In 2018, I bought a camera after moving to New York. I was inspired by the works of artists like Joel Meyerowitz, Garry Winogrand, and Vivian Maier, as well as friends who used cameras to document their surroundings and daily lives. With no formal training, the camera was a raw tool in my hands, serving as a mirror. It reflected back the things I saw, the things I was drawn to, and over time showed me the things I missed. I learned a great deal from my first camera and the photo books I read repeatedly.

I shot almost exclusively on the street for many years, as my day job had me covering ground throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Over time, I found myself exploring and wrestling with the ideas of photographic neutrality and what the images I made said about the way I saw the world. I came to the realization that photographs are just as constructed as sculptures and paintings, even when working with candid life. The effective suspension of public life during the pandemic caused a tidal shift in my practice, as I became more interested in photographing the impact of human lives on environments more than human forms, taking ‘street’ photography to a literal end.

During that time, I also started bringing my camera into the mountains as I made my way through summiting all of the peaks above 35,000 feet in the Catskills Mountain range. In the wilderness, I found myself compelled by the same ideas and feelings—looking to capture the evocative textures of the environment and the registers of presence and absence of a world imbued by human touch.

My practice has evolved in the years since my first camera, as have my influences. I feel equally inspired by the sonic experiments of artists like William Basinski, Dylan Carlson, and Felicia Atkinson, and multidisciplinary artists like Tehching Hsieh and Robert Rauschenberg, as I do photographers like Richard Mosse, Richard Misrach, and Gregory Halpern. I spend less time photographing people on the street and more time photographing the streets themselves, the mountains, or in my studio or on site when making commercial work, where I still strive to capture feelings more than anything else.

My practice remains deeply personal, a tool to investigate the world outside and within, a form of deep listening and patient observation.