Family and California
My first move out of my family’s house in 2001 took me 2000 miles away, to New Orleans, LA. where I lived for 3 years, making photographs, witnessing and absorbing an abundance of Southern culture while working random day jobs to pay my rent. I got around by bicycle, lived in a shotgun apartment and was mentored by an amazing 80 yr old photographer, named Herman Leonard.
I moved to New York on a scholarship to the School of Visual Arts in 2004, less than a year before Hurricane Katrina devastated the first place that felt like home to me. My first year in NYC seemed to lay extensive groundwork for many projects to come. Though, I didn’t see it just then. By my second year at School of Visual Arts, all of what I had left behind shifted tremendously. New Orleans was deluged, my grandmother had passed away and my father called one night to tell me he had been sentenced to two years in a federal prison for a blue-collar crime I didn’t pry far into knowing too much about. The comforts I had felt before, were plucked from beneath me.
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I moved to New York on a scholarship to the School of Visual Arts in 2004, less than a year before Hurricane Katrina devastated the first place that felt like home to me. My first year in NYC seemed to lay extensive groundwork for many projects to come. Though, I didn’t see it just then. By my second year at School of Visual Arts, all of what I had left behind shifted tremendously. New Orleans was deluged, my grandmother had passed away and my father called one night to tell me he had been sentenced to two years in a federal prison for a blue-collar crime I didn’t pry far into knowing too much about. The comforts I had felt before, were plucked from beneath me.
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