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.
2024 mummers parade
2024 Mummer’s Parade
It’s 2024. My first blog ever. The first week of the year. I find myself reflecting on the first day of the year, Mummers Parade.
Photographing the streets is so interesting, especially during city-wide events like this. These are main characters. I am just a participant in their story, but I come home with a millisecond frame of their life and I take that with me forever. Maybe every photographer comes across this thought right before that first frame taken for the day.
I love capturing the chaos. I involve myself as much as they allow me, smile, click, and maybe converse. I’m then forgotten.
One person yelled at me “either take my photo or not, don’t be secretive about it”. So blunt, but I’m just trying to see if I could frame the confetti flying over your head but got there 2 seconds too late.
A group of old Mummers told me to take a photo of them, then immediately waved off and chatted away. A young boy in renaissance jester costume asked for a photo and asked where he should stand; then ran off to his friends. I think about these moments often, why did they ask for a photo anyway? I often think about the excerpt from Diane Arbus when I get lost in this thought:
[…] But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.
Diane took photographs in the last mid-century. Now we’re nearly 100 years later. Still seeing this “license” being incredible proficient in the day of phones.
