Hold still.” It was something I heard over and over again growing up, as a neurodivergent kid constantly asked to quiet my body, control my focus, and behave. We say it to children, to our pets, to portrait subjects—spoken with care, but also with control. This image resists that request.

This portrait reflects not just how I see, but how I might remember a loved one over time. Shot through a modified camera lens, the figure sits composed, blurred, dissolving at the edges. This person might be someone I once knew, someone I once was, or someone I'm trying not to forget. Memory can be rigid, cruel, and untruthful.

The lens becomes a point of conceptual transformation. Its distortions speak to the instability of memory—how our recollections soften over time, lose definition, and bleed into invention. Memory is not permanent. It's soluble. What appears to be a failure of focus is, instead, a deliberate act: a way to show how memory resists stillness—how vision may become a record of loss, and how the photograph, even in its stillness, continues to shift.

Additional views and installation photos available upon request.