MFA Progress Blog 2024-2026
(blogress?)

August 26th, 2025

The last thing Richie said, as he laid in bed to catch a little rest before going to the Urgent Care unit when it opened, was “It’s already so beautiful out today”. He lifted the shades, saw the sun beginning to rise, and eagerly wanted to go for a walk. I told him to rest first, and we’ll enjoy it when he woke up. Forty minutes of fitful rest passed.

On Tuesday, August 26th, the worst thing imaginable took place. Every worst nightmare, the thing you don’t expect and can’t imagine ever happening, the kind of thing that breaks a heart and shatters the world, occurred. And it gurgles. A sound of air trying to be taken in through liquid, past airways that don’t work and around a mouth that is cold and blue, below eyes that are unintentionally open and unseeing. And then, there is screaming. Hoarse and loud and desperate, and it sounds so sad, so fearful and shocked and unbelieving, and it turns out that I am its source. Absolute terror. He is pulled up against my chest like the bear hug of a dear friend and is cradled between my legs and arms, and vomit and bile flow unbidden—putrid, frothy, and coating us both. I am electrified by shock, which travels from me to him as his body begins to go rigid, shakes slightly, and his eyes float farther away once the seizure takes hold. I hold his head, making sure his mouth doesn’t bite down too hard, and go to turn him on his side over the bed. He is freezing the entire time. The cold of something left out that should have been slowly simmering on the stovetop.

A friend happened to be staying over in the next room that evening, so I yelled for him to make ‘the call’. We moved my love to the ground, and I scooped thick, elastic strands of white saliva from his mouth and cleared his airways as best I could. I held my hands together, a kind of prayer but with both palms facing him instead of myself or upwards to an aloof entity beyond, and pressed life back into his heart. Pump after pump after pump after pump. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Over and over and over, and all the while the screaming that sounded like it was beyond my flesh rattled us both. He rose briefly to gasp a sodden breath, and went back down with his poor unseeing eyes staring at nothing. It felt like forever and like time had stopped on an infinite repeat of unfairness. EMTs appeared, our neighbors came in and helped me off of his poor cold body. I wanted him to be clothed, I needed to clothe myself, and I kept thinking about how much I wanted to cover him from these strangers and protect him.

Things became fuzzy after that. One of my neighbors walked me into the living room to lay on my back and practice breathing. Water was handed to me from a dozen hands. Nothing sat correctly. Nothing felt right. The day was too clear and covered in mist. They couldn’t stabilize him for so long. Why couldn’t they stabilize him? An hour and a half later, we’re all at the Emergency Department. A doctor finally finds me, and his voice is calm and warm but carries a storm. “We don’t know what is wrong, but he is very, very sick. We can’t figure out what happened, but he is incredibly ill.” His gentle emphasis on the second ‘very’ is like a pushpin of oration through my mind. “Very, very sick.” Nothing has added up for anyone, and nobody can figure out what happened or why. They let me back very briefly to see him, and hold his hand. I was able to take a quick photograph, and then they took him away to be put on life support and to further stabilize him. And we begin to wait a very, very long time.

August 2025

Had a spicy evening with a recurring friend, and I was able to make a couple images. Beginning to incorporate more and more of our friends into shoots.

July-August 2025

We went to a campground we love, Twin Ponds Lodge, which is a gay men’s nudist lodge hidden away in Trump-country in Maine. It’s 86 acres of woods and walking trails, and we decided to bring some friends of ours up with us this time. It was definitely a different experience to be in a group rather than just Richie and I, and it was wonderful. Our ideal eden.

July 2025

Getting back to shooting after the residency refractory period. The in-house photographs are moreso sketch shots but it’s a start.

