Hi, I’m Samuel Wang. I’m a freshman at UCSD, born in Guangdong, China, and photography is how I interact with the world frame by frame and step by step.
When I was little, my dad’s work took our family around the world. He always carried a small camera, capturing moments of me in places I can barely remember now. Most of my childhood exists not in memory, but in those photos stored on his old hard drive — I adopted these fragments of me. That’s when I first realized the power of photography.
Years later, at eleven, we returned to the same vista point along California’s Highway 1 with a tall fence and a single tree. My parents asked me to pose with a victory hand sign beside it. I didn’t understand why until I dug through old drawers back home and found it: a photo of myself, years younger, standing in the exact same spot, in the exact same pose. The frame hadn’t changed — but I had.
Still, it wasn’t until 2022, on a trip to Qianxinan, that I truly fell in love with photography. Explore this site to see how I tell my stories through photographs.
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Through years of exploring and refining the expression of emotion via photography, I was honorably awarded a Silver Medal in the Scholastic Art & Writing.
