One roll of film. A million feelings. A hot dry climate In an unfamiliar city. During my nine months in Phoenix, Arizona I felt confused, sweaty and frustrated. Phoenix was a creative desert for me. Nothing I created there felt right, felt like me, felt worthwhile.

This body of work focuses on identity; specifically how my identity changed when I moved away from my hometown for the first time. The experience is now a small speck in the grand scheme of my life. But when I was wrapped up in the midst of it I felt non-existent, just completely and utterly out of place. Maybe it was heatstroke or the unknown or the rising housing prices or the lack of trees. I’ll never know for sure.

One thing I did know was my inherent need to feel like this new city and environment were my home, like I was meant to be there. I began to place myself in the environment, working through my feelings while physically documenting my time in my new normal. Ultimately, I left Phoenix and I never felt like my identity melded into the landscape like I had hoped it would. These photographs are the remnants of the experience, my physical form cut out and removed from the unfamiliar landscapes, and one roll of negatives, now overlapping mementoes as the timelines and experiences have jumbled in my head.

I did not develop the film and begin to truly process my time in the desert until I had moved back across the country, to another new state. I then poured over my single roll of film, enlarging, editing and cutting myself out of the landscape I once desperately tried to identify with. I chose to do this as a way of taking back the nine months I lived in Phoenix, and celebrating the growth I experienced there.

People often feel lost in their 20s, it’s become taboo. However I’m beginning to see that we’re never really lost, we just forget pieces of ourselves in the busyness of life. This was Phoenix to me, a time period of forgetfulness and misremembering. While many of my experiences in Phoenix were traumatic, I am thankful for the immense growth the city put me through.

Afterall, what are we if not a product of our environment?

(To be clear, this is not a project telling you to never visit or live in Phoenix, AZ. This is not a hate letter to a city but a love letter to the better parts of myself that emerged from the desert, a promise to leave the bad parts to rot in the sun and dirt and take what I had left with me.)