Sha La La, Man, Vol. 1: Buffalo

This is a selection of images and page spreads from the larger body of work featured in my book, "Sha La La, Man."

This project began in October 2024 when I was on research leave from my university and I spent a large amount of time back home in New York, in both Buffalo and Manhattan, where I have not visited much since moving to Los Angeles over a decade ago. My mother was moving out her home into a retirement community and I wanted to take personal pictures of some of our family traditions and places that shaped me. That October was a radically transformative experience for me. I fell back in love with a place that, as a teenager, I was desperate to run away from, and re-wrote deeply entrenched personal narratives that broke my heart wide open to people and places I loved.

For many years I locked these feelings inside and was unable to process the complex emotions that New York as place represented for me. When I came back home to Los Angeles I felt a deep, almost overwhelming sense of grief about lost time that simply would not go away. During this period, I began going through the images I took while in New York. I also sorted through thousands of family photos, scrapbooks, and artifacts that my mother began sending me. This, in itself, became a therapeutic process that eventually, and quite unexpectedly, evolved into a book project, "Sha La La, Man."

The book was directly inspired by the photo albums my mother put together of our family over the years that I would often look through whenever I was back home. As the project evolved, I began to make a photo book that combined images from the present with old family photos from my mother's photo albums. This had the effect of creating a unique self-portrait documenting personal identity over time. As I went through the images, I was filled not only with a deep feeling of impermanence, but also struck by how much of one's identity is constructed by family and place, often without us even realizing it. Before I could even talk, I was a Yankees and Bills fan, dressed head to toe in clothes reflecting these allegiances chosen for me by my mother and grandparents, and these elements become core to who we are. As sorted through a large number of photographs from the past and present, I saw deep associations between memory, place, and the construction of the self, many of which I had never even occurred to me until working on this project. Inspired by Fellini's dream sequences in 8 1/2 where events in the present bring to mind childhood memories that shaped one's personality, I began to sequence the photos to reflect my own place-based associations, such as how Scime's Sausage reminded my of going there with my grandparents, which induced a flood of memories around their Italian-American food traditions; how seeing a "Bills Mafia" sign brought back so many childhood memories of games, birthdays, and heartbreaks; and even how a birthday cake in the present can take one back to all the birthdays one had as a child. From a phenomenological perspective of associative and episodic memory, time - as seen through the visual images brought to conscious awareness in our own private consciousness - is happening all at once: through memory, the past, present, and future are experienced all at the same time, and these family photos combined with my own photos from the present became the physical externalization representing these internal mental associations and processes.

From an aesthetic point of view, I have always been in love with the amateur quality of the analog photos in my mother's photo albums - their imperfections of exposure, the off-kilter compositions, the accumulation of dust - and much preferred the look of them to digital photography or digitally enhanced analog photos using professional film stock. As long as I have been interested in photography I have wanted the images I took to have the same look and colors as these drugstore family photos taken using non-professional film and cameras. For this project I purchased from a local camera shop the same Fujifilm 35mm disposable cameras I grew up using in the 1990's as a teenager. I scanned the film myself on a very inexpensive scanner; on many photos I was unable to remove the dust, so I just left it there, rather than get the photos professionally scanned. It was also extremely important to me to make no alternations to the images. The images in the book are raw scans from the 35mm negatives: I held myself to a very strict standard of making no digital edits, including no color correction or corrections of exposure at any stage of the process. There has been no digital manipulation whatsoever to any image in the book.

The title of the project comes from a line in the Lou Reed song "Street Hassle," which itself is inspired by girl groups of the 1960's. This music, from bands such as The Chantels, the Ronettes, and the Shangri-Las, was the music my mother most listened to growing up, and captures the nostalgic, bittersweet feel of the images, as well as the vulnerability and intimacy characteristic of them. These songs will always be the sound of New York to me and it will always be the sound of "home." The physical book comes with a link to a custom playlist of songs that I curated to accompany the project.

The images below are individual photographs from the book interspersed with digital images of its page spreads. The book is meant to be viewed as an analog object and, like a scrapbook or family photo album, the images are meant to work in conversation with each other, rather than appear in isolation. Nevertheless, these pages are an attempt to recreate some of the spirit of the project online. Though not divided this way in the book, the project here is broken into two parts. This is the first part of the book, from Buffalo; the second part, of images shot all in Manhattan, are in the next portfolio.

Sha la la, man ...