24p., 5.84” x 8.26”, staple bound, ink jet printed on matte paper

This is a photo series I worked on while living abroad. I was inspired by André Aciman’s essay, Arbitrage.  In the piece, the author describes the somewhat discouraging realization that wherever he goes, he witnesses the world through a film of association. Whenever I travel somewhere new, I am similarly haunted by all the other places I’ve been, stringing together fragmented memories of destinations long past and conjoining them into a patchwork of remembrances that refuse a new city from ever truly feeling new. A symptom of this tendency is an acute off-ness that follows the ritual associations; a new place is ever familiar, yet just off enough to assert it is, in fact, new. These images aim to show a world that exists outside of reality, one that is at times surreal in its inability to distinguish itself as familiar or unknown.