As I stood in my backyard, hanging a sheet of bright green gift wrapping paper along my clothesline, I resented my mother for refusing to turn a single wall in our room into a permanent green screen. I had just turned ten years old and was ready to take my filmmaking to the next level. Granted, we were renting the house and were behind quite a few payments at that. However, it was difficult to be reasonable while creativity had sparked a wildfire of ideas that was slowly burning out as obnoxious New York City winds blew my green screen away. Pressed for time before the next gust, I tapped the bright red button on my Kodak camcorder gently enough not to knock over the stack of books it was leaning against.
My life has always been a fight against the odds. Growing up in poverty, I was never expected to become much more than an average employee. However, the ocean of creativity and ambition that existed within me had drowned out this average agenda from an early age. As a child, I was far too innocent to believe money could prevent me from being successful, and as I grew older, I simply became too ambitious to allow it. I needed to make the world wonder how a boy, who lived in a single room with his entire family, had managed to become a household name throughout the country.
By my eleventh birthday, I had taught myself to edit films on various Hollywood level programs in order to produce a documentary on the abundance of stray animals in my neighborhood. I cycled through month-long free trials and delved into every last tool on each program, knowing I would never be able to afford them once they expired. As a child, cinematography had been a blank canvas on which I painted beautiful mosaics inspired by my most innocent curiosities. However, as I matured and lived through darker, more somber days, it grew into an outlet through which I challenged corrupt ideals and injustices. At the age of thirteen, I produced a documentary that analyzed the great leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and had the privilege of interviewing Abdullah Razzaq, one of Malcolm X's most trusted associates. It was my attempt to fight racial discrimination in the status quo. Determined to make my voice heard, I submitted my documentary to the National History Day contest and was proud to receive the award for Best Documentary Inspiring Social Activism. However, I was much prouder of the process behind my documentary. I had spent hours nearly suffocating in a hot coat closet while recording voiceovers on a pair of headphones and had filmed with the same Kodak camcorder that had captured my very first video.
My journey with photography exemplifies my life struggle and the identity I have developed because of it. I grew up as a dreamer in a seriously limiting reality. Thankfully, I always possessed the resilience necessary to turn these dreams into a possibility for myself. With debt towering over my family, I never expected even the slightest support for my ventures. I only expected myself to show enough determination to compensate. No one believed my films could compete against those for which money and resources were no object. In the same way, no one expects me to go further than my local community college in pursuit of an education. However, I have done absolutely everything in my power to make sure that is not so. I have never been ashamed of the poverty in which I grew up because I have elevated myself to a level far from its grasp. In fact, I accredit all of my accomplishments to the hardships I have faced in life because they have molded me into the hard working individual I am today, who needs little to nothing to achieve his wildest dreams.
