BREDA brought Rose Paradise and AJ Kyser together to showcase our Time Choker and Jane (Tethered), with AJ photographing Rose in a collaboration that felt as organic as it was intentional. Using their large format camera from the 1900s to capture Rose wearing the piece, they turned the session into a meditation on time itself. The choker became both jewelry and metaphor: a way we adorn ourselves with memory while moving boldly into the future.
As the afternoon light filtered through a Brooklyn backyard's canopy, Rose Paradise watched the first Polaroid develop in AJ Kyser's hands. The camera's mechanical click and chemical bloom had created something immediate yet timeless, her image emerging slowly, like a memory becoming solid. Around them, the scattered remnants of their session told the story of an afternoon spent in creative communion, instant film photographs spread across the concrete like tarot cards, each one capturing a different facet of Rose wearing BREDA's Time Choker. The vintage large-format camera stood sentinel on its tripod, a century-old witness to this modern collaboration. In this intimate Brooklyn sanctuary, surrounded by wire chairs and the gentle sway of a hammock, two artists had discovered what happens when the patience required by analog photography creates space for authentic connection to emerge.
For BREDA, self-expression is the thread that runs through our foundation as well as an artist's life. Folk singer-songwriter Rose Paradise has been building worlds since she was a child, an only child with an "unruly imagination" who kept herself company with friends and stories made entirely in her head. Songwriting became a natural extension of that, a way to create without anyone's help. Her debut album, Over the Hill, became something different, a chance to let other people in. "They helped shape the songs into something I couldn't have made alone," she says. "Learning to let people in is something I'm still working on. I'm very protective of my songs, but when it's the right people, there's really nothing better than collaboration."
Her voice, both in the literal sense and as an artist, found its first outlet in childhood. In preschool, music was part of learning; she remembers her teacher playing guitar while the class sang about the day’s lessons. By seven or eight, she was singing on her own, loud and unreserved, realizing it was a release. “Over the years I’ve honed my technique, but at the end of it, I sing to let out something inside of me.”
It’s Rose’s embrace of vulnerability that truly defines her artistry. “Where I thrive is my vulnerability,” she explains. “I write about what I know, what I’ve felt. I write best when it comes from a deeply personal experience and I typically don’t shy away from saying it just like it is.” This unflinching honesty becomes her creative strength, turning personal narrative into universal connection, a philosophy shaped by the places that formed her.
Her artistry lives today between her California upbringing and her Brooklyn life. In the Bay Area, psychedelic music and the coastal landscape shaped her sensibility. “Nature and the world around me had a huge impact on my songwriting.” In New York, she’s found a different energy, drawn from experiences “unimaginable to my younger self” and the widened perspective they’ve given her: crowded sidewalks, overheard snippets of conversation, the electric charge of the subway wheels beginning to turn. When asked which lyric from Over the Hill most reflects her ethos, she points to Tangerine. “It’s about time, the way things change from relationships to the shape of the physical earth around us and how there’s no use in trying to stop the inevitable.”
Time is everywhere in her process. Each song is like a time capsule, holding a story. “When I look back at older work, it’s telling of who I was when I made it.” For Rose, the past isn’t about nostalgia so much as connection. “I hope someone listens and can connect with what I’m saying and maybe it helps someone going through a similar experience.”
Collaboration has expanded that connection, whether it’s recording with friends or touring with The Wildmans. Her first time playing in places like Virginia and Pennsylvania was more than a change of scenery; it was an immersion into rolling green hills, quiet stretches of highway, and the small-town venues where music hangs in the air long after the last chord fades. She took in the culture, the shifting light, the rhythm of a band on the road — and in watching another group move through their creative process, she found new doors opening in her own mind. “To see how other people approach a song can open different doors in your mind of where to go next. When you are locked in with someone and both feed into each other’s creativity it can really propel you to the next level.”
Even her approach to performance reflects this balance of protection and openness. “I love putting on an outfit that turns me into a character, especially when I perform. It can be easier to put your whole heart out there when you’re wearing a costume.” That willingness to shift, to inhabit different versions of herself, became the foundation for her collaboration with photographer AJ Kyser, someone equally committed to capturing truth over pretense.
For AJ, intimacy cannot be manufactured. “It’s just one of those things that blesses you with its presence when it appears, if at all,” they say. Shooting Rose, they took a minimal-direction approach. “I thought of it almost like she was in a photobooth. I wanted to allow as much space as possible for her to just be herself. The rest, my visual identity, comes naturally from there.”
This philosophy of letting subjects lead took shape early in AJ’s career during a large-format photography course in New York, when they photographed two trans women who met decades ago at Bell Labs and are now married. “They were so unapologetically themselves,” they recall. The experience was formative, teaching them “to let my subjects do the talking and just provide them a platform to do so.” It’s an approach that relies as much on intuition as on technical skill, knowing when to step back, when to wait, and when to create the conditions for truth to emerge.
For this shoot with Rose, AJ chose intentionally to work with a 1907 camera they had found on eBay. “Time is something I think about constantly in my work, whether it’s the literal length of a shoot or techniques from a century ago.” Their understanding of self-expression is rooted in an acceptance that it will never be complete. “Maybe that’s my definition of self-expression: it’s a process that won’t ever be finished.”
That belief sustained them through vulnerability’s risks. Their first gallery show was “terrifying” under the weight of perfectionism. “But being there on opening night, seeing familiar faces from all parts of my past, made it worth it. You’re your own worst critic but living that firsthand is something else.”
In both Rose’s music and AJ’s images, self-expression is not a performance. It is truth, shaped by time, colored by place, and brought to life through the courage to let others in.
Talent: Rose Paradise
Images: AJ Kyser
Video: Bellamy Day Brewster
