The Dailies
An evolving photography gallery, a place for my thoughts, and my inspirations
Chinatown / Nighttime
Nighttime in Philadelphia’s Chinatown got me praying on luck and hoping for unconventional wisdom.
The act of photography is simple. But photography is anything, but. The world in constant motion: a simple breath, a misstep, or a minute expression. How do you capture emotion in a fraction of a second? Increase the shutter time? Now what about at night, when light is so dim?
I can’t fully anticipate another’s intent; I’d be foolish to think so. But my experiences behind thousands of frames prepare me for the 1/200 of a second of luck; to build a scene before my eye grasps the viewfinder. Hip shots, chest shots, need to be quicker.
Or slow down to capture the remnants of human intervention.
In the past year, my practicing mistakes have led me to the process of understanding this colorful blurred world. Accomplished by many, removing limitations of convention to create a feeling in a frame. “Are, Bure, Boke” - from the living legends like Daidō Moriyama in Provoke, to modern street impressionists like Olga Karlovac. Pushing how far viewers could understand the street by bumping the seconds, or pushing light sensitivity. I haven’t fully embraced an unconventional craft, but one day I hope to define my own - maybe after my millionth frame.
Consciously or unconsciously, the next time you take a shitty blurry photo stamp it as art.
Friendship / Duality
Friendship / Duality - Writings on my photography journey to editing a small collection of photos of Philadelphia's Chinatown
It’s 1am. Silence in the background, just listening to rules and logic wrestle my imagination. I constantly fall in and out of love with every photo on the floor. Then despise my self and doubt my work. Why am I doing this? Who’s this for?
In Chinatown, I wanted to snap photos with romanticism one day, curiosity the next. I photographed with feeling in the rain, then with technique in cruel light. With the backdrop of a changing landscape, I wanted to see the people that live in it. I wanted to fall in and out of love with every subject, living or concrete. An impression of a Wong Kong-wai burnt into my mind, “undying love”, “we were just 0.1 cm apart” or
"The louder the better. Stops me from thinking."
So, I’m publishing the first part of my project Friendship as a virtual gallery, with the idea that this project may never end. Because my hope is that Philadelphia’s small, but rich Chinatown will never either.
