The Last Day

The project is a documentation of daily surroundings mostly shot in Virginia and the greater United States. It explores aspects of loneliness, precise or doomed architecture, and an underlying layer of loss of family within a failing society.

It’s a feeling I often visit in my dreams, a preparation for tragedy. We’re all boiling frogs and either the world is ending, or it’s a quarter life crisis. The only reassurance that everything will work out is that the trees are still standing amidst the buildings and telephone poles that have caged them in. Somehow not poisoning the foliage, we accept the encroaching architecture and barely sympathize with the roots struggling to push through the sidewalk. There is something to our blissful ignorance, but for me, it is a paranoia. It’s all I can see.

Upon transitioning out of the 2020 pandemic came the newly introduced anxiety of the decade to follow. Finally the project began to take form, the culmination of the work that I’ve made thus far in my life that reflects a current emotional state influenced by our society and era. 

I was living in Richmond, VA when COVID hit and since work was scarce, I wandered the city more than usual documenting this shift in society. Shortly after, the nation-wide civil unrest and division in America became my primary focus for the summer. Richmond’s fraught past made it a lesser-known epicenter for reform. This was the world and era in which the images were made.

The project is a documentation of daily surroundings mostly shot in Virginia and the greater United States. Captured from 2019-2024, it explores aspects of loneliness, precise or doomed architecture, and an underlying layer of loss of family within a failing society. Each image and diptych represents vacancy alongside community, often in search of familial ties in the liminal environments I experience in between work and life events.

Softly lit scenes juxtaposed with harsh documentary style images reflect the brutal highs and lows of a modern day mind, the activity or lack-there-of. It’s a matter of viewing these scenes as a visitor to this world, with a disassociation to their presenting environment. As with mental health disassociations, the work’s pages are filled with vacant and severed-from-reality scenes, a quiet and calm dystopia that we all inhabit. I hope to show the terrestrial and societal beauty in this disconnection from the natural that we all suffer, if not for the world, then maybe for myself.