Photography came later, and sideways. My grandfather had an old Rollei, not a reflex, and I was drawn to it immediately, the way you're drawn to things you can't quite reach. He understood that, and gave me a Polaroid instead. I played with it, but without real commitment.
The shift came around eighteen. My girlfriend's father was a professional photographer with a shop. Eight years together. It would have been strange not to learn something. The first Yashica as a gift. Then Nikon. Then the darkroom, developing film by hand.
This coincided with starting architecture school, and something clicked, not metaphorically. The way you learn to read space, light, structure: it changes what you see through a lens. Today I shoot exclusively with Fujifilm.
I've spent a long time trying to understand why I photograph. I don't have a clean answer. What I notice is that I'm drawn to stillness, to spaces without people, to things that are often considered ugly. A crack in a wall. A plain container.
There's something I look for in those subjects that I can only describe as quiet. A place apart from the noise. Whether the subject is beautiful or not seems beside the point.
