Visions come, visions go…

…and visions come back around sometimes. This set of photography was influenced two-fold.

First, there used to be an Instagram craze, the 7 Day Black and White Photo Challenge. You post seven black and white photos in seven consecutive days to your Instagram account. The photographs are meant to reflect your everyday life and are to be posted without any explanations or captions. A couple of friends nominated me to participate in the challenge, but at the time I was traveling and really excited to share colorful images from my international adventures. One friend in particular, Antonia, commented pretty loudly on social media that I should do the challenge.

The quick cool story behind Antonia is that she was one of my Uber passengers back in late 2015. We found a nice rapport during our ride and she ended the conversation by inspiring me to create some still life photography, something I had never previously done. What was born from the conversation was: Still Life with Cereal. Though we’ve only met in person once, Antonia keep in touch from time to time with great phone calls. She’s an artist at heart and is always an open soul urging me to explore and express myself more creatively.

In February of this year, our phone call brought us back around to the idea of the Black and White Photo Challenge and also to the idea that I should do more local exploration and create small photo essays. I’m very pragmatic when it comes to my art which is good and bad. I am always thinking of a larger set up, theme or narrative behind my work and executing it, usually to the hope of perfecting the original vision. It’s very nice to have voices from time to time that say, “just do it,” and Antonia’s voice echoed such a sentiment.

About a week after the call, that spirit to create more freely bubbled up to the surface. I took a break from some Uber and Lyft driving while in downtown Los Angeles. I knew it was time to just grab the camera and create. I approached it like the 7 day photo challenge…

no narrative, no goal, just shooting.

The second influence…

It took me a while to realize this, but I actually envisioned doing a set like this years ago. Somewhere early in my Los Angeles life, back in 2014, I told myself that I should do some street photography around Los Angeles. In particular, I thought I would walk around Hollywood for a few hours one day capturing candid images. I told myself that I would call the set, and the subsequent blog post, “A Day in LA: Hollywood.” As future blog posts will show, after these photographs of Downtown Los Angeles, I followed up with similar black and white candid photos sets of other LA neighborhoods (Venice Beach and Manhattan Beach).

It was not until a few days ago (March 2019) that I was thinking about these sets and it finally hit me…

“You’ve just done, ‘A Day in LA…’”

The vision of doing candid street photography in Los Angeles had come back around five years later. Though Hollywood is not a part of it (yet), I’m glad that something tucked in my brain from long ago came back to the surface (with the help of a friend).