At eighteen, my father gave me a camera as a birthday gift. I hadn’t shown any interest in photography specifically but was always interested in creating. For a time, I used it but never with a desired outcome. I’d try snapping skate photos of my friends when we were out or maybe a self-portrait in the window of a store. Eventually, in undergraduate school, I shifted my attempt at studying filmmaking to photography out of a disinterest in the collaborative aspects involved in movie-making.
Once in my intermediate class, I began to really engage with photography by shooting these crude self-portraits that I didn’t fully understand. I wanted to make work that was unique. At the time, I thought that if I was in the images as well as behind the camera then no one else could ever have made the same image. Eventually, I graduated undergrad having developed a bit of process surrounding these self-portraits.
After that, real life took over and the camera went away until I enrolled in graduate school. There, in my second year, I picked up a camera again and challenged myself to study landscape photography to further my abilities within the medium. After graduation in 2010, I attempted to make it within the arts field and, by 2015, had moved into photography and art as a full-time profession.