I was born on Kauai in 1972 and by the time I was sixteen had lived in California, Oregon, Wisconsin, Texas, Mississippi, Oahu, and North Carolina. Moving from such extremes as the suburban neighborhoods of Silicon Valley to a teepee on communal land in southern Oregon, I grew up with an appreciation of a wide-range of lifestyles, making me both curious and tolerant.

I am working on my MFA degree at Columbia University School of the Arts.

I make sets of photographs that are created as thematic projects, usually organized around a physical subject such as a place or an object; Each body of work consists of a sequence of unaltered photographic prints. For example, I spent the summer of 2005 hauling my 8x10 large-format camera around Brooklyn photographing the ad hoc doorbell buzzers that I noticed were being replaced—due to gentrification—with official intercom systems. My decision to document the endangered buzzers, like the majority of my projects, was inspired by direct observation of my surroundings and a desire to explore and scrutinize with the lens of a camera.

My photographic focus explores the details of the modern world and their social resonance: repetition, improvisation, variation, expansion, and ingenuity. I emphasize these themes in the images by taking a slower, more considered approach while behind the camera, taking the time to stare. I photograph in color when I deem it appropriate, but the majority of my work is in black and white where I believe the specificity of the details, or the abstraction of the space, are better emphasized. I want to make the world see itself vividly through the subjective observations drawn in my photographs.

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