Been and Gone

“Been and Gone” is a series of photographic work about drifting away from home. In January 2020, I moved away from Vancouver, the only city I had ever lived in, across the country to Toronto for work. I left the place that had shaped and formed me as a child. Over the course of several weeks, my brother and I slowly departed for Toronto: from Vancouver down the coast to southern California, following the Mexican-US border to New Orleans, then up through the Midwest to Toronto, making pictures along the way. At the end of the trip, the images were sequenced along with vernacular photos from my family archive. While on the road, I kept my compositions limited to objective structures, signs, and landscapes that reminded us of the home we were leaving— whereas the archival images, though most having been taken before I was born, are filled with people or places I have a deeply personal or familial connection to. It is in the sequencing that I arrived at a linear narrative that has a unique meaning to me, but similar to how we experienced subjects on the road; the sequencing acts as a sort of non-linear “montage” to conjure an entirely different set of ideas individual to each viewer.