“As soon as you can build that bond in those initial seconds, that’s where the magic happens.”
What would you say has been the most fulfilling project for you?
That’s a good question. I think the most fulfilling project for me was a documentary photography series in Afghanistan, that I went out for independently called Resilience. The whole purpose of that project was to document the beauty of daily life in Afghanistan that was different than what you know or see in the media.
There’s just a resilience in the fabric of the culture and one of my favorite photos that I’ve ever made was in the streets of Kabul, where I saw this balloon seller who had one leg and was riding his donkey. He got off on the side of the road and had a little megaphone and was announcing that he was selling balloons. So I pulled over in the car, found the perfect composition and two seconds later, this kid came up to him and made a sale. It’s against this very stark backdrop of dirt roads and to me, this image symbolizes hope.
That project was something I’ve always wanted to do since I was a little kid and I was finally able to do it back in 2018.
That scene sounds like it was from a movie and brings up the whole idea of ‘art imitates life and life imitates art.’ When you think on photography, there is the photorealist aspect of the medium or capturing an ‘absolute truth,’ and there is also the creative means to straddle the lines between fiction and reality.
You’ve stated in the past, that the most exciting images to make are the ones that can never be replicated. Can you explain that further?
I like to call those scenes ‘chance encounters.’ I think what makes photography so special, is that there is this blend of you’re half there witnessing a scene and there to document it, but also have to surrender to a lot of the subject matter and what’s unfolding in front of you. You don’t have control over it and if you’re there in that moment in time, it’s all out like a God moment happens and you’re able to capture it. That’s the most fulfilling feeling in the world to me.
There are all sorts of genres of image-making where you’re able to control certain scenes, but when you’re out in the world and you’re documenting the reality of daily life, there’s just a split second that happens that you can never otherwise replicate. Those are the moments that I live for.
