Long Island City

I photograph to remember. Casual snapshots have taken the place of a written journal, while location-based documentary has been my focus. They are ways for me to reconcile my identity with a space. I adore the mundane, believing that there is indeed power and potential embedded within the vernacular vision, if look close enough—and it is usually after the spontaneous capture that I can reevaluate what lies between my images.

Long Island City is an image-based series documenting the neighborhood of Long Island City in Queens, New York. Long Island City reflects and portrays me moving through the space, while traces of prior industrialization and commerce have been gradually fading away. City archives of rezoning proposals, press materials, real estate documents, and other related historical sources are being researched and examined, offering the fundamental perspectives of this project. Long Island City builds a portrait of the neighborhood as a site, illustrating the change of time and space, as well as these in-between moments that I have arrived to and experienced through introspective landscapes with a large format camera. The photographic process magnifies these prosaic glimpses and turns them into a close study of the mundane.

Within the scope of photography and urban studies, Long Island City delves into the history and topography of a single neighborhood. This not only includes archival sources found in Queens Library and New York Public Library to inform the image making process, but also the direct inclusion or appropriation of different found visual sources through the libraries’ archive, including scans, collages, digital media, and recorded video/sound. These are effective elements that are embedded into the body of work. In the form of a fluid image grid and a photo book, large format film is used to capture both colored and black and white images of the neighborhood, offering a more fluid perspective of photorealism. Short stories in the form of autofiction accompany the images. These stories are clues to my interactions and memories associated with Long Island City. The anonymous pseudo-protagonist is a metaphor to the individuals experiencing their routine lives in the neighborhood, as I found these vernacular moments to be very powerful when we consider our identity to land and the solitude experience.

In the end, my interaction with these places inspired me to photograph them and bring together my perception of Long Island City—where I have arrived at and will on someday depart from. My body of work, ultimately, aims to preserve a glimpse in this ephemeral moment, a slate of time, that portrays my flâneur movement in the neighborhood, in addition to how the local environment has been transitioning. Long Island City is also my reactive process towards the surroundings, my habitual space. These transformations that have occurred and continue to occur in the neighborhood are also manifested into my lifestyle, impacting the way I perceive home and seek comfort.

text and image

2022 - 2025