20/20, A Plague Year in Review
With photographs, as a treat! Best read via Substack, not via your email client because this letter is too long to read in your inbox
Recording the Extra Spicy podcast in my makeshift desk/blanket soundproofed studio
Having worked as an assignment photographer for the last six years, I’ve learned to measure the passage of a year in quarters. This year, though, I abandoned that concept (time, to be clear) as well as my old photography practice for something that made more sense in a year where I, frankly, did not want to participate in my commercial artistic practice the way I had prior to the plague.
I did everything I’d done in previous years but with much more thought, much more slowly, and under strict personal and professional boundaries. I started the year on a self directed mini artist retreat in Oakland in mid January. I spent my days going to the museum, grabbing coffee and reading for most of the day, writing and, attending my beloved gathering of chosen kin at our Black Brunch Club, started by my mentor, George McCalman.
A few weeks later, my best friend invited myself and my partner to join her and her partner on a weekend trip to Mammoth Lakes. It was my first time seeing the Eastern Sierras and I became totally smitten, completly understanding why Ansel Adams spent so much time with his 4x5 wandering those mountains and vistas. I was awed, humbled and greatful that we’d made the decision to move to California just five years prior. Seeing those snow capped mountains really stirred something in me.
That’s nature’s job, I think.
View of the Eastern Sierras
I hadn’t realized how close Mammoth Lakes was to a ton of our National Parks including Sequoia and Kings National Park. As we were driving in I noticed we were also just a short ride away from Manzanar Internment Camp, so on our way out, we visited one of the most chilling places I’ve ever been. It was hard to hold back both tears and anger walking those grounds. I was leveled by the dignity of the Japanese Americans who had to suffer under the hands of their own country, thanks to fear, conspiratorial thinking and racism.
People still carved out dignified lives in an incredibly hard place to live and ensured the preservation of their humanity in the face of gross inhumanity.
Cemetary at Manzanar Internment Camp
Carving out those moments of contemplation and repose early in the year helped me to find a new way to work. I decided I was going to dedicate more intentional time to my writing, so I started a Tinyletter, which ended up being a respository of the bullshit I was constantly navigating or dodging as a Black photographer in my often insanely racist industry. The letter I wrote in Feburary about losing out on the February 2020 cover for a sixteen-page cover story (make it make sense!!) in Food + Wine got surprising response — a lot of folks appreciated not only the disclosure but how I called upon history and humor to bring to light a collective experience so many people of color constantly have to navigate.
By late February, I was getting ready to shoot a second assignment for Apple and working out gear logisitics for my upcoming, early March trip to Vietnam to shoot my third cookbook for Red Boat Fish Sauce, written by my friends Diep Tran and Tien Nguyen while also juggling a persistent concern: I had gotten really, incredibly, frighteningly sick at the end of 2019. I was battling some sort of weird fatigue-related illness that wasn’t the flu or a cold which debilitated me for months with memory issues and extreme fatigue, incredibly crippling body aches and fever so high I was constantly sweating my bedsheets.
I was still in recovery mode by the time I got on a plane at to travel to Vietnam.
I’m grateful that not only the Red Boat crew carted me around Phu Quoc and Saigon — literal bucket list destinations for me — but that they also fully trusted me as a photographer and created such a warm, loving, positive work environment so I could do my best work, even when I was cranky and I was from being so tired during the trip.
See my Vietnam visual travel diary, here.
I got to work with Celeste Noche, of whom I was already a big fan prior to traveling and working together, and now, I’m basically obsessed with her. I got to visit a wet market, spend time in the bustling city, and even had the pleasure of bumping into the one and only, Daniella Zalcman, who just so happened to be vacationing on the same small island I was working on for two weeks. It had been years since we first met, both speaking at a photo conference in Alberta, Canada.
Celeste, Yen, me and Daniella cooling off at the airbnb after a jaunt in Saigon.
About a week and a half into my trip, the news from back home in the States was getting…scary. I bought out the mask section at the local 7-11 near my Airbnb in Saigon a few days before heading back home and about a day before all of my assignments for the year were canceled.
I was most devastated about losing Thrillist’s Restaurant of the Year package and the double whammy of losing their first Black food exec editor shortly thereafter. I’d been gunning for some food publication to hire me to shoot the coveted restaurant of the year package and, finally, my time had come… or so I thought. It came and went, and so did my month-long trip to Europe to make photographs and show my book to some international clients, and to finally travel around the country, another bucket list goal.
In Vietnam, folks were wearing masks and washing their hands — the requirement of social distancing had not been put in place, it wasn’t necessary in a place where adult human beings can follow basic instructions — well except for the white American and Russian tourists, naturally. I knew I’d be in for it upon returning home to the States. During my thirteen-hour plane ride, I wrote an essay that would become the first of many ‘dispatches’ from quarantine, published at my olde Tinyletter, that was, to my surprise, continuing to get a lot of sustained engagement.
Read That One Time Y’all Had Me Fucked Up
Secretly, I had been scheming on leaving Instagram for good, planning my escape to coincide with the end of my shooting year which somehow happened earlier than anticipated in March. I sent out an email a few days after lockdown upon my return from Vietnam, out of gut concern for how the fuck my fellow freelancers were getting ready to navigate clients, brands, institutions et al going broke or bankrupt, leaving us to fend for ourselves financially even more than we already do.
