In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes writes that, “Photography transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, into a museum object.” Considering the years I myself have spent photographing people—whether at events, through formal portraiture, in fleeting passing moments on my phone, or even myself—I have on few occasions stopped to think about the politics of that practice. As humans of the digital age, we wield high-technology cameras in our pockets, and that enables us to memorialize—or museumify, in a Barthesian sense—any person or scene we come across, often without explicit consent of the object of our gaze. The photographer, therefore, is someone charged with power. 

Over the years, I have grown infatuated with two things: 1) photographing strangers, and 2) photographing people I know in moments of vulnerability. This distinction between public and private being has always been of deep interest to me: what limitations are placed on people in public spaces of high surveillance, and how do people open up in comfortable and intimate spaces? Barthes also notes that in the process of being photographed, one “experience[s] a micro-version of death…becoming a specter.” This distinction may be pointless, then, recognizing that the public photo captures a subject in an already inauthentic state, and the private one makes an intimate moment public and unexceptional through its capture. That then begs the question: why photograph at all? While it’s frightening to know we can be captured and watched by any lens at any moment, there is another way to frame this conversation: cameras equally have the power to subvert, liberate, and empower.

Critically considering both subject autonomy and photographic agency—and power and powerlessness—I have become all the more thoughtful of what, who, and when I photograph, and the medium of film photography has forced me to slow down even more.

Portfolio project completed under Keavy Handley-Byrne at the Rhode Island School of Design. Shot on 35mm and Medium Format black and white film. Images are digitally retouched.