Aaron McElroy was born in Florida in 1978 and moved to Connecticut--
until he left home for Boston at the age of 17. In Boston he wandered
around the streets and worked as a counselor for misguided youths. He
didn't pick up his camera until the age of 25, yet grew fond and attached
by way of it. The camera revived and enlightened, so much so, that he
began developing film and making prints in a self-taught manner using a
make-shift darkroom of sorts: The midst of his apartment.
NESOP was soon to follow, in effort to expand the seeded meaning, and
he began there with photography of documentary and fine art studies.
Traces of documentary can still be seen in some of his work, yet a
standard storytelling seems not enough to capture the complexities of his
fascination between the admixture of reality and surreality. The punctured
veneer of reality compelled him into the chiming chants of surreal streets,
and thus brought him to New York City, so naturally, in 2007. He
continues to conceive images with tradition and non-tradition, a preference
for black & white film, and a distressed facet of mood relayed variously on
the surfaces of his images.