What was the moment you were like, I could do this and I really have a shot to go far with this whole entire competition?

I'm gonna be honest, I didn't ever think I was gonna win.

I never thought I was gonna win Miss New Jersey, I never thought I'd be performing on the Miss America stage, but it's always been a dream of mine.

And it's something that I did start really changing my mindset going into competitions this year.

It took me three local competitions to win a title, and you have to win a local before you can go to the state competition.

And I I wasn't winning, you know, and I was stressing myself out and it was it was affecting me, you know, mentally, emotionally.

And then I changed my mindset.

you overcome that like from your concussion i'm sure you were that's a lot right it was

Mm-hmm.

And then after about a year or two, we lost our practice space, and I was kind of flailing.

And I ran, I would, s- I was in The Strand bookstore in Manhattan, and I ran into Rob Chamberlain.

And he was working there.

And he was like, "Hey, do you wanna start a band?" And I was like, "Yeah, sure.

Why not?" Um, and so for many, for about 12 or 14 years, Rob and I had various iterations of stuff.

Um, and what was kinda funny is that there was always, like those, those guys always had this weird competition with each other.

[laughs]

For Kiley, photography's accessibility is part of what makes it politically powerful, especially in conversations about illness and disability.

One of my f- favorite examples is a photographer named LaToya Ruby Frazier.

She's a Pennsylvania photographer from Braddock, and she was using her family and her family members to explore the socioeconomic disparity, these small towns that no longer do manufacturing and things like that, and then taking that into the broader world.

The last four years she spent studying people in Flint.

How do you make an image that explains the water is poisoning us without just having a literal sign saying, "The water is poisoning us"? How do you express these very complex ideas in a visual form that is sort of universally understood? I think that even being seen in terms of a lot of m- medical things are, like, we sweep it under the carpet.

We're not supposed to look at that.

Sometimes just the, the act of being seen became important in terms of acceptance of disease or ill- illness or disability.

As it turns out, iteration is a huge feature of Kylie's personal photography practice.