Figuring it out.
My photographs are driven by my hunger for exploration. This urge was impressed upon me at an early age. Every year (still) my family goes on vacation to national parks. My dad and I usually haphazardly examine a map and then hike up the hardest trails. Sometimes we have concrete destinations, but other times we choose a trail because it appears weird or seems uninhabited by additional hikers. Just the notion that something exists is enough for us to want to check it out.
Science and science fiction have also played a major role in my appetite for exploration. My family would go to Star Trek conventions and watch Star Trek the Next Generation on TV. The opening lines resonate in my head. “Space the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It’s continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.”
My Dad is the vice president of an amateur astronomical league. He taught me how to use a star chart and to navigate the sky in order to find galaxies and other messier objects. Using the method of star hoping, we would jump from one spatial object to another until we found hidden treasures that reside far beyond the confinement of Earth’s atmosphere.
There is no reward for observing the sky other than the euphoria associated with finally seeing something you have always read about or seen pictures of with your own eyes. I remember waking up at 2 or 3 in the morning on a cold clear night and driving up Turkey Hill with my father. I laid under sheets of moving pads staring at the stars while my dad set up his scope and searched for the comet that was visiting our quadrant of the solar system. Standing on top of a ladder next to his monstrous scope, and peering into a tiny eyepiece, I see a fuzzy object, a visitor from somewhere I can never go but only imagine.
In high school I wanted to explore every nook of my town. I started with obvious spots, such as a nature park that was located on a marsh near the dump. This was never a spot that I had been brought as a kid. Once I knew all of trails I abandoned them, walking through the thick yellow grass, running through thickets of thorns, discovering abandoned bunkers and submarine towers. While I think that I now know of all that exists within my hometown, when I find odd spots that I missed in the past, the thrill and act of discovering remains persistent.
Even in New York my appetite for exploration remains. Last summer I would bike as far as I could in a random direction. I remember biking through Queens, watching the urban environment transition into historical architecture, into quiet towns separate from any sign of city life, watching cultures fluctuate between blocks and blocks and blocks. My roommates and I would go dumpster diving for food, planning out maps of all the Trader Joes on Long Island using Google Maps, and then driving blindly through the night in search of loaves of bread and fruits from unknown suburbia, ending the night with a sunrise on new found shore.
Currently, Staten Island has provided me with an outlet of seemingly limitless exploration and possibilities. Its landscape constantly changes from urban city, to woods, to mansions, to seashores, to suburbia, to long stretches of highway, to horse ranches, to everything in between. I cannot really make sense of the place. Everyone is so different but regardless everyone is very proud to live there. Every time I visit I find something or meet someone that is unique to my previous expeditions. I keep photographing on Staten Island because I want to honestly understand it in its totality through my own physical experiences through completing a journey into the unknown.