Working Artist statement as of Residency

The work I make inevitably resolves to a meditation on romance through photography—how it is found in my life and the many iterations it can take. The male body acts as the central force of gravity in my practice; the densest point of fixation throughout my work against which all other references are derived or lead, and is an object of unrelenting beauty and strangeness for me. Examining intimacy and privacy are crucial themes I employ when documenting the scenes I discover or compose. These themes also heavily impact the end product which often results in the form of a book, zine, or some other smaller form of media an individual can privately peruse.
As I continue photographing and getting older, my interests hone in on the domestic and personal alongside my partner. I document examples of the subtlety and nuances our relationship takes on, how it evolves and how we can format it to align or deviate from our own expectations of success. Not having grown up with any gay role models to base this period of our lives upon, it has been incredibly tumultuous to navigate how we can continue to grow as individuals while still finding fulfillment and contentment. This has led me to examine the facets of intimacy in my own gay community, reflections of affection and allure I hold for my partner now translated onto the bodies of other men—locating my own romantic self in the experiences we share with others. Fighting implicit taboos and shame around what we learned a happy life together can look like fuels my search for the limitations themselves, and in doing so I photograph the sexual and domestic as one.

Additionally, I felt I should include some of the images from my sketchbook. This is just a way for me to anticipate and begin composing photographs while I’m away from my camera or don’t have the means to make the shot right then, but it helps me feel as though I’m still working on my output. I think it also has helped people understand my process and consideration for making these works.

June Residency/End of 1st year

I printed a series of 20x24 and 24x30 photographs to display for residency, as well as the examples of the temporary collages and the one larger collage titled “Wind/Wound”. I also included the three zines I produced just as examples of having made something this semester, which felt like a bit of a flop in terms of my making process. It really only came together the final few weeks of the semester but it was frustrating none-the-less.

The sequence on the wall of images was gut instinct, which is typically how I handle a first run of sequencing, and I’m really content with how it came out. It began telling the story I think I’d like to be describing with the work inevitably—a book. Or more specifically, a duology. I’d like to produce two book that somehow intertwine each other, or reference one another, while including two thematic narratives. One regarding just Richie and I in our home, and the other the men who enter and enrich it. I have a couple of loose freewrites about it:

The work still feels like it’s about domesticity—about being in a long term relationship, like this is the growing up part. It’s looking at flaws and aging as a gay man in a partnership. A weird queer intimacy, though considerably very tame. Relative to the queer adolescence work I’ve focused on, this looks like a maturation of that. Having no role models to see what it’s like to age-up as a gay couple… Adolescence is fun and exciting, but now there’s a more realism based experience as you grow up. How do you feel paired but also not feel heteronormative? Getting older as a queer person doesn’t look like the hetero counterparts of straight peers. And that standard is not one we need to be held to or hold ourselves to. Maybe my work is about just growing up in love as a young adult into a full adult. There’s an ease to being with someone of the same gender, and being around those like people, and letting go of wanting to be like the people you’ll never be a part of or like… What is it like to be a gay person at a certain age in a relationship? Can it still be about idealizing a male beauty, but how it’s grown with me and also changed as I’ve aged? What about the homosocial aspect of my life, filling it with other gay men and sometimes allowing them into our sexual life? How does that butt up against a sense of security offered (or perhaps falsely instilled) by these heteronormative infrastructures we’ve embodied?

My project is about the men we surround ourselves with, the people who are important and vulnerable with us, and who expand our perceptions of what it means to be gay men in love, who love. I photograph a lot of our friends in nude scenes, fully embracing themselves in domestic spaces, alongside Richie and I. Eventually, I want this work to be an homage to the future direction of what normal and honest and safe can look like as gay men. To do that and want to talk about it and see it in the world, I have to live it as well, so my work and I assist each other in expanding our gay spaces and developing meaningful connections with other gay men in the search for some sort of true sense of camaraderie.

June 2025

Right at the end is when it really started to feel like it was coming together. I had a selection of images to pull from, and began making more frequently. I decided to follow through with some sketches of shots I had been making for a while, and expanded where and who I photographed. With all of these outdoor shots I’d made recently, it made me eager to create balance between these wide expanses and these tiny scenes that took place in our tiny space.

May 2025

This feels silly, but we’ve been anxiously anticipating a cruise for the past year. Richie’s sister insisted we accompany her and her wife on a cruise along with their mom. The issue isn’t that we don’t want to, it’s that leaving our home is daunting and terrifying in a sort of way. We don’t travel—we don’t take trips or go anywhere and rather have people over and make dinners for our friends and host events and parties. Part of this is an economic anxiety, part of it is growing up in the socio-economic worlds we each did with little money and no opportunities to leave the house or ‘enjoy’ ourselves in a space designed for recreation or leisure. Regardless, we went on a cruise to Alaska for a week. It was of course beautiful, though fraught with my own biases towards such a hyper-commercialized and curated experience that at times felt canned, but when we got to get off the ship and explore the ports on our own or walk through forestry, it was lovely.

