Two self-publishing projects have got me doing a deep dive into my iCloud Photos, and it’s a lot. A lot of images, a lot of memories, a lot of Scorpio related screenshots of CoStar, a lot of gallery and museum shows, an extra double a lot of Meaux Meaux pics, and thankfully a lot of laughs too.

The first project is an idea I have for a book that centers on the iPhone pics I tend to compulsively take on my walks around downtown L.A. It will include images from the last seven years—I picked that timeline because my Photos album starts on May 15, 2015. And I like the number seven.

Since the pandemic these #DTLAWalkabout pics often included a graff tag I started noticing: Heavy. I’m convinced that once you begin to pay attention to something, it will reward you with frequent appearances (ask me about finding playing cards) and sure enough I see Heavy on every single walk I take. Sometimes I make a game of it to see how many I can find. I call it Heavy Hunting.

I typically post my images directly onto my IG stories. I do it with such regularity that people will often talk to me about Heavy, both in person and sliding into my DMs. Recently folks have started to send me images of the Heavys that they find and even post them on their own social feeds. I love to see it.

One of these people is Johnny, an IG friend (@blackmuseumist) that I met IRL at the 2021 Felix Art Fair. He reached out and said he was obsessed by my obsession, and invited me to participate in a zine he’s putting together with a Heavy spread.

I started going through my iCloud in earnest last week with both projects in mind. Umm, it’s not a small task: there were over 45,000 images. I’ve been methodically going through and putting select pictures in a Book album and/or my public, shared Heavy album. I’m also deleting a ton of nonsense, bad, mistake kind of pics along the way. I am proud to say that as of this morning I’m down to 42,350. Which still seems completely ludicrous, but…progress!

So far there are 179 Heavy photos and 842 images that fit my book idea. Ha ha. Gonna need a bigger zine and maybe that book is actually a volume set. So many images. There is just so much to see.

There's just so much to see