On the value of finishing what you start

I noticed that a lot of your photos have this cinematic quality. How does your experience with film influence your photography and vice versa? Since you do both, I’m curious how they inform each other and how outside inspiration fits into that.

My first interest was in film and video. Early on, I was more interested in motion work—moving images—and this started when I was very young, maybe when I was seven years old. When I was in third grade, my dad gave me a digicam, and even before that, I had a little film camera.

And it was actually a Powerpuff Girls-branded one that I got for my birthday. It was maybe my seventh birthday, and then when I was eight, I got a digicam. My dad, who was a hobbyist photographer, and I would take that digicam around with me everywhere. And it’s funny, actually, because last night I went through one of my old hard drives dating back to 2004, when I first got this digicam—or it was a year after I got it, I think, maybe.

I just went through a bunch of my childhood videos that I took myself. So I think it’s very special that I got to take my own home videos, because I don’t know if your parents have old tapes or videos of you when you were a kid or whatever. My parents didn’t really take those kinds of videos, but I took them myself—and of my life—and I pulled some of these old videos. It was 20 years ago, off my hard drive last night, and I was just looking at them and I was like, “This is so weird.” I mean, I don’t really remember things that well from 20 years ago because I was a child.

So kind of watching these videos as being like, I took them—it felt so weird. That was me, and that was my life, but also this is what I saw. But yeah, I just did videos of everything. I took pictures of everything too, but I loved videos, and my little sisters and I did big mock music videos together. I was eight years old, and I would shoot fake music videos, and then I would put them into Windows Movie Maker and edit them and stuff. And that was an early hobby of mine. And then my brother and I sometimes would write little scripts or skits, and we would act them out and film them with our friends and our cousins.

I feel like for a lot of artists, we get into our work as kids, and there’s this real sense of childlike wonder. As an adult, do you ever feel like you’ve had to relearn that? It’s tricky when something that once felt therapeutic becomes your job, how do you hold onto that original spark? Or how do you tap back into it?

Yeah, I don’t think I have to tap back into it because it really never went away for me. Yeah, even though it’s work now, I do genuinely love doing it. Whenever I’m picking up money jobs or whatever, I also make sure that I have a lot of personal topics going on at the same time. That kind of keeps it going. I feel like a lot of photographers or other people get into this hole where they start doing what they like for money, and then it makes them miserable. And I think to combat misery, or to prevent yourself from falling into it, you have to also do it for fun. Otherwise, it’s purely work.

For me, it’s work, but it’s also what I do for fun and how I work my brain and whatever. So yeah, I definitely answered the last question because I went on this tangent about my childhood videos that I found last night, but it started with video, and then I got into photo because the older I got, the less time I had to make videos. I think just going through school, learning how to do basic math, learning how to, whatever, be a person—taking photos just felt quicker.

Until I got to adulthood and I didn’t really have the resources to make films or make videos or whatever. It’s hard—it requires so many resources and labor from so many different people. And so I just kept taking pictures as a way—I mean, I think that they’re related, especially for me. I see my pictures kind of as stills from a film or slices.

How do you know when a photo is done? How do you know when a music video is done? When do you know where it’s like, “Okay, this is it.”

I think just once it feels right. I don’t get overly tactical about it, and I don’t really overthink it. It’s just if it feels right to me, it’s done. If I’m on set shooting a video or filming, I’m not a person who does that many takes. I’ve got one or two takes, maybe three, but it’s like once I have it, I have it. I’m not going to try to do it again. It’s a gut feeling where I’m like, “This is good.” So because of that, I tend to shoot quickly.

What is it that gives you the gut feeling? Is it years of experience, trust in yourself, or both?

I actually think it’s kind of instinctual and surface level. It’s like if I’m looking at it and it makes me feel anything, especially if it has a strong composition, I’m like, “Yeah, this is good.”

So you have the Digicam project, and you shoot a lot on Digicam. I know you’ve had a connection to it since childhood—why the Digicam? What is it about it that draws you in? Tell me more about that.

I had one as a kid and I loved it. By the time I was 13, I kind of strayed away from it because when I was in eighth grade, I got a film camera, and I kind of became obsessed with film. I did shoot digital for a long time after that. I think for 10 years I only shot on film.

What made you pick it back up?

I was with a friend of mine, Sophie Lee. She always shot with Digicams, and she was into it way before it was cool again—like 2015, when it was peak uncool, she was doing it. And in 2017, she came to visit New York. She lives in the Netherlands now. She came to visit New York, and we were hanging out, and she had a Digicam on her, and I was like, “I had one as a kid, and I took it everywhere, and I was obsessed with it.”

And she was like, “We should go to this store and see if they have any.” That was a few years ago, but at the time I went, nobody wanted them, so they were having a sale, and I saw one in the display case that was the same kind that I had as a kid, or very close to it. The one I had as a kid was a Sony Cyber-shot T2, and the one that I found was a Sony Cyber-shot T10.

Very close—they look identical. They have the same design. It’s just the T10 was a newer version released three years after, but the design is the same, where there’s a cover on the front and you slide it down to turn the camera on and reveal the lens. Yeah, it looked identical to the one I had as a kid, except the one that I had as a kid was silver, and the one that I found was pink.

Also, that specific camera is so popular now.

