Stay on your guard, Joe

Anyone who dismisses you

Dismiss them promptly, 

Permanently, and

Without recollection

Don’t compromise on what matters to you

Keep active

Do not cultivate the uninterested

Do not accommodate them

Keep away from them

Do not work for them

or, with them 

Don’t get lost

I picture the Earth 

think i     n          g

turning–

being,

absence,

loss

Years on 

I carry,

wherever I go,

Your echo

Ayngel Is a decade-long body of work investigating the transformative, emotional, and material after effects that evolved from a single chance encounter between myself and Ayngel at a gas station in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts late in the evening of June 13, 2013.

Over the course of the following four years, I regularly traveled across state lines to spend time visiting with Ayngel. Initially, I spent time shadowing him during his night shifts working at the gas station and within time, I was visiting him at home, learning about his artistic aspirations, creative community and family, (the loss of the two), and struggles with mental-health and American healthcare. From our first encounter, I quickly found myself absorbed within his world, identifying in our relationship something like family, and frequently encountering characteristics approximating or mirroring my own attributes, fears, and challenges to self-actualize. My intentions were always friendship, but I was certainly contending with a desire to make pictures. Our visits were unscripted and spontaneous. These photographs made on film range from portraiture, still-life, and landscape, to shared archival imagery, cell-phone imagery, and diaristic texts.

While this work is grounded in a tradition of documentary practice, subjectivity and fiction intertwine to question and explore themes of representation, self-fulfillment, and American masculinity as shaped through labor, family, and creativity. (“Ayngel” itself is an adopted alias, embodied by both subject and artist, speaking to identities in-flux, transformation, growth). In the process of assembling this work, timelines and identities merge, fracture, and reassemble, as I grapple with the desire to reflect an inclusive, authentic portrait of Ayngel and our relationship. Throughout, I have asked myself: Do we ever fully know another individual? I have worked with great care to bring Ayngel dignity, communicating my intentions and inviting collaboration in the creation of images and texts.

Ayngel is a gesture of love, self-reflexive-portraiture, a challenge to preconceptions, a meditation on extended family and friendship, and living material reflecting on the importance of human connection. In our contemporary climate of exceeding isolation, political, social, and emotional instability, striking up a conversation, listening, and asking questions, feels all the more essential. A monograph of Ayngel will be published by Trespasser early 2024.