Nearly a love letter
Anxiety demanded i search
The day i turned twenty
New York toiled my rapture :: lost. violent. tender.
XX serves to be an indexical rupture and creation | his explorations
Within men, as women, and imagining children,
XX became Sterling—
As Blake Sterling’s debut portfolio of silver gelatin prints, XX presents an immediate body of work photographed during the month and twenty days he spent in New York City from June to July of 2024. Blake restlessly searched grappling to understand the city, and thereby himself, as he walked between places and watched the people there. He desired to find someone or some people in the city to be violent and tender with: what would it mean to obsess, adore, capture, and hurt his subjects? Sterling’s aesthetic continues to toil with performative identities in society: gender, sexuality, and appearance. As he searched for himself, Sterling captured individuals living and performing their miserable lives. He writes,
To all of my subjects, I photographed you to understand a piece of my life better.
This is my love letter to you, to me.
-XX
