The work I make is both a reflection of an authentic truth and a presentation of an alternate reality. This notion of authenticity, something being true or real, and concurrently the indefinable feeling of constructing a lie, drive my practice. I want to know what happens when there is a forfeiting of control surrounding the spaces of fantasy and reality, and address the level of trust the audience gives the artist. There is a space that exists in this division that touches the boundaries on either side but remains a type of transitive space where emotions seem to lose their footing. This instability requires trust, and an acceptance that there is not necessarily a fixed objectivity or subjectivity in the work.

In the ongoing series Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, I photograph young enlisted men wearing authentic U.S. military fatigues from World War II and modern theaters of combat, to create photographs that directly reference vernacular and historically repeated imagery of American soldiers. The titling, Imitation and Practiced, alludes to the behaviors and personas/icons that these men are projecting, and provides a chronology to the series, noted by numbered chapters, as it references before training, after training, during deployment, and after deployment. The photographs have potential to assert themselves as icons, just as these men are positioning themselves to embody the fantasies of masculine and military iconography, but stumble because of the contextualizing video and photographs. Video of the making of the staged images (which focuses on my direction) and documentary footage from Iraq and Afghanistan (that was recorded by some of the men participating in this project) point to the breaks in this constructed fantasy where the imagery reflects concerns with aesthetics and perception, rather than with consequences and current realities.

The fantasies that are illustrated in the first three chapters of this series have the illusion that they can be carried out with perceivable limitlessness, but no matter how much reality is repressed there is an inevitability that it will surface. This surfacing takes many forms; a hairline fracture easily smoothed over, or much more dramatically as a complete shatter or full obliteration. In the final chapter of Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt the various participants in this project, which has spanned roughly 4 years, are photographed together in a traditional, straightforward portrait. This single image captures the cumulative consequences of faith in this masculine icon and fantasy that has been perpetuated as a type of coping mechanism. There has been not only a passing of time, but both a physical and emotional weathering process, and in specific cases, serious physical and life consequences. In its completion, Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt will represent failure; an unfulfillable fantasy, an icon of rightness and inevitability that is a lie, and an overall realization that the tenuous division between perception and reality is completely personal and subjective.

I continuously search for sincerity in photography, predominately in the gap where content driven photography chooses a side. As photography changes, so do our expectations, but they do not disappear. Exploring assumptions, why we have them, how we construct them, and what specifically we feel when they are not met, is a part of my work on all levels; for viewer, subject, and artist.