Exit Wounds

In Exit Wounds, I trace the shape of my policeman father. The project confronts domestic and familial trauma, drawing throughlines across masculinity, fatherhood, policing and punishment to constellate a personal history of violence.

Photography shares a lexical proximity with my father’s work as a policeman — to “capture,” to “shoot.” But where a gun obliterates, the camera punctures windows towards meaning and truth.

In 2022, my policeman father fired bullets in our house, marking his departure from our lives in gunshot residue. To me, this marked the rupture of our family: decades-worth of familial issues culminating in an act of violence.

Exit Wounds is an attempt to work through this, piecing together documentary photographs, archival material, self-portraits, and performance, to grapple with memory and abuse. It draws throughlines across masculinity, fatherhood, policing and punishment to constellate a personal history of violence — how this patriarchal lineage ingrains itself on a domestic level that it becomes inextricable from identity. Ultimately, the work has been my attempt to confront my own domestic and familial trauma and finding its place within a broader context, an act of remembering and re-membering myself.