Gomez Was Here

Since my teen years, I’ve considered photography my first medium— a long lost love of archiving and presenting how I see the world around me.
These images show the beauty in the raw unpretentiousness of San Francisco nightlife through the use of disposable cameras. My goal in using disposable cameras as my tool is to show how the need for inaccessible and highly expensive gear is unnecessary when you utilize your eye and intuition. This exhibit is my resurgence as a photographic archiver— capturing moments of joy, resistance and unapologetic queerness.

What you see here is Oakland as experienced on foot, a collection of fleeting encounters that exist for a small moment, before disappearing completely. I started taking long walks through Oakland as a way to slow down my constantly racing mind, and the more I walked the more I began to notice new scenes, new places, and the more I felt connected to this town. I’ve loved shooting film for years and bringing a small film camera along created this safe space for me to feel present, admire the beauty of this town, and fulfill a creative curiosity. The more I walk, the
more I want to walk again. Sometimes I have a route, but most times I don’t. The rhythm of shooting film is a perfect compliment, each moment must be earned through presence, not speed and not being able to see the images right away gives the moment a sense of memory. In our hurried world, walking becomes a radical act. These photographs are invitations to slow down, to notice, to find the extraordinary hiding in plain sight on every block of this city I call home.

These images were shot on my first 3 rolls of film, when I was still learning how to use a camera, and was first introduced to 24th Street in San Francisco. Looking at them now, they feel like a faint inscription to my future self that would only become legible years later. When Brava Theater was still the York Theater, and did not yet feature the face of my future partner Vero Majano painted on its façade. When Galeria de la Raza on 24th and Bryant had a payphone outside, I could not have predicted that Vero, DJ Brown Angel and myself would create a show called The Q-Sides 20 years later that would change our lives (and that corner). Each imperfect frame reminds me of what I was drawn to before knowing why.

in this photo set I look back on the early 2010s in seattle, washington, where I lived for a decade. My beloved friend group was made up of queer punks, artists, musicians, poets, and organizers of all kinds. these photos were taken in underground venues, on back porches of rented shared homes that doubled as practice spaces and studios, and outside of cafes and bars -- all of which no longer exist. there is a grief so loving and bittersweet to remembering our youth, our time spent growing up in the moss wet and mountainous liminal years of seattle's post-grunge era and technocapitalist, Amazon-driven gentrification boom that ultimately moved most of us out and along to new places, new paths, and onto second or third lives. I've included one more recent photo, taken just earlier this year in west oakland, to remind me that the way we love each other, create art and lives together, and share our worlds continues to exist alongside those original timelines laid down in years past.

Paintings made in reference to Rivas' observations of San Francisco