Thesis STATEMENT

During the exploration of learning and loving Photography, my work changed and shifted rapidly. The lens was always a place I came back to.  I remember my dad bringing me along to band practice growing up in Pasadena and Sierra Madre.  I’d lay on the floor by the bass drum and be bored out of my mind. My dad played in an R&B band that would cover Motown classics and soul. He exposed me to a vast spectrum of music from a young age, and challenged my ear constantly. He never “made it” as a musician you could say, but there was never an option to ignore music. It was weaved into everything.  It became something that has thrilled me all my life. To live alongside it, to play it, to listen, to experience. There became a need to capture it.

 Through my teenage years in and around Los Angeles, I spent countless nights finding all ages underground indie shows that were anywhere from $2 to $5 entrance. I became so entranced by these artists. So many of them were my friends. I watched so many of them become great. I started photographing these shows and experiences in a keepsake fashion on my mom's 1990s 35mm film camera. It quickly became a huge part of me, and gave me this purpose or place in the music.

I craved this touch of nostalgia in everything I photographed as it gave me this sense of home. Nostalgia for a time I never lived to experience, but was always in my ears and such a large portion of the physical media I consumed through my youth.  I have always had a deep admiration for the performer. Maybe a part of me wants to feel what they feel. Remembering being so young and having my walls covered with posters of  bands and musicians covering even my ceiling. Music was always something that took over my whole being. The music scene is home to many elements of the soul. The escape, the connection, the passion, the thrill. The lifestyle, the experiences that are fleeting between you and around you. Falling in love with sonic waves and the person behind it, adhering to the persona they build. 

Finding a way to capture this element of the soul has been an ongoing quest that's developing through remembering my childhood and in a sense paying homage. I struggled as a Photographer to understand my role and capture the feeling that music had given me all my life from a perspective that was entirely different from the commercial world of Music Photography. I struggled to separate this commercial or label standard way of capturing the show from the real thrill of it, and what the music makes me and so many others feel. I was drawn to the way musicians were captured on every album cover of these vintage records I grew up with, in the vinyl sleeve, the CD books. So many of these highly artly forward covers and connecting those elements with the keepsake fashion of my family photos drew me to look deeper. 

 I wanted to photograph in the way I felt nostalgic for. I started this series on a disposable Kodak camera and a 1980s Polaroid in an effort to see things differently or interact with the artists in a different way than before. I was drawn to the way that the Kodak disposable and smaller cameras brought people to life. When I lugged a DSLR around with a heavy flash, it was like something changed between us, there’s a certain guarding that happens.  I quickly switched over to a canon point-and-shoot to capture the later part of this series. I am continually looking for ways to bridge that gap of connection and to capture this in-between space that sustains somewhere between the personal and the commercial. This series is nowhere near its final form, and something I hope to continually grow over the years working in the music industry and alongside it. Deepening my grip on understanding where my role is and where I come into the work in those elements, and why it feels so urgent to capture.