When our pursuit of wealth has finally spoiled the earth, what if we could start over, taking the fabric of all that we've known and loved and plant a new seed on a different planet? Would it even be wise to do so, knowing that we are just as likely to do it again? Perhaps it's best to just leave blueprints for the cosmos to figure it out for themselves. 

The False Parting is an in-progress body of work containing photographs made along the trails of the California Gold Rush. Through weaving images of natural and synthetic landscapes, I am seeking to further understand the ways we preserve, memorialize, and exploit our resources. The photo series explores a "pseudo-nature", turning images into a scavenger hunt of what is loved and lost, hoping that we might once again find our way. 

Other Side is an ongoing investigation of neglected space, land use, and community set in the lush visual landscape of a DIY skatepark in Baltimore. Through images involving both builders and users of the space and its surrounding environment, this series imagines a counter-narrative to the increasingly limited ways contemporary society permits play and imagination within its current structure.

In August of 2021, a work-in-progress showing was hosted at The Meadow in Baltimore, curated by Hot Sauce Artists Collective. Portraiture and landscape images were presented in a salon-style hanging, interspersed with found text and graphics from antique Farmers Almanacs. The photos ranged from documentation of users and builders of the space, bucolic landscapes littered with the remnants of its city existence, and evidence of the seasons passing through “farming” cycles. The incorporation of found text poetically linked the tradition of farming as a means of providing sustenance to a community with the work and ethos of this modern-day concrete farm. 

In September 2023, two images from Other Side were included in the B23 Best of Baltimore Artscape Exhibition. 

Squeegee is a photography and film collaboration between Brad Ziegler and filmmaker Khalid Ali. 

In January of 2017, we came together to begin exploring the car window washing work that the young men on the downtown Baltimore corner of Washington Boulevard and MLK were doing, and from there let the scope of the project expand organically. As two high school teachers, we are moved by the ways in which young people respond to adverse circumstances, choosing often to rise up by their own means rather than work within a given system. This project exists as our contribution to the increasingly public debate about squeegee workers.

All proceeds from the project went to Baltimore Youth Arts, an arts and entrepreneurship program that works with youth ages 14-22, with a focus on those in the juvenile justice system. 

The project culminated in a photography book and film release that was scheduled to be held in April 2020 at Full Circle Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland. The event was cancelled due to COVID-19. The book's first edition of 100 has sold out, and the film has continued to be screened virtually at various festivals across the country.