I make photographs so as to not lose sight of the people I have encountered. The images are born out of a respectful curiosity, each a story constructed from observable “truths”. The work is nostalgic and sentimental in a way that urban friends find perverse, but it is also dispassionate and cold in a way that feels disrespectful to the rural people that I come from. It falls near a point of intersection that is home for me: a space that is neither one, but also not both. I was a rural person, but not anymore; I live in a city, but I am not urban. This personal identity has led to a trend in my work, a kind of call and answer between urban and rural spaces and cultures.

My process is personal; making photographs is not about ironic distance, it is about emotional nearness to things that often feel foreign. The camera offers me a vehicle to explore that space comfortably. Creating images is a way to face down the things I was told to fear in my childhood, or that I still fear now. My photographs are thus a search for identity, but often not only of my subjects. Instead, they are also a search within myself, to find my own way of relating to the Other. In a moment of human history in which otherness is being defined in increasingly narrow ways, my hope is to convey a sense of that relationship with those who view the resulting photographs. With each one, I wish to rebuild a sense of trust in people the viewer can never know, but people who in small ways also hold our fates in their hands.