I remember I got the call while sitting in my British Literature course during my last semester, discussing Zadie Smith’s White Teeth with my rather eccentric professor.

The assistant of a photography magazine in New York called me to tell me that the Editor-in-Chief wanted to schedule an interview with me for an editorial internship.

I remember stepping outside into the hallway and watching the palm fronds tap against the windowpanes as I absorbed this information. I watched their brittle leaves caress the building, dipping in and out of pools of golden light like they always were, as I sunk down onto the warm steps, in shock at the opportunity before me. I would write for that magazine for the next five months.

Those would be, and were, the most turbulent and life-changing months of my life. This was November of 2023. By December I would graduate from college. By January I would sign the lease on a beautiful apartment I had never seen and by January, I would move to New York City. But there was so much contained within these stories. These stories of big decisions that changed my life. They concerned chaos and heartbreak and the incredibly strange affair that was finishing the degree I would have spent forever working on if they would have let me. My entire life was swirling around me and I was anxiously waiting for the dust to settle, trying to control every speck of it that I could.

Amidst all of that, by working for a photography magazine, I was falling into a state of deep fascination. The more I studied them and connected with their creators, the more photos became an increasingly central part of my life.

EVIDENCE OF LIFE

They became these things that I could hold in my hands and hand over as hard evidence for the life I and others have lived. I could look at Melissa Shook’s shots of her young daughter and relate to the inescapable ephemerality of innocence. I could walk through Hellen van Meene’s latest exhibition in Chelsea one night and feel an ache in my bones as I remembered the violent, beautifully haunting affair that was growing up a girl. These images were telling the story of my own life.

Writing has always done that too. I can find whole chapters of myself within the pages of a Plath novel or a Didion essay. But there is something inherently abstract about prose. I had a teacher once who said that there is nowhere to hide in writing and I am realizing now that she was wrong. You can always lurk between the lines. There is always a chosen dichotomy present of what is being said, and what is not. I think the best writing nearly lacks that dichotomy, or at least presents itself that way. I have always felt that my own best pieces of writing were the ones in which I held nothing back. I told the story. I didn’t think about it. The words poured directly from my body to the page as if they were my own blood. We as writers chase those rare moments of total clarity.

But photos presented a new angle, one that could capture so seamlessly what a hundred pages might merely make a dent at.

FALLING IN LOVE WITH PHOTOS

I was working on that internship throughout the entirety of those months, and while it was brutal and unpaid and exploitative, I think it paradoxically grounded me from the mayhem of my own life. The clarity of the photos offered an immediate source of inspiration that I needed desperately. I would get all of these assignments for articles and reviews and interviews that needed to be written and conducted and I would think I was going to explode. And then I would look at the photos I was reviewing. I would study the exhibition, staring into these images that someone made, and everything would fall away. I didn’t know how much photos meant to me until I experienced that.

I wrote dozens of reviews, many of which you can find here if you are curious, and fell more entranced by photography with each one. I got to interview all of these amazing artists about their work, discussing the nuances of each shot and the themes latent in every pixel. I spoke with Abbey Drucker about contemporary feminism and Heji Smith about subverting the male gaze through seemingly perverse exhibitions. I got to pick Astrid Klein‘s brain about her work in challenging perceptions of identity through collage.

I grew close with the other interns, many of which were photographers themselves, learning that images were not the passive, easy art form that I think I always subconsciously believed them to be. I had always loved art, but the photography section of the museum was never what pulled me most. Until then. Images became the most stunning things to me. I could scroll through them for hours. I could pick one and write two pages about it.

NEW YORK

And then I moved to New York. I moved to New York and went through bouts of unemployment where I would spend the days running around the city, snapping photos of it. I knew a photographer who said he didn’t care for capturing New York. He loved the city, but found no originality in taking photos of it. I have thankfully never found that to be my experience. In fact, I find quite the opposite to be true. There is always something that feels entirely unseen about this city despite it’s reputation as a perpetually flooded tourist attraction. I never grow tired of looking through the lens and seeing it on the other side.

It should be said that I am not a photographer. I am a self-professed writer and that is hazardous enough. But taking photos has increasingly become one of the most crucial and meaningful things that I do. I have been rightly accused of being comically quick about snapping shots. I rarely look at what I’m doing, pulling my phone out on impulse throughout the day to capture this or that, saving up a collection of possibilities to sift through later that night.

I was doing just that the other evening when I came across these from the weekend. Taken over the course of the past few days spent between hopping between Brooklyn and Manhattan, they tell the story of this January in New York City. Or, life as of late.

And because I haven’t said it yet—Happy New Year.

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