I stepped away from the journal until recently, as you may seen.
I mean, maybe it wasn’t a pause so much as a quiet 'stretch of space' that I didn't realize I needed, uh, if you will. The kind where things are still happening, just not being...named? Not being translated yet? But I digress.
Back in the studio recently with Briana Noir here in Houston. Same environment in a literal sense, but it didn’t feel quite the same. You know, a subtle shift in the tools, in the pacing really, in the way I’m like seeing things before they even exist. New gear, yes, but more than that, a slight reorientation of a sort. No, not a departure. Just a recalibration of instinct that has been there all along, is what I am seeing it as.
Now, this new set circles around a very familiar visual language. That commercial, almost archetypal idea of 'sexy.' Denim, skin, physique, beauty, the suggestion of attitude more than the declaration of it. It’s a language that’s been spoken loudly for decades, if perhaps sometimes to the point of exhaustion. And yet, it still has room. Or at least, we keep finding a way to make room inside it; because here we are.
I think what interested me here wasn’t in trying to coerce or reinvent that language, but speaking it more quietly from my side and allowing Bri to channel what needed to be channeled. By letting small shifts do the work. A turn of her hip that feels less posed and more remembered. A gaze, a reflective glance, a powerful lookaway, that doesn’t demand attention so much as it withholds it. There’s something about restraint that starts to feel louder than the obvious, if you let it.
Lighting has been part of that conversation of course. I’ve been moving through some slightly different approaches this year. Nothing that would read as dramatic perhaps from the outside, but enough to change how the image breathes for me. Paying more attention to where the light disappears rather than where it begins. Letting falloff do a bit more storytelling, if I may be so bold as to suggest. It’s less about revealing everything directly, cleanly or derived, and more about deciding what gets to remain just out of reach.
It feels familiar, sure, but not in a stagnant way. More like revisiting a place you’ve seen for years and noticing details you somehow – missed – before? I dunno man.
And then there’s, of course, Bri.
At some point, collaborations stop feeling like collaborations in the traditional sense. The lines blur. The translation between photographer and subject gets faster, yet quieter. There’s less explaining, less negotiating, more recognizing. We’ve been shooting together for 7 or 8 years now, and it doesn’t feel like a timeline as much as it does a layering. Each project sits on top of the last, informing the next without needing to reference it directly.
There’s a kind of trust there that’s hard to articulate without sounding dramatic, so I won’t try that hard. But it’s the kind that lets things unfold without forcing them. And that tends to be where the more interesting moments live. Almost as if the work creates itself, and I am along for the ride (if you'll allow me that tired cliché here).
We have more coming, too, to be clear. Not trying to divine some manufactured “big announcement” energy here. Just in the sense that the work keeps asking for itself, and I intend to listen.
At the same time, I can feel something else pulling at the edges too, because you know, natural light exists and I miss working with it more and more this year. Not just as a contrast to studio for shits and giggles, not as some corrective shift, but as another extension of the same conversation. A different dialect, perhaps. Less controlled, more reactive? Or at least, reactive in a way that asks for a different kind of attention than hyper-controlled studio work does. But again, I digress.
No conclusions yet. Just directions.
It feels good to be in that space again.
