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For more than 20 years, I have helped brands and corporations translate complex messages into beautiful, human-centric visual stories. Having shot everything from local features to national campaigns, I have grown to dislike rigid photographic categories. I prefer a documentary approach that captures the full breadth of a narrative by mixing poetic scenes and quiet details with traditional lifestyle and portraiture. My favorite clients are the ones who trust my eye and send me out into the world with a clear sense of their brand and story. By putting me on the ground with the people whose experiences they want to share, I am able to leverage a career’s worth of experience to build an honest image library that feels authentic, intentional, and grounded in real life.
My love affair with image making started early, when my father sat me down one day with his old 35mm Canon camera. Fascinated by this fantastic machine that uses time and light to capture memory and emotion, I was soon obsessively photographing the world around me. A high school job in a photo lab gave me access to free processing and helped me quickly develop both my technical skills and my visual sensibility.
In college (Indiana University), I opted for a well-rounded liberal arts education that would help me understand the world, so I became an English Major. To my surprise, that education became quite relevant to my profession as a photographer, giving me the tools to fully inhabit a client’s story before I head into the field to capture it.
After graduating, I moved to Chicago where I assisted advertising photographers on everything from lifestyle, food, architecture, and still life. The experience was invaluable, and I still lean on many of the lessons and skills I learned during those early years of my career. Perhaps most importantly, I gained a deep insight into professionalism, and remain grateful for all those seasoned pros that showed me how to properly run a production, a business, and demonstrated how to treat everyone involved with respect.
I’m currently based in Santa Monica, California, where my wife walks our dog along the beach, my teenage son infuriates the neighbors with his drums, and I continue to roam the streets with my camera, looking for that one picture that makes sense of it all.
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