It’s a hot summer night in San Francisco, the kind that feels like a mistake, like the city forgot what it’s supposed to be, and I’m at Michael’s house for salon number three. I don’t want to be here. I should be literally anywhere else. And for some reason as I’m thinking about this night I’m channeling the voice of Raymond Chandler. What the fuck is that about?
My mom’s been maybe dead three months and I’m running her gallery now, spending my days surrounded by her taste, her choices, her ghost. The last thing I want to do at night is stand around Michael’s talking about art. Pretending any of this experimental performance shit matters when nothing matters, when everything’s just absence and heat and going through the motions.
Jordan Essoe is slamming bricks into Michael’s floor. Actually SLAMMING them. The sound is sickening, crack, crack, crack, and Michael’s pacing around the edges of the room and into the kitchen, saying out loud to anyone who’ll listen, “How am I going to explain this to Alice? Jesus, how do I tell Alice?” His landlord. He’s literally narrating his own panic while Jordan keeps destroying his floor.
But he doesn’t stop it. He’s moving around, sweating, wringing his hands, telling everyone about Alice, about the deposit, about how fucked he is, and he lets it continue. Because that’s what it means to believe in something. You let it damage you while you openly catalogue the destruction.
Now here’s what happens when you’re broken open by grief: you start seeing the cracks in everyone else.
I’m watching Niki through the lens, and for the first time in months, I actually see her. Not the person I’m angry at, not the person fading away, but the person who’s also damaged, who’s also barely holding it together.
My damage lets me see hers. And Jordan’s. And Luciano’s. We’re all walking wounded, all of us, making our weird art in Michael’s living room because the alternative is staying home alone with our demons.
And that’s when it becomes the intentional one. When I stop photographing at people and start photographing with them. When I realize we’re all just damaged people documenting our damage.