It’s so popular now and you know what’s funny, I don’t want to take full credit, but early on, Sophie was like, “I think it’s taking off because of me.” Not directly because of my work, but because I run that Digicam page, and early on, people weren’t shooting with Digicams like that. So a lot of the early posts for the first year or two that we had the page up and running, it was just a lot of my work and Sophie’s work because we weren’t getting enough submissions. So anyone who clicked on that page and on a random post, they don’t care who took it. They don’t care that it was me.

No, it’s totally you because you’re one of the first if only people that really repopularized Digicam photos.

I think it got really popular again because celebrities were then taking them around and whatever. Everyone’s like, “Oh my god, Bella Hadid has one now, so I have to have one now.” But if you were someone who got back into it through this avenue of photography and not like, “Oh, celebrities are doing it, it seems cool,” then we would’ve run into the Digicam page at some point, because at the time we made that page, there wasn’t another one like it. Now there are a bunch of Digicam pages, but back in 2017, there weren’t.

So I saw this one that looked identical to one I had as a kid, but it was pink and they were having a sale. I bought it for $20—with a charger, battery, memory stick. And from that point on, I just started using that again for ease of use, I guess. I can carry it everywhere with me in a way that I wouldn’t carry a mirrorless camera all the time.

What is it about the fidelity of the pictures that you would rather take it on that than your phone?

The phone is too sharp. It’s scary. Anyone who’s ever taken a picture with an iPhone knows this. It’s just too sharp, it’s too real. It also feels kind of fake. Even though a Digicam is the same size as my phone, it makes me think more about the composition. It’s just more thoughtful.

What’s your relationship with criticism?

I actually feel like criticism—or external criticism—is the one thing that is missing from my life and my practice, and I know a lot of other photographers feel this way. My boyfriend’s a type designer. He makes fonts, and his friends get together and give each other feedback, and they can rework their fonts and improve on that. Your font—you’re drawing it for X amount of time, sometimes for years—you can go back and redraw the characters.

But I think with photography, you’ve already taken the photo. Unless you’re going to go back and take it again, it’s harder to very directly implement that criticism. You can keep those things in mind for the future. I criticize myself enough, and once I’ve taken a picture and I see the things that are wrong with it, then I’m like, “Okay, I’ll just do better next time.”

I would say all of my photographer friends are pretty self-critical. I think criticism is good, and I went to art school, so I used to sit there and receive critiques day after day, so I’m used to it. Some people never experienced that, and then they can’t handle any sort of criticism. But I think criticism is a good thing, and I wish there were more avenues for photographers to give and receive constructive criticism when asked.

I hate unsolicited advice and unsolicited criticism. I do think there needs to be more space specifically for work criticism, though.

How easy is it for you to give up on a piece of art or quit, be like, “You know what, I’m going to scrap this and move on.”?

I don’t scrap anything. I just have to finish things. Even if it’s not good. I can’t not finish something. If I don’t want to finish something, I have to look at why I don’t want to finish it and if I have this feeling that I don’t want to finish, it’s likely because I’m not happy with it in some way or I don’t like it enough, and then I have to sit there and think about why I’m not happy with it, what went wrong. That’s part of the self-criticism, and then I just finish it because I think every project deserves to be finished, even if it’s not good.

That’s so evolved. That’s really impressive.

I actually was talking to a friend about this last week because I have a friend who is a producer and photographer that’s starting to get into directing. She directed her first film ever, a two-minute-long fashion film. She shot it a year ago now, and I’m editing it for her and we sat down for an editing session last week, and I actually really had to push her to finish it because she was like, “Mentally, I’m over it. Emotionally, I’m over it. I feel like I’ve moved on past this project. I don’t even want to read it. I didn’t want to finish editing it.” But it would be a disservice to not finish it.

Is that frustrating for you as a collaborator?

Not really because she’s so new to it, but when she was like, “I don’t even want to finish it.” I gave her this pep talk where I was like, “You have to.” Because I asked her, “Why do you not want to finish it?” And she was like, “I don’t know, sitting down and editing it with you, I see all the things that went wrong.” And I was like, “But that’s why you have to finish it.” You can’t evaluate everything that went wrong, and in the moment it’s daunting to figure out what went wrong, but that’s part of the learning process. You just have to figure out what you didn’t like, what you didn’t want to finish, what made you not want to finish it.

Sometimes it’ll take me a long time to finish something, but I won’t not finish things and I always encourage other people to finish everything. I encourage people to finish everything because I don’t always think it’s about the final product or the end result. It’s not about if this is good enough to share or not. I see value in the process of doing things.

Do you listen to music while editing or do you edit in silence?

I am kind of a silenced person. I’m not a passive listener of music. I want to sit down and listen to something and think about it. I’m not a “lo-fi beats to listen to while studying” person. I need to be involved, listen to music, which is kind of annoying. So when I work, it’s mostly silence and then I can’t have distractions around me. Working at home is really hard for me to do because my bed is right there. I want to crawl back into bed. I want to lay down or my cat is there and I’m like, “I want to hang out with my cat.” There are too many distractions at home. I do really well taking my computer to the library.

What inspires you?

Films, movies, that’s number one because I see my photos as a part of a story, part of the narrative. Whenever I’m on set with a model, I’m like, “This is the kind of character we’re playing.” I also really love architecture, paintings. I like looking at other mediums. Sometimes if I find an artist whose work I like, I’ll just look them up and try to find as much as their work on the internet as I possibly can, but I do think in general it’s good to go out and see what’s out there, what’s the world. I try to do that frequently. I go to the movies multiple times a week also. I love going for walks and just looking at buildings. So I like architecture as well. I kind of take inspiration from a lot of different mediums.