I work mostly in photography, but painting shaped the way I see. the Ashcan and Boston Schools taught me to look for the emotional charge in a scene — to build images from atmosphere and gesture rather than chasing descriptive realism as an endpoint. I bring that same painter’s sensibility to my staged photographs, treating light and mood as the real subjects. for me then, The camera is simply another way of carrying that sensibility forward. it allows me to work faster and to be more productive.

Most of my images begin long before the camera is involved: in sketches, diagrams, and written notes about tone, color, or psychological tension. From there I build the photograph the way one builds a small film set — sourcing props, directing models, shaping light, and constructing the environment as precisely as possible. I aim to “photoshop” in-camera: to bring the image into being in reality, through physical choices, rather than “fixing it” after the fact. The camera is the stand-in witness to a scene that has already been lived into existence.

This process lets me push the images toward the mythic and the psychologically charged. I’m drawn to moments that feel suspended between reality and dream-logic — the place where memory, fear, and desire begin to blur. Meaning emerges, but I don’t force it; I want the images to feel familiar and uncanny in equal measure, like the rare moments in life when everything seems slightly over-arranged, too perfectly timed and well lit to feel entirely real.

My work reaches for emotional/psychological truth through constructed reality. These staged scenes become vessels for the deeper currents beneath daily life — the things we feel but rarely articulate, the strange gravity of unspoken experience.