Broken Mirror 
Truth in Photography Summer 2024 

In the beginning of the year, I was frequenting a porn theater on the outskirts of Queens. On my first day there I met a sixty-two-year-old self-proclaimed crossdresser named Veronica and we exchanged numbers. The theater is a big part of her life where she can explore her sexuality. She says people check their emotions at the door. A younger queer male tells me the theater is the only place where you can be yourself. There is no judgement. The space allows both anonymity and privacy from the outside world. The only requirement for entry is fifteen dollars cash at the front door. Veronica lived in the lower east side from the mid 80s to 2004. I asked her if the closure of porn theaters and other public sex sites led to a change in my generation’s sexuality and her response was that the major impact of my generation was September 11th and technology.

Wildwood, a vacation town with architecture like Las Vegas, is located off the last stop on the turnpike in Cape May County. This infamous “Jersey Shore” town has a rate of drug-related crimes higher than the average US city. A lot of kids come down from the AC / Berlin area one hour north and 45 minutes west in Camden County by the Pennsylvania border. The party I pass on the front porch of a two-story beach house is the closest thing to reality television you can get. White panels, metal railing, cheap patio furniture, and three guys wearing Hanes T-shirts. I meet Anthony, AJ, Chris, and his girlfriend Tori. They hauled here from Philadelphia for the summer to work in a restaurant. Their boss pays the rent and they’ve never been happier. Cigarettes for days, booze on the beach. Frozen drinks, sugar, lemon, sunburn, headaches, exhaustion, and sweat, I leave.

The photographs you see here are emotional encounters that reveal what’s beneath a glamorous facade. The images have a sadness. I think about the cracks in our society. Some portraits were taken of strangers in my hometown while retracing the footsteps of my youth while other portraits were taken of people I met while working as an event photographer in New York City. I’ve learned that we all suffer from similar problems.

https://www.truthinphotography.org/broken-mirror.html

Broken Mirror Arcanite Pictures Online Exhibition 2025 

There is a woman naked in the ninth ward hugging her heart shaped stuffed animal we both love a jersey shore house party and the vacant movie theater on the weekday with the lady who just quit her job. 

The Wawa manager looks sad on her day off and the dominatrix at the sex club is blazing the smoke filled her eyes with a weeping willow waterfall.

Christmas eve at the plaza and the crossdresser from the porn theater shows me how to dance a record of no regrets with the sex doll at a motel in Mississippi an escorts living room a baby doll a stripper a vagabond. 


https://www.arcanite-pictures.com/samantha-sutcliffe

Rockaway Art Week 2023 

Responding to Rockawy Art Week’s theme of Liminal Space Uncensored New York’s artists used the feelings of tension as a jump off point to explore a plethora of related topics. 

In our society oppositional views on gender, race, drug use, victim mentality and gun violence tear us apart. This group show, curated by Samantha Sutcliffe with assistance of Joseph Cochran, will have a experimental film installation by Joseph Cochran that explores the Rockaway’s past and present, never before seen images and interview transcripts from Samantha Sutcliffe’s archive on isolation, a black and white film photograph confronting addiction by Lauren Massie and Johnny Scuotto’s collage about the demographis of violence and a garment about the cult like victim mentality portrayed in media. 

“Far Rockaway and its surrounding areas represent the perfect, most visible remnant of the infamous Robert Moses’ power. His rockaway improvement plan which began in the mid-twentieth century changes the Rockaways from a bungalow-laden resort town to a segregated quagmire of public housing, isolating wealthy communities and Moses’ own passion projects such as Riis Beach. 

To this day the Rockaways remain one of the most impoverished resource-deprived communities in the city. While less than 5 percent of the burrough’s total population lives there, approximately 30 percent of its public housing stock can be found on the penninsula. Bombarded by climate disasters and lethargic governmental aid, Moses’ vision now lives on as a dilapitaded husk, more notable for its crime and apathy from the public.” - Joseph Cochran 

https://uncensorednewyork.org/arts-and-education#rockaway-art-week

The Vida Archive at The Royal 

Curated by Samantha Sutcliffe

The Vida Archive is a group exhibition curated by Samantha Sutcliffe which features the work of Vodka Vida, Rachel Wark, Alexey Yurenev, Samantha Sutcliffe and Arthur Arbit. The Vida Archive invites you to step into the mental state of a thirteen year old Catholic school girl from the suburbs of New Jersey who suffers from borderline personality disorder. The gallery space will mimic Vodka’s teenage bedroom using original pieces from her archive including hand-written poems, posters and pencil drawings of her highschool enemies and unedited writing from her published art books RAGING BULL (2019), YOU NEED DISCIPLINE (2020), YAZ CAR SUICIDE (2020) and SAD SARAH (2020). Shadow box sculptures inspired by church decorations created by Arthur Arbit, an immersive kaleidoscope installation by Rachel Wark and black and white silver gelatin prints of Vodka’s bedroom taken by Samantha Sutcliffe will be displayed on the surrounding walls. Vodka’s favorite photographer Alexey Yurenev will show for the first time his archive of the Night Wolves, a Russian motorcycle club he followed around between 2015 – 2017.

