Photographing things I enjoy has always been the seed.
It started with my racecar in my parents’ garage. I bought a camera so I could document what I was building when my friends weren’t around. No bigger plan. Just wanting to capture something I cared about.
Years later, that mindset turned into my first real art show.
CLA$H was the first time I intentionally built an exhibit around an idea. Work for fun on one wall. Work for hire on another. And in the middle, the place where the two meet. I brought in a table to physically hold the National Geographic cover and my first place trophy from my first documentary Big Mountain Heroes. It was proof to myself that those two worlds don’t have to be separate.
That show was intentional.
After that, I brought a camera to Burning Man for the first seven years simply to document what I was experiencing and gift friends memories. No clients. No expectations. Just participation.
For a few of those years I carried a Polaroid. I’d photograph someone watching the sunset or passed out in an art installation, print it, toss it into their bike basket or slip it into their shirt pocket, and ride away. Ideally they never even knew I took it. That was the point.
So being selected as one of the artists to install my Burning Man photography inside the Reno Tahoe International Airport exhibit honestly caught me off guard.
I never pursued having my work shown at an airport. It was never a milestone I was chasing. I didn’t manifest it or even think about it. The installation ended up spanning a few hundred feet of wall space inside the Reno airport, hanging there for a quarter of the year where thousands of travelers pass through every day.
I was