Gallery
The gallery is, in the simplest sense, a repository of photos of mine that I like. But if you’ve read my essays on art, you know that I don’t really approach photography that way. Most of the photos I take are meant to depict something. A majority of them are taken to help me capture and think through things I’m feeling. This is my primary way of processing emotions, good or bad. So the gallery also acts as a journal of how I’m feeling.
These photos aren’t good art, exactly — the purpose is fundamentally not quite that of art. I’m not trying to convey something to you, I’m trying to capture it for me. So some of the photos are somewhat nonsensical and meaningless (I assume — to me they make perfect sense). To mitigate this, along with the photos are brief descriptions of how I see them/why I took them.
I do think there’s still value in seeing a photo in isolation initially, so the text isn’t immediately visible — it comes up when you click on the photo.
Some have titles, some don’t. It doesn’t mean anything.
I am terrible at photography right now (particularly post-processing). I started recently. But I'll get better, I promise!
As a final disclaimer, now that I'm sharing this site with people whose opinions I care about, I want to note that I haven't pushed any of my photos in a while — I promise I'm not quite as bad as these photos would suggest!
6/25/25
Warm summer day vibes :)
This photo isn't great — I was playing around with post-processing — but I don't hate it, which is good.
6/24/25
The lake has a peculiar trait. When you’re cold, it’s cold. When you’re warm, it’s warm. When you’re festive, it is too. When you’re hollow, it’s empty. And when it’s just another day, it’s just another lake.
I was cold today. So I went for a walk to the lake. To be honest, the photo isn’t very good. But the lake — not as a body of water, but as an area, as a scene — was cold. I appreciate it matching my vibe.
This photo is, frankly, not very good. I wouldn’t have taken it just walking past. I spent about twenty minutes sitting on that stump and thinking, and at the time I thought that a shot like this would have been nice. Dynamism from the angled path and knots, adding color to a quiet focus. As it is, though, the “lack of subject” idea doesn’t really pan out — the stump is small and unimportant, even when centered (at least not as important as it should be), and leading lines strongly push the viewer off the right of the frame. I only include this photo because it’s an important part of the story of the day to me.
I felt a lot better once I unpacked how I was feeling. But before then, I took this to capture where I was. I don’t know how to describe it, exactly — reaching for freedom through thorns seems far too melodramatic. Either way, I like this photo. It's not necessarily that well composed, but that’s okay — it serves its purpose. I’m definitely a sucker for natural black-and-whites.
Before 6/24/25
The Safety of Childhood
I took this photo on Juneteenth. It feels reminiscent of paintings of swaddled babies — the pillar is the father, the sun the mother. The three subjects form the only stable line of the shot.
A lot to do — all wonderful — but starting is a daunting thing.
I took this photo when I was first experiencing the mindset, and didn’t understand what it was. I didn’t know how to get back into it, and couldn’t understand a lot of the things I wrote. This photo, to me, is about feeling lost — about simple things not making sense.
I was having a good day, and wanted to depict “satisfied.” I don’t think it’s a very good photo, but I like it — it’s one of the first I took.
To me, this is the antithesis of the telephone pole. It’s about clarity and agentic behavior. But it seems to mean something different to everyone who sees it, and frankly, it doesn’t do a great job of capturing what I meant it to anyway.