Studio Notes: December

Back to Photography

My first MFA semester at Columbia has wrapped up, and I’m left digesting what’s been a whirlwind semester and year. Life seems to have a particular knack for throwing the good and bad at you all at the same time and 2025 was certainly that for me.

And yet as always, I found meaning through artistic creation. Art is and always has been continuously devalued and underappreciated — the artist sometimes seen as crazy, egotistical, a lunatic — sometimes misunderstood, scorned. For me being an artist is less about making money from your art (that’s a bonus) and more a philosophy towards creation, a relationship with art and artists, a conversation with the world around you.

American singer and activist Harry Belafonte is quoted as saying: “We believe that artists have a valuable function in any society, since it is the artist who reveals the society to itself”.

When done right, it can also be a resistance towards commodification, leading even Trotsky and Breton, in their “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art”, which was a rebuke of Stalin’s USSR, to write that the artist is a natural ally of the revolution.

---

In my last Studio Notes I wrote about screen-printing and image-making, and at what point a photograph loses itself and transforms into something else. The line is more blurred than I originally thought.

I printed this using and altering the CYMK process — it is an image from a film still from the Albanian movie “Victory over Death (Ngadhnjim mbi vdekjen, 1967)”. The film is based on two real female partisans, Bule Naipi and Persefoni Kokëdhima, who fought against and were eventually caught and tortured by Nazi Germans during the fascist occupation of Albania in WWII. For this image, I switched up the order of the CYMK layers, resulting in an alteration of the original photograph.

My initial desire to learn screenprinting was to expand upon the ways I can incorporate archival images into my work (this worked well), but also to see if I can print my own photographs this way (this didn’t work so well).

As much as I like screenprinting. and plan on incorporating it into future projects, I found myself wanting to return to my roots in photography.

---

I’ve been itching to photograph. This invariably happens when I go too long without doing it. Photographically, I find New York City extremely challenging. It’s a bit ironic, given just how much is happening here at any given moment, but I find myself drawn to quieter places, where people are just one part of the landscape, instead of dominating it.

I am also not much of a street photographer, preferring instead to focus on projects or photograph when I am in new places.

These photographs were taken during a trip down the East Coast to Baltimore, all from the car window. I became interested in this idea of photographing in this way. The car is such a central part of American history and identity — what happens when you see the world primarily through a window?

Forced to shoot black and white as we only have a B&W darkroom set up at Columbia. I can’t say my developing skills are rock solid after a 9-year hiatus, but I like to think it lends to the charm and nostalgic quality of the images.

Till next time!

---

P.S. I’m super excited to be helping organize a photo festival with The Raw Society in Menorca, Spain next May. Check it out and come join us to see incredible photography and explore the magical island of Menorca.