Dream Aquarium

Paris: Trocadéro

Since part of my research interrogates the visual logics of aquariums, I visited the Aquarium de Paris inspired by my surrealist predecessors. Like André Breton’s photograph of coral or Rogi André’s portraits of Jacqueline Lamba swimming in an aquarium tank, my black and white photographs attempt to recreate surprising moments of encounter in the darkened space of the aquarium.

Louis Aragon described the arcades of Paris as an aquarium, but it is really the cinema that offers the clearest surrealist counterpart to the aquarium. Robert Desnos wrote that “we got into the dark cinemas to find artificial dreams and perhaps the stimulus capable of peopling our empty nights.”

In an aquarium, non-human creatures do the peopling. Out of the darkness, sharks emerge. Through glass, animal-plant hybrid forms appear. The glass screen mediates the encounter, much like the screen of a theater—with scratches and blemishes that make legible the materials that bridge the worlds of dream and reality.

Plant Infrastructures

In my dissertation, I track the techniques and technologies that undergird natural history sites—from biological knowledge that informs how aquarists deal with specific fish specimens to the physical transportation devices used to move plants and animals globally.

This on-going project pairs images that, together, show the space’s immersive effects and the infrastructures that made those views possible. I captured my garden but also the car the plants came in; homemade terraria and the bar cart that the glass rum bottles used to be on. Showing the infrastructure and the effects they make possible, this project mimics the methodological approach of my dissertation which disenchants greenhouses, aquariums, and colonial gardens to better understand their undergirding logics and consequently their ideologies.

Frames

2015-Present

In Joshua Tree National Park this month, I came across an empty door way and window—the remnants of Wonderland Ranch—which now frame the landscape. I had not taken a photograph with my camera in years, and when revisiting my photographs, I saw a recurrent attention to frames. A modernist, self-referential impulse, these frames-in-frames resonate with the format of a photograph. But these frames also reveal things about the landscapes we encounter.

A frame can be a doorway or windows (in a home, boat, or car) but also infrastructure like handrails or the beginnings of a construction site. Each offer a way of engaging, encountering, or building up space. Foregrounding them hopefully reveals frames as a way of providing more information to a scene—capturing the technologies through which the world is made legible.

2025: Looking through the window at another visitor looking through a window at the Zoo Martinique.

2025: A monkey looks out from the same enclosure.

November 2015: A doorway to the shared gardens of the AirBnB I stayed in when visiting Vienna.

December 2015: A construction site in New York City showing development along the Hudson River.

April 2016: A weathered wall to one of numerous gardens I visited while studying abroad in Florence.

May 2016: Mediterranean and international transplants grow in Italy, enframed by a handrail.

August 2019: On a cross-country road trip, the window and mirror frame the repeating landscape.

August 2015: The window reveals the Costa Rican landscape, while the cross reveals the social practices of the man steering the boat.

June 2021: Joshua Tree National Park as seen through the ruins of Wonderland Ranch. The Wall Street Mill hike features numerous artifacts that reveal the imprint of Euro-American settlement on the park.

June 2021: Above the building, the tips of Joshua trees appear.

Boundaries

Italy: Florence, Milan, and Lake Como

Between any two things is a boundary that separates them and imbues meaning. City-lines demarcate the wilderness from the urban just as garden walls define what is within and what is without. These boundaries raise questions of permutation: who or what is allowed to pass between these areas? When the boundaries are permeable, they become sites of high-traffic and thus rich with character.

The Villa Medici in Fiesole overlooks the city of Florence and bears witness to various borders — trees between properties, streets cutting through the countryside, and the boundaries of the town.

This villa is built into the hillside and has several tiers of walls. This dog barks over one such wall at the various guests passing at a lower level.

Flowers line the slopping, zig-zag paths that lead up and down the garden property.

A sea of flowers grows before the windows of the Sforzesco Castle in Milan, creating vistas to constantly renewing life just outside the 15th century castle construction.

In what was once the moat of the Sforzesco Castle roam many cats, popping in and out of visitors' views.

The blue of the water meets the green of the forested mountains around Lake Como excepting these spots where pastel constructions spring up in the dozens of small lakeside towns dotted around the shore.

These luxurious shoreline towns halt suddenly as if the pastel riches cannot venture any higher up the steep hills behind them.

From a higher vantage, the boundary with the water is eclipsed, showing that these towns are also between earth and sky, not simply water and earth.

Urban Nature

Italy: Florence and Venice

The Garden is a testing ground for Nature lovers. Vines, trees, and flowers grow—cultivated—often to complement a home and provide a respite from the demands of human civilization. 

But if gardens bring Nature in, Venice is a city founded on the concept of going out to Nature—out on the water, out on the lagoon, out on the Sea. These two types of spaces are perfect, if unexpected, pairs. Each presumes the ability of man to survive and thrive in an environment. Trees and plants may come into a backyard, for example, because man's rationality shall be sure to keep the garden from becoming a wilderness. And living amongst islands did not stop Venice from becoming a thriving city with a high population density. Today's residents and (the early founders) made a decision: no cars, no carriages, but boats. Humans thrived from these other inventions, yet the Venetians did not believe that humans can only inhabit places navigable by coach—just as 19th century innovators did not feel confined by the ground or 20th by our atmosphere.

From Villa Gamberaia, just outside of Florence, the proximity of homes to the Tuscan landscape is abundantly clear, with brush surrounding these hilltop homes.

Like most gardens, the gardens of Villa Gamberaia are centered around specific experiences — tasting an orange, walking along water, or spotting a single flower through the bushes.

Gardens are structures spaces, with prominent walkways or axes guiding the movement of visitors — usually human. Yet they are never truly tamed, as here a lizard makes a resting spot on a piece of art.

