Florida street project
:my journey
Growing up in Brooksville, Florida, felt like being the only neon sign in a town that preferred everything beige. The air was always thick enough to chew, like the humidity was personally offended by my existence. I swear the whole place was built out of church gossip, Dollar General receipts, and the sound of pickup trucks revving for no reason. I spent most of my childhood trying to fold myself into something smaller, something quieter, something that wouldn’t get stared at in the aisles of Tractor Supply.
Middle school was basically a survival game where the prize was making it home without someone asking why I walked “like that.” I hid behind thrift-store flannels and band tees that smelled like dust and teenage angst. My earbuds were basically life support—Midwest emo and Depeche mode or really anything that made me feel like someone out there understood the weird static buzzing under my skin.
Music didn’t just help me figure out what I wanted to do — it basically grabbed me by the hoodie, shoved me into the Florida heat, and told me to look harder. Midwest emo gave me that shaky‑handed honesty, the kind that makes every photograph feel like a confession, while Depeche Mode slipped in with its synth‑soaked shadow‑vibes and whispered that reinvention is a survival skill. Together they rewired how I see through the lens: suddenly every streetlight is a character, every cracked sidewalk is a lyric, every stranger is a whole album I haven’t listened to yet. My camera became a mixtape — half trembling guitar riffs, half darkwave heartbeat — and I finally realized my art didn’t have to be clean, it just had to be true.
Florida’s underground emo scene only fuels that chaos. Bands like Poorsport, I Swallow Ghosts, Day Hike, Late Summer Sentiment, Withyouallday, and Orange Peel scream from tiny venues and living rooms that it’s okay to feel everything all at once. Shooting those shows taught me to move fast, to trust instinct over precision, to let blur and blown‑out highlights tell the story better than any perfect exposure ever could. I learned to shoot like I’m trying to catch lightning in a sweaty, crowded room — because half the time, I am.
Brooksville wasn’t built for kids like me, and I felt that every time I lifted my camera. The town is all sun‑bleached parking lots, half‑empty plazas, and a kind of stillness that makes you feel like you’re supposed to shrink yourself to fit. But photography turned that stillness into something else. I started noticing the way the afternoon light hits the rust on an abandoned sign, the way humidity softens the edges of everything, the way even the most forgotten corners have a pulse if I stare long enough. My lens taught me that even the places that feel like they’re trying to swallow you whole can become beautiful if you learn how to look at them sideways.
Shooting became the one place where all the noise in my head finally made sense. Editing became the part where I realized what I’d actually been feeling. And seeing the final image — that was the moment I understood that the world wasn’t empty; I’d just been looking at it with the wrong settings.
Brooksville wasn’t built for kids like me, and I felt that every time someone said “bless your heart” with that tone that meant the opposite.
When I was about three, my stepdad showed up—not like a hero, but like a plot twist the writers forgot to foreshadow. He wasn’t flashy or loud. He was there for me, but he wasn't trying to force some Hallmark moment. He just existed with love in this steady, quiet way, like a lighthouse that didn’t care if you were a ship or a shipwreck. He carried a camera everywhere—not in a pretentious “I’m an artist” way, but in a “the world is weird and I want to remember it” way. I didn’t get it. I thought it was just another adult hobby, like grilling or obsessing over weather apps.
One afternoon, he handed me one of his old cameras with zero fanfare. No speech, no “this will change your life,” just a casual “Thought you might like this.” And suddenly, I’m holding this heavy, metal thing that felt more real than anything else in Brooksville. It was like someone handed me a key to a door I didn’t know existed. The weight of it grounded me in a way nothing else had. For the first time, I felt like I had permission to look at the world instead of hiding from it.
I started taking pictures of everything: the cracked sidewalks downtown, the weirdly aggressive squirrels at Tom Varn Park, the neon diner sign that flickered like it was trying to communicate in Morse code. I took photos of the sky when it turned that apocalyptic orange before a storm, and of the way Spanish moss dripped from the oak trees like the town was wearing its own emo haircut. Brooksville was still small and suffocating, but through the lens, it became… interesting. Strange. Almost beautiful in a haunted, Florida-man-adjacent way.
I even took pictures of myself, but only in reflections or shadows because I wasn’t ready to look myself in the face yet. The camera didn’t care if I was queer or awkward or wearing the same thrifted jeans three days in a row. It didn’t care if my hair was frizzy or if my voice cracked or if I didn’t fit into the neat little boxes Brooksville tried to shove me into. It just let me exist without commentary.
My stepdad would look at my photos like they were something worth paying attention to. Not in a fake “good job, champ” way, but in a “tell me what you were trying to capture here” way. He never tried to fix me or straighten me out or make me smaller. He just let me be this chaotic, artsy, half-formed creature trying to make sense of the world one shutter click at a time. In a town where everyone had an opinion about who I should be, he was the first person who didn’t try to rewrite me.
Photography became my emotional support language. When school felt like a pressure cooker or someone made a joke that hit too close to home, I’d grab my camera and wander. I’d end up on abandoned train tracks or staring at the way rain pooled on the pavement after one of those sudden Florida storms that appear out of nowhere like a jump scare. Every photo felt like a tiny rebellion—proof that I was here, that I noticed things, that I wasn’t just background noise in my own life.
I started seeing Brooksville differently. The peeling paint on old barns looked like abstract art. The rusted fences became metaphors. The empty parking lots at night felt cinematic instead of lonely. Even the Waffle House sign buzzing at 1 a.m. felt like a character in my story. Photography didn’t make the town bigger, but it made it feel less like a cage and more like a place full of strange little secrets waiting to be captured.
Being a queer sixteen-year-old in Brooksville meant building myself out of scraps: thrift-store clothes, late-night thoughts, iced coffee, Mom Jeans lyrics, and the quiet encouragement of the one adult who actually saw me. Photography stitched all those pieces together. It made me realize that being different wasn’t a glitch; it was a lens—one that let me see beauty in places everyone else ignored.
Sometimes I’d sit on the hood of my stepdad’s car, camera in my lap, watching the sun melt into the horizon like it was exhausted from being in Florida all day. He’d sit next to me, not saying much, just existing in that calm way he does. And I’d think about how weird it is that one small gesture—handing me a camera—could change the entire trajectory of my life. Like he didn’t just give me a hobby; he gave me a way to breathe.
I started taking pictures of people, too: my friends sprawled on the grass after school, my stepdad laughing at something dumb I said, strangers at the flea market who looked like they had stories carved into their faces. I learned that photography wasn’t just about capturing what things looked like; it was about capturing how they felt. And Brooksville, for all its flaws, had feelings. Messy ones. Complicated ones. Ones I understood more than I wanted to admit.
The more I photographed, the more I realized I wasn’t trying to escape Brooksville anymore. I was trying to understand it. Understand myself. Understand why the world felt too big and too small at the same time. The camera became a translator between my brain and the world—a way to turn chaos into something honest.
