I didn't start with photography, I started from writing. But when I wrote I often wrote about photographs. And at the beginning of my career nobody was looking at my work and labeling me as a photographer, or at least I didn't think they did. I was as much a wannabe writer as a wannabe photographer. Every year I published a book with a selection of pictures and some writing. The writing was unstructured and not always connected to the photograph. I did everything - writing and shooting - in a vacuum without feedback. I was excessively curious and introspective. I read aspirationally, as I still do, and was just discovering Sebald, Ghirri etc. I was less cynical about photography, that's for sure. The White Book is from 2009, which was a very active year in the beginning of my career. I was in Japan, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Milan, Switzerland, and Cote d'Ivoire. I had my first paying client in 2007, so this was still an early stage of figuring out what I wanted to do. I shot fashion in Europe, personal projects in America, photojournalism in West Africa, and snapshots of all the things in between. I'm still figuring it out. Though the writing is...more ornate than I now prefer, it handles the same subjects, references, and thoughts that engage me today, though I challenge you to read or understand all of these sentences. I must have been (still am) insufferable. For me the joy was in the daily work of it: the job of looking, writing, thinking, and traveling. The years when I did these annual books were formative years, not only because I experimented more in those days but also because I photographed more of my daily life. I preserved my life in the subjective and selective way unique to photography, so my memory has converged on everything recorded here. Every image in the White Book was shot on either a Leica M6 or a Rolleiflex 2.8 Planar, always with TriX that I developed in a bathtub and scanned. The Rollei's a square 6x6 negative. I've never been so inside the experience of taking pictures than when I had no need to check what I was shooting. I trusted the light meter and the viewfinder. And I let my simple developing method (testing the temperature with my elbow) create a visual tone that linked images shot and developed in vastly different environments. / The order of this gallery is randomized for each page load. But everything is here. It will load bit by bit as you scroll down.
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