Biography
Biography
I am a 35mm photographer and writer interested in our relationship to figurative and literal light sources.
When I was 5 my family did a cross country road trip in our Astro van. Somewhere between Seattle and the Carolina coast I picked up a camera. By the time I was 8, my parents gifted me a 35mm purple plastic Vivitar. I loved it. It felt both like a scientific instrument and a personal assertion: the camera was my world and empowered me with a distinct sense of self--each image expressed my unique point of view. The next development in the photo saga involved trips to the Photo Lab, which averaged once or twice a week. We would be waist-deep in the dark of winter and out my mom would emerge from this humble, single-story building holding some miracle emulsions. Weeks would ramble forward and backward, loop on and on--another winters day; rain coming down in streams... us—bouncing over brick alleys with a piece of sunshine captured somewhere along the way. These photos were everything: proof of light’s great power even during a dark season.
Even now, my work stems from a need to recover “lost” light. The choice to look for bright spots—to live in perpetually sunny So-Cal and shoot color film rather than black and white, each of these things allows me to move beyond the literal and instead attempt to explore the metaphorical lost-light. Additionally, a preference for ‘round-edges’ (to look at things with gentleness), contributes sensuality and femininity to each finished work, while an integration of humor breathes relief into critical, and often painful, examinations of personal as well as social/cultural ideas and practices.
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