I take pictures, make films, start things, and travel to get lost. It has not been a straight line. That is the interesting part.
Editing a Puerto Rico series down from a couple thousand frames. Slowly, on purpose.
Back in St. Pete between trips, photographing the parts of the city people drive past.
Testing what AI is actually good for in real production, not the demo version.
Reading old restaurant menus for a project I cannot fully explain yet.
// TEXT → rewrite this whenever life changes. Current beats polished.
Nostalgic about the past. Obsessed with what's next. Not trying to fix that.
People, hands, signs, old buildings, food, light. The stuff most people walk past. An archive of experiences, not a greatest-hits reel.
This one is not a trip. It has turned into a body of work. I keep going back to photograph Puerto Rican culture, the old city, the neighborhoods, the people, the things that are changing before anyone gets a picture of them.
The plan is an exhibit. Right now it is a hard drive, a lot of frames, and a slow edit.
Not a travel guide. No "ten things to do." Here is where I ended up, who I met, and what surprised me.
Documentary, curious, imperfect. The neighborhoods, the food, the people, the getting lost on purpose.
Some pictures come with a story. This is where they go. Written like a human, short when short works.
Ideas, products, tools, things that probably should not work but might. Some become businesses. Some become art. Some just fail. All of it counts.
TEXT → name it, describe it in a sentence, say what you are not sure about yet. Honesty reads better than a pitch.
TEXT → a real thing you made with new tools. Where it saved you, where it fell on its face. AI is one tool in the box, not the whole point.
TEXT → tell the failure straight. People trust the person who shows the misses. It usually leads to the next idea anyway.
Not everything here is a masterpiece. That is the point. It grows with time and gets more interesting the older it gets.
I'm Eddie Allen. Forty-seven, based in St. Petersburg, Florida, by way of Bridgeport, Connecticut. I run a creative studio called 1920 Studios: photography, film, branding, storytelling. Before that I built and ran an award-winning restaurant, Central Melt, and sold it during the pandemic. Before that, a few other things. Businesses built, businesses lost, careers changed, more than one fresh start.
1920 Studios is named for my father, Edward Michael Allen, born in 1920. He taught school and served in the Second World War. He died in a car accident when I was twenty-two. A lot of why I photograph goes back to him. A picture holds on to something that would otherwise just leave.
I am nostalgic and I am restless. I love old menus, contact sheets, and neighborhoods nobody has renovated yet, and I cannot stop experimenting with new tools to make things I could not make before. This site is where both of those live. Stay a while. Click five more things.