While I had been really wanting to create a new body of work, something had been nagging at me. I really wanted to get back in touch with something that I felt had been missing for years. I started going through a lot of my old photographs, past collections, to see if I could visually identify something. I came across a small collection of about 10 images that I once showed about 10 years ago titled "Youth of Today" which I took back in 2000/2001.
This collection showed people that I had lived, ate, attended concerts/political rallies, did community gardens and so much more with. While looking at these images, I started to wonder what had happened to these people. Thanks to the internet, I had been able to keep in touch with some of them as we grew older and moved on with our lives. Yet, others I had lost touched of, and some I even forgot their names. This was unacceptable as this period in my life was very significant, while it was shorter lived at its core than what I would have liked, I still carry the ideals of then.
This lead me to look at myself and see how much I had changed over the past fifteen years. It shocked me to see myself now and compare it to who I was then. However, it made me think that if I had changed so much and never really knew it, how had the people that I photographed then changed now. The collection, while it is a revisit of that sub-group of society, does not document the new generation that has taken our place but rather tracks down the people who I grew up with, these same people that are the same as I am and who experienced these events with me. I wanted to see how much they had changed, if their ideals, every day life had changed. Were they still the "political punks" and community activists that they had been a decade and a half ago?
This collection is my attempt to gather those answers, and to get back something that I feel that I had lost.