Photography can be a lot of things. But for me, it’s a way of seeing and understanding the world. It’s an extension of a moment or memory trapped in time.

Photography is an entirely sentimental and aesthetic realm; a realm of self-pleasure and fulfilment. In her essay, On Photography, Susan Sontag says:

“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself in relation to the world that feels like knowledge- and therefore power… Photographed images do not seem to be statements of the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.”

Thus, self-pleasure arises out of that knowingness of your surroundings, and the sense of power in being able to capture and appropriate an exact emotion, feeling, memory, or sensory experience attached to that moment— at a specific time, in a specific place.

Currently, I’ve also been using photography as means of deconstructing the form. Just as words come together to form a sentence and then a paragraph, so too can separate parts of an image come together to appropriate a memory. Say, for example, the eye line of the subject in the image or the position of their hand in the frame— to isolate and capture these poetic moments is to imitate what the mind does when absorbing one’s surroundings. To appropriate reality is to ultimately conquer a miniature retained reality.