Between 2011 and 2014, I embedded myself in New York City's underground rave scene with a camera—not as a voyeur, but as a witness. The resulting body of work captures a subculture at its inflection point: the last years before social media colonized nightlife and reshaped what it meant to be truly underground.

Shot in dark rooms with direct flash, the images are deliberately unpolished. Faces caught off guard, bodies in motion, spaces that weren't meant to be seen. That rawness is the point. The rave scene of this era operated on anonymity and ephemerality. You had to know someone. Nothing was posted. The experience existed only for those who were there.

By 2014, that was over. Instagram had arrived in force, and with it came a new kind of performance. Overnight, rave goers were always aware of the lens, always curating. The music was the same, but something essential had shifted. Authenticity, once the scene's defining currency, became another aesthetic to imitate.

This portfolio is evidence of what a subculture looks like when it still believes no one is watching.