My early photography is saturated with a sense of death. I later came to understand that I was photographing all the places that were missing the physical presence of my father; that I was trying to capture his ghost in the faces of my family members and in the emptiness that his presence left in rooms and landscapes.
As a child the show Unsolved Mysteries disturbed me yet I also found it humorous. The total infidelity to the traumatic nature of the events portrayed seems revealing of the nature of the tissue of American television culture. I constantly look for the humor and the beauty in death in order to distance myself from the punch of its emotional reality. Police dramas have a similar outcome; they reference real trauma but filter emotion through actors and plot narrations, to numb the sting of the real emotion that a “victim” might feel.
In my work, I attempt to bridge this gap between humor and trauma by pairing my own works with what I consider to be my families "work" to be the families curator.