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You have a well-versed background in filmmaking and photography; can you pinpoint a defining moment in your career that has shaped who you are as an artist today? The answer to that question is actually quite complex. There is not defining “moment,” but there is a defining process. My official background in the creative visual fields is actually not one that includes formal training. Technically, I attended Dartmouth College, where I majored in International Economics. After graduating I worked in finance, marketing and management consulting for years. During my travels as a consultant, I purchased a camera and started taking landscape photographs of the locations I was working at. I was emailing these photos for fun to my friends and one thing lead to another. First individual friends really liked them, then restaurants became interested in them, and then a gallery. I won an award and I found myself wondering if I wanted to trade my suit in for a camera permanently. Before jumping from the business ship completely I took a position at Marc Ecko Enterprises as the Vice President of New Media. In this position, I was responsible for the conceptual and visual design of our interactive marketing campaigns. This gave me a lot of exposure to the fashion world. I translated the skills that I had learned shooting popular landscapes to shooting models. It was at this time that I began to shoot a lot of fashion photography. Fashion photography made me spend many hours inside the studio learning about artificial lighting verses simply using the natural lighting present in landscapes. So now when one looks at my photographs, you can see the blend of precise artificial lighting blended with natural ambient lighting that gives many of my photographs a slightly hyper real look without looking artificial.
Can you detail the exact moment you took the photo of “Believe” at Burning Man? Was it an arduous process to capture that shot or was it spontaneous? This year at Burning Man, I learned something that had eluded me for many years of attending. And that elusive lesson was the power of being alone. My girlfriend, Shannon Shiang, had the brilliant idea of us camping at separate camps so that we have more autonomy for exploration. We both camped with different sets of our best friends and allowed our friends to experience us again as individual human beings rather than some sort of Siamese twin
that couples have a tendency of becoming. The extra time created by the mere fact of not having to worry about your partner twenty-four hours a day, allowed me to spend many hours by myself meditating and absorbing the environment. One morning I had just spent hours and hours by myself at the “trash fence” which is the outer perimeter of Burning Man. It is not a typical place that most people spend time at, but one I found myself meditating about the definitions of human existence and my part in the world as a human being, but also as a photographer. I had been struggling with an issue for a bit of time leading up to this moment. I had been producing “pretty images” for some time that people loved, but I really had not found my voice. I had not been able to figure out how my images would produce some added benefit for the world. How would I as an artist help affect the world in a positive manner? The message I have been refining for some time is rooted in utilizing my work product as proof positive that if you simply “believe” in yourself and follow your dreams tirelessly, and get up after every time you fall down, you can and will make it. However, it was an anecdotal message rather than a visual message directly coming through my work. After ruminating on this for some time, I returned to camp and drove a friend to the playa airport in one of ‘The Lady Buggies’ art cars you can see at the Imagine Gallery. After dropping her off, I was looking at the sky and noticed that it was clear except for a patch of clouds that had that stereotypical movie look as if God was coming down out of the heavens, like in the Simpsons opening. After all the thinking I had done that morning about delivering a visual message with my work, I arrived to that part of the sky to a pretty conspicuous scene. The message was staring me right in the face. Before I brought my camera out, I noticed another friend of mine there with his girlfriend appreciating the same magical moment. I took a photo or two of the installation but also thought to myself: “Wow it’s a beautiful image, but if there was going to be a message, I would love it to be unique…” At that moment an art car drove by dropped people off on top of each letter making the scene surreal and unique. Just when I was about to congratulate some photographer for having the great