Urbanism

2019–2024 | A prelude to Convergence

Urbanism traces the formative years of my photographic practice—a period shaped by instinct, repetition, and a quiet obsession with rhythm. These photographs emerged before I had language for my style or philosophy, but they were already circling something deeper: the feeling that public space is never neutral, and the city is always performing itself.

Shot between 2019 and 2024, these images document the theatrical, tender, and often surreal ways people reveal themselves in urban space—through costume, gesture, architecture, and accident. At the time, I was drawn to visual tension, graphic energy, and the unpredictable collisions of street life. But looking back now, I see a more essential undercurrent:

a question about how we perform identity—playfully, politically, or unconsciously—when surrounded by strangers.

This was the series where I first began to understand that I wasn’t just documenting the city—I was translating it. These weren’t just clever moments. They were emotional metaphors. Dream images. Symbols of something collective, unresolved, and strangely sacred.

In 2024, Urbanism was selected as a Top 3 finalist for the Urban Photo Awards Book Prize. Though my current work (Convergence) has moved toward a more abstracted and ambiguous visual language, this series still marks an essential threshold. It taught me how to listen to the city. It taught me that meaning lives not in spectacle, but in the poetic accidents of public life.

Five of the photographs included here were made shortly after the book’s submission. Though newer, they extend the visual frequency and thematic DNA of Urbanism—and feel inseparable from its spirit.

This was where I learned to see. Not just images—but presence, performance, and myth.