BODIES IN WATER: A WORK IN PROGRESS

swimming in San Antonio, Texas

swimming in the East Bay

Swimming has been many things for me over the years. Initially, it was delight punctuating hot California summers in the Central Valley. When I developed asthma, it was a medical doctor’s best idea for learning breath control. In high school, it was a way to be part of team of competitive swimmers. Later it was training for my seasons as a college water polo player, one third of the sprint triathlons I ran.

A year ago, buoyed by scholarship around the physical and mood-related benefits of swimming, I started a visual inquiry into how water makes us feel. Check out the ongoing work here.

my 80-year-old friend and photo collaborator, Raymond Holbert

DEAR LITTLE HILL

One of the most striking things about our neighborhood is that it is so neighborhoody. We are entangled in each other’s lives; we bring each other backyard lemons and figs. We throw all-ages happy hours and full moon suppers. We sweep the sidewalks for the little feet that pass by on their way to class. On Sundays we pull weeds to the live, community jazz sessions at Fat Apple’s—or dust off an instrument and play along.

M and her pullet, Honey

Over the next year, Michelle Mendieta Mitchell, and I will be creating a visual love letter/living archive of our neighborhood.

We are connecting with neighbors on porches and in yards and in living rooms—making a collection of photographs of our community.

neighbor Don and his BunBun

a young family that attends school on our block explores the local granite

P and her companion, Bubba

If you are in the neighborhood and want to take part in the project, reach out to schedule your session.

OVERLAP: THE EAST BAY PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTIVE FILM SWAP

Overlap

Friend, neighbor, and EBPCO fangirl/boardmember Kendra invited me to collaborate with her for the East Bay Photo Collective’s film swap. The results are at turns beautiful/strange/unlikely records from the intersection of intention and happenstance.

The Slowdown

In going analog, we invited a slower pace, specific risks (mishandling the film as we swapped, misaligning the frames as we loaded it), and the chaos of composing blindly into the other person’s frame.

Our Ongoing Project

What began as a one-off EBPCO prompt has grown into an ongoing project. For each swap, we each choose a color to focus on. We don’t tell the other photographer what we are photographing. The project continues as a practice of staying open to the process—and its pace continues to resist the rush.

Kismet! I photograph a friend’s tattoo and Kendra photographs a succulent that echoes the petal structure

Want a Double Exposure of Your Own?

Bid on a signed, framed print from our OVERLAP: YELLOW/PINK series OVERLAP 2285, or other interesting works created by EBPCO members at this year’s East Bay Photo Collective festival.

OVERLAP 2285, up for auction on September 20 at EBPCOFEST 2025

CHINESE CULTURAL CENTER + EDGE ON THE SQUARE: WE ARE IMMORTAL! PROCESSION

Project: We partnered with SF’s Chinese Cultural Center and Edge on the Square to produce an embodied visual ethnography documenting Chinatown’s first Pride procession as intergenerational joy

The procession on The Friendship Bridge

Date & Place: May 24, 2025; Chinatown, San Francisco
Event: First Chinatown Pride procession and festival, under the theme We Are Immortal
Focus Area: Cultural equity, LGBTQ+ visibility, intergenerational storytelling
Methods: photo documentation, participatory presence

Free Mom Hugs + Rice Rockettes

city dignitaries, politicians, artists, activists, and community members catch joy of the day

HISTORICAL TERRAIN

Chinatown holds deep legacies of activism and art but, as in many places globally, queer histories here have often been under-told or erased. The challenge was how to document the first Pride procession and festival in ways that honor community voices, intergenerational connections, and embodied joy for both the present and for the future.

APPROACH + PROCESS

Drawing from visual ethnography as embodied, sensory, and relational, the photography process emphasized:

•Immersive Presence: Walking the procession route alongside participants, attending to sound, movement, and atmosphere—allowing the city itself to be part of the method.

First Annual Chinatown Pride Procession

procession-goers respond to the choreography

procession participants point out Chinatown landmarks

•Participatory Ethos: Letting stories emerge in situ—listening to elders recount telephone exchange histories, observing children dancing, engaging with drag performers and artists. Participants guided what felt meaningful to show.
•Photography as Knowledge-Making: The images were not illustrations but traces of encounter. Shoes on uneven pavement, shifting lantern-light, laughter between generations—all became data that reveal Chinatown Pride as lived, felt, and historic.
•Ethical Sensibility: Minimal staging. Attention to dignity and consent. Commitment to capturing Chinatown Pride as co-created energy rather than externally imposed narrative.

community members learn choreography at Edge on the Square

“Chinatown is profoundly queer—not just in identity, but in existence. Its queerness stands as an act of defiance against racism, displacement, and corporate encroachment. This history runs deep through San Francisco’s cultural fabric, inspiring an ‘immortality’ that lives on in those who continue our fight against erasure.”

— CCC + Edge on the Square

Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory hand out samples of their famous cookies

elders entertain with traditional drumming

Rice Rockette member, PeiPei Ma Bilz, at the CCC community Bridge

IMPACTS + RESULTS

tabling at the SF Chinese Cultural Center

•Cultural Visibility: Images made queer Chinatown histories visible—contributing to resisting erasure.
•Organizational Assets: Photos now serve partners (SF Chinese Cultural Center & Edge on the Square) as festival marketing, web galleries, advocacy material.
•Community Engagement: Participants saw themselves reflected, affirming identity and legacy.
•Documentation for the Future: A visual record that becomes archive—proof of presence, proof of hope.

