The View From Behind the Lens

There is a photo I never took of myself.

I was there… at every event, every milestone, every room where something important was happening. I had the camera. I knew the angles. I knew how to find the light. But I was never in the frame. That was the deal I made with myself, somewhere along the way, without fully realizing I had made it.

Gauff won her first major title by defeating Sabalenka in the 2023 US Open Final | Brittany Dacoff

2023 US Open Finals Photographer

I grew up figuring out what it meant to belong somewhere. My mom worked a 9-5 and overnight shifts every Wednesday. She was protective in the way that fear makes people protective; tightly, with love underneath it. My sister wore her rebellion loudly. Mine was quieter, the kind you don't notice until it's already done. I learned early how to make myself small enough to stay out of trouble, small enough to be useful, small enough to not take up too much space.

The camera came later in college. My sister and I bought one together, and I started documenting the ordinary moments that somehow felt worth saving. I didn’t know then that I was practicing something. I thought I was just taking pictures.

After college, I cycled through jobs the way you do when you’re trying to figure out what you’re actually worth. I sat at desks, answered phones, and watched myself disappear into the furniture. I was a high performer in a system that had no language for what I was. I kept my head down. I kept showing up. I kept hiding.

And then, something broke open.

The world shifted. The streets were loud, and the silence in the rooms I worked in became too heavy to carry. I don’t know where the breaking point came from exactly, maybe from every moment I had swallowed something I needed to say. But I finally spoke up. I stopped making myself small.

I didn’t plan the fallout. But I think some part of me knew that if I was ever going to stop hiding, I had to build something to step into.

That is how Blacklight Imaging began; not from a business plan, but from a moment of being unable to stay quiet any longer. I started shooting anything I could. I was self-taught, learning from mistakes and momentum. I built workflows. I learned to protect my time and my work and my peace. Slowly, I stopped being the person who made herself invisible.

But I still found myself most comfortable behind the camera.

There is something I want to say about that; something I’m still working out. Because I don’t think hiding is always the same thing as fear. Sometimes it is a vantage point. Sometimes the person who holds the camera is the one who sees the most clearly.

I think about this when I think about B. HUNTER

B. HUNTER is the Founder of Power Speaks Louder (PSL), an Emmy Award-winning visionary, a Motivational Speaker, and the Executive Producer and Director of the documentary Still Standing. She has been doing this work since 2016. Coordinating food distributions, street outreach, health and wellness programming, youth empowerment, artistic installation, and films. In 2025, PSL was named the California Nonprofit of the Year for the 31st District. She has been honored with multiple local, state, and legislative awards. The list goes on.

But the list is not the thing.

What I keep coming back to is the way she moves. The way she takes up space — not aggressively, not performatively, but as if she has simply decided that the world is large enough for all of her. She knows that knowing what to say starts with knowing who you are speaking to. She meets people where they are; because, she has actually thought about who is in the room.

As I was moving from room to room with B. HUNTER . I watched her hug a strangers like they were family. I watched her laugh with her whole body. I watched her stand in front of a wall of names and point at them like they are the whole point.

Because they are.

The new Power Speaks Louder Headquarters is a physical thing that should not exist and yet does after 9 faithful years. It’s a space built from years of showing up when it would have been easier not to. The walls are covered in framed certificates and awards and photographs and impact reports. There is a Community Wall that chronicles every program, every event, every moment of contact between PSL and the people it serves.

There is an Emmy Award. The documentary began as a project to highlight the impact of PSL and post-pandemic recovery. It screened at Harkins Theatres. It won. The award sits there now, lit from above, in a building that B. HUNTER built.

As I photographed the opening I watched people walk through the door and stop. I watched them read the names on the "Who Cares?" wall and find themselves listed there.

I watched her with her parents. The photographs say something about her support system. The way her mother looked at her, the way her father smiled. The way B. Hunter held both of them at once.

I don’t know exactly what it means that I have spent so much of my life making other people visible. I don’t know if that is generosity or avoidance or both at the same time. I don’t know if the camera was always a way of seeing clearly or sometimes a way of not being seen.

What I know is that Blacklight Imaging exists because I eventually stopped being able to stay quiet. And that the work I do now feels like the truest version of what I was always trying to do, even when I didn’t have the language for it.

I know that B. HUNTER is building something that will outlast this moment. That the names on that wall are not decoration. That the Emmy is not the point. That PSL’s mission; to inspire individuals to reach their full potential while building community, growth, and resilience. It’s not a tagline but a practice, repeated every week in Riverside County and beyond, in food distributions and walk clubs and youth programs and documentary films.

The Open Door Campaign is ongoing; names are listed in the order received.

Contributors are added weekly, honoring everyone making a difference in our community.

Power Speaks Louder is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. All donations are tax-deductible.

I know that I am still learning what it means to stand in my own light. That some days the camera feels like a shield and some days it feels like a gift. That the question of why I hid for so long does not have a clean answer, and I am not sure I want one.

What I want is to keep showing up. To keep bearing witness. To keep making people visible…including myself.

I’m the founder of Blacklight Imaging, a photography and visual storytelling company based in Southern California. All photographs in this piece were taken by myself at the Power Speaks Louder Headquarters opening. Learn more about PSL at powerspeakslouder.org.

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