Making Space for Ideas

Last time, I wrote about the who of my photography—choosing the people I photograph with intention. Here, I want to think about the how.

I want to make more thoughtful pictures. I love working in tricolor or ultraviolet; those images can be striking and pleasurable. But they tend to stay at the surface. Lately, I’ve felt a pull toward work that carries an idea as well as an image.

Some of that impulse is already present in earlier projects. Closer, the series of platonic friends in nude embraces, began as a response to prolonged social distancing. After months of separation, I found myself thinking: when it’s safe again, I want to photograph bodies pressed together.

Our New Body came from a different place—an extended engagement with modernist painting. Cézanne’s still lifes often collapse perspective, producing tables and rooms that couldn’t exist in the physical world. I became interested in making bodies that functioned the same way: structurally impossible, assembled from multiple images into new forms.

These projects arrived differently, but neither came from nowhere. They emerged through sustained attention—thinking, reading, looking. Time in libraries. Time with photobooks. Following threads of influence, sometimes academic, sometimes intuitive, until something begins to cohere.

This is one of the directions I want to lean into this year: allowing ideas more space in the work, and trusting the slower pace that requires. I don’t yet know what the next project will be. But I’m interested in the conditions that make it possible.