Documenting the passage
What does your brain attend to when not being directed? What does it notice and bring to your attention regularly? When you are commuting what do you think about? What do you notice? I have always noticed transitions, light, shadow, color, texture, where one materials meets another and conflict or harmony is created. I have always noticed juxtaposition and equal and opposing forces at play. I have always felt it important to document passage, the journey, the peripheral, the evidence of time. I’m recognizing now that this is a tendency developed by feeling like I am outside, other, a flâneur, or observer but not an active participant. I am reminded of reading Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin in graduate school. But I have a hunch I would understand them differently now because I understand sensory stimuli better and understand what role image making has for me in my self regulation. My brain has been collecting stimuli for decades, using its photographic memory to build up a huge catalogue of light and shadow and texture and color, of my experience moving through it all. I feel as though lately I am not collecting as much because my brain has reached a certain saturation point and is now in a different stage of processing and outputting my conclusions.
So, it’s an interesting time for me to also be realizing that my documentation and sharing habits have to change. I have been using Facebook since it was created. (I actually went to highschool with Mark Zuckerberg, though he was a few years younger and we were not friends, and I’ll have to make another post about why Facebook always felt safe to me and why it no longer does.) I have uploaded thousands and thousands of photographs to albums on my personal page, where I have around 900 friends who I mostly know in real life. My facebook page has become a massive problem for me though because it is an archive, but I no longer feel my content should be there, so I’m starting the long process of removing it with thought. Many of the images I have there are not what I consider my “work,” but they are documentation of my experience, of my passage.
This post is being written because today I got distracted by a facebook album of photos I happen to look through. It was called “Daily City Views” and was a chronicle of images I snapped on my commutes mostly across New York City. I lived in New York from 2007-2017 and I moved there after spending 3.5 years in Shanghai. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life when I arrived. I got a job as a tutor at an agency my sister worked at. This job paid me $60/hr to help rich white kids in upper Manhattan with their private school homework mostly. Many of the kids did not need tutors in the traditional sense, but because the expectation was perfection, I was hired.
When I started graduate school at Pratt, this tutoring job was my main source of income. I was also teaching in classrooms as part of my schooling so many days I would be in Brooklyn teaching low income students, sometimes at shelters, and then I would traverse the city to the Upper East side, crossing income barriers along the way that few rarely do. I have always been adjacent to extreme wealth, ever since attending Phillips Exeter Academy as a financial aid day student. I sat next to some of the wealthiest kids in the world for 4 years and was exposed to a world of privilege few realize exist. My former classmates are running so many things rights now.
By the time I finished school and started teaching full time for a non profit called Studio in a School, I had left the agency and begun to work for one uber wealthy family only, spending 6 hours a week after school with a girl who did not need academic help but very clearly needed present adults. I was paid $175/hr, which was a big raise, but less than the family had been paying the agency I found out, which was $360/hr. I worked with this family for 6 years in total, 3 of them independently. You do the math on what they paid for someone to simply be present for their child.
I’m mentioning all this because I have come to see my position and experiences in the world as a set of experiences that are so uniquely mixed, I feel it has contributed a great deal to the way in which I operate now and see the world and capitalism. I want to use my unique experience mix to point out patterns I have been able to identify. I have always moved between barriers and boundaries. Even when I applied to Pratt, I didn’t actually formerly apply, I just showed up and talked myself in, like it was permeable. I have always treated the world as if it is permeable to me and it has therefore been so. I have been a person that floats between identity groups and cultures and countries and can blend in because of my ability to observe, mirror, and mask, and probably because of my whiteness and beauty. I understand wealth because I have been around it so much, but I am not of it. I am other. I have also been around extreme poverty and have myself been houseless and had to rely on the generosity of others for a stretch of time. That generosity was coincidentally extended from the wealth I was connected to from my high school and it required me to have humility, another thing lacking these days. My life’s course has been altered by my educational opportunities many times, a privilege I am acutely aware of. But I still stand outside the privilege mostly, observing and analyzing it, as I do everything, but not financially benefitting from it as my disabilities and worldview that have developed from them actually prevent me from accessing much of the wealth I am adjacent to.
These images were taken between 2012-2017 mostly and they offer insight into who I am. What we experience and notice and choose to document forms a huge part of who we are. I hope you enjoy this glimpse of my passage. Please message me if you’d like to inquire about collecting any of these images as prints. They would be priced at $40 cad for an 8.5x11” plus shipping, though not all are available.