“Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” is a photographic series that began in 2021 after I had moved back to my hometown of San Diego from NYC for the first time since 2011. I was astounded by the reformation of the landscape I had once known after a decade of urbanization and gentrification, and found visual potential in this new-but-familiar place.
When I realized I wasn’t able to acquire work in the same photographic industry as before, I began working as a day laborer in construction and demolition projects, which became a main source of income for me on and off for the next few years. This shift opened up a plethora of new photographic notions: documenting physical labor without exploiting the worker, the formal vocabulary of the materials/machinery associated with both development and destruction, and the topographic change over time from construction’s land reformation.
During this period, I attempted to document the locations that I personally worked in as well as other sites of construction and development as a way of staying creatively grounded. I collected debris and scraps from my job sites to make sculptures for still life, sometimes photographed on-site and sometimes brought home to be photographed in a studio setting. These experiences would come together to make this body of work, and informed a lot of my current visual inquiries about class disparity and the role of the “artist/photographer” in a community.