I hit up some of the homies who have long been laboring for a safe, inclusive, respectful industry to work in and asked them what could we do or say or make that might help keep the most vulnerable amongst us protected. Within a few weeks of discussion and, after obsessively reading the Panthers Ten-Point program and Poor People’s Campaign economic bill of rights, twelve of us set about writing a bill of rights on behalf of the freelance lens-based community — from photographers to educators to cinematographers and beyond.
As of today, we have over 2,500 signatories to the bill.
While working on the bill, meeting weekly from March through early July, the public execution of a Black man by state security forces went viral, just shortly after one Black man was lynched during his running practice. A few weeks prior, we’d found out that the virus was primarily killing Black and Latinx people, so everyone not Black and Latinx took a collective sigh of relief and, to add insult to injury, white people decided it would be open season for Black folk. Again.
A protest happened in Minneapolis, and then the uprising spread like wildfire, all over the country. Simulatenously, Black people across industries, began a series of disclosures of the abuses, violence, and mistreatment they constantly had to navigate at work. From Twitter to Instagram, undercover racists were being rightfully called out and dragged regarding their career long abuses of power against their Black employees.
Suddenly, my bare inbox was flooded with inquiries.
Clients I’d been chasing for five years began populating offers of commissions and assignments. A 2019 client who ignored my complaints of racist abuse during a job sent me fifteen dollars via venmo for some ‘self care’. I was on an Instagram hiatus after leaving Vietnam and my head began spinning because I wasn’t yet aware of the upheavels and the collective and necessary snitching that precipated these new job offers.
I decided to use the moment to air out half a decade of my own grievances, again employing my newsletter to do so. I took it a step further and had pointed, frank conversations with every single photo editor and art director who was suddenly knocking on my door, despite my having been working at a high level in my industry for many years. I said no to every offer that came my way (save for two) — I wasn’t going to risk my life and well being, anymore, and especially not to help aid in this sudden show of faux solidarity and concern. I asked decision makers why it took them seeing Black people being publicly executed before they felt it was worth the “risk” of hiring me for work?
Read This You? Five Years of navigating racism as a photographer here.
On set pandemic/uprising fashion while completing my only job of the year.
I pulled myself out of bids where I was forced to compete with white photographers who had already been chosen for the work to save myself the headache of doing labor for jobs someone had already decided I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going to be a diversity and inclusion quota grab, anymore. And I told people to do their fucking jobs, which often meant considering the safety and well being of the Black photographers they were currently exploiting.
I wasn’t in the mood to make photographs while juggling the renewed existential dread of being Black in America, but I could talk about those experiences as a means to provide myself relief. I said yes to every opportunity to speak and write that came my way, instead: I published one piece of serious writing via Medium’s Gen verticle about Jim Crow propaganda and its effect on the psyche, edited brilliantly by Hanif Abdurraqib.
I spoke for APA LA, Citizens of Culture, Our Place, Vital Strategies, Las Fotos Project and Ethel’s House. I was interviewed by Soleil Ho and Justin Philips for their SF Chronicle podcast, Extra Spicy, about the faux merotoracy of food photography.
In the midst of upheavel and uprising, my first cookbook was published to some serious acclaim and the second iteration of the new photo award I founded, the Lit List, both picked up steam. Lit List finalists from 2018 and 2020 were getting hired, everywhere from Vanity Fair to British Vogue.
My second cookbook dropped in the fall and both books were included on multiple best cookbooks of the year lists, including the New York Times and SF Chronicle.
After attempting to redeem Instagram for myself as a means of community education, I finally jumped ship for good, deleted my account and moved my newsletter to Substack where I devoted the remainder of the year to writing and teaching, holding discussion classes on James Baldwin’s work — although not referred to as a philsopher, I’ve always loved Baldwin’s philosophical thinking about the psychic damage the concept of race has done to both black and white folks alike and to everyone else caught in the middle of that ideological rift.
The discussions were always challenging and riveting and in a year where Americans refused to embrace vulenrability as a central tenant of navigating one’s humanity, I was seriously humbled by the robust conversation and the willingness of all participants to be open to navigating, publicly with strangers, conversations about race. I found myself constantly looking forward to these discussions especially as I have now spent months researching for the purpose of writing a book.
While I am certain most of 2021 is going to be a shit show, thanks to our outgoing and incoming adminstrations, I have a renewed faith in my ability to adapt and survive.
I’ll be applying for a journalism fellowship at Harvard for fall 2021 and working towards getting into a PHD program for the spring or fall of 2022 to study philsophy (and so I can finish writing this damn book!!).
I’ll open next year photographing a cookbook written by Bryant Terry (a literal dream come true) as part of a crew with my nearest and dearest collaborator, Jillian Knox. That book, alongside the Red Boat cookbook, will drop next Fall.
If I am lucky, I’ll get two or three more book commissions and maybe I’ll get to shoot some important stories next year, inshallah. If you’re an editor (especially cookbook editor) reading this, my hiatus ends Feburary 2021 — what’s good!?
It is a privledge to be alive and to have survived, let’s not take that lightly. This has been an unbelieably hard, shitty, never-ending year and all I can hope for all of us is that next year we will continue to work towards building a country worth calling home.
For all of us.