"Close to Home", is an ongoing project that looks at people within a certain radius of my home in Minneapolis. These images are "found portraits" in the sense that I am walking through an event or area looking for faces. The time spent on each portrait is generally very short, maybe a minute or two. I normally take between one and three exposures.
My photography is a social exploration of my environment, an attempt to connect with and understand my own humanity through my community. I am always looking, collaborating, pulling people into a frame, immortalizing. My subjects are people that I find attractive, odd, lonely, vulnerable, confident, lost … unique. Their social clues draw me in: the way they dress or adorn their bodies, their posture, the way they cut their hair, the skew of a baseball cap, where they position themselves in a crowd.
Forget who you are for a moment. Identify yourself in each photograph through a veil of your own experiences, emotions and prejudices. Realize that we all exist within each other and that this is simply what it means to be human. My photographs are of strangers.
If you meet some stranger in the street, and love him or her, do I not often meet strangers in the street and love them?
If you see a good deal remarkable in me, I see just as much, perhaps more, in you.
Why what have you thought of yourself?
Is it you, then, that thought yourself less?
- excerpt from Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass (1856)