April 2025

I’ve taken a break from making collages altogether. It’s left me feeling as though I’ve lost before I’ve entered the game, so until I feel the need to make one again, I’m not going to. I’ve gone back to my Pentax67, and I feel invigorated again to begin shooting. After extensively (obsessively) focusing on Mark McKnight’s Heaven is a Prison, I had a small breakthrough that I want to address my apartment in the way McKnight reforms the land to become the origin of all lands—the men become every person’s original man, how they play is raw and real and visceral and coarse. There is a magnanimous power the world and the men encapsulate, and their sex in the field of the primeval becomes biblical. I want to look at my apartment like this, reconstitute what the place is into what it has become metaphorically, how Richie and I inhabit it and how it has been within these walls that we’ve entered this new chapter of our lives. I’m beginning to look at this space as our own kind of origin story, how it has been this location which has seen us develop our patterns, our domestic rituals and responsibilities, how we’ve allowed our relationship to change shape and take the once solid stone walls that built it and allow them to become gelatinous, allowing for the osmosis of other men into our intimacy, and what that has taught us. I’m looking at Richie, at myself, how the space sees us as though that of an omniscient viewer, how reconstructing the internalized story of success and a relationship can look, and the pride we have for any space we cultivate as our own.

Spring 2025

This season has been slow going. I haven’t felt inspired to make anything and have been feeling particularly underwhelmed by my own unwillingness to commit to just sit down (or stand up) and make work. Again, I’ve shot a couple things every now and then, but nothing of value. On the other side of things, I’ve been doing a lot more research and involving myself more with the readings and other elements of what Caleb has been engaging me in. A couple of things have really stuck out for me, those being a book called “Uncut: A cultural Analysis of the Foreskin” by Jonathan A. Allan, “The Faggots and their Friends between Revolutions” by Larry Mitchell, and an interview with Michael Foucault from his book “Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth”, titled “Friendship as a way of life”.

I made a couple of quick-collages, smaller and temporary pieces that existed as photographs and not as objects. I would make them on whatever surface I was currently sitting at and then photograph them. Afterwards, I reshuffled them together and put them back in my bag of images. These were moreso practices, but I felt I needed to make something. I photographed them with my digital camera, so while it was out, I also would make a couple of shots of things around the apartment I felt I was drawn to, just to have made something.

March 2025

In March, I went to a friend’s house as a sort of make-shift artist residency. They are slowly renovating a section of their house in Connecticut to be a fully functional artist residency, but while they get there, they invited me to come try it out. I wound up making my first ‘successful’ collage of the semester, but I still wasn’t fully sold on it.

The other portion of my time there, which was three days, I refocussed on returning to where I felt most comfortable. My ‘usual’ making process and normal thinking always returns to the book format, sequencing and laying out both visual and textual language. I was able to finally construct and put together my earlier idea of making How to Unclench a Fist, an accordion book of the images I’d shot in January of Richie about tension and letting go of tension. I also produced two other zines, one exploring surrealism and the strangeness of sequence and stimulus titled Night Shift, and another recollecting a trip I’d taken with a friend of mine during which my relationship became jeopardized, titled At the point.

Late Winter/Early Spring

The start to the second semester was rough. I was feeling frustrated with not being particularly inspired—after the Winter Residency, I felt excited from the feedback, but worried I wouldn’t be able to continue making my large scale collages without some sort of impetus. The previous collages were successful, but were very much so reactions to something having taken place, having gone through something in my life. The last sentiment my previous mentor, Jessie Aron Greene, left me was to try making a collage a day or at least a couple times a week. I understood his reasoning, but I felt like it wouldn’t mean anything, wouldn’t come from me feeling something but just from the rote practice of making. Though that makes sense and I would otherwise agree, I had a very difficult time committing to that. It wound up holding me back from continuing forward with this, because I didn’t want to make something without reason or a root of some kind. I would shoot every now and then, but it otherwise felt a bit hopeless, and I was feeling helpless and self-sabotaging.

