My process is an exploration of the limitations of portrait photography to present fixed identities – of efforts to consolidate a subject within the confines of a frame. Instead, I engage with fragmentation and invite the viewer to put the pieces together. This is most clear in my collages, but is no less true of the single image works, where I capture moments not for their own sake, but for the narratives (past and future) that they gesture at.

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Focusing on the materiality of the process, I aim for my photographic prints and collages to occupy a space that is extremely tangible and physical. Simultaneously, I am pushing against the idea that a photograph should try to represent a moment, to explain definitively how it “really” was or who the person “truly” is. The darkroom process and film development, alongside experiments with developers, contrast filters, and multiple negatives, then on to the physical cutting and layering the collage elements together– these elements are all intrinsic to my practice.

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The collages often begin as single images, but within the printing process the images are ripped and torn. The disparate pieces are then reattached, presenting them to the viewer to be structured anew. Here, I employ our desire as humans to heal and preserve relationships. Rupture and restoration are both collaborative processes.

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These works direct this process toward a sparing, sometimes removed view of intimacy, and the mirroring often found within relationships. Portraits of mothers and daughters, friends, and lovers are paired with more abstract images of hands reaching out, shadows of gestures, and moments in which the absence or presence of another are in conversation.

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By focusing my work on the joy of individuals, found in the quieter moments of love, trust, and touch, I explore the subtle ways we engage with implication and gesture to piece together our inner lives and share them. These concerns are linked to the construction of wholes from parts – which is reflected in my method. Moments are to narratives as a touch is to care; as a gesture (both in my tearing of the paper, and in those almost imperceptible physical gestures of my subjects) is to a series of possible persons and their relationships. Present through all of this, though, is the recognition that tears – both in images and in relationships – can rarely be seamlessly mended, and that in spite of this there is beauty in their “repair.”