On the Road, Embracing the Distance

After flying from his home in New York to San Francisco, he spent three weeks driving across the country with the photographer Justin Maxon . Mr. Abdulaziz gathered 52 rolls of film. Yet when he returned, he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to develop anything.

“For me,” he said, “it’s not necessarily about making the photograph available to other people. Just the fact that I did it.”

Mr. Abdulaziz grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. He never fit in. He left home at 17, moved to Florida and “never looked back.” The experience taught him about the danger of running from oneself. So when he became frustrated with his own photography — “I was taking other people’s photographs,” he said — he sought to confront his feelings, and to photograph from a sort of limbo.

“I just want to put my feet in the position from which to receive whatever it is I come across,” he said. “I have no reason to be a part of it, and that’s what I need to photograph.”

Wanting to get away from intimacy, Mr. Abdulaziz sought to avoid portraiture. He also didn’t want to photograph New York, where things felt too familiar. But while walking through Hells Kitchen on an assignment — carrying a 6×7 camera, as he always does, and listening to music on his headphones, as he rarely does — he ran into a homeless man named Ezekiel, who asked him for a light. [ Slide 13 ].

He took a step back. Ezekiel’s eyes were piercing. They talked for half an hour. Other than his name, Ezekiel revealed very little about himself. He worked hard to obscure his face.

“I had these collisions in my mind,” Mr. Abdulaziz said. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to make a portrait.’ At the same time, I felt so compelled to make his portrait.”

When we spoke early in August, Mr. Abdulaziz was 58 days away from a move to Berlin. He wants to continue exploring both himself and his photography. He wants to confront his fears. And he wants to be closer to his girlfriend, Ida, a Swedish ballet dancer and the subject of a much different, distinctly personal photo essay, “Love Is Not a Color Photograph.”

“It’s not like I want to be a war photographer or a travel photographer,” Mr. Abdulaziz said. “These categories block out the truth for me. I just want to learn and I want to let my photography reflect these things that I’m interested in experiencing, in a more free-form way.