In 2000, I noticed the neighborhood in which I had spent my whole life changing. It was becoming a "destination" neighborhood and I was trying to capture what made it my neighborhood before it was gone. It was the first time I picked up a camera and walked around to explore. For over 20 years, I walked the streets of the neighborhood and captured as much as I could to show changes to people, places, and things. I don't know of many projects that document 23 years on negative film other than this one. I have combed through 50,000 negatives to describe this area. In 2023, this body of work was in an exhibition sponsored by the Maryland State Arts Council. I continue to photograph in Hampden, but that's just because I always have my camera with me and I'm always exploring. The next step in this is to make a monograph titled Hampden.

In 2008, I travelled through several countries in Europe photographing without an itinerary. When I showed this work to my recently deceased mentor, Philip Perkis back in 2009, he told me that he saw it as a body of work that represented loneliness. I had just gone through a very difficult breakup and wanted to run away. I didn't tell him the story, I just let him see the images. I'm happy that my work reflected how I felt. This is another body of work of about 100 images I am hoping to create a book with. 

Since I was a child going to the Baltimore Zoo and the National Aquarium in Baltimore with my parents, I have been attracted to these types of places to photograph. I remember for one of my first projects at NYU on medium format cameras going to the Central Park Zoo and photographing. Since then, whether in La Jolla, CA, Chicago, IL, New Orleans, LA, etc., I have visited their zoos to observe the people, the animals, and the interactions between. Specifically, over the past three years, I have done most of my photographing, besides family work, taking my daughter to the Maryland Zoo and National Aquarium. Inspired by Garry Winogrand’s 1969 monograph The Animals, I have been compiling work to produce my own The Animals.

My camera travels with me everywhere. I spend significant amount of time doing long term observations of similiar settings or exploring certain themes. I also love the tradition of the street photographer travelling with an open eye to what they may encounter without a plan. The photographer that I first really admired to the point of treating his book as sacred text was Robert Frank. His monograph The Americans, published in 1959, was an journal of a Swiss man attempting to figure out what America was in the 1950s. This ever evolving body of work is not so much a capture of a specific time, but of how I move through places and observe them.

In 2024, I was faced with spending a whole two weeks without my daughter. With the previous few years being quite emotionally trying, I took that time to visit my meditation teachers, that I had met in 2020 online over COVID, in person in England.  I also wanted to return to my favorite place in the world that I'd ever been, Capri, Italy. No matter where you go, there you are (but at least I took 40 rolls of film).

This was a featured essay published the initial edition of  Seven Mens Magazine, a publication based in New Orleans, in 2012. They asked me to quickly put together something on this excentric owner of a backyard wrestling type of boxing matches at his location in uptown New Orleans. When I arrived, I was alone, there was no interview to go along with it or context of why I was there. Mike Tata didn't have much at all to say to me, just told me to wander around for a few minutes and take some pictures.

My love of music and performance for a long time once brought me to a career in live entertainment. I play music myself. I have yet to scan a few months long tour I travelled with in 2019, but hope to have those images soon. I've never felt like a completely auditory participant in live music, but sometimes as a collaborator capturing a special moment.

I have taken thousands of portraits. They may not come at the best time or be flattering, but here are just a few.

Selection of snowy photographs.

Photographs from the Mayor's Christmas Parade in Hampden, Baltimore, MD.