A Year at Hollywood Beach is an ongoing photographic project documenting Chicago’s Hollywood Beach, a site of queer gathering and social life on the city’s North Side. Beginning shortly after I moved to Chicago in 2024, the project emerged from my own search for community and from the experience of becoming both a participant in and observer of a space where belonging is repeatedly produced through everyday rituals of leisure, friendship, desire, and visibility.
Made primarily through spontaneous iPhone photographs, the series attends to fleeting gestures, unexpected visual correspondences, and recurring patterns within the beach’s social landscape. Drawing on psychoanalytic ideas around the gaze, desire, and the unconscious, the work asks what compels certain moments to be photographed and how acts of looking shape both the image and the person making it.
Situated within a longer history of queer gathering along Chicago’s lakefront, A Year at Hollywood Beach also considers photography as a form of connection across time. Rather than treating the images as a closed archive, the project understands them as networked objects, circulating through the artist's practice as material to be combined with other media, shown in exhibitions, and turned into gifts and postcards. This ultimately connects people, histories, and places while continually raising new questions about queer belonging and collective memory.