Am I Not Light

In 2014, I moved to a new city for work that inspired me. The days were full, the work fulfilling, yet beyond it, I found myself often alone—separated from my wife, my family, and my friends. I was surrounded by people but lacked real connection. It was a new kind of solitude, quiet but with a heaviness, and I began to take walks, to look, to make photographs. Photography became a way of being present—to what was before me but often unseen, and to parts of myself that were, too. To my surprise, my images began to mirror that inner world: lyrical observations seen at a distance.

Am I Not Light traces those years—2015 to 2021—through images, a poem, and a video collaboration with Mike Long of Tiny Anthems. Together they form a meditation on living between presence and absence, motion and stillness, belonging and distance.

Loneliness, I came to see, is not an aberration but part of human rhythm. It can surface in a crowded city as easily as in the quiet of an empty room. These photographs became a way of reaching outward—of asking, through light and image, whether we are not all searching for connection in the same way.