DID Artist Fotobudz
Welcome to Fotobudz
I’m Christopher Wheeler—Fotobudz—a Southern California–based fine-art photographer and AI-collaborative music artist. My work lives where urban exploration, architecture, and healing collide.
From a disposable camera in a Jacksonville trailer park to city nights with a DSLR, I’ve chased one question: what does survival look like when chaos becomes the lens? Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), I turn fracture into focus—each image, story, and track a different facet of the same lived truth.
Here you’ll find more than pretty pictures or background music. You’ll step into fine-art giclée prints, immersive exhibitions, and soundscapes shaped by multiple voices—all rooted in real places, real trauma, and the ongoing work of healing.
Fine Art Born from Lived Experience
In abandoned corridors, flooded stadiums, and forgotten architecture, I look for the places where time left a mark but never fully erased the people who were there. My photographs of urban exploration and derelict spaces become gallery-ready giclée prints—built for collectors, galleries, and institutions who want work with real weight behind it.
Every frame sits in the tension between ruin and rebirth: peeling paint, broken glass, quiet light cutting through the wreckage. These spaces mirror fractured inner worlds—especially for those living with trauma and DID.
Many series expand into multi-sensory installations: fine-art prints paired with narrative writing and AI-collaborative soundscapes. Together they form one language of survival—meant to be seen, felt, and heard in the same breath.
The Chair Movement
The Chair Movement began when I decided to stop hiding and start witnessing my own story. It started at Arrow Lane in Jacksonville—an overgrown trailer park where my world fractured at nine years old—and has grown into a series of empty chairs discovered in places time tried to forget.
I don’t haul chairs into scenes or stage them. I go out and find them—on porches, in backyards, in abandoned hospitals and ruined lots—left behind by people who once needed that seat to stay upright. A cracked plastic lawn chair, a rusted stool, a single seat in a peeling ward: each one becomes a stand-in for a survivor whose story was never fully heard.
Together, these chairs form a visual testimony about trauma, displacement, and resilience. They’re not just objects in decay—they’re witnesses. The Chair Movement invites viewers to take a seat, recognize the weight of what was endured, and stand with those whose stories still live in the room.
Save Ellis Island Collection
In 2025, ten of my photographs were selected for the Save Ellis Island Professional Photographers Gallery—my first official accreditation as a fine-art photographer. Captured during a private hard-hat tour of the Ellis Island hospital complex, these images move through ward corridors, isolation rooms, and treatment spaces that once held countless untold stories.
This ten-image collection is now institutionally archived within the Save Ellis Island Foundation—preserving not just architecture, but the memory of those who passed through these rooms on their way to a new life. Each frame is a quiet witness: peeling paint, fractured tile, and long corridors echoing with the weight of arrival, separation, and hope.
The Save Ellis Island Collection sits at the heart of Fotobudz—where urban decay, history, and trauma-informed storytelling come together. It’s the bridge between my personal fracture and a larger American narrative of migration, care, and resilience.
Forging Rhythm
Forging Rhythm is my story told in sound—AI-collaborated music built from the same fracture that drives my photographs. After a four-month dissociative break in 2022, I turned to therapy, psilocybin, and music as tools to piece myself back together. By 2025, AI became a creative ally: I pour lived experience onto the page, AI drafts lyrics and tone in my voice, and together we shape each track until it feels honest.
The result is an evolving soundscape where The Four Horsemen—my alters—step forward chapter by chapter. Some tracks come out as rap, carrying anger and defiance; others soften into reflection or hope as the healing work changes. Each song is a milestone, a marker of where I was mentally and emotionally when it was forged.
Forging Rhythm is meant to live beside the images and stories on Fotobudz—not as background music, but as a parallel language. Listen in order, follow the chapters, and you’ll hear the same journey you see in The Chair Movement—fracture, memory, and survival set to rhythm.