Every day is a chance to Begin again. With a Beginner’s mind, the expert becomes the student, open to the potentialities and possibilities that get buried in the ego of knowing. To become a Beginner, one learns to remain curious about the beautiful mundanity of life. One’s surroundings, routines, and daily lived experiences become opportunities to engage deeper with essential questions circulating the creative practice, including:

Who am I? What story do I want to tell?
How can I serve my personal mission?

Statement & Values

Collective Statement: Begin Collective creates accessible opportunities for creative exploration and community-building among people at the intersection of LGBTQ+, non-binary identity, and chronic illness, disability, and neurodiversity through mediums of photography and storytelling. Because starting projects is often tedious, scary, and overwhelming, Begin Collective helps members start the process of delving into their creativity with a small community-driven, self-directed project that is financially accessible, and open for interpretation. Begin Collective offers tools to develop and complete an independent but Collective-guided body of narrative work. Participants are chosen through open calls and nominations.

As we continue to develop Begin Collective, we aim to create opportunities for individuals to partake in photo-based projects, build community, and better understand the role of context in contemporary art practices. Begin Collective provokes the standards of photography and imagines possibilities for what it can be, especially by publishing work in online galleries and using cameras with fixed settings. Through discussions, we consider critical challenges regarding the canon and the exploration of people whose stories have been misrepresented, excluded, or erased, prioritizing BIPOC, queer, and non-normative individuals. We aim to challenge traditional image-production traditions through modes of making that honor the grit, the grime, the queer, the accidental, the immediacy, the power, and the magical potentialities of analog.

Between 2020-2023, participants worked on the project, I See You See Me, in Austin, Texas with a culminating exhibition at the Dougherty Arts Center (July-August 2023). I See You See Me features collaborative formal portraits, film photographs, contextual language, and multi-media collage around platonic intimacy, queer and nonbinary identity, disability, and expressions of joy. You can view participant galleries here.

Currently, I See You See Me, is on pause while we work on before the last lilac blooms. We are excited to launch more chapters of this project and new projects in 2025-2026.
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Begin Collective was created by twin siblings riel and Bianca Sturchio in 2021 out of a desire to cultivate a creative community within their intersectional identities. The collective is most notably known for their personal photography series, before the last lilac blooms (formerly called Chasing Light). After working on before the last lilac blooms for fifteen years, riel and Bianca decided to use their experience to formally launch Begin Collective as a way to create intersectional connections and provide a platform that can help support others through group-guided photography projects.