Sweet Revenge, 2022 - Ongoing
These are portraits of boys on the edge of becoming.
The work centers on two nephews, photographed over several years, staged and held still, at the moment before adolescence closes in and decides what kind of men they will be. That moment is brief. The work tries to stay inside it.
Alongside the portraits sit fragments from another generation. Family archive images, domestic interiors, the adults who came before. Not as explanation, but as context. This is the world the boys are inheriting. The rooms, the bodies, the silences. The weight that gets passed down before anyone thinks to ask whether the child wants to carry it.
The work began with an absence. A brother who was never born. Watching these boys grow up, I kept thinking about what gets transmitted through a family. The tenderness and the damage, the rituals that shape a child into something specific before he has the language to resist or refuse. Brotherhood as inheritance. Childhood as the first place where that inheritance lands.
The images don't explain what they show. A boy getting his hair cut. Two brothers in a room at night. A fish held in a plastic bag. A tattoo that reads Nothing Less. These are ordinary moments. The weight inside them is not.
Sweet Revenge is not anger. It is the act of making something careful and serious out of what tried to be invisible.