CODA

T H E S H I F T

I've spent a long time putting out work under my own name feeling completely disconnected from it. My name is who I am to family, but it never held the weight and soul of the images I was trying to create. For years this disconnect has bothered me, and then came this past year.

It has been, without a doubt, the heaviest and most brutal year I've had. Massive down trade in business, paired with a terrifying spiral in my own mental health and well being, has left scars.

We work in an industry that eats its young. It demands our absolute essence, our raw passion and our life force to create things for others and then it demands more. The excessive hours, the constant over delivery and the quiet desperation of burnout. It destroys the very thing we are hired for in the first place.

But as with all competition, when the market gets tough we tell ourselves that some work is better than no work so we sell out quick and cheap.

We bury the pain, ignore the damage we are doing to our mind, family, friends, and we just fucking push through.

But in the quietest, lowest moments of this year, in the absolute silence, I had to find ways to breathe and keep moving to create. During all of this the need to address the elephant in the room returned.

In music a Coda is the final passage. Its what happens after the chaos and tension, it follows the noise of the symphony once it has fully played out. It is the final resolution.

Art and photography embodies this to me. A visual Coda.

The world is chaotic, loud and moving fast, but when the shutter clicks, the noise stops. The image is the final permanent resolution of that moment.

This shift to C O D A Isn't some polished business strategy or clever marketing grift. I don't care about perfect symmetry or corporate optics. My work has never been polished, and it sure as hell has never been perfect.

This moniker is my way to honour the blood, the burnout, the lessons. Its a boundary, a legacy and a return to the honesty of the craft I try pursue.

C.C