Encounters is an ongoing body of work that I started to make when I moved back home, to Staten Island, in 2016.
Ultimately about a love of place, my homecoming has been both a rediscovery and discovery, of place and of self. So much of what I seek is a kind of magic that can exist in ordinary daily living.
The photographs emerge from overlapping conversations: a dialogue with the people that I’m photographing, many of whom I’m meeting for the first time, and they in turn in dialogue with both myself and their surroundings. I’m curious about the particularities of a person’s life and experiences, but also about community: what it could mean for the individual, and the ways a person can both belong to and stand apart from it.
