saunter ii.
I'm bringing bokeh back, but saying goodbye to Lily </3 Photos I took in February, 2026
After getting a bit of existential dread out of my system in our last walk together, I finally feel like I’ve moved through a bit of creative catharsis for the first real time in nearly two years. I have a fire under my ass and a chip on my shoulder, this has helped move things along for sure, but when reflecting on the month I keep returning to a rather tender lesson…
one: art is the friends you make along the way
I learned, or remembered, in February 2026 that creating with my friends is not just something I enjoy doing, it’s an absolutely essential part of my creative practice.
I met Lily not too long ago. We really only became friends in the months where she already knew she would be leaving us for Valhalla (New York City) at the end of February. Maybe that’s what made the friendship so easy, there was no pressure to commit to anything long term. Also Lily has infinite aura. Anyways, you know how hard friendships are in LA— you make dinner plans or whatever and both parties continuously cancel last minute until the very thought of this person is only a vague figure behind an opaque film of guilt and anxiety crystalized by the countless canceled appointments.
In a rare and beautiful arch, Lily and I made it out of this stage of purgatory rather quickly. Within a month, we found ourselves hanging out often. I don’t know if she knew how creatively vulnerable I was at this time. When I asked her to go out and shoot with me in February, it was the first time I had asked anyone to meet up and model for me in a really long time…
It’s one thing to say ‘being an artist is vulnerable,’ it’s another thing to live through that vulnerability and understand why that statement is true. It’s because a lot of the time it’s actually just really embarrassing.
It means having shitty ideas and saying them anyways. It means pitching to a group of people and hearing crickets on the other end, it means getting home at midnight after a shoot and panicking over the fact that what you captured just wasn’t that great. I take a LOT of bad pictures. It means sharing that same work anyways because you have to. It means dying on muddy hills for bad ideas. It means accidentally giving up great ideas and regretting it. It means spending countless hours of time, endless energy and money you don’t have producing an inherently narcissistic vision with zero promise of return (financially, emotionally). It means trolls on the internet calling your work AI slop, overly sentimental, fake deep internet art. It means being authentically embarrassed you even care enough to read them (i don’t by the way…).
All of this “…being an artist…” shit is of course me talking about a very narrow vision of what that means. What I mean by “being an artist” in this context is someone who has made the ambitious attempt at making a living off of their art in a place like Los Angeles…or a place like the internet. I know this sense of the term is so narrow, but still…it’s a role to play in this world and I am filling it for the time being.
I’ve become so disillusioned by the habits of this role, that I have forgotten how to make art. I finished my last big collection “MidAmerican Fever Dream” and the first thing people ask is “what’s next?” I don’t fucking know! Should I have known?
Two years pass and I realize I am trying to force myself to produce ONLY “great” work. How was I doing this? By sitting at home and endlessly plotting through tired ideas that never catch wind. You need to go outside to catch wind, typically. But I wouldn’t. I was frozen.
In truth… I was afraid, horribly afraid, of creating bad work. Or mid work, which we all know can somehow feel worse. So I would avoid creating, stuck in a perpetual state of contemplation. What I was actually doing in this cycle of avoidance was strangling the sensitive, intuitive, and embodied side of myself that creates great work because she’s bored sitting at home in front of the computer. The side of me that creates because it’s fun, cathartic, personally meaningful. Because it connects me to people and the earth.
At some point, I realized I had grown extremely isolated, lonely, and rigid in my creative practice. I knew all of this, but didn’t know how to break out of it. It was too much to ask someone into a creative space where I didn’t know what the outcome would be. All this exacerbated by having moved from my home and some of my closest friends in Rockford, Illinois to Los Angeles. All of the momentum I had been building in the quiet, contemplative patterns of a midwestern forest among people who I could deeply trust was abruptly stopped by the thrashing of concrete freeways and endless acquaintances.
It takes courage and vulnerability to get in front of a camera. I don’t ask people to do it lightly. I share in the vulnerability because what we end up capturing is usually some mix between who they are and what I, through the narrative or composition, have projected onto them. Sometimes I hop in the image too! Often when I create scenes, the content is inspired by live dialogue about the subject matter, often leading to vulnerable topics and finding new ways to relate to one another and the scene.
It gives the images a sense of closeness and vulnerability that otherwise would be difficult to express. I need people I can trust to create artwork. People who are fluid, expressive, casual, and who trust me back. Because for me, creation isn’t a solitary practice, its collaborative and alive with connection. It’s about feeling that connection and responding to it. Lily was so fun to capture because she jumped in, shared a story about a birthday or two, and accessed that place vulnerably wearing it on her face unattached to the outcome. Not everyone is willing to go there, but to those who are, like Lily, I’m incredibly grateful.
Bye Lily, I’m going to miss you.
two: im bringing bokeh back
A goal for myself this year is to dive into new styles and techniques so I don’t get bored. Pretty much my whole time photographing in this four years, I’ve avoided bokeh like the plague. It’s sort of a taboo sensibility for me because it got really tired in the early instagram era.
I’ve clung to a style which leans on an extremely deep focus as a way of creating a sort of flattened sense of space where the viewer has focus on almost everything in frame, like the image below.
But recently I’ve been thinking about the camera as a tool that has its own affect, and I realize there’s something beautiful about bokeh in that when we see it, it’s reminds us that the image has been captured through a lens, that the lens has been focused to a specific place, and that place is where something or someone stood and was observed. It communicates intention, space, and physicality. A tender subjectiveness. While shooting with Lily, I experimented with shallow focus and ended up loving one of the shots (Bokeh Experiment 1).
These color studies of a portrait of my friend Gustavo dive into a more impressionist style I’m really interested in exploring this year. I love the palpable texture and obscurity, while also knowing and “feeling” that the figure is looking directly at you. The bokeh off his glasses give the impression of alien eyes. All around fun form to explore.
BUT, what I really wanted to dive into was a sense of nostalgia…why? Because it’s the salve to my sunburnt ego.
I went to Pinterest to remind myself of the bokeh era I remember (circa 2012-2015). I was astounded by the visceral response I had to recognizing a series of images from my tumblr feed over a decade ago. It’s like when you see a screenshot from a 2015 instagram grid and realize that time passes through us like wind through a canyon, changing every cell in our body and somehow remaining the same.
Tumblr radicalized me out of a republican, evangelical perspective throughout high school. It was the writers, artists and curators there that slowly opened my mind to a greater world of perspective when I had no access to it in the embodied world at the time. I’m deeply grateful for them. In their honor, I will continue to explore how to use bokeh in interesting ways.
Thank you to Fox who bore with me in exploring a different pace and style of shooting while also trying to capture a bit of story. This birthday series I’m casually working on hasn’t found an end yet…and Fox has become one of my favorite characters.
three: im an evening primrose
This last section is going to be mainly just my favorite images I shot while in Anza Borrego, California this month during the blooming of the desert wildflowers. Watching the landscape oscillate through a new season, following pollinators as they navigate times of desert abundance, being struck by a waxing moon as it glides across waning lakes. Learning from friends. Letting go of myself.
My greatest moments of joy and transformation are in months like these, where I get to be with people I love in natural places and create out of sheer love of the game.
I would love for this blog to become a place for dialogue around the themes, places and characters I contemplate in my work. Please comment pieces and topics that resonate with you!
Bring back bokeh! I really like the “Gustavo at the bar” pieces
🫶