About

After graduating from high school, I enrolled in photography school in a last-ditch effort to go to college. I barely knew how to use a camera, but I hadn’t been a good student in a traditional learning environment and wanted to find a way to channel my curiosities. I didn’t become a much better student, but I grew to love photography. It allowed me to be an observer, get out and talk to people from different walks of life, and ask lots of questions.

A year after I finished photography school, I received a one-year fellowship at Fabrica, a communications research center in northern Italy. I moved to the small town of Treviso and worked with artists from all over the world. This is when I began interviewing my subjects and noticed that, unlike many of my peers, I was just as concerned with the interview process and the writing as I was with the photographs. I saw each component as an essential part of the portrait. Though I didn’t have any formal training in interviewing, I became better at getting people to open up, and I started to feel like it made the work stronger and more comprehensive.

After Fabrica, I started my career as a photographer in Italy, fascinated by small communities and groups of people that were brought together by a simple common thread. For my first personal project, I traveled to a village in the Dominican Republic populated entirely by migrant sugarcane workers from Haiti. I took 14 portraits and interviewed each subject to include a caption that gave some insight into their lives. The story sold immediately to a magazine for which I had always dreamed of working. I wasn’t paid enough to cover the expenses that I had put into it, but it was a deeply satisfying experience that became the start of something crucial to my development as a photographer. I realized I could learn about people’s lives just by asking them: the world became both larger and smaller.

Since then, my work has taken me all over the world. I did a story about voice actors in Rome who dub popular Hollywood films into Italian. I went to a town in Alaska where nearly everyone lives in a single 14-story building. I tracked down 16 people in Vietnam 45 years after an American soldier took their picture in a village outside of Saigon. I spent three weeks in Tokyo covering a story about retired sumo wrestlers. My work has been featured in National Geographic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, TIME magazine, NPR, Wired and The Guardian.

With my wife Sara and our daughter Gus. Spring of 2023.

My first Christmas, 1982.

My parents, Barbara and Douglas. Both 18 years old here.

1984

1985

Summer of 1985.

With my sister Julie in 1986.

Halloween, 1986.

I never sucked my thumb but I was obsessed with this blanket.

My first day of kindergarten.

These roller skates were a 5th birthday present and apparently I was obsessed with them.

1987

Family vacation to Colorado, summer of 1988.

First grade, 1989.

Sixth grade, 1996.

With my dad in 1997.

Things got very awkward there for a minute, 1997.

16 years old, 1998.

After an all night shoot during my days at Brooks Institute of Photography, 2004.

A shoot during my time at Fabrica, The United Colors of Benetton’s creative research center in Treviso, Italy. 2007

With my mom in 2007.

Tanzania in 2008.

Bari, Italy in 2009.

Barrow, Alaska in 2010.

Bayou La Batre, Alabama during the disastrous BP oil spill in 2010.

New York City in 2011.

Chandigarh, India in 2011.

30. After this shoot for TIME Magazine, 6-year-old Penny said to me: "I was very patient while you took my picture, so can I take your picture now?". How could I say no? 2012