Hi, I'm Noah

In a nutshell, I love creating community and making beautiful things.

Working with people, creating comfort, and giving something unique and of value makes me happy. I've spent the majority of my adult life in entertainment and hospitality. It is definitely part of the special sauce that allows me to work with people in a certain way. Get to the core of their brief, and also capture some very honest and intimate portraits. I also know how to throw a party.

The rest of this is quite personal and has almost nothing to do with why you should work with me professionally, but if the how and the why of the project interests you please read on...

I was lucky enough to design, build, and run some pretty great hospitality based businesses. Some of which also held the Blind Eye brand. By the waning hours I'd made thousands of friends and memories (and certainly a greater number of mistakes). I was exhausted, and for lack of a better word, jaded. As popular or beloved as those places may have been, the long hours required to operate them left me with nothing but bar in my life (and 100+ hour working weeks for 15+ years). I felt used up and empty. It was time for a change.

I am the child (brother, cousin, nephew, and so on) of artists. I was raised by and adjacent to creative, kind people. With empathy, art, and the sincerity of that art as a core part of my value system. The planning, building, and implementation of creative businesses filled that void for me for many years. My new "improved" life offered stability (and regular established working hours) but it was comparably sterile. I spiraled once again, almost into oblivion.

Enter photography. Something I was always fond of but never pursued, mostly due to the price point. I budgeted, scrimped, saved, and sold off, then bought the cheapest "real" camera I could afford. The results were almost instantly gratifying. It didn't fully plug the hole it felt my soul was falling out of but it allowed me to create again in a sustainable way, and some of the images weren't half bad.

I started @pragueatnight as an excuse to leave the house when I wasn't headed to the office, and an opportunity to learn and practice photography in what I had identified as the most difficult conditions possible. I figured if I could learn to shoot without light I could learn to shoot anything, anywhere, any time. #availablelightphotography became a mantra. For the uninitiated, photography literally means "drawing with light". Shooting without light is impossible. Too much light and the image blows out completely. Dark streets and flashing stage lights were photography bootcamp. There are close to 3000 images on that account, some of them are even good. It taught me a lot and over the years the camera became an extension of me. An extension of my hand, and an essential tool for creativity and emotional survival.

I was still miserable.

Convinced since childhood that I was "broken", living with an inner narrative that was eviscerating. There was something inside me that made things that seemed simple for others almost impossible for me. I had never in my life felt comfortable or at ease, in my own company or the company of others. In spite of my professional, social veneer I was (am) just playing an extrovert. A role I have studied well, that I am good at. I can even enjoy it. But it's still mainly painful and fraught with anxiety.

Some may wonder why I sometimes have trouble regulating my emotions and never, ever shut up. Now you know.

A friend encouraged me to seek professional psychiatric help. It took a fair bit of time, but I eventually managed to make that appointment.

At 50 years old I was diagnosed with ADHD (ADD specifically). Soon after with severe depression and anxiety.

I now have excellent professional help. We are working on this. I am working on this. Day to day, every day. It isn't simple, but the stigma I had given myself of just being a "broken" person is starting to evaporate.

This project is different than anything I have built before. By design it is not traditional "entertainment and hospitality". It's a working photography studio with a bit of extra room for some (50+) friends.

For me, it actively combines my need to create beauty and community, and to be social. Behind locked doors, on terms I can handle. While making space to help facilitate fulfillment of these needs for others who may be similarly sensitive.

I believe it embodies the same ethos of inclusiveness, kindness, empathy, and mutual support as all of my previous projects. It just seeks to do this more actively and mindfully.

As experiments go, the symbiosis of creative events space with creative visual space has been stunning so far. It is a creative mutual support ecosystem which has already taken on a life of it's own.

I can't begin to express the thanks I have for everyone who has supported me and my projects throughout the years. I hope you appreciate this next phase of my life, and the life of "Blind Eye." Different but the same.

All my love,

Noah