The First Years represents an ongoing documentation of my family and how the family structure creates and reconfigures identity. My interests as an artist revolve around a world familiar to me, and photographing affords me deeper access to my personal experience. Though families vary greatly, the desire to understand how familial connections are shaped is universal. My vantage point is one of a father working to reconcile the conflicting experiences of parenthood, where the weight of being fully available to my children pushes up against the need for autonomy and individuality. In creating these images, I hold multiple truths at once and, in the process, create an unfinished space by which viewers can reflect on their personal histories.

This project, now in its tenth year, has taken numerous visual forms and continues to accumulate meaning. While the earliest years of the project were rooted in the documentary ethos, the pictures have evolved into orchestrated vignettes that embrace the tableau as a basis for creation. My process follows the rhythms and routines of our family life. The images emerge through a combination of spontaneous response and directed construction. Often working to recreate a visual idea that initially occurred naturally, these images interweave reality and fiction, capturing complex, conflicting emotions where joy, vulnerability, confusion, and fear occur simultaneously. Individual identity is obfuscated within the images, amplifying the potential for universal self-reflection. The photographs privilege the sculptural over the social, calling upon unorthodox compositions, unexpected gestures, and emotional aura to create reflective spaces where unfinished narratives await completion by the viewer. 

The parenting experience—though intense in the moment—is ultimately lost to the passage of time and instability of memory. These artworks represent an attempt to hold onto what I know cannot be preserved. These pictures exist as both poetic vignettes and a family history of sorts. Photography, being a generous medium, allows these works to operate as both keepers and interpreters of history. These pictures stimulate my sense memory (more than my intellect), acting as a lifeline back to intangible moments of elation and fear—the dark and the light.