I grew up in bars and feel their familiarity like it’s part of my DNA when I’m inside one.

We have closets full of the knives and guns left to us from family members (some so long dead we never met them). So, it comes as no surprise that violence, sometimes even on ourselves, is one more thing we inherit.

I’ve always loved photographing bands. I started going to see live music only after graduating high school and the vitality of the music made me feel like I had to participate however I could. Photos were a way for me to do that.

My work, for better or worse, has always been about people (even the photos where no one is present, I think, are about the people just outside of the frame). My work with portraiture and candids are such that I sometimes can’t make a distinction between the two, but this is my attempt.

Candids happen somewhere between the more carefully considered shots in a studio environment or out on the street. I can’t tell where the portraits begin and the candids stop, but if you have an idea you can send me an e-mail with your best guess.

Before I ever knew it was something people were doing (and making a name for themselves in bigger cities), I was shooting night life photos. I learned how to tape down my lens, use hyperfocal distances, and blast everyone in front of me with a flash so I could get the people in the foreground with well exposed backgrounds. The equipment got better and eventually I was shooting photos in bars a couple nights a week.

My dad took me hunting as a kid. We shot one squirrel that was meant for my uncle’s stewpot. My dad said I was a good shot and was happy I would know how to feed myself (which was a part of his childhood growing up). We went a couple more times, but he always discouraged any other kills and, instead, turned it into a long walk in the woods carrying our rifles. Dad taught me to appreciate animals and to protect them even as he taught me how to be a good steward of the land by responsibly taking wildlife.

Otherwise, my experience with animals was hunting crawdads and salamanders or spending all my time wishing I had a cat or a dog.

These days, I don’t have reason to hunt and the majority of my shooting is done with a camera. My love of the wildlife we encounter or have sitting next to us on couches is enough that the shots of them have become their own subgenera of my work.

I never cared much about shooting landscapes or still life images, but I still found myself aiming my camera at the places and things I experienced. These are documentary shots cataloging the experiences I’ve managed to accumulate.

I have over a decade’s worth of my original film that I’m still scanning. Negatives from my first photo class all the way to outtakes from my trip to work with Reagan in Los Angeles. To add to that, I normally keep one or two of my film cameras in rotation even now. Some of this stuff feels so disconnected from where I am now, plucked out of time without any exif data to tell me where I was or what I was doing then, that it’s almost like pulling work out of the archives that belong to someone living a life entirely separate from mine.

Sexuality, identity, and what’s considered taboo has been a part of what I shoot from the beginning — if only because I was out there exploring these ideas with friends since way before I started shooting photos in high school. These shots, honestly, could fit in almost any of the other categories, but for the sake of keeping this part of life in its own walled garden, as is custom, I will let these images live here.