On some Texan Days
Back into Photography
At age 14-20, I connected to photography and videography in a very emotionally complex way. At the time, it felt like exploration, a fun game of hide and seek. I found a thrill in exploring different shots, concepts, and ideas, twisting the static world and making it my home in a part of my brain that only and only I could see. However, those explorations became fussy, cluttered, and unrecognizable through the years. The concepts became rules, profit, deadlines, and algorithms. Stability handicapped my quest for exploration. It debilitated my mind and refused to let me wander in blissful unhabitable places that only my mind could walk through. Then in October 2022, on a very adventurous fast trip to the state of Texas, I rediscovered some things: 1.) A horizon of the sun I have never seen before. 2.) The dried air of the habitat around a cactus. 3.) The field's vast openness as the birds chirped. 4.) And the empty walls of a construction site. At that moment, I felt 14 again. I found my mind wandering into a small space of that unhabitable place I had long lost. On those days on that Texan trip, I found a piece of myself. I rediscovered a part of me that wanted to document the little spaces in my mind where they wondered, explored, discovered, and felt sorrow and joy. And this is when I realized I wanted to return to photography and videography in its most complex form. Not to take beautiful pictures, not to bring incredible, exciting, artistic photographs. But to capture with the camera the tiny spaces in my brain that have made me feel alive in different dimensions.