DJ Microtone and DJ Livv spin a lively mix for We are Immortal! silent disco

silent disco fundraiser at SF Chinese Cultural Center

TAKEAWAYS

•Co-presence Matters: Processing and dancing with participants, not apart from them, generates images infused with context and feeling.
•Images as Dialogues: Sharing imagery with community members, photos sparked pride, memory, and new storytelling.
•Everyday Details Speak: Small moments between attendees and performers, site texture, tabling, and silent-disco good times carried as much meaning as the grand procession.

DIY: WAYS YOUR ORGANIZATION CAN DO THIS WORK

1. Begin with immersion—walk the spaces, feel the atmosphere.
2. Let participants co-shape what is documented.
3. Seek details that evoke sensory and emotional registers, not just events.
4. Share images back to community for reflection.
5. Build dual outputs: public storytelling + internal archive for memory-keeping.

CTA

Visual ethnography allows cultural centers, nonprofits, and movements to show not only what they do, but what they feel like to live inside. We Are Immortal! demonstrates how images can serve as tools for visibility, dignity, and collective memory.

KIT: Schedule a 30-minute discovery call. Let’s design processes together that honor your community’s presence and ensure its stories endure.

Welcome Home: Housing First for Veterans in Beaumont, California

At Linc Housing’s Liberty Village, homes are sanctuaries—safe and stable places.

Supportive housing for veterans often means a quiet place after a season of chaos. It sometimes means a studio apartment where sunlight filters through curtains, where pink-filigreed furnishings welcome tired bodies after a long workday, or where there is space to host a small dinner with friends. Housing can mean an enduring welcome and a sense of belonging.

A photograph of home is not the happy ending of a story. It’s a fraction of a moment. But it makes evident the value of uplift to people who have risked so much and have much to look forward to.

Engineering Our Biophilic Future: UCSC'S Baskin School of Engineering

Photographing the staff at University of California Santa Cruz’s Baskin School of Engineering meant spending time on the lush campus surrounded by people researching big data, cyber-physical systems, genomics, and computational media.

A Place of Our Own: Stable Housing in the City of Angels

Linc Housing’s mission is to build communities and strengthen neighborhoods for underserved Californians.

Over the past year, we’ve partnered to tell visual stories about the ways people can thrive when they have stable housing. In our ongoing collaboration, I’ve dropped into creative play sessions and financial workshops; pizza parties and market pop-ups; resource sessions and apartment life, too.

I’m grateful to the many people who welcomed me into their homes for this photographic series—who introduced me to their parakeets or explained what the diplomas were for or shared early memories of childhood in Cuba. It’s difficult to understand the forces at work and the urgency of California’s housing situation without listening to people who have encountered its raw challenges.

Washed Up: Photographs and Erasure Poems from the Pacific Trash Vortex

I’m rooting for the fungi to save us from plastics. Until then, I’m collecting small, handsome shards, swishing them in the Pacific to remove the sand, photographing them, and creating erasure poems about their previous lives.

Hem + Jaleo: Upcycling and Flamenco with Fafafoom's Mira Musank

Hem & Jaleo sprang from the imagination of talented textile artist Mira Musank (of Fafafoom)—a way to interact with the work she created during her residency with Climate Creative.

Hosted at The Dome, the event invited the audience to participate in life drawing as models moved around the space wearing Mira's creations made entirely from textile waste—pre-consumer cutouts, sewing remnants, and pre-owned clothes.

Agua Clara Flamenco then brought Mira's upcycled textile designs to life on the stage transporting a rapt audience through song and rhythm through the music of Andalusia.

On Assignment: Knoxville, Tennessee

iPhone 13 | Knoxville, Tennessee

Most of my photography assignments begin before I arrive on location. First conversations with clients involve visual tone, lighting, and potential locations. Sometimes a photography session is shaped by early conversations with portrait subjects or by visual research about a neighborhood, or by a big idea we are illustrating.

On location in Knoxville, Tennessee for UMASS Magazine recently, my assignment was also informed by the gorgeous issue of Mergoat Magazine I picked up in a cafe and flipped through before walking through Old Gray Cemetery. It was changed by unexpectedly heavy rain as it was prevented from falling on a carefully groomed Smokies baseball diamond. It was flavored by my producer’s nostalgia that resulted in a late-night stop at the Waffle House.

My niece asked me how I think about the future of my work. She was wondering what AI-created imagery will mean for the kind of editorial photography I do. And I can’t quite know.

But making work that combines the sensation of rain-on-skin and the specter of invasive kudzu and the taste of a stack of late-night pancakes into a story about a very specific place might be my favorite kind of alchemy.

I’m grateful it’s also what I get to call my work.

Images from the Knoxville sessions are embargoed until the articles are published later in 2024; images included here are iPhone BTS

I Am First Gen: photographing in support of academic thriving at UMASS