The building blocks of a garden are organic from the obvious — the flowers and trees which are staples of the modern garden — to the subtle — like these seashells which adorn grottos

Flowers go hand-in-hand with architectural features in gardens, growing over, above, and between them over a garden's lifetime.

The waters of Venice reflect the buildings above.

The sunset skies over the Piazza San Marco show seabirds flying overhead.

Gondoliers navigate between buildings. Almost no people live on the first floor of buildings because of the variations of the tides, as seen along the walls where algae grows.

These canals have become the defining features of Venice. The Gondola and the gondolier join the symbol of the lion to define a Venetian identity, powerfully shown on their flag alongside the flag of the country they now belong to, Italy.

City Symbols

New York City

From the skyline to the streets, signs play an integral role in the flow of New York City life. Billboards past and present linger overhead, while bus stops, traffic lights, and store front signs actually guide movement. Individuals and groups attempt to find their place in the city amidst the overwhelming stimuli. Just as signs dominate the city-goer, so too does the city-goer dictate the signs. Her interests define what should be advertised and her movements dictate where, and in this way, we are all contributing to the ever-changing facades overhead.

Amidst the browns and greys of old and new buildings emerge the green traffic light and Apple TV advertisement. Notably, the brand name is absent here, replaced instead with the infamous logo.

Peeling paint reflects the city's past. Advertisements once stood here, perhaps indicative of increasing and decreasing relevancy for the city's various neighborhoods.

From The High Line—itself a tourist attraction—other tourists are visible, gathering near a bus stop as they plan their day. Above them hangs a museum advertisement which may fail to enter their itinerary.

In Chinatown, English and Mandarin coexist as locals and tourists mingle on the street level, reaching understanding over the smells of produce and meat.

Buff Monster, an artist affiliated with the 100 Gates Project, painted this sign on the security gate just beneath the store's own sign. Passersby epitomize what the city stands for: art, creativity, diversity.

The photographer attempts to contribute to the world of signs. My reflection alongside street art in this window front is a transitory, fleeting attempt at becoming part of the cities iconography—with the photo, perhaps, a more permanent part of the corpus of images.

Imprinted Pasts

Austria: Vienna

Imbuing every aspect of modern life with glamor, the past haunts Vienna. By night or day, change has occurred. Plastic meets intricate metalwork at street level, electricity lights walkways at night, and shoes—casually tossed—dangle overhead in the trees. The specter of a history exists visually among the taste of new immigrant foods or the honking of modern traffic. Through the play of light, the city—which exists, like all art, continuously from conception to today—is illuminated.

Ornate gilding from the past casts shadows on the streets traversed today by the city's 1.8 million inhabitants.

Tram lines disrupt every vista, emphasizing modern needs that co-exist with the city's preserved aesthetic.

Shoes worn by a man today show signs of aging from normal shuffle on the street, but this pair also braves the elements, hanging from a tree in front of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Vintage exists in the public imagination and its glamour exists displayed alongside modern luxuries. Shop: Flo Vintage!

Cars pass by Café Museum, opened 1899, a Viennese coffee shop frequented by artists like Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka—the art icons of the city.

Everyday people pass icons of the past on their daily routes.

And today, new icons are raised to watch over the city.

The Naschmarkt has existed in Vienna since the 18th century, but today's modern iteration has fluorescent lights illuminating paved roads, graffiti, and food from immigrant cultures, like Balkan, Chinese, and Indian cuisine.

Delicate Encounters

Costa Rica: Parismina and La Selva

Navigating nature, one is overwhelmed by the sense of delicacy that happens in each interaction between human and nature. In my first time into a tropical rainforest and, more specifically, into any true wilderness, I explore the ways humans respond to nature. Despite our capacity to react to the wild with awe, fear, and hundreds of other emotion, here I track, at least on the one-on-one level, the gentle ways that people treat living flora and fauna.

In order to showcase the frog’s full beauty, a herpetologist gently nudges a red-eyes tree frog to expose the colors on its sides—bright blues and yellows to complement its green skin and namesake eyes.

Immersed among trees, the wanderer stops to admire the canopy overhead. The forest envelopes those who enter it, injecting itself through its roots over the carved trails that humans use in order to experience its magnificence.

Bright footsteps on the narrow trail, mostly overgrown by the plants surrounding the area.

During a night expedition, a conservationist holds steady to allow other photographers to capture shots of a frog peeking out from his boot. Jumping from the ground to the boot, the frog seeks shelter on the very visitors who first startled it with flashes and cameras.

Spotted in shallow water, this turtle was picked up and demonstrated to students during a forest walk. Despite being handled gently, the turtle was shy and retreated into its shell in order to keep itself safe.

Light and Fantasy

Costa Rica: Parismina

Walking through the forest in an area that is completely off the grid, there is an all-encompassing darkness. Fighting this blackness is the light of a flashlight, which reveals animals around you that appear to emerge from the black. These photos all depict this unnatural source of light because there is a surreal quality to this experience, quite literally these animals appear above reality as they, and only they, appear around you.

Glowing from a seemingly divine light shining on the leaf, this frog merely appears—floating, suspended in air.

Looking up at the sky, under the canopy, there are no stars to see, just whatever appears in the flashlight, like a moon of leaves.

Golden rays hit only the tallest trees during sunset, seen here through the canopy.

Trails emerge as flashlights cross paths with footsteps.

The artificial flashlight supplements the soon-to-be-flash as conservation photographers surround a frog on the forest floor.

Reflecting the light, this bright toilet glows and reveals in its bowl a frog friend who came indoors (and jumped away unharmed!).