I’m learning film. Cue emotional deconstruction. What a humbling experience. The question I keep asking myself is, “am I a good photographer? or just a decent editor?”, but the question is moot – both have the same answer.

I didn’t start photography with the intention of making it a job. I started with the intention of documenting my growing children. Then I turned the camera around onto myself and started unearthing my own stories – conjuring them like kids with a oui-ji board in a candlelit basement. This haunting is permanent.

An important question to ask oneself as a creative is “what are you saying with your work? what is the message? what aspects of your story do you filter your subjects through?” and “have you successfully conveyed that filter?” I thought I knew the answers to these questions. I thought my work was a visual dissertation on the lingering side effect of longing and homelessness. But what happens when you heal?

Evolution. But evolution is messy business – it’s not supposed to sit in a straight line of linear transmutation. It is cyclical, like trauma. It is wild and self-referencing. It is the decaying carcass turned mucus soup in the breakdown of tissue, and the solidifying embryo that sprouts in response. It is ugly and beautiful all at the same time, and so I have to expect my work to be both/and. I think I’m done looking for my creative voice, because I don’t believe it was ever lost. If it eludes my mind it is because it is not meant to be articulated, maybe not even meant to be understood, but felt and witnessed and released and allowed to shift and change and become unrecognizable.

What do these photographs say?

Perhaps nothing more than I lived, I mated, I reproduced; and I found wonder in the process.