"I don't really put myself into a category...I would just say I am...what I am."
"Mental health...I think everyone struggles with stuff."
"I feel like people could be doing so much more and everyone is just wasting talent."
"I know what they're like growing up...public housing, public assistance was my life growing up."
"I was thinking about the past and not going backwards."
"It's the look that my children gave me that went to my soul...I never wanted to see that look."
"Growing up...One of the most difficult things was to ask for me."
"God can take two broken people and put them together and make the most beautiful mosaic out of life."
Overview
Stories Under A Tent
This series explores the lives of individuals from all walks of life. Within Stories Under A Tent, I found that photographing someone was not always enough to fully understand or hold onto the stories they shared, with or without a caption. Photography can preserve a moment—a single frame of time—but it cannot contain everything that happens within it. So I began filming these individuals as well, at 24 frames per second. I wander from city to city, sometimes across state lines, setting up a tent—literally—and inviting people from all backgrounds to come inside. I listen as they muse aloud, reflect, and share a story with me. I am not merely documenting the subject; I see the process as a negotiation with time. What is captured is real, but the moment itself is already passing.
Each subject is presented with an intentional stillness. In contrast, the filmed conversations introduce movement into expression and vulnerability. The camera captures the voice, the pause, the hesitation, the shift in behavior—elements that resist being held in place. I am interested in the space between who someone is and what remains after the moment has passed. A portrait can feel definitive, but it is only ever partial. A story can feel complete, but it is always unfolding. Light becomes a collaborator in the same way it does in my photographic work. It shapes the subject while revealing the limits of what can be seen. It isolates, defines, and, at times, conceals. In both the portraits and films, light draws attention to the surface while suggesting something just beyond it. The result is not an attempt to fully understand a person, but to sit with what cannot be fully known.
These works are about memory as much as presence. Each subject offers a fragment of their life—an experience, a belief, a moment of reckoning. Once shared, that fragment becomes fixed in a new way. It is no longer only theirs; it becomes part of a collective archive. Like any preserved object, it can carry different meanings over time. What is said today may be heard differently tomorrow. This series explores the desire to hold onto something real in the face of impermanence. A photograph and a filmed conversation are attempts to stabilize what cannot be kept. And yet, within that effort, something honest emerges.
Not permanence, but trace.
Not possession, but witness.