“Today the only works which really count are those which are no longer works at all.” -Theodore Adorno*

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.” -John Berger**

It’s important to film and document what happens, when it happens. It’s important to leave documents of real life instead of curated life, which we’ve all become so used to. We document the happy moments, the milestones, the loved ones. We document so we don’t forget. The bad moments? We want to forget them, but we can’t. We don’t need photos, but what about people outside of our own heads? They need to see it too.

Riots, protests, need photographers and filmmakers. I want to document the quiet protests. The ones going on in houses, huts, tents, refugee camps, work about countries fleed from when they finally got to where they fled.

It’s the quiet I want to preserve and write down. I want to speak for them, not necessarily even out of a political standpoint, but a human one. We all want to leave this planet better than we started, to make our mark. While we with the internet and freedoms have a chance at that, millions don’t. I want to give them a chance to leave their mark and tell their stories.***

It took me a long time to uncover that the mundane is just as important as the other side of our reality. And finally, I came to a place where I believe that the most important work is done in, around, between and among these two worlds. The work of struggle and complacency, fighting against each other, just as those two opposing forces fight against each other all day long. We eat toast for breakfast while listening to the radio. At the very same time, somewhere a child is dying of starvation. Those are indelible aspects of our everyday lives, and I think it’s important to document them both.

The former and the latter are both someone’s realities. We create to ignore, justify, fight, love, hate, question those two differing worlds. For me, creation is just as much an act of salvation as it is an act of education. The mundane and the horrific have different stories to tell, and as such are equally important to take notice of. For years and years I tried to figure out what those two things fascinated me; figuring out their connection opened a whole new world. In their dissonance, they leave a bigger mark than by their isolation.

As for the scar left behind? It’s the emotions that the images themselves evoke as opposed to an actual physical mar. Most scars we can cover by wardrobe or makeup. But, however, when we sit down to create? There’s no makeup or wardrobe to hide behind, the curtain’s open before us, waiting for us to open it wider rather than run away or shut them tight.

*Epigraph from the Introduction of The Object of Performance by Henry M. Sayre.
**Ways of Seeing, by John Berger. (Page 1)
***Something I scribbled down one day at random.