Chasing Visual Stories

I’ve made it my profession to construct visual narratives. And yet the narrative of my own life only makes sense in fragments and moments and a complex web of pictures and smiles and interactions and smiles.

I’ve always been drawn to cameras, screens, buttons. Anytime there was a video camera or a lighting board or a projector, I’d want to know how it worked, what you could do with it.

My sister loved to do plays. And I loved to talk to the stage managers, lighting techs, and anyone on a walkie-talkie. I thought that was THE COOLEST.

The Early Years

My dad gave me his Canon AE-1 Program at some point in my early teens. Those first few rolls of film were full of mistakes, expired film, bad exposures, and an occasional winner. What made one photo good and one photo bad?

I borrowed books from the library and learned the basics of how a camera worked, how a picture was taken. I found a light meter at a pawn shop. I bought FD lenses wherever I could find them.

The Yearbook

A couple of my friends from dance told me that if I joined the yearbook, they would let me use a nice camera and I could get all the film I wanted and it would all be developed for free. As long as it was stuff taken at the high school and for the yearbook.

For 3 years, I took hundreds of photos, including sports, performances, and student life. Some of my favorite moments were in the wings of the auditorium of the Academy for the Performing Arts, where I was in the Commercial Recording Arts Department. That’s where I got my first taste of arts photography.

My senior year was the high school’s 100th anniversary. Our yearbook was 800+ pages long and told the whole story, with hundreds of scanned photos from archives. I was photo editor that year as we switched to digital cameras and from Adobe PageMaker to InDesign!

Then, A Bruin

A coinflip decided between Recording Arts at Indiana University and World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. In the WAC department, I met incredible dancers, artists, musicians, event producers, video editors…

I mostly set my camera down during those years. I focused on event production in the summers, interning at the Skirball and Grand Performances and eventually landing my first job out of college at Yiddishkayt Los Angeles, producing and marketing Ashkenazi cultural events.

Economic Collapse

Just as I was getting my feet under me, the world turned upside down. After Bernie Madoff with everyone’s money, the nonprofit sector was in a freefall. I lost my job and started piecing together a career in freelance graphic design, event production, automotive marketing, teaching Jewish sunday school and songleading.

I started meeting people working in public organizing and saw the connections firsthand between civic engagement and community events.

The Road Hit

Around 2013, I got tired of working 80 hours a week for the automotive industry, and decided to burn some fuel for myself. I took my savings and a Hyundai Santa Fe and followed my feet toward a life on the road. I had recently discovered Transformational Festivals, and I was hooked. The colors, the sounds, the dirt and the grime and the crystals and the dreamers.

That year, I went to Yosemite for Strawberry Bluegrass, Colorado for Sonic Bloom, Mexico City, Cuba, Lightning in a Bottle in LA, Shambhala in British Columbia, Burning Man, Symbiosis, Art Outside in Austin, Halloween in New Orleans, and eventually landed in Asheville, North Carolina for the Winter when it got too cold to sleep in my car.

On a Wander

The road seemed to go on forever, criss-crossing and chasing work where I could. The festivals were at least giving me a ticket and meals, sometimes even a little cash. Or I’d volunteer in the kitchen, box office, or sound team to score a ticket and I’d take photos in my spare moments.

It was around that time that I got to start working with The Bloom Series. Jeet Kei’s documentary had been my first introduction to the Transformational Festival scene and now I got to shadow his video crews and take photos and interview footage of luminaries at the center of the scene.

While on assignment at Sonic Bloom in 2014, we were treated like VIPs, but the actual services we needed as media were lacking. Beer and massages? Great! Power? WiFi? Nowhere to be found. I realized there was a big missing element of the festival media experience.

We Were Optimystic

With all of our photographer friends, we figured we could set out and make a better media hub with the things we actually needed to capture the event, stay in the moment, and secure our belongings. We launched Optimystic Media Hub, a festival media co-op, with the creative genius of Megan May Stone and ran an unbelievably rich media experience at many festivals including Lucidity Festival, Enchanted Forest Gathering, Boogaloo Mountain Jam, XLive Conference and FestForums.

We provided credentialing, on-site media processing for marketing, press management, video production, secure gear lockup, and most importantly: WiFi and power. The archives of that era are approximately 60,000 photos.