Collectives, Projections, and Continuously Having to Pinch Myself: The Night Show 1 Story
3 years ago or so I stumbled across the popular YouTube channel of street photographer and filmmaker, Sammy “Streetlife” Lintaro. The first video of his that I would have seen was titled something like “Tokyo street photography POV” and it was exactly what I was looking for: beautifully shot and produced proof that there were other people in the world doing similar shit to me with a camera. The fact that he was on the other side of the Pacific was of no consequence. By this point I’d already been shooting a metric shit ton, I was up on the Vivian Maier and “Everybody Street” tips, I had started my book collection (though mostly how to’s at this point), I was listening to podcasts, and I was ravenous for more street photography …well “content” I guess (—Gross. I know). Something about Lintaro’s channel felt super relatable. Like I was tapping into the veins of a peer. More humanizing than a “best of” compilation from a master’s decades long body of work. Granted, Lintaro seemed an incredibly talented and prolific peer, but a peer nonetheless. Whatever it was, the hook had set. I was in. Over the next few months I’d like, subscribe, and binge (LSB) all of Samuel’s videos including two that would change the trajectory of my photography and life. These were his “ON THE STREET WITH [008]: VoidTokyo Collective” and his “Bringing Street Photography back to the Streets! (ROZOU PROJECT – Tokyo)” videos.
The former would be my first true experience seeing a street photography collective in practice and it really helped humanize these photographers/artists who operate at very high levels. Their photography was exceptional and exciting and the way they worked and convened together to talk shop and produce a group zine was something to aspire to. I’d instantly become a fan, search them up, and order the latest Zine that was available at the time (Vol 7) and ever since VoidTokyo became my North Star. The seed to form my own street collective in San Diego was officially planted.
The latter was a video of one of the VoidTokyo members, Tadashi Onishi and his project, The Rozou Project. With The Rozou Project, Tadashi projects his street images in a highly trafficked pedestrian walkway in Tokyo. Tadashi stated in the video that the concept arose as a means to present his work to the subjects of his photography, the very same people who may not always have an interest/understanding/chance to view street photography. Another seed had been planted.
Just as soon as I’d finished watching these videos I knew two things: 1) I wanted to form a street collective in San Diego, and 2) I wanted to project my photos somewhere in San Diego. I immediately took action on one of these things and bought a projector. I tested it out a time or two in my mom’s house where I was living at the time and proceeded to leave it in it’s box for around 3 years (for good measure). I’d dreamt out loud about doing a projection show, my own version of The Rozou Project, but I wasn’t ready to put myself out there in that way. Not all alone. (What if no one came?) So I never acted on that desire, that was, until I had assembled my crew.
Forming a street collective as it turned out was a much more daunting a task than I had thought. Where to even begin? At this point in my “career” I was very much a lone wolf. I’m pretty sure that’s why documentaries and street photography YouTube channels became so prominent in my consumption, I was really needing community and so far that only existed in books, podcasts, and on screens. I’d occasionally see people shooting while I was out around town but not really what I’d call street photographers. I started selling work at art festivals and markets around town, and would occasionally meet photographers who might have some interest in my work but again it wasn’t really a place to discover other San Diego street photographers though a couple did cruise through. Online I had migrated almost exclusively to The Gram by way of Facebook (#ImOld). For the record, FB still is arguably the far better platform for both words and images, yet there seems to be no arguing with the world when it’s collectively doing dumb shit (see: anything) so on to insta I went. On insta there aren’t any “groups” like there are on FB and there weren’t any prominent hashtags for San Diego Street Photography that I could find either. So I decided I had to go out into the world. I don’t remember how, maybe from one of the photographers who came through my sales booth at an ArtWalk event, but I’d eventually find some local meetup groups post about photowalks in San Diego and so I figured these would be, if anything, good places to meet other photographers (hopefully some street photographers). The idea of a photowalk was always a tough one for me to wrap my head around because to me it’s just not a fun shooting experience. Walking around with a big group of people constantly having to catch up or waiting on others to move, sounded like a frustrating way to try and make photographs when you’re accustomed to serving as your own master and following your own intuition. Eventually I’d reframe photowalks as networking events (—I know. Gross again.) and this would help me care less about the photos I was making during these walks and focus most of my energy on meeting new photographers and making genuine connections, or at least trying to.
