20 Eyes in my Head

The ability to be a wallflower is a skill some folks achieve naturally. Hell, in certain moments I, too, have averted my eyes, ducked into the shadows, crouched down in the crowd. Usually this occurs when some kind of shady shit is going on and the authorities have shown up looking for culprits. . Otherwise, I find I am a very participatory photographer. I engage my subject, form a relationship with them, even for the briefest of moments. That connection may show itself in the slight nod of the head, the locking of eyes, a faint grin. It may also come in the quiet beckoning of a small boy, to “HURRY THE FUCK OVER HERE!”, out of the view of the local police, who are frantically searching for you at 3 in the morning for breaking into St. John’s tomb and getting drunk and high with the local riff raff(actually off-duty tour guides). These encounters are why I travel. And I believe why I started taking photographs in the beginning. To capture these fleeting moments of understanding between 2 people. Of lazer beams between eyeballs like something in the cartoons. I get to look back in these images from time to time and remember the entire production that was going on around me at that moment. The smells and sounds, the languages, the air. And the eyeballs, of course.

These were taken from March-May 2015, in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and Egypt.