Jerad Armijo, who works under the name Away I Flew, is a landscape photographer born in New Mexico and based in Portland, Oregon. His chromesthesia, a form of synesthesia in which he perceives shapes and colors in response to music, shapes the pastel-hued, minimalist and surreal palette of his work. He pairs his photographs with original poetry, and has released several of his series as NFT collections.
Armijo picked up a camera in his mid-teens, drawn first to portraiture through the work of Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe, before turning to the landscapes of his native New Mexico several years later. The state's peaks, plains and plateaus, along with the color in Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings, became a lasting influence on his work. In his early twenties he left New Mexico for Portland, Oregon, while working through depression, and turned back to photography as a way to process that period. He discovered his chromesthesia as a teenager but only began letting it guide his color choices fully several years later, translating the shapes and tonalities he perceives in music into the forms he finds and photographs in nature.
