nathan moya
I’m a photographer, artist, traveler and polymath living on the central coast of California, near San Luis Obispo. Curiosity more or less compels me to carry my camera everyday. There’s always a point at which the light hits right.
My artistic life has been a wide mix of music and the visual arts. I played music in bands for most of my teenage and early adult life, then sort of abandoned that to pursue what I thought would be a PhD in Philosophy. But I realized I really don’t like academia politics all that much. So I wrote short stories for while, got a fun gig writing beer reviews until I realized I’m allergic to hops and shouldn’t drink beer anymore. Thankfully a good bourbon suits me fine. Then a year stint in Mexico gave me the gift of relief printmaking. Learning the process and heuristics of a medium is truly what motivates me.
I was not a good hitter
And I’ve been lucky enough to work in the coffee industry for 14 years. I’ve worn many hats — barista, manager, educator, coffee roaster, consultant, competition trainer — and it’s a consistently furtive place to work in. I have met countless interesting people through coffee, and it remains a fundamental and important part of my life.
Likewise, but in a different way, golf has been and will always be in my life. I’ve played since I was a kid, and I truly believe it’s the game that most parallels the vagaries of life. To play well is to lean into the art of the sport, where the subconscious takes over and one just responds to the situation at hand. It’s a fascinating feedback loop.
Photography, then, is very much a culmination of all the things I do. It bridges observation, attuning to one’s environment, sensitivity to circumstances, fine attention to detail, things writing, art, coffee, and golf all share. I guess life gifts these things to us generally, if we pay attention. And that is the core of photography: observing, attention, framing and reframing, ideations over and over. It’s unfortunate that we must use language to talk about something that is visually understood, apprehended, and experienced. Because good photography bypasses the prefrontal cortex and hits in a primal way. The viscera expands. We know it sans language or verbal expression. We can point and say “THAT ONE!” when we see something true. I think in that moment in front of a good photo it’s like seeing something familiar for the first time, all over again, again.