\n<\/p>\n
People liked being in my pictures, mostly because I cared so much about how they looked in them. I\u2019ve never been interested in ugly shots of beautiful people, which we see far too much of now. I was the in-house archivist: at the end of a night out or after a trip around the world, I\u2019d have all the evidence. What power! I\u2019d dole out images to friends like a drug dealer, teasing them, bargaining for things I wanted. Memories, with leverage.<\/p>\n
In 2010, Instagram was founded. That same year, Apple introduced the iPhone 4, with its first front-facing camera\u2014an innovation that quietly turned the lens around. My role as documentarian, gatekeeper, and distributor of memories was becoming obsolete.<\/p>\n
Two years later, everyone had a camera in their pocket. (Except my dad, who still has a flip phone.) Everyone had a platform and an audience. The idea of publishing photographs in a magazine, waiting for them to be printed and seen, began to feel too ceremonial. Why wait for a newsstand when you could upload instantly and reach more people than most magazines ever could?<\/p>\n
Fast + Louche ended not with drama but with a job offer\u2014another magazine hired me and asked for exclusivity, and I gave it to them. But if I\u2019m honest, there was another shift underway. I was getting older, media was getting faster, and the gap between living a moment and publishing it collapsed. It was time to be Slow + Tight. As the nature of personal photography changed, images that once were precious and finite became JPEGs on an endless scroll. Today, our diaries exist as a constant stream\u2014clicked, posted, forgotten\u2014submerged in an ever-expanding digital archive that almost no one revisits.<\/p>\n
As I revisit these images a decade and a half after they were taken, I realize Fast + Louche was a precursor to the visual culture we take for granted. And it belongs to a special, narrow window of time\u2014when access still felt rare, when documentation required intention, and when not everything was instantly seen, shared, and consumed.<\/p>\n