About
I tell myself I am a storyteller.
The camera is just how I keep my notes.
The thing about making pictures is they make you believe in forever — like God pressed his thumb down on the whole world and said hold still.
I was four or five years old when I picked up my first camera. Back then I chased chickens around in the dirt, a five-year-old savage with a plastic lens, trying to pin down the chaotic geometry of a bird in flight. I don't know if it was the sport or the evidence I fell in love with, but I remember that was the first time I heard the wind blow through the grass.
In art school, the camera became my witness before I understood what I was testifying to. I believed in it like some men believe in whiskey or Jesus. I couldn't paint or draw, so I told my story the only way I could — through pictures. A man with no arms learning to eat with his feet.
My path eventually strayed. I did what most men do — traded the grain for the paycheck and raised a family in the shadow of the American Dream. I carry that era like a scar from a knife fight I didn't want to win.
I tend to photograph people — people I've known too briefly, people I've loved too deeply, people whose names I may not remember but whose faces I couldn't leave alone. The ones I loved always came out slightly blurred — either my hands shaking or their souls already halfway out the door. Doesn't matter. I kept the negatives anyway.
