My Cousins, on film

My first roll of film was shot in the wake of my grandfather’s passing. My maternal family gathered to mourn Grandfather Solomon, yet grief quietly gave way to something surprising—a celebration of life, a family reconciled and reunited. In Tampa, Florida, where so many of my family’s roots are held, my cousins drifted toward the water, moved by habit, by memory, and perhaps healing. In my grandfather’s religion, Catholicism, faith begins in water, and I cannot separate these photographs from him—from his belief, and from the Florida childhoods of pools and beaches by those he left behind.