Hyper Non-Straight Street
Image Abundance

“ek is almal wat voor my was” — fokofpolisiekar. 

In the words of my favorite Afrikaans punk band, “I am everyone that came before me.” 

We are also everyone around us. We introject the images created by others, real and fake, thirst trap selfies and old master paintings, straight and queer. We are amalgamations of the ‘gram.

During the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, my longstanding iPhone street photography practice hit the lockdown wall. Isolated from the street, I found myself weaving together my album of street shots with images found while doom-scrolling, reading the news, or in a rabbit hole of Google image searches. Without access to museums, I began to take virtual trips, hunting for pics to knit into my digital assemblages. As social distancing morphed into social gatherings and isolation faded I kept exploring my new approach to building pictures. 

This project exists because of existing images mixed with, what I call, my non-straight street photography. Some images queer the street through gender fuck digital assemblages creating binary blind avatars. Some salivate over hot bodies from Grindr pix or Renaissance paintings (hard to tell the difference sometimes). Some steal from the masters: old and new, fresco and AI. They all reveal the hyperabundance of images the world has produced and keeps producing. The bottomless well that feeds the image we project back to the world.