Boomtown

This picture-making obsession revolves around my relationship with time. Specifically — the desire to pause. The camera can pause time unlike any other instrument. I attempt to amplify the pause through the form of a print. The photographic pause has the potential to crack open the micro moment, in that one time and one place, and invites us to contemplate the macro. I began making this body of work — Boomtown — as a first year student at the San Francisco Art Institute. Having lived in other cities during their own periods of boom — from dot-com New York to pre-olympic Beijing and Shanghai, the energy in San Francisco felt familiar. Indeed cities do change — constantly. Yet in Boomtown, that change can feel particularly forceful. In San Francisco, a city of less than 47 square miles, the energy of change is far more compressed and accessible. What can one San Francisco street corner, in one micro moment, reveal about the plight of the city? The pause brings me closer to some kind of understanding. And what can that same photographic moment also forever fail to reveal? The pause can create more questions than answers. This paradox is the space of picture-making I continue to live in.