The first picture I remember taking was a polaroid at a family reunion. A hot air balloon had drifted into the frame overhead… and I shot it. Balloon in the lower left third, pure blue sky everywhere else, just enough space to feel like it was going somewhere. People said nice things about it. I was a kid, so they were probably being kind. But I remember looking at it and thinking:
yeah, that’s the one.
That feeling never really went away.
A few summers later I was gifted a camera for mowing the lawn and picking up the dog poop. It was this bizarre, bright yellow point-and-shoot thing that looked like a Dewalt drill crossed with a pair of binoculars. A totally confused and useless thing, but so I was I at this point. I took it everywhere. I would get in trouble at school for shooting instead of paying attention. I took it to my baseball games. One afternoon, playing shortstop, I decided the world needed to see what a batter looks like from the field in the middle of a swing – so I pulled the camera out of my uniform and shot it. The ball went right past me. My coach had opinions about that. So did my teammates. So did my mom’s boyfriend, who was somehow always more invested in my games than I was. I didn’t care.
I had the shot, kind of. It was blurry.
That’s basically the whole story. Everything since then has been a more professional version of the same problem: I see something, I have to capture it, I can’t help myself.
I was late to the smartphone game (thanks mom). But early Instagram, when it was still about pictures – man, I thought I was a bona-fide photographer. I’d shoot railroad tracks or some otherwise innocuous scene, and slap some faded film, teal and orange, Thumblr-fied filter on and watch the likes roll in. Eventually I got a Fujifilm and started spending a lot of time in Europe. Then I started studying film. And then it all just became the thing I do. Not a thing I chose so much as a direction I was already moving.
What shapes how I see things is harder to explain but I’ll try. Nostalgia feels warm and orange. The sea has a particular blue that doesn’t feel cold, even though it’s the same blue as fog, and that does feel cold. New York City is monochrome. Paris, smells bad. A scene tells its own story without me. I’m just here offering a translation so someone else can feel what I felt when I was standing there. The things that feed that: sunshine. Good drinks. Summer heat. A room full of people who are happy to be there. The montage part of the movie where everything is working, even if it’s destined to go to shit in the third act.
I moved from photography into film, from film into campaigns, from campaigns into brand building. The titles have changed – photographer, filmmaker, art director, creative director – but the instinct is the same one that stuck a camera in a baseball uniform. I see something worth capturing and I figure out how to make other people see it too.
I’m based in Los Angeles. I work across campaigns, brand identity, film and video production, and whatever the thing is that doesn’t have a clean category yet. I’ve built brands, directed shoots, run creative systems, and made work that has ended up at any place you might see… things.
If you made it this far, you probably already know if we should talk.
