I'm a Baltimore-based teacher, designer, and photographer shaped by my childhood in Amsterdam, where I learned to read the city through its social interactions—the gestures, glances, and moments of connection that unfold on street corners and stoops. I continue this practice in Baltimore, a city persistently reduced to harmful stereotypes that distort its reality and diminish the people who make it home.

The Dutch have a word, gezellig, that doesn't translate cleanly but captures a particular quality of togetherness that is cozy and alive with human warmth. It's what I search for with my camera. The man and his dog absorbed in a parade, the girl sitting apart with her doll finding her own quiet way to belong, the boy grilling outside his house turning the sidewalk into a kitchen, the performers throwing ribbons through the air as they move down the street. These aren't staged moments of unity. They're evidence of how Baltimore creates space for people to gather, to cross generations and backgrounds, to simply be together.

Stereotypes obscure the perspective of a city that makes room for connection, that holds both the loud and the intimate, that refuses the isolation it's been assigned. My photographs offer a different story.