Edmond, a rising photographer in New York, tells his story through other artists.
It was not long ago, given that he recalls it so clearly, that Sincere Dennis, an up-and-coming photographer based in New York, simply wanted to be a part of a creative journey. Music was what finally brought him there.
Around Sincere were friends who, involved in singing and rapping, found themselves through their own artistic mediums; and he very much wondered how that would feel.
While he says that he had never been a musician of any sort, music was what helped him discover his passion for photography. As soon as he picked up a camera, he began discovering his voice.
“I started doing photography because of music,” he said in a recent episode of a video series, “The Accents.”
“Music, it’s just a motivator. It’s what keeps you going.”
https://youtu.be/xd6GVlCX3GA
Purposely stepping away from the digital world, one that he finds to be “over-saturated,” he bought his camera on eBay. It’s in that way that he prefers to stand out.
“If you want to stand out as a photographer, you need to have something much better and different,” he said.
“My work, it doesn’t look like anybody else’s.”
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Edmond, the director of “The Accents” and also a talented photographer based in the city, is himself, like Sincere, no stranger to that often daunting, sometimes impatient, desire to discover his identity.
He hadn’t lived in Hong Kong since he was eleven, but since then, he lived for eight years in Shanghai, six years in Los Angeles, and four years in New York City. Throughout his many relocations, he had met children who, just like him, struggled with their identities.
One of his friends in Shanghai was born and raised in South Africa, though her parents were from Taiwan; another friend was born and raised in Hong Kong, spoke perfect Cantonese, even though he has an Indian background.
While grappling with his own sense of “belonging” and identity, he realized that perhaps other artists experience this exact grappling, too, an inward artistic phenomenon that his series explores.
That is in great part what inspired his series in 2018.
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“[My situation] allows me to understand closely how [other artists] feel and what they have been through when it comes to processing their identity,” he told us.
“Listening to their definition of identity-based on their individual experiences makes the whole project unique.”
He also hopes that this “The Accents” and this notion of a common search of self sways artists away from thinking that their industry is, or should be, necessarily so competitive.
For him, it’s all about communication and connectivity.
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The way that true artists can grow is when they embrace communication and connectivity; it’s when they are open to genuine collaboration, disregarding any tendency toward competition.
“At its core, [the industry] is really pretty simple,” he said. “Be kind to others and be true to yourself.”
When asked what parts of his identity he wants to explore most, he couldn’t find a single part of himself that could be more important than any other. Instead, he is simply looking forward to all of his transformations, the kind that would encourage his artistry.
And it’s with his video series that he’d like to inspire that mindset in other artists: endless self-growth yields endless possibility.
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