At one of these walks I’d meet a street photographer, who after we’d swapped insta’s and chatted a little beforehand would end up all in my feed. Just prolific as fuck. Hitting the pavement and posting daily. Strong sense of composition and framing, his work often reminded me of my own. And this same dude seemed to be not only out shooting all the time, but also really well connected with these various meetup groups and other photographers. I thought for sure this was my guy. So I reached out, a couple times maybe, and he eventually agreed to meet up for coffee and to talk about my dream of forming a collective. At least 2 years had passed since the initial seed had been planted and so I brought in tow, my now two VoidTokyo zines (Vol 7+8), a couple zines from an Italian collective called Fragment I found on insta, a couple other photo publications (Frames and Framelines), and a proof copy of my first zine/book to make the pitch. I told him I wanted to put together a San Diego collective that would make our own publication. Bert would later tell me that he came to that meeting to tell me “no,” that he in fact did not want to join a photography collective with me, but that my passion and enthusiasm flipped him. And flip him I did. He was now a co-founder.
With Bert as a co-founder I felt like we could easily put a super-crew of San Diego’s finest together but my naivety had clouded my judgment again as it took us the better part of a year to finally get our team together. It was a lot of work and learning on the fly but once we finally assembled everyone, I mean, my god, I still have to pinch myself every now and again because this crew is like The Monstars. Straight up some of the sickest photographers/artists in all of San Diego. Our collective, Heart, had finally taken it’s inaugural form with the goal to regularly produce a collective zine, just like VoidTokyo.
Meanwhile, as Bert and I spent the last year or so making efforts to put together the Heart crew, I was simultaneously engulfed by another collective which spawned out of a local non-profit which I love and support called Medium Photo. Medium’s claim to fame is an annual photography festival and portfolio review in San Diego that has been going strong for over a decade. It is a fantastic event which puts photographers in front of important industry players from the museum, gallery, and editorial worlds. I attended the festival for the first time and did their pop-up sale as a vendor in 2023 (where I met another one of Heart’s founding members—shout out to Dia!) and I was instantly hooked. “So this is where photographers who are serious artists come” I thought to myself as I attended lectures on bookmaking, listened to talks given by accomplished artists, and made friends with some really dope photographers and just genuinely good people. I joined Medium at the highest membership I could afford because it offered some perks that interested me like private collection tours, and opportunities to hob knob with some influential people inlcuding scott the director of Medium. After bugging scott [b. davis] the founder and director of Medium long enough about if Medium would ever have a crit group or not, he eventually threw me a bone and connected me with a group of members to form a team who would put together an artist talk program which kind of scratched some of the same itch. This became my first volunteering bout I’d do with Medium and it’d lead to an eventual offer to join the board of directors, which I’d go on to accept thanks to the sage advice of the late-great Doug McCulloh (if a door/[opportunity] opens [even slightly]… charge through the door).
Now in a bit of a restructuring period Medium is shifting gears from the museum model to a collective/community driven organization and so when the Medium Collective came to be, as a newly anointed board member, I was also now a member of a multi-disciplinary/multi-genre photography collective. In the span of a year I had gone from no collectives to founding my own and becoming a member of one of the most serious artists groups in town. Another total pinch-myself-moment.
So fast forward to one of the first Medium Collective meetings where we were talking about out of the box ways to show work and I pitched the projection show concept that I’d been sitting on for oh you know just about …3 years and to my surprise a lot of the photographers thought it was a great idea. It was all the validation I needed to press forward so I gave myself an arbitrary deadline ran with it. I put the call out to both collective groups and an open call to my followers on insta and that was that. I told just about anyone and everyone who came into my booth at the Festival I was vending at a couple weeks before. No backing out now. IT. WAS. HAPPENING.
I decided to project locally in my hood, Ocean Beach, for multiple reasons mainly 1) is it’s a happening place and on Wednesday nights there is a farmers market that goes on the main strip until 9pm so it was a good source of foot traffic and 2) OB is a very art-friendly community so if we were projecting art/photography on a random wall for an hour at night in an alley way no one would bat an eye at it. Also 3) selfishly it’s walkable for me so I could enjoy myself and not sweat having to drive home. And Lastly 4) even though OB can be a little seedy, I consider it a very safe neighborhood for anyone with at least average street smarts so I felt very comfortable running my projector there especially since I’d have friends from Heart and Medium there to help carry/watch over equipment if necessary. I ‘d scouted it out a couple weeks beforehand and found a nice spot in the alley behind the Harp and OB Thrift. It was dark enough that the projector looked great and also light enough to feel safe and have places for people to stand/sit.
