At first he thought he found it in the corner of her smile or in the smell of her hair or the way her breast felt rising beneath his hand with each breath as they slept.
But he grew weary of such beautiful things.
He began to question.
She became impatient.
He thought he found it again after a brief drunken moment pissing in an alley when the moon cast his shadow along the bricks and the city fell silent.
And once more during a quiet moment alone high up on a mountain somewhere in the southwest, breathlessly watching the sun paint a final stroke of orange against a snow-capped peak in the distance.
But these were lies.
And when he finally realized it wasn't there, he began to wander away and into the darkness somehow beckoning.
Being alone seemed the only way and he took the emptiness as meaning and the emptiness took him as prisoner.
But still he searched.
And it finally came to him while curled on the floor of his living room, after debating through tears if he really meant anything to anyone besides his own flesh and blood. Questioning if he really ought to exist at all when every breath felt like an unworthy waste.
And there he realized he had found it.
It wasn't the happiness he needed.
The happiness was a salve.
He needed the pain.
To let it become him and he it. To go within it and emerge on the other side. Because the pain was as much a necessity to him as air.
It made him.
And he would breath it every day for the rest of his life.
And he would learn to find it within himself.
In the corner of his own smile.
This is a series that I never intended to make. Burned out and nearing thirty, I decided to re-calibrate many things in my life. After breaking up with a long-term girlfriend, I moved into the cheapest apartment I could find and lived alone for the first time since my early twenties. Thankfully I started going to therapy but the progress was slow and, being in an on-and-off relationship with dating apps, I was constantly wrestling with loneliness and self-worth. I spiraled hard into depression.
Not knowing what else to do, I reached for my camera and started asking friends if I could take portraits of them, mostly out of a desire for companionship. Soon, I found a small community of friends and models and began shooting like crazy, rarely with any concept in mind other than trying to express and ease my existential dread. The constant stream of creative exploration was chaotic, vibrant, and fun and exactly what I needed. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was documenting my battle with depression. I was channeling my struggles with intimacy, loneliness, and isolation.
When I look at these images together, I get an overwhelming sense of something that I don’t think can be articulated in words - something about collective listlessness and frustration and loneliness. There is some collective unscratched itch that haunts the individuals in these frames. Some desire for something deeper than the fleeting attention of a lens pointed in their direction. Something more akin to a collective yearning for love. To love and to be loved. Not necessarily romantically, but wholly, intimately, and comprehensively. Through making these images, I learned something about friendship and what it means to love oneself.
