I love lens-based mediums because I love my folks. I was raised in Missouri, where I spent a lot of time photographing my family. As the son of teachers, sharecroppers, and dancers, the stories that I was trying to tell weren’t particularly grand, but they were full of so much spirit…so much love. It felt like, for the first time, I could memorialize the people who, to me, are everything. Through these photographic encounters, I watched my folks confront grief head on and come out restored. Myself included. I’m talking about watching my grandpa reflect on the life of my late uncle, his brother, only to end with tears of jubilee. Or my great grandmama, Daisy, reclaim her vexed relationship with cotton, saying “this is the happiest and healthiest I’ve felt in years,” while walking a cotton field tilled by Tameka Peoples, owned by a beautiful sister, Lisa Nelson. These tender moments are my worldview. And they are why I have faith in image-making.

Today, I aim to bring that same intimacy to photography and filmmaking as I tell stories about our relationships with the past, each other, land, ourselves, and memory. As I produce work from North Carolina to Missouri to New York and beyond, it feels like I am always stumbling upon little reflections of my family history in the world around me. As these stories come together in (unlikely) harmony, they stand as testimony to the ways we transform trauma into renewal and pass down a rich spirit of resistance across generations.

At the end of the day, I’m finding that there is something special that connects us — something that transcends geography, time, and the ways our stories have been historically told. I hope that my work can help reveal that. I’m still searching. I probably always will. What a gift! It keeps on giving.