From the Archive

One of the goals of Limits of Language was to go through my archive to share photographs from my early work. When I first started making photographs, I had a few primary interests, one of which was portraiture (we’ll get to the landscape and street photography soon).

Boys and men have always been a primary subject for me, with the goal of the portraits being to reveal or better understand a brief moment of their masculinity. This may be displayed through their pose or clothing, their relationship to the setting, or an action they are taking. You can see this most clearly in my portraits of Chris and Rich, and more subtly in Men on Broadway, and of course, my own self-portraits. Quite honestly, this theme of understanding how boys and men experience masculinity has continued to run through my clinical work as a social worker and now as a researcher.

This theme began in the early days of my photography journey, around 2006, when I started my BFA at the School of Visual Arts. Like any art school student, I used my peers and friends as subjects, which I was lucky to have such dynamic young men in my life at the time. Looking back, I hope these images do justice to our younger selves as we began our journey into manhood and finding out who we were going to be as men. Here are a few of the photographs:

You can see all the photographs in the new gallery in the Photography section of my site, entitled “Early Works: Young Men”.

As an aside, I truly miss making photographs in film. There is nothing better than the quality, texture, and character of film photography. Not to mention photographing with my Hasselblad 501cm and the square format.