An Intrinsic Beauty

I shot New York Fashion Week for New York Times T Magazine. I was searching for the hidden beauty.

Amazon River Boat Song

This time last year, in the middle of one of New York’s snowiest winters, I boarded a plane to Brazil to work on a project with my good friend Cameron, who after two years in the Peace Corps in Mozambique was fluent in Portuguese. The project was about people living along the Amazon River. This is not that project, but rather the moments in between, the friends we made, the shit we jumped off of. We knew the Amazon River had its share of dangers — piranhas, cayman, anacondas, stingrays, fish that can swim up your urethra. But it was so hot all the time and the water was so inviting. And none of the people we met seemed to warn against it. On the last night of staying with a family in the floodplains, we asked the patriarch, a grizzled fisherman with a big belly and toothless smile that grew up on the river, if he was ever afraid of getting in the water. He said every time, and proceeded to show us a hole in his thigh courtesy of a stingray. Then the whole family laughed at us for our recreational use of the Amazon River.