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WORK STATEMENT I have been behind cameras since a young age. My commitment to photography concretized after I began photographing my maternal grandparents whose hard lives, idiosyncratic personalities and boundless love seemed visually etched in their faces and presence. I loved photographing them. In April of 1998, I shot an image that affected me profoundly, and strongly compelled me to examine the ways others have persevered through hardship. During this phase, I labeled myself a "documentary photographer". I believed cameras were able to capture veritable slices of reality and that depicting social problems was enough to incept change. I created many images of individuals that seemed to be suffering, impoverished, or socially marginal. I am still primarily interested making photographs that have social and cultural themes, although I am less interested in depicting suffering, lack, and social marginality. I have not turned my attention away from those things, but am now balancing that exploration by trying to create images of humor, strength, joy, faith, celebration, tradition, and beauty. I also no longer believe that pictures are inherently truthful (nor inherently deceptive). I now understand photographs as subjective constructions that have malleable functions and effects. Photographs are polyvalent instruments capable of operating as communication, art, evidence, enticement, warning, reportage, denotation, and abstraction. Despite this awareness, I believe in the efficacy of photography as medium for reportage and journalism, ethnography, and as sociocultural commentary and discourse. BIO I am originally from Denver, Colorado. I have also lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Jerusalem. My travels have taken me across the US three times, and through Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Israel and Jordan. I am currently living in New York. I received my BA from Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado in May 1996. My studies were a mosaic of courses in Psychology drawing from Humanistic, Transpersonal, Jungian and Buddhist disciplines. I will receive my MA from Temple University in Fall 2007 (I have completed my coursework and thesis). My work at Temple focused on the connections between anthropology, visual communications, and linguistics. The work included an intensive immersion into the cultural, ethical, political, and methodological issues related to photographic and filmic representation, as well as exploration of the political-economy and social aspects of language and language usage. I am not sure what the future will bring for me. I aim to create more work that invites contemplation, communication, delight, and understanding. I would like to improve what I can, travel, publish a book(s), teach, enjoy living, create networks, build community, nurture friendships, learn, and build a family one day. I strive to involve photography in all of that. Professionally, I am seeking more ethnographic, journalistic, editorial, architectural, commercial and fine-art projects.
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