Can you tell us a bit about how you discovered photography and what your path has been?

I know it sounds super cheesy but I’ve pretty much always known I wanted to be a photographer. When I was 6 or 7, my grandfather found a Canon AE-1 at the back of a closet, gave it to me, and told me to walk to the park and take some pictures. I came home and assured everyone that I’d taken some really great shots and that I was going to be a photographer when I grew up, and didn’t realize until the next day that there’d been no film in the camera. But I ended up sticking with it anyway, and went to undergrad for photography, doing mostly documentary work. I worked in product photography for a couple years after college until I decided I hated that enough to finally go get an MFA.

You currently live and work in New York, how has that impacted your work?

New York seemed like an obvious choice when I was applying to grad school, mostly because I was really into documentary and street photography at the time. I totally moved away from that way of working, but I think New York affected my work in ways I hadn’t anticipated, which is even cooler. I recently moved to Gowanus and I’ve been working on combining images and objects in sculptural pieces, and they’re all inspired by (or literally taken from) the industrial neighborhood that surrounds me. I also think that having access to New York museums and galleries is always touted as an opportunity to see these great works by master artists, which is obviously true; but that access was just as useful in helping me crystalize what I don’t value in art–not just aesthetically but ethically and in terms of how to create art world I hope to see in the future.

You make use of appropriation of vernacular imagery in your works, can you explain your relationship with found images and how it impacts your work?

A couple of years ago I started to feel kind of weird about calling myself a photographer. Everyone is a photographer now, realistically, so describing yourself as a photographer feels like it inherently creates this hierarchy where what you’re really saying is, “I’m a better photographer than the rest of you.” So I started looking at vernacular images, first on the old hosting site Photobucket, and genuinely found a lot of them more interesting than some stuff I see in galleries. I think there’s just as much value in these as in pictures that I take, and sometimes more–I think vernacular work is often less self-conscious than work made by people who have studied photography for years. So now all of my work is sourced from sites like this, from surveillance cameras, from Youtube, and from my family’s archives. My goal is to appreciate, highlight, and recontextualize these images without seeming like I’m trying to “elevate” them to the level of fine art.

Looking through your works, they feel very desolated. From the laundromat views, to Area 51 views, you often capture spaces and circumstantial subjects through surveillance technology . What draws you to this style of imagery and technology?

Even when I was working in documentary photography, my pictures were always pretty spare. I think I naturally tried to break down a really complex world into simpler scenes that I could process and understand more easily. When I use surveillance cameras, I’m interested in the quiet moments that seem to nullify the usefulness of them: if surveillance cameras are constantly looking and recording in anticipation of an event, what’s going on when there’s no event to review? I like the idea of this imagery being able to exist on its own visual merit and not just as a tool to protect private property.

How would you describe yourself as an artist?

I think I work pretty inconsistently, actually–I’ll spend weeks thinking about something, gathering reference images, going down rabbit holes online for hours and hours, and then suddenly create the actual work in a frenzied couple of days. So maybe I just mean “disorganized,” or at least that I have a weird relationship to time management

Who/What are your biggest sources of inspiration?

Right now, my neighborhood is my biggest source of inspiration. They just started dredging the Gowanus Canal, and I’ve been watching it for hours, imagining how I’d incorporate the objects they pull up into pieces. There’s also something really fascinating to me about having absolutely no idea what a lot of equipment does or how it does it–or realizing that I never even knew it had to be done–especially on construction sites. There’s so much of the world I don’t understand or know anything about and I’m constantly curious about all of it. I’ve also been going through my grandfather’s old slide film, and popping into thrift and antique stores to look for other people’s discarded photographs

What advice do you have for an artist hoping to pursue photography as a career?

So much work I see now looks so similar! It’s really easy to get caught up in mimicking trends in photography–and often it seems like an easy way to quickly gain traction for your work–but that’s not sustainable long-term. I honestly think it’s not a bad idea to try to limit your exposure to the available deluge of contemporary photography until you’ve got a better sense of what you’re drawn to. Try to shoot a lot, whatever interests you, and then look back over your own images to clarify and understand why you’re doing what you’re doing and move forward from there.

Describe your creative process in one word.
Obsessive

If you could teach a one-hour class on anything, what would it be?
Probably on how to make your artist statement sound less like pretentious gibberish!

What was the last book you read or film you saw that inspired you?
I don’t often take direct inspiration from books or movies, but I recently read a book about the human body that told me an immense amount of information that’s ultimately meaningless–like how your DNA would stretch to Pluto if laid end to end–and I think that kind of thing correlates pretty directly to the way I work.

What is the most played song in your music library?
I barely listen to music, honestly–my most played thing last year was the rainforest sounds I put on when I’m falling asleep. I am well aware that that makes me sound truly insufferable.

How do you take your coffee?
Black, and preferably iced.