1.30.25

Working on a new idea, aiming for a zine as an exercise. Anticipating it to be an accordian book called “How to unclench a fist”

Residency after Semester 1

Crit studio, January 2-12

December, 2024

Gathered a lot of imagery and began playing with ideas about collage and scale, and pulled together a couple of pieces. The elongated one is called Bolero and the wider one is called November Boy. We had to establish boundaries we hadn’t yet confronted in our relationship with Omar and ended it. It was bittersweet because we care for him so much but the way our relationship just doesn’t have space for a third to be a part of. He wound up going on a date that weekend and entered a relationship soon after which is helpful for us letting him go because we needed him to find his own happiness, but we also contended with the sourness and sadness it left us with. Richie went through what was otherwise a breakup period, and I made work about our time together. Bolero is a poem about how he became what he was for us, and then re-entered the world again without us.

Free write as well to accompany Bolero:

An interest. Soft, as Lamb’s Ear.

Held in a returning state of ritual—some type of performance we could dance to

with Bolero loops and a spotlight.

Something old. When the Hunt was a reason to leave safety.

A walk about the perimeter, following a scent that snuck inside

to squeeze some kind of desire with lust.

Circling a point. One never landed on but seen.

A satellite admired; wandering debris, rich in ore, caught briefly in orbit

to be righted and returned to space.

This interest—soft as Lamb’s Ear.

11.11.24

Detail shots of Omar. I’ve become very taken by his stretch marks and how they seem to catch light differently—more eager to reflect than the rest of his body. I use these later on to push the limitations of the film grain and blow them up to almost over-examine these traits.

10.29.24

Richie found a leaf on his walk a week or two ago and brought it home because something about it reminded him of me. We kept it as it dried out and Omar kept playing with it every time he came over, so I just decided to introduce it as a prop for the shoot because something about it’s “metallic” quality reminded me of Omar’s stretch marks or the oils on his skin.

10.18.24

Began shooting Omar, who we were jointly fooling around with. He later goes on to become something more for us and our relationship and puts to question how to move safely in this space which seems to have no parameters or identifiers. For about a month, Omar becomes both a muse and a source of tension.

10.10.24

I’ve begun really considering the map, what it means and its relationship to us as people but also flesh. How it conveys information and is such an inundation of data but only holds value if you’re actively searching for something, otherwise it’s just a wash of overwhelm. I incorporate my sketches and notes of my preshoot and then the photograph that I made after it, collapsing both space (the intention and the product) and time (the early idea and the result).

10.8.24

Shooting HP5 @ 1600 for indoor shots at home after work. Just getting back into using the Pentax67 again, focusing on what’s immediate to me. Self portraits, my partner, eventually some of the guys he and I have over, and recreating/capturing our routines and patterns together. Looking for the sweetness and casual comfort.

9.15.24 - 9.23.24

Did a shoot with Ryan Rudowitz (Rude Polaroids) when he was visiting a mutual friend, Jamieson Edson, from New York. I’d been wanting to meet him and shoot with him for a while, so it was cool to get together. We mostly just geeked out about polaroids and didn’t really make anything that I’m particularly happy with, but I also brought my Pentax to try shooting for that and got a couple images I liked. Additionally, Richie and I went to a wedding and I made this picture of him on the bed of the cabin we stayed in.

8.20.24 - 9.11.24

Polaroids from the end of summer

In mid-August, my partner, Richie, and I went up to his family’s camp in upstate NY for about 11 days. This is our one vacation of the year, so we try and make sure we make the time for it. We usually split time with some friends or his family staying there as well, but we had the cabin to ourselves this year for the entire time. We mostly spent all our time on the dock reading every day, which is really all we want to do—unplugged and unbothered time to sit in the sun and read through stacks of books (and in my case, a list of essays for school). When it came ti picture making, I made the shots I found based purely on the circumstance, aiming not to facilitate or construct any scene or image, save for maybe one or two. Though it was of course a relaxing experience to have this time to unwind before both my upcoming semesters at work and at school began, it was nice to simply lean into the leisure and pleasure of the location and our own bodies alone at the water.

