I still remember the first time I picked up my father's camera. It was sitting on a pile of books, letters, his stamp collections, hand crafted chess sets, rubik's cubes, and other treasured things in the walk-in closet at the labyrinthine center of our Morningside Heights home.
That closet was his personal domain. For as long as I'd been alive it was hidden behind a locked door.
This time, with the door open, it was strange mostly for how quiet and normal it felt. The thrill of surprise and wonder at new discoveries I'd expected were still there. But, they were muted in a way I've never fully shaken. It must have been weeks or months since he hadn't come back that morning at the beach in Puerto Rico. Time didn't mean much to me after that... or maybe it was all I could see.
I remember that moment vividly too, in a scene captured in so much detail it's seemed sometimes like my mind is made from film. Standing there at dawn, being all of just barely 4 years old, when I realized the ocean had taken him. But that's a memory for a different story to be shared some other day.
Today is about pictures: moving, remembered, yet to be made, and still.
His devotion to photography passed along to me in scattershot bursts. Sometimes on, usually off, always staccato, and a bit too glitchy for my liking. It's the tracing of trails between candid moments and future memory fragments that catch my attention most. The stories between the stories, put on pause for when I'll need them later.
I've lived most of my life on the road in one way or another since then. This series is a small way for me to trace more of those lines between the moments, places, and people I've met along the way.
I hope that by sharing here I can add another key frame to that process of discovery we all go through in our own ways. To find and create new moments to call home, to learn from the things beyond return, and make new stories in the places where we haven't yet been.