Other Works
Portrait Project: Naiomi
The longitudinal portrait project documents how relationships evolve when given space to breathe, how the camera records transformation that happens too slowly for daily observation, how the ritual of annual meeting—a deliberate constraint—creates its own form of connection. I photograph Naiomi once per year—no more—with only occasional text messages between sessions. We save our conversations for these annual meetings, creating a rhythm that mirrors how relationships actually develop: through accumulated time rather than constant contact.
The project began in 2020 when Naiomi was seventeen, a high school senior on a museum trip. What started as a straightforward portrait has become documentation of parallel transformations—hers and mine, individual and relational. Each year's photograph captures not just her aging and life changes, but how our dynamic shifts: how I see her differently, how she sees me differently, how the camera records what we might not consciously recognize.
During our September 2025 session, Naiomi asked to break tradition and meet more than once yearly. I agreed, uncertain whether abandoning the annual constraint would transform the very thing I was trying to document. But we're humans, first meeting as mentor/mentee, then as photographer/subject, then as friends.
The Women Who Raised Me
Creating these collages forced me to excavate not just facial features, but gestures, conversations, withheld emotions—tracing how trauma transmits among the women in my family across four generations. Working first on the collages, then photographing them from my desk, gave me a chance to inhabit these women's perspectives while bringing them into my present space as an attempt at physical connection across time and loss.
Bryan & Manu
Cartimar Market