Limited edition books will be for sale the night of the opening all proceeds will go to Open Path Psychotherapy Collective.


https://rsoaa.com/exhibitions/the-vida-archive/

Under the Shadows of... (2017 - 2019)

Under the Shadows of... is a multi layered account through photographs and interviews of a trans female sex worker who de-transitions after four years of being on hormones. The project, shot over the course of three years, is a testament to the universal need for connection and community against today’s deeply fractured societal backdrop.  

Under the Shadows of... was short listed for The Hopper Prize in 2021. Different iterations of this project have been published in Fotofilmic JRNL 10 guest edited by Paul Schiek (2021) and Phile Magazine Issue 03 (2020).  


https://fotofilmic.com/jrnl-10/

Notions of Home Winner for Interiors/Still Life Category

The Lucie Foundation is proud to announce Notions of Home an open call supporting the Lucie Witness Program: Visions from the Youth of America.

My Suburban Sprawl is made up of photographs taken in and around my hometown of Morristown, New Jersey. The work is about what exists beneath the surface of things. It’s about drugs and failed family dinners. It’s about being a teenager and feeling boxed in and lying to your parents and finding freedom in the back seat of somebody’s Pontiac Grand Prize in a Burger King parking lot. It’s about getting older. The main themes are “isolation, alienation and dysfunction” This is where I was born and raised and I respect the place but it haunts me. My Suburban Sprawl is my attempt to do it justice.


https://www.luciefoundation.org/open-call-notions-of-home/

My Suburban Sprawl at The International Center of Photography 2019 

I’m at the waterfront and I have a burning throat filled with chocolate I’m fantasizing about weathered down leather the kind that looks polished with grease and if I could I would hop on the ferry and get off in Times Square and walk to my friend apartment but its a holiday today its Easter and I lied to my parents and told them I was sick so I didn't have to go see them and I feel terrible but I can't bring myself to go because I"m haunted by my hometown I can't stay there for more than one day I always feel terrible plus I haven't seen my mom in over a month and she got a haircut that my dad says looks like Mary Tyler Moore. This might sound neurotic but that's because I am neurotic changes change things and I can't handle that especially in the suburbs where out of the ordinary stands out like a sore thumb people hide behind their doors because nobody is checking on them because nobody cares so people keep to themselves and the sad truth is that people get trapped here it’s so isolating that's there's no chance for transformation they will rot here and I’d probably rot here with them too.

My Suburban Sprawl is a documentary made up of photographs taken in and around New Jersey and stories written about my heavy-hearted teenage years. A town located fifty miles west of New York City, Morristown, is full of strip malls and it is the headquarters of pharmaceutical and healthcare giants like Novartis, Phizen, Bayer, and Colgate-Palmolive. It has the second highest income per capita. 

But this work is about another landscape altogether, one that exists beneath the surface of things. It’s about my friend Ingrid and drugs and failed family dinners. It’s about being a teenager and feeling boxed in and lying to your parents and finding freedom in the backseat of somebody’s black grand prixe in the Burger King parking lot. It’s about getting older. 

Made up of forty black-and-white photographs and fifteen short vignettes, My Suburban Sprawl is told from my own personal perspective and its main themes would likely be listed as “dysfunction, isolation, and alienation.” In that sense, I suppose it’s probably something that a lot of people can identify with, whether you’re from a small town or not. This is where I was born and raised and I respect the place but it haunts me. My Suburban Sprawl is my attempt to do it justice. 

Dangerous, Hysterical and Perfect Pop Culture Fun (2023) 

Black and white silver gelatin print, 12 x 12 in. mirror frame, various tearsheets collected from ebay and scotch tape.

Dangerous, Hysterical and Perfect Pop Culture Fun is a critique on media’s conscious choice to profit from the seduction of image and their role in the creation and destruction of celebrity. The work was installed at the Death of the Subject group exhibitiion at Public Works Administration in Times Square, New York City, alongside multi-media works by Jake Brush, e5piral, Johnny Scuotto and Joslyn Crocco. Death of the Subject explores the distrubing flow of media brainwashing and doxing culture, suggesting to break the cycle by pausing and becoming symbiotic with nature.

In Boris Groys’ Into the Flow he explains that being offline is the act of contemplation that leaves no trace and therefore does not belong in the material world. The death of the subject means the incapacity of the subject to communicate and contribute their own message therefore becoming a secret. The media cycle (tabloid) continues to validate this behavior that has trickled down to all classes (non-celebrity) resulting in loss of job, housing, community and suicide. The death of one’s image is a blessing in disguise. Although painful, the rebirth creates an open minded existence, a freedom from the attachment of the image of the self.  

https://uncensorednewyork.org/arts-and-education#death-of-the-subject

Anachrome x Uniform Object Paper Magazine 2022
Creative + Photography