I am a bridge. I have always felt able to provide a linkage between unknown or inaccessible worlds. I am drawn to interior moments, to uncomfortable experiences. I am a chronicler of the unseen and the unnoticed. I love the edginess of the photographic frame, and the external quiet of the internal debate. I revel in and deeply respect being admitted into the world behind the scenes.
As one person with a camera, I construct very involved and intimate, but unobtrusive, contact with people’s lives. I return repeatedly to the people I photograph. I reveal my own identity. I become known. I believe it is a heroic act to face a camera’s lens, to risk the reproach of permanence, and I record those acts of bravery as people reveal themselves to me through my camera. The images that result are collaborations.
Photography is an immediate way of recording the everyday, of freezing the gestures of storytelling. It creates a methodology of noticing. The strength of a documentary told through still images is that the still image can be returned to again and again. Photographs slow the pace of information, so that it can be apprehended and studied, letting the details of the story unveil themselves within each frame.
The body of work that accompanies this application was photographed in a church for the homeless that operates out of several schoolbuses in San Francisco. I am at work on a new project with the city’s immigrant day laborers.