutely wonderful.

Those that didn’t make it

I want to talk a little bit about failure.

This is a photo of the wall next to my desk where I’m currently working on the 2026 edition of my ongoing series, Standing Still In A Storm. I’ve been doing this project for close to 15 years now, with each year the guidelines changing a little bit. The basics remain the same: painted freehand parallel lines in black gesso that are not allowed to touch but meant to get as close as possible to one another. The paper size, border measurements, and brush width vary year-to-year, but the general rules are always the same.

So far, this year I’ve finished 18 pieces—including these six failures. For one reason or another, each of these did not meet the standards I have for the work. On some the ink bled under the tape (an issue I did not discover until the work was already complete and otherwise satisfactory). On some the slightest twitch of my hand caused the black lines to meet at some point. On others the proportions weren’t right and by the time I got to the last line it ended up wider than the brush I’m using. Whatever the reason, these are the failures—one-third of the work I’ve done so far.

I feel like artists online only ever show their successes. The ones who post process videos only do so when the final work is suitable for publishing. Content creators and influencers crop frames and set up shots that don’t actually represent what they’re doing. The rule of advertising is that everything has to be positive all of the time, and the internet has become one big advertisement for life. It’s all success stories, and I wonder how many of them are outright lies.

The thing is, everybody fails. The process of taking inspiration to creation is an arduous one. Yet in a society that demands better results faster, standards lessen, quality drops, concepts fade, and the finished product is cheapened. It’s no wonder those obsessed with capital love AI—it removes all the parts that take time from creativity, but in doing so it also removes everything that makes a creation good.

Failure is important to process. It’s a learning experience, much more so than achievement. By having this entire sect of culture that only shows finished products, it becomes akin to something between a gallery and a mall. The human values have been lost, and it’s not because people don’t fail, but because in the public eye, they’re not allowed to.

I finally saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire—one of my favorites—on the big screen tonight at the Academy Museum’s remarkable David Geffen Theater. It’s incredible how much the theatrical experience made a difference in a film I already loved. The low-light scenes felt intimate and the French coastline was glorious. What changed the most was the sound; I was actually pissed during the first scene because I thought someone nearby was talking, when it was actually from the film itself, a voice passing by in a hallway off-screen. There was the subtle crackle of the bonfire and the brilliant a cappella singing that brought many to tears. Then, of course, there’s the famous Vivaldi scene at the end that hit like ten tons of brick.

Though I’m not there as often as you’d catch me at an American Cinematheque screening at the Los Feliz 3 or Egyptian, I do love going because it’s one of the best theaters in Los Angeles from a purely technical perspective. The sound is impeccable and the red-carpet maximalism really works for it aesthetically. I can even forgive the fact they don’t allow food. What matters most, obviously, is the programming.

Entering the Geffen Theater

Until I moved to Los Angeles, I never really lived anywhere that featured repertory cinema. There were certainly independent theaters, but they’d be showing current films with limited distribution or were festival-circuit type movies. In LA there’s a handful of theaters dedicated to screening films from yesteryear that maybe people haven’t had the chance to see on the big screen or just want to see again. There’s an entire website here dedicated to keeping track of all the films showing across the city. It’s how I watch about 80% of the movies I see these days.

It’s a wonderful thing for many reasons. A few weeks ago I went to a screening of Out of Sight. It was the first time I’d seen it since my dad took me to see it during its initial theatrical run in the summer of 1998. Being able to associate with those memories again, something I otherwise probably wouldn’t think of, is a great thing.

Other times it’s really nice to be in an audience of people who are intentionally seeing a specific movie and are dedicated to a good experience (such as not taking out your phone or talking during a film). People laugh together (or, such as tonight, they cry together). Film is a special form of art that allows for these collective experiences while still being a very individual activity. I love going to the movies alone, because it’s the film that is bonding everyone in the cinema together.

So tonight I got to check another film off a list of something I’ve waited for a long time to see on a giant screen, and it was 100% worth it. There are many things I enjoy about living in LA, and shit like this has to be near the top.