8.7.24

Continuing to slowly make more polaroids

I have definitely slowed down my physical production of capturing images—I haven’t had a ‘photoshoot’ with someone in a couple months I think, so it’s been hard to feel like I’m still making work. Although I’ve begun carrying around my SX70 with me in my bag and around on walks and errands, as well as being more cognizant to pull it out around the house and when we have friends over, so I’m getting back into making shots. Here are just a couple of the images I’ve been making of ‘normal life stuff’. I also dusted off the old Pentax67 and finished a roll, so I’ll have that back from the lab at some point soon hopefully, and will put any decent shots I get from it here.

8•1•24

New plexi-image: Uproot, 6 panels of plexi, 4”x5” each
Below, new assembly of images

I wanted to try working with an image with greater information and clarity, so I used an image I’d made with my Pentax67. I’ve found at this scale, the quality of the image plateaus at.a certain point, no matter how much information get packed into the bitmap. I may try making this image or another like it at a larger scale and see if it’s any more legible. Additionally, I find the image starts to fall apart and lose legible light after 5 panels, and no matter which panel becomes the 6th it’s always hard to see. So I think 4 or 5 panels would be the sweet spot if I continue working with plexi in this scale.

After I played with the documentation, and removing the figures from the scene, I wanted to play with that idea but include the figures from the other images I’ve produced so far. I think there’s something there that I’m drawn to, and again simply need to push it and ask myself “why”. There are qualities of Sakura Kelley’s unfixed inkjet prints I’m drawn to and would like to see if I can access qualities of image degradation in this medium, Liz Deschenes and her color panel works (which sort of feel too minimalist for me), and have also discovered Letha Wilson’s photo/sculpture installations. Though the content of that work is wildly uninteresting to me, I am drawn to the photographic integration she plays with in her sculptures. This sort of 3D photo collage may be a direction I experiment with next (also thinking about Gonzalez Torres and his jigsaw puzzle photo pieces). I’m seeing this somehow as a weird intersection between photographs and the photobook/book layout, in just the ‘collage’ pieces. I think they’re working most successfully as photographs of the objects rather than the objects themselves (again, ugh) but I’d like to see if there’s a way to make them intractable as digital works possibly? Something in the likeness of selecting your point of focus in each image but never being able to see the entire image in focus. It’s possible I need to make stands with more distance between the panels to emphasize this in the documentation and really dramatize it in a more overt way.

Again, I’m finding myself interested in removing overall legibility in these 3D pieces from the viewer, offering them the suggestion of a fully composed image but not allowing it to ever come fully into view by teasing the point of focus forward or backward in space, similar to the act of photographing as seen through a viewfinder (giving the viewer my experience photographing vs the photograph’s capturing). In thinking of Barthes, I’m offering the viewer a closeness to the actual experience of photographing by altering how to “see” vs “look”, further dissecting the moment the photograph existed in into planes of existence and then memorializing them in panels akin to tombstones (etching into plexi rather than stone of course).

7•29•24

New image/stands

Made a new panel image and a set of panel stands to help keep things uniform when looking at them. Brought them into the studio and made a couple shots to give them a bit more presence. Strangely I’m kind of liking them as ‘rephotographs’ now and am considering exploring that process of taking the image, turning them 3D, then photographing them again to see how they become further distorted or information becomes less legible.

7•22•24

5 panel Plexi rendering of “Mirror closet” polaroid, 4”x4”x1”

I planned on trying to render an image in a grouping of plexi-panels, so I chose an image from my archive and began breaking it down by plains of field. I inverted it and rendered them as bitmaps, then brought each over to the lasercutter and began etching and cutting. I wanted to try and bring a bit more dimensionality to the photo, give it more physical presence, but I’m not sure if this is as successful as I’d have hoped. I wasn’t as neat with my object tracing as I could have been, but what I was happy with was the mirror panel being etched on the coke bottle green plexi, which I think helped it feel a little more nuanced and intentional. This was just an experiment to see how it could be done, and I’m not altogether dissatisfied with how it came out, but it definitely has room to be pushed.