STATEMENT OF WORK

I collect images that are both documents and celebrations of small moments of tenderness. These small victories in feeling free are the things that make us feel whole. I photograph people that I'm close to in moments of stillness. I document the feelings that drive us: love, longing, desire, nostalgia, or a mixture of something in between. When the world feels spun into a state of entropy, this work offers some semblance of order. Bodies exist in transitional states while landscapes blur edges of form. Time and identity are suspended in an attempt to restructure. Hierarchies and society temporarily dissolve to create space for future existences that are more fluid and malleable. In making photographs, I always seek to have the viewer feel rather than think about what they're seeing.

To grasp these untranslatable sentiments, I work closely with my collaborators, contemplating our intimacy and limits through proximity, distance, and touch. The people I work with maintain a sense of autonomy over how their portrait is portrayed in sharing how they relate to their body and their environment in the process. However, the work is not objective. They are letting me see and document through my lens and experience. The process becomes a push and pull, a negotiation of boundaries and vulnerability.

The making of the photographic print in the darkroom is an important part of my process. It is the time where I can put my hand into the work. I embed a single moment in the physical colloid of the film and expose and fixed it into the paper. It's a direct touch to the moment the photograph was taken. The temperature, humidity, and particles in the air that day are covertly embedded in the emulsion attempting to capture residual memories. By creating works ingrained in the film, I explore the tension between what is physical and what is latent.