I put together a flyer to send out to my newsletter and promote on Instagram and on it I had, somewhat arbitrarily, set the time of the projection show to be from 7:30 — 8:30pm so to fill the time I’d need A LOT of images. This was the biggest oversight which led to 30ish hours of editing in the 3 days leading up to the show. Luckily, I had worked out a playlist beforehand, so it was just a matter of sequencing 350ish photos and getting the timing of the slide changes on beat —eek. I’d made some slideshows for my YouTube channel previously that no one watched but I was thankful for the experience because no matter how prepared I think I am for video editing it always feels like so much more work than I expect. With the help of my fiancée and daughter holding down the fort at home I was able to hunker down and get it done. Plus I even slept for a few hours the night before the show! (#MajorBonus)
The morning of the show I planted my car as close to the alley well before the nightmarish farmers market traffic became a factor as it always does around midday. At the show there were a few of the Heart Members, a couple of the Medium Collective friends who were in the show, and a handful of other photographers and friends, some in the show, some just there to support. We set out sandwich boards on either side of the street fair directing people to the alley for an “art show” and a few people came through from reading those and there were also just random cars and passersby who came through. Some stayed for a bit, others walked right through without raising an eyebrow. It was hard for me to sit and watch because by the time we pressed play for the first time publicly I had seen some version of the show at least like 20-30 times while editing, but I got to watch my friends see it and soak in their reactions. Like the cheers that followed when the first images started coming up, and Mark (Heart member) proclaiming almost instantly, “we can make a book right now!” which by the way, is a very accurate statement.
Truth be told this show was small. At the height there would be a crowd of around 20 or so folks watching and while for the most part I felt like folks were pretty engaged with the presentation, to me this was mainly a proof of concept, 1) that it looked badass projected right onto a textured surface, in our case across one and half garage doors in an alley, and 2) that something like this can draw an audience, even if just other photographers and artists. And with the risk of sounding like I’m stopping to sniff my own farts too much (as if that’s not entirely what this post is!) I couldn’t help the feeling like this marked the beginning of something much bigger. Like an echo of so many origin stories of bands, start ups, etc. that begun in a garage and end up playing on a much bigger level. That’s the dreamer in me getting going but even still, this night was really special to me. It really got me fired up about doing more cool shit with our photo community here in San Diego.
So I know it’s like 6 months late but I want to say a MAJOR THANK YOU to all the artists who participated in the slideshow and BIG THANKS to everyone who came out to support, and thank you to anyone taking the time to read this. It might sound dumb but this was one of those nights where I came home all up in my feelings (#ICried) because I was able to pop out from the grind and catch a glimpse of my dreams coming to fruition IRL(!) and it’s always a surreal feeling when I get those moments, even if brief, to smell the roses. To be on this path doing dope shit with dope photographers is such a privilege and I don’t take it for granted.
After the show I grabbed some food and drinks with a group of photographers comprised of Heart, Medium, and new friends. We shot the shit, talked about the show, and talked shop a little before disbanding for the evening. Still riding high I ended up going into the Harp to take in the end of the Wednesday night jam which remains one of my favorite musical experiences in life. The jam has relocated since I wrote about it, but the musicians are still there and the talent is still absolutely insane. This particular evening the house band closed out the night with an epic showstopper and it was the perfect cap on a great night.
If you want to stay tuned for shit to come like calls for art to project, location and time of the next show, and anything and everything else in my photo orbit you can sign up for my newsletter or follow me on insta.
Speaking of following on insta, here are the links to all the artists who showed at Night Show 1 give them a follow:
From Heart
Bert Celeridad @str33t.shinobi
Delana Delgado @strawb.unny
Vince Fanghella @vincefango
Mark Remulla @mvrkwill
Dia Soto @colors_of_the_barrio
Arianna Ytselle @ariannaytselle
From the Medium Collective
Stefan Frutiger @stefan.frutiger.photography
Traverse Robinette (no insta …yet)
Contributing Friends
Alex Denney @_lexphoto_
Fernando Phillipi @fernandophillipi
Stevie White @steeveewhite
Lastly, since I first drafted this blog post way back in October Heart has since gone public with our own Instagram page AND we have our next projection show scheduled on 4/18/25 in Escondido at The Photographer’s Eye Collective Gallery at 8pm. All 7 members of Heart will be showing work along with 20+ other San Diego street photographers. Unfortunately, the call to submit has closed but you can definitely come to check out the show and connect with many members of our local street photography community. We hope you’ll come check out the show!
