ABOUT ME

I was really young when I read my first book. The Magic Treehouse books. 2 kids who would go to their hidden treehouse…and then they would travel to all these different worlds and times. They would go on all these magical adventures wrapped in mystery and fairytales. I loved them. I was right there with them. I could have swore I was running away from the Dinosaurs too. This is when I fell in love with words. What words meant to me, and how every word could hold so much yet be something completely different to someone else. At this point, everything associated with words became a muse for me. Music, books, poetry…I look at my life like a book. 

Then around 12 years old…I borrowed my dad’s old Sony disk camera. Took pictures of everything. I mean..everything. My dad says I went through a 6 month period of only black and white photos. I captured flowers, doors..kitchen things…everything but people. Yet..I loved the photos. I loved how something so ordinary…could look so interesting in an image. At the right angle…with the right light…it was no longer ordinary. I loved these art for years, of capturing the ordinary and creating something different. 

I turned 25 and my dad gifted me my first professional camera. Terrified of it, it collected dust for a year. Then, I returned to the Carolinas to take care of my grandparents for a whole year. I ended up having so much free time that I picked up this gift and starting shooting with it. Learning all the different lighting, the different methods…how this camera worked. 

Then I went to my own magical treehouse and traveled to this entire new world of photography people. Who are not ordinary…but who always feel it.  People always feel ordinary, and that there’s nothing special about them. I took this like an untouched wood block and worked on it. I worked on creating my camera and myself to capture the extraordinary in something that seems so mundane. Human emotion…is an art in itself. It needs no help to understand it’s vitalness to this world…yet here I stood with a little beginners camera trying capture this extraordinary thing. 

So here I am today…still standing behind a camera trying capture this magic. In whatever way I can….I capture this emotion…and I paint it with words and stories and colors….and I deliver this gallery. A gallery that I want people to open…and climb into their treehouse…and warp into this place of fairytales, dragons and myths. I want one photo…to speak a book. I suppose that’s what makes me different. I don’t consider myself a “Photographer”. I am a storyteller. Designed by God to create art in the form of people. To use the skies, the waters, the winds…and help people see they are not ordinary. They are so much more.