Look at Me

I want every person to just pop out of their photograph. I want you to feel as if you’re standing in front of them. I want to erase the barrier between what is seen and what is felt so that when you look at a photo you are filled with emotion. I want you to feel a person, not just see them.

To that end I ask you to look at me. To really look. You know when you’re a child and you’re arguing with your parents and they say “Look at me!” ? It’s that level of focus I ask though not in a condescending way.

When I was living in New York, and spending a lot of time in Manhattan, I learned how to break down barriers quickly so that a person would become an instant friend. They say you’re not supposed to look people in the eye on the streets, in order to avoid conflict, and that’s mostly true, but it also works in reverse. You can make friends by looking a person in the eye. So it becomes a case of discerning who is who.

When I do portraits, everybody is a friend. I arrive at each situation with some level of trust already baked in. When you add to that my New York personality, the result is often something like what you see above (or below) - a living, three-dimensional human being.

If you read just a few of my posts you already have a sense of my style, my strategy, my process. I’m still working on it. But the important thing to take away is that I am always striving for something authentic. I really want you to feel what I feel when I’m taking the photo. So in that sense I’m just transferring energy, and that’s what my photographic portraits are - packets of energy that can be seen and felt.