Exposing You While Revealing Me
What fascinates me about portrait work is that I’m not simply documenting a person. I’m creating the light that illuminates them.
When I first started photographing people as a profession in 2010, I relied almost entirely on sunlight. I learned to look for it, chase it, and position people within it. There is certainly beauty in natural light, but I eventually found myself wanting more control. The sun dictated too much of the process. I could react to the light, but I couldn't truly shape it. It wasn’t producing a look that felt right for me.
That realization led me down the rabbit hole of studio strobes.
I researched lighting obsessively. I studied modifiers, power ratings, light patterns, and techniques the way a college student crams for finals. Night after night I found myself reading articles, watching tutorials, and comparing equipment, convinced that somewhere in all that information was the key to creating the portraits I envisioned. Something needed to connect with me.
I still remember the excitement of getting my first set. I was convinced they were going to unlock a whole new level of creativity.
They did, but they were also disappointing.
The excitement faded quickly when I realized they simply weren't powerful enough for what I wanted to do. I had all these ideas in my head about shaping light and creating dramatic portraits, especially outdoors, and the lights just couldn't keep up. The more I learned, the more limitations I discovered.
So I upgraded. Then I upgraded again.
Each new set of strobes got me closer to the images I envisioned, but each step also expanded my understanding of what was possible. What I thought was enough power last year suddenly felt inadequate the next. The better I became at seeing light, the more demanding I became of the tools creating it.
When I started bringing my strobes outdoors, a completely new challenge emerged. I wasn't just shaping light anymore, I was competing with the sun.
Overpowering sunlight became its own obsession. Every time I thought I had enough power, I found a situation where I wanted more. More output. More control. More ability to impose my own vision on a scene regardless of what the sun was doing. The stronger my creative vision became, the stronger my lights needed to be.
I found myself hauling around external power packs just to run my lights. At first it felt like part of the adventure. Eventually it became a pain in the ass. I wish you could’ve seen me running through the woods while I was documenting the escape at Clinton Correctional in northern New York. If the branches weren’t already poking me in the face, they were getting entangled in my cables. I wanted the freedom to create anywhere without dragging a portable power station behind me. I even resorted to renting a portable generator a couple of times. The loud motor and smell of gasoline was an embarrassing lesson learned. The pursuit of portability became almost as important as the pursuit of power.
Looking back, it wasn't really about the equipment. It was about gaining greater control over the medium I was using to tell stories. Every upgrade, every experiment, every late-night research session was in service of one thing: the ability to create light rather than simply accept it.
There’s something deeply satisfying about constructing light from nothing and watching it wrap itself around a human being. A person stands before me as a three-dimensional subject, full of contours, angles, textures, and depth. My challenge is to use light to describe that dimension. To decide what emerges and what recedes. To let a highlight rest gently on a cheekbone, allow a shadow to deepen along the jaw, create separation where none existed before, or force your eyes to travel along the portrait the way I intended.
What excites me is that light becomes a language. Every adjustment changes the conversation. Moving a light a few inches can transform the feeling of a portrait. A face can appear strong, vulnerable, mysterious, approachable, resilient, or contemplative simply through the placement and quality of light.
Yet for all of the control light gives me, it has limits. Light can reveal shape, texture, expression, and presence, but it can't penetrate the skin. It can't illuminate a lifetime of memories, heartbreaks, victories, fears, or dreams. It can't tell me who someone truly is. No amount of carefully crafted lighting can reveal a person's full story.
And maybe that's what keeps portraiture interesting to me.
Every person arrives carrying a lifetime of experiences that exist beyond my understanding. The light I create can acknowledge a physical form, but the deeper parts of a person remain beautifully out of reach.
The portrait is not an attempt to tell someone's entire story. It's an acknowledgment that there is a story there at all. It's a small glimpse into a person whose depth extends far beyond what any light can expose.
That's the challenge I’m deeply in love with. Using something as intangible as light to reveal what it can, while respecting everything it can't.
