Where are you from? How long have you lived in Westerly?

I grew up in a small town near Hartford, Connecticut, and started coming to Rhode Island in the summers when I was young. We had a boat and would spend weekends on that, hanging on the beach all day, cooking dinner on a little grill, and taking the dinghy into town for ice cream. My family bought some land and built a house in Westerly when I was in first grade, and it’s really felt like home ever since then. Annie and I were long distance—she was living in Salt Lake City and I was in New York City—when we decided to move to Westerly around 2012 and start our life together.

When did you first get into photography?

I’m so lucky to have gone to a public high school that promoted the arts and gave kids access to different mediums, including a darkroom. I started shooting surfing, skateboarding, and landscapes, all on 35 mm and medium format. My friends and I used to make surf and skate movies in the summer. I was really inspired by the surf film Shelter and would dream of our stretch of beach as a desolate point break somewhere in Australia. When I was 16, I went to a Jack Johnson concert and gave him a VHS copy of a video I’d made. I still wonder if he ever watched us bodyboarding waist-high wind chop. By junior year, I knew I wanted to go to film school and try to make a life with photography at the core. I studied photography at Ithaca College in Upstate New York, and had some wonderful professors there who really expanded my understanding of the art form.

When and how did you find your niche shooting mostly architecture and interiors?

For a college photo project, I used a four-by-five camera to shoot some rooms at a beautiful inn down the road from my school. They hired me to come back and shoot the rest of the spaces later that semester. It was an early lesson in having a schedule, shot list, and client expectations! Right out of school, I jumped into shooting whatever gigs I could get: women’s clothing, machinery parts, and mail order catalog decor—“It’s 5 o’clock somewhere” signs. It taught me a lot about the business of photography, managing a workflow, and keeping my clients happy. I learned about lighting from assisting incredible photographers like Tina Barney and Bruce Weber, all of whom were hugely influential. Through all the random jobs I was doing, designers and architects would consistently call me. My dad always told me to pay attention to the clues and let them guide you in a direction. Space and the built environment have always been really inspirational to me, and I think in some way I was meant to work in the sphere of interiors and architecture. I’ve been following the clues ever since.