Finding My People
I didn’t set out to build a community. I set out to take pictures.
For a long time, my work was about light and shadow, about the way a body could hold a room the same way a mountain holds a valley, quietly, without asking permission. I liked the technical problems: how skin reads differently in low light than in high contrast, how a single shaft of window light can turn an ordinary Tuesday afternoon into something that feels like a held breath. I told myself the nudity in my photographs was incidental. A formal choice. Nothing more.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize I was lying to myself about that.
The people who started showing up to sit for me weren’t just subjects. They were looking for something, the same way I was, even if neither of us said it out loud in the beginning. Someone would message me, nervous, half-joking, saying they’d always wanted to try this but never had the nerve. Someone else would show up having driven three hours, because there wasn’t anyone doing this kind of work where they lived. Over and over, I heard some version of the same sentence: I didn’t know there was a place for this.
I started to understand that the camera wasn’t really the point. It was the excuse. It gave people permission to do something that’s surprisingly hard to do alone. My studio became less like a set and more like a waiting room for something people had been carrying around for years……
The wish to be seen exactly as they are and have that be enough.
I remember the specific afternoon it clicked for me. I was setting up lights, doing the usual small talk to put someone at ease, and they said something like, “You have no idea how long I’ve been looking for a group of people who’d just, let me be like this.” Not sexual, not performative. Just unguarded. And I realized I’d been looking for the same thing, from the other side of the lens. I wanted a community where the body wasn’t a problem to be managed or a thing to be hidden, where it could just be material, like fabric or stone, worthy of attention without being loaded down with shame.
