“Photography is not like painting,” Henri Cartier-Bresson observed in 1957. “There is a creative fraction of a second… the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.” Cartier-Bresson’s formulation of the decisive moment has long shaped the canon of modernist photography, privileging the singular instant where form and meaning converge. Yet, my work diverges from this ideal: rather than the pursuit of a single decisive instant, my practice is attuned to the accumulation of encounters, the repetition of daily passage, and the layered temporality of urban life.
Driving through Little Haiti, Overtown, and Downtown Miami on my way to school and work, I began to see these routes not merely as detours around traffic, but as sites of sustained observation. The people, colors, and textures of these neighborhoods entered my photographic vocabulary, demanding a visual response. Here, the decisive moment gives way to a more durational gaze—an acknowledgment that the city reveals itself not in isolated instants, but in rhythms, patterns, and continuities of lived experience.
In this sense, the project inevitably enters into dialogue with Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), a work that redefined photographic seeing by exposing the fissures, contradictions, and alienations of mid-20th century American life. Frank’s America was fractured, dissonant, caught between myth and reality. My deviation lies in charting a different historical condition: the cultural integration and hybridity characteristic of the 21st century. Where Frank revealed the estrangement of individuals within a vast and unequal nation, my images consider Miami as a site where cultural collisions—immigrant, Black, Caribbean, Latino, Anglo—generate new forms of belonging, however unstable.
Coming from Pittsburgh, a monochrome steel town marked by its industrial past, Miami confronted me with a chromatic and cultural excess that was at once intoxicating and unsettling. My first encounters were not framed by welcome but by difference: “What are you looking at, Cracker?” In that address, the city announced itself as a place where vision was already entangled with race, history, and power. To photograph here was to acknowledge that looking is never innocent.
If Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock haunts the work, it is because his verses articulate the uncertainty of entering into unfamiliar social worlds: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.” Like Eliot’s speaker, I am both within and outside, both observer and implicated participant. In photography, too, there is always the preparation of a face to meet the faces one encounters, a negotiation of self and other, visibility and concealment.
Thus, while indebted to Cartier-Bresson and Frank, my work departs from their modernist paradigms. Rather than the purity of the decisive moment or the alienated vision of postwar America, it insists on hybridity, exchange, and contested belonging as defining conditions of contemporary visual culture.