Stepping Into the Frame

June 3rd, 2026 was the first full day I'd had to myself since before my son was born.

I didn't plan it as an event. I woke up, and he wasn't there, and the morning was mine — not the fragment of a morning, not the forty minutes before he wakes up or the hour after he goes to sleep, but the whole thing. Light through the window. Coffee going warm. The specific silence of a house that belongs, temporarily, only to you.

I drove three minutes from home. Set up a tripod in a parking lot near a wall I'd been looking at for months. Loaded the camera. Stepped into my own frame.

I have been behind the camera for as long as I can remember. I know how to direct a subject, how to find the light, how to wait for the moment that tells the truth. Being the subject of the work is a different practice entirely. You cannot see what you're doing. You have to trust the frame you set before you stepped into it — trust the light reading, the angle, the distance. You are working from memory and instinct and a kind of faith that the machine will see what you cannot.

It was uncomfortable in the way that honest things usually are.

I've thought a lot, since Azulu was born, about the question of visibility. Who gets to be seen in a documentary practice, and who stays behind the camera. I have always understood myself as someone who makes images of other people and other places. That morning, I was asking whether I could make an honest image of myself — not a polished one, not a posed one, but the kind that tells the truth about where I was and who I was becoming.

These photographs became the cover of the first episode of In The Frame. They were the first images I've made of myself that I didn't immediately want to delete. That's not a small thing. That's the whole thing.

The frame doesn't lie if you let it. That morning, I let it.