Shelter in Place is an ongoing self portraiture series.

On March 16, 2020, I left my office to begin working from home in the midst of a global pandemic. I vividly remember driving home that morning with my work desktop buckled into the passenger seat. It felt small and surreal. All of my daily rituals evaporated overnight. I was too nervous to take the train the week before. The coffee shop where they knew my name and order before I walked in the door no longer exists. Friends and family lost jobs and then loved ones, and any sense of security or normalcy was wiped out. It felt overwhelming. Any stranger on the street could unwittingly kill you, and you could do the same to anyone you came in contact with. It felt unimportant. I still had a job, I still had my health, and I still had a roof over my head that I shared with someone I loved. It felt important to document this moment in time and try to capture a sliver of the myriad of emotions. I’ve been documenting the anxiety, boredom, joy, fear, guilt, relief, privilege, stress, peace, gratitude, dread, unimportance, frustration, and banality of my everyday reality to regain a sliver of control of my narrative. Shelter in Place is a tiny, intimate, bullshit-free window into a little life lived against the same few walls.

During the Spring of 2016, I moved to Rome to study architecture through a different lens.  I stumbled upon a message scrawled on a wall in the architecture school in Genoa:

-ARCHITETTURA
+AVVENTURA

For me, this was a call to action.  I soon rediscovered an old love for photography that had long been buried under school work and deadlines.  This series serves as a wake up call to me.  It is a reminder to slow down and appreciate the bits and pieces of where I am now and to do the things I enjoy.  It is easy for me to get lost in work, but was I able to get lost in the moment?  This collection captures the things abroad that moved me, be it monumental space, or light, or the passage of time.

The Central Branch of the Des Moines Library was designed by David Chipperfield Architects and was completed in 2006.  It is located in the heart of downtown Des Moines, Iowa, in Western Gateway Park.  The building is meant to act as a link between the city and the park.  This area of the city has undergone extensive redevelopment in recent years.  The library has become a symbol of this urban renewal.  

In a season of continuous urban gentrification, it is all too common to watch public space disappear into newly developed downtown condos or premium city office space.  Only a very few wealthy clients are able to afford the services of an architect, let alone a big name such as David Chipperfield.  Public space within the city has been greatly reduced to retail spaces.  Libraries are one of the last few, truly free public spaces.  They provide a sheltered space with access to seemingly limitless information.  Their importance cannot be stated enough.  The public deserves well-designed, beautiful spaces that work for them.

A collection of 2016 and 2017 portraits

Produced in collaboration with artist Josh Frank, this series explores the intersection of indulgence, excess, and addiction.

A gathering of timber this massive would stretch for miles when placed end to end.  Gathered and compressed on a single plot of land, where it meets its final resting place.  This material had a short life in this state, it was cut to size and tied together, left untreated, and laid across the earth for the ease of movement of massive equipment across miles of earth.  This is a byproduct of the construction of an oil pipeline.  It is paid off, in hopes of indefinite storage here.

This is an exploration of Black's Heritage Farm.
The farm as compressor of massive volume.
The farm as final resting place.

 Black Contemporary is an exploratory laboratory on a rural, small family farm for the investigation and manipulation of materials.  It is run by artist and architect Pete Goché on Black's Heritage Farm.  The grain drying facility was built in 1979 and currently serves as the studio for site-specific installations every spring.

Various product photography shot late 2019-present