Ned's Story

Born and raised in New York City

I've spent a few years in other places

but New York has always been my home

Brooklyn now

I've been a photographer as long as I can remember

but now it feels new

I feel new

I like shooting feelings

better then looks

emotions more then labels

comfort and discomfort

joy fear sadness

I don't like punctuation

Aya's Story

For a time sex was the only place I could feel it, it's not that I'm not emotional or anything, but life always seem to be too cloudy, like all the different colors of Play-Dough were mixed together into one on those colors that are not quite brown and not quite gray, somehow sex made things crystal clear. Tears made sense, laughter made sense, power and lack of it made sense. Everything else seemed confused, chaotic. I guess that's life when you are a teenager.

Then there were conversation and learning to talk to people, and learning to express myself with words, to be myself more, a little step at a time. And then there was art school that taught me, even more then how to be a graphic designer and illustrator, how to verbalize myself, to give words to ideas, to abstract emotions.

And then there was the internet and being able to be myself without being myself. To reinvent myself under a different name and discover that the more I removed myself from myself, the more I became myself. And that the more I became myself - the more I became attractive, both to me and to others.

Art didn't come as a surprise, I always had it, I always had pens and crayons and paints around, and I always liked holding them. I was never that kid who was the best in painting and in art at school, that knew how to draw cartoons or decorate notebooks with flowers, but I was always doing it, out of habit more then anything else. Expressing myself through art, sort of crept in the back door, I was doing it long before I thought about it, but suddenly it was there - the main tool for me to express myself, without having to take responsibility about my life or what people might think about me, just there.

And now, I'm here, Brooklyn, I just married a man I love, and it seem that all those things, all those way of self exploration and self expression, came together to bring me to this point in time, to a place and situation where I can just be me, myself and be loved for it.