My work is about capturing the temporality, melancholy, and innate beauty of life from a beginner’s mind, primarily through visualizing shades of grey, and occasionally through bursts of color.

It is in the everyday moments of life that we see the breadth and depth of existence. The moment - the here and the now - photons captured on a medium, reflected from animate and inanimate surfaces, representing a mere instant - a visual meditation where time stops but feeling persists…

There is melancholy to photography, for the moment so captured no longer exists - a fleeting and vanishing mist with only an impression left behind of a lost world. This highlights a deep absurdity to life - places and people exist without us, and periodically we arrive and gain a view and interact with them, only to depart and to never truly return to the exact same person or place. And so we carry with us these temporal impressions, these memories of a particular space and time, and we hang on to them, despite knowing the conditions that gave rise to them no longer exist - that those moments no longer truly survive.

We all know, but rarely contemplate, the profundity of existence: we erupt into life wholly from a singular perspective, and as we leave we only do so from our vantage point. It’s the path between these seminal landmarks that makes one’s life. How we spend it, and with whom we spend it, makes all the difference. We celebrate seemingly arbitrary moments, such as a new year, a graduation, an anniversary - but these moments truly matter - they compel us to pause, to breathe deeply, and to strip away the obscuring layers of our temporal conditioning, leaving us with unadulterated feeling.

I approach photography with a beginner’s mind, seeking to restore the tabula rasa of my unconditioned beginning, returning to moments before there was imparted meaning and artifice. In the stories of my photographs you may recognize your own: across continents and across decades we have all collectively and bravely built families, friendships, and societies spanning innumerable generations, the fruits of which have brought us all here today, leaving us to ponder the images I have placed before you. You will see a smattering of photos taken across my adulthood - just a fraction of innumerable moments of time. Remember that the world’s magic is all around us - captured smiles, gazes, light and feeling, but between the photographs are the moments of the everyday: millions upon billions that together create the tapestry of a beautiful life - the life in which we all share.