Member Spotlight: Juno Morrow

Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got your start in photography.

Hey there! I'm a neurodivergent artist and designer living in Brooklyn. Professionally, I teach game design in the South Bronx. Aesthetically, I'm drawn to saturated colors, dramatic light and contrast as well as novel scenes. I don't limit myself to any particular genre or style, although the vast majority of my work, and that for which I'm most well-known, is street photography.

I'd say my first significantly influential experience with photography was with a GameBoy Camera. For those who don't know, the GameBoy Camera was a cartridge attachment that featured an early digital camera which could take highly pixelated photos that could even be inserted into games (i.e. taking photos of a person who then becomes a game character). I had used disposable film cameras before that, but the lack of immediate gratification and limited resource aspect along with the inability to resupply oneself as a child meant I never really took to it.

By Ashley Pomeroy - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,

A couple years later, my dad ended up letting me borrow his early Sony Mavica digital camera, which took (very low resolution) photos on floppy disks, for a vacation I took with my grandmother. I ended up coming back with a suitcase full of 40 or 50 3.5" floppy disks. The ease with which I was able to experiment and iterate while visually digesting the world around me meant I was totally hooked and my life would never be the same.

How did you discover CMC, and what has your experience been like as part of the collective so far?
Photography has been something I've now loved for most of my life, but also something I've practiced largely in a vacuum. I'd never really had photo friends or community to engage with and so often I'd find myself going extremely hard with photography for a few months only to burn out from the isolation and step away for 3, 6 or 9 months at a time. In the spring of last year, I brought out a camera for the first time in months to a conceptual art performance and a very young photographer covering the event by the name of Eli came up to ask me about the lens I was using. I was super impressed that he was already working a photography gig at 17 years old, but what impressed me even more was his incredible street photography. Seeing his work (@eli.jacobson_) inspired me to go out and restore street photography to my regular routine. 

Seeing how inspired I had become from connecting with another photographer, I decided to seek out others. I stumbled upon @idle.workshops on Instagram which is a sort of weekly listing for photography events in NYC and NJ. From there, I discovered Photostroll NYC, Beers & Cameras and other community focused events. While I love these communities, they tend to be more focused on photowalks and equipment than the work itself, so I kept looking for spaces to more critically examine the work itself. 
I ended up hearing about CMC and I've been going ever since. It's been so refreshing having a space to engage with photos in a deeper and more intentional way than the 1-5 seconds you might get on Instagram. I love being able to speak with other creatives on their practices and approaches, which can help you get out of your own head (and vice versa).

What draws you to a particular moment or scene when you're out shooting? Is there something specific you're always looking for?

My eyes are generally drawn to movement, intense color, light and shadow, order/disorder, as well as novelty.  For candid street photography specifically, I often pay attention to strongly expressive elements. These might be gestures of intimacy like the electric embrace of a new couple oblivious to the world around them or the contemptful expression of a father who's run out of patience for his child's antics as he firmly leads them by their upturned wrist. Other times, I might be drawn to a specific environment and how various people navigate it, such as capturing a high turnover street corner. There might be fast-moving finance workers mindlessly following the well-worn paths of their evening commutes colliding with starry-eyed european tourists darting around in a nervous but excited manner, their eyes affected by a sort of negative gravity. Overall, I'm looking for scenes that can provide a window into other people's worlds and allow viewers space to explore those.

Share 5 images that feel most like you right now. They don't have to be your newest or your "best" work. Instead, just the photographs you'd show someone who has never seen your work before. Walk us through each image and tell us why you chose it.

Every photographer has photos they're more attached to than other people are and this is one of them for me. This was taken in Chinatown during Lunar New Year celebrations earlier this year. I love how crowded and messy the street is, littered with discarded confetti cannons, as a parent leads their daughter by the hand to cautiously navigate the perilous street. I love the details like the daughter holding a Mandarin Orange, which is a symbol of luck and prosperity during Chinese New Year and the eye contact of the child with the lion puppet in the background as the rest of the family looks on at something outside of our view.

I love the light and fun energy of this snowball fight scene with various figures engaging in different ways. I also love how I could use the flatness of the blown-out snow  to simplify what would otherwise be a very busy scene.

I love a spectacle, even a mundane one like this. It feels kind of absurd how we engage with these spectacles these days, racing to capture and share them, which I hoped to capture.

This was taken in June around early afternoon. I was hoping to take advantage of the intense solstice sun and the contrast it can provide between light and shadow. I found a composition I liked and waited for the right subject whose silhouette might tell or suggest something interesting about them.

I'm so taken by hands and their gestures. I also find something powerful in the disembodiment of those hands and symbolic conjurings of my subconscious (black/white, subject/object, passive/active, leader/led, etc.)