I make things.
Photographs. Films. Music. Books. Businesses. Code. Ideas. And, occasionally, a completely new version of myself.
For more than three decades, I've followed curiosity wherever it led me — across rooms, industries, countries, careers and versions of my own life.
A camera was my first passport. It took me around the world, put celebrities and complete strangers in front of my lens, led to work with names including Condé Nast and Live Nation, and eventually put me in classrooms where I could pass what I'd learned on to somebody else.
The résumé was never the point.
The people were.
I've spent much of my life fascinated by people: who they are when nobody is performing, what they make, what they hide, what they love, what they lose, what scares them, and what happens when life forces them to become somebody they did not expect to be.
Photography was simply the first language I learned for exploring those questions.
Over the years, that curiosity expanded into filmmaking, writing, teaching, coaching, entrepreneurship, technology, software development and music. If an idea requires a camera, I use a camera. If it needs code, I write code. If it needs words, I write. If it needs guitars, drums and a microphone, I make music.
The medium has never mattered to me as much as making the thing.
A life spent making.
Different mediums. Different cities. Different jobs. Same underlying obsession: make something honest, learn what I don't know, and leave the world with something that wasn't there before.
A camera became a passport.
More than three decades behind a camera, traveling, photographing celebrities, artists, performers and everyday people, and working with organizations including Condé Nast and Live Nation.
I started teaching what I learned.
Universities, workshops, classrooms, one-on-one coaching and platforms including Adorama. I've taught and mentored photographers and creatives from around the world.
I never stayed in one medium.
Photography became film. Film became writing. Writing became books. Business became software. Software became code. And eventually, after 21 years away, music came roaring back.
The plan changed. More than once.
New York. Travel. Colombia. Michigan. Successes, failures, relationships, losses, reinventions and the repeated discovery that the life you imagined and the life that actually arrives are rarely the same thing.
Let life be complicated.
Years ago in New York City, I had the opportunity to sit down with Anthony Bourdain for an interview and a longer conversation about life and storytelling.
What stayed with me was not celebrity. It was approach.
Curiosity. Honesty. The willingness to let a place, a person or a story be messy without turning it into a cleaner version just because that version is easier to sell.
That idea now runs through nearly everything I make — photographs, films, writing, music and the stories I tell about other people and myself.
Ideas that refused to stay ideas.
Some ideas became photographs. Some became exhibitions. Some became books. Some are still becoming whatever they're supposed to become.
Glimpses
A photographic exploration of time, memory, everyday experience and what happens when control gives way to observation.
Kinetic
A body of work centered on movement, energy and what happens when motion is allowed to exist inside the photograph instead of being frozen away.
Resonance
Part of an ongoing body of published work built from the same curiosity that has driven the camera since the beginning.
In Crossing
A year of New York City street photography — people, movement, accident, timing and the strange electricity of the city.
Photography + Business
Books and teaching projects spanning photography fundamentals, technique, creative process, marketing and building a life around the work.
The memoir
Creativity, identity, mistakes, loss, reinvention, travel, love, starting over and what happens when the old answers stop working.
Reinvention has no age limit.
Twenty-one years ago, somebody told me my music was going nowhere. I listened. And for a long time, music disappeared from my life.
At 47, I came back to it.
I taught myself recording, engineering, microphones, production, mixing and mastering because I didn't know how to capture what I could hear in my head. I failed. I scrapped things. I started over. I learned.
Eventually, I made The In-Between.
Not knowing how to do something is not the same thing as being unable to learn it.
That experience reinforced something I wish more people believed: you can return to something you loved. You can change direction. You can fail. You can start again.
One life. Different forms.
Today, the different parts of my life are finally making sense together.
I'm making music. Creating short documentary films about interesting people and the stories they carry. Writing a memoir. Returning to coaching. Developing talks and workshops. Continuing to photograph. Building things with technology. Following curiosity wherever it goes next.
I don't think the work is really about photography, music, filmmaking, writing or code.
Those are tools.
The work is about what it means to be alive — what we do with what happens to us, what we make from the cards we are dealt, and whether we let circumstance get the final word.
You do not control every card you are dealt. You still get to decide what you make from them.
Sometimes that becomes a photograph. Sometimes a film. Sometimes a book. Sometimes a song. Sometimes a business. And sometimes the thing you have to create is yourself again.