youth, revised
In 2015, while visiting Paris, I made a set of innocuous pictures of local kids playing basketball. Around the same time, I was taking my naïve first steps into commercial photo. Shortly after this Paris trip, I’d publish my photos on social media, and they would garner some clout as “Paris Youth"—two magazines would publish them, and other outlets would share or re-share.
Years would go by, and I'd publish and un-published a handful of websites, flow in and out of commercial work, move house dozens of times—all the while continuing to make photographs. "Paris, Youth" would define me, and new collaborators would reference that series—hinting to say "recreate this". They sought to capitalize on what they thought I was.
Yet, I somehow never measured up to the precedent I set for myself back in 2015. Who I was in 2015, at 17 years old, was wildly more simple than who I am today. youth, revised is my way of reclaiming myself outside of my "youth". So, this collection is a memorial, in some way.
To my mind, it indicates many things: a reconciliation with one's legacy of “youth”; a memorial to Life’s “youngness”—an ability to "be" or "not be" without condition; or a memorial to the essence of Life fragmented and scattered amongst the global-social order, lost in our emphasis on commodity-oriented "being" within techno-capital.