if I had hair, I'd want you to pull it

'if I had hair, I'd want you to pull it' features others also working in the adult industry and builds a visual inventory outside of both highly-produced content often necessary in the adult industry as well as gritty spectacle.

Analog image-making opened up more ways for me to be meditative and experimental than my everyday has ever allowed for. I believe fantasy can be a sustainable tool for survival, and my work primarily builds a world for myself and those around me, selectively allowing the outside to look in. Self-determination is key to these private and public spaces, and as most of my work involves intimate images of others, I use a large-format view camera to turn the process of photographing into a slow collaboration. Through the time and expense of making in this way, I’m interested in rejecting the idea that our representation should be easily consumable and straightforward.

My most recent work titled if I had hair, I'd want you to pull it features others also working in the adult industry, primarily made of and in collaboration with one of my closest friends. While our bond was initially forged from simultaneous experiences of violence perpetrated by the same individual, our friendship quickly expanded to hold creative experimentation, healing, and new possibility. As our relationship and trust has deepened, we now play with the dynamics of professional and personal submission in the work, something I often bring into the rest of my photographic practice.

Sex workers straddle multiple social worlds, ascending and descending the spectrum of economic tiers quickly and often clumsily, and I try to encapsulate the resulting strange and disjointed environments that surround us regularly. The images build a visual inventory outside of both the highly-produced content often needed in the adult industry and the gritty spectacle many projects around sex work manifest into.