Long before he thought about galleries or photobooks, Kai Diaz was the unofficial archivist of his friends’ lives. Growing up immersed in surf and skate culture during the visual explosion of the 1990s, he was the kid holding the camera while everyone else chased waves or landed tricks. VHS tapes, shoe boxes of prints, and decades of casual documentation followed. He filmed, photographed, and saved moments not because he imagined an audience someday, but because he wanted to remember.
“I just wanted to look back ten years later and say, “remember when we did this?”” he told us.
That instinct, which seems equal parts curiosity and affection, never really left him. It simply evolved.
Today, Kai’s work moves comfortably between street photography, studies of overlooked spaces, and emotionally charged fragments of everyday life. Whether he’s photographing people, abandoned objects, or fading urban textures, the impulse remains the same: preserve what might otherwise disappear.
The Documentarian Mindset
Kai describes himself as naturally curious, someone who instinctively wonders about the unseen histories behind what he encounters. So, for him broken-down car isn’t just visual texture. It becomes questions:
Who owned it?
Where did it go?
What did it witness?
And his curiosity extends to people as well. Kai captures glimpses of stories unfolding: a stranger’s posture, a scar, a gesture caught mid-motion. Then, he invites viewers to imagine where those stories might lead.
That’s something I love about Kai’s work, how open-ended it is. How it has a way of setting off your imagination. His Instagram sequences, carefully grouped into visual sets, feel closer to short films than individual photographs. Images speak to one another, creating emotional continuity without explanation.
It’s no coincidence that cinema plays a major role in how he sees. Directors like Christopher Nolan, Sofia Coppola, Spielberg, Kubrick, and Tim Burton shaped his visual instincts long before photography became serious work.
“They don’t explain anything,” Kai says of filmmakers he admires. “They just show you, and you feel exactly what they wanted you to feel.” That philosophy carries directly into his photographs.
Why Film Still Matters
At this point, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that Kai works almost exclusively in film. Part of that decision is practical experience. Having grown up shooting analog before transitioning through digital photography’s rapid rise, he understands both worlds intimately. Digital cameras still serve a purpose (primarily for scanning negatives or the occasional commercial assignment requiring instant delivery) but they aren’t where he feels most connected creatively.
Film slows him down in ways he values deeply. With only 36 exposures available, every frame requires intention. Light must be understood rather than corrected later. Exposure decisions happen instinctively, guided by years of observation rather than software sliders.
But process alone isn’t the reason. For Kai, the difference ultimately comes down to emotional depth. “There’s just a feeling about film,” he says. “People ask why I don’t just apply a filter to digital. It’s hard to explain. It’s just not the same.”
His preferred stock, Kodak Portra 800, reflects that balance between control and unpredictability. He knows how it responds to harsh Southern California sunlight and trusts its color rendering instinctively. The result is work defined by warmth and subtle tonal transitions that feel less manufactured and more like a memory.
Equally important is permanence. Kai prints his photographs whenever possible. Hard drives feel temporary. Physical objects feel like history. “I don’t want my photos stuck in a digital space,” he says. “I want them in people’s homes.”
Seeing His Photos “For the First Time”
Of course, all film photographers eventually have to confront the question of what to do with years of negatives slowly but surely accumulating in boxes and sleeves. Storage is one thing. Understanding what all that work adds up to is another. For Kai, the answer arrived through a trusted friend with a different perspective.
Enter Marcelo, a close friend and designer whose artistic upbringing and global experience gave him a different vantage point. After silently admiring Kai’s photography for years, he posed a simple question:
What are you going to do with all of this?
Kai didn’t have an answer. Equally problematic, he didn’t believe his work fit neatly into a single theme (a common anxiety among photographers preparing their first book or exhibit). Instead of forcing one, Marcelo proposed something radical: hand over the images and let someone else look.
Sequenced into chapters rather than a singular narrative, the work revealed connections Kai himself couldn’t see. Images paired unexpectedly. Emotional rhythms emerged. Threads of curiosity and attention tied disparate subjects together. Seeing the layout for the first time left him emotional.
Kai selected roughly 500 favorites spanning five years and printed them all as small physical photographs. Two weeks later, everything changed.
“It felt like I was seeing my photos for the first time,” he says.
The resulting project, currently titled Echoes of the Unseen, explores the overlooked: objects, people, and spaces most pass without noticing. The title reflects Marcelo’s observation that Kai consistently stops where others keep moving.
It also reinforced a lesson Kai now recommends to anyone considering a photobook: Find someone you trust and let them look at your work. “You’re too close to your own work,” he says. “You’ll just be too critical. Having another eye look at it changed everything.”
The Challenge of Making Something You Love
The book currently exists as a single proof copy, a substantial 250-page volume featuring nearly 200 photographs. Like many first-time photobook projects, the obstacle isn’t vision but logistics.
Publishing costs are steep. Paper choices matter. Sequencing decisions affect everything from weight to price point. Kai wrestles openly with the balance between artistic integrity and financial reality. Premium paper feels essential to him. So does maintaining the tactile experience he believes gives photography lasting meaning.
Self-publishing has become the likely path forward, supported in part by an inventive solution: selling the original five-by-seven sequencing prints themselves. Each week, Kai releases small curated sets drawn from the original editing process, signed, archival, and genuinely one-of-one.
It’s both fundraising strategy and philosophical extension of his work. Rather than sitting unseen in a closet, the photographs begin new lives in other people’s homes. “That feels better,” he says. “Giving them a second life.”
Legacy > Fame
Ultimately, Kai isn’t chasing recognition so much as resonance. He talks less about fame than legacy, his hope being that someday someone might flip through a book or history archive and recognize a photograph he took even if they never learn his name. That the image might simply tell them what it felt like to live during this time.
“That’s kind of my way of living forever,” he says.
For someone who started out filming friends just to remember shared moments, it feels like a natural evolution.
The camera never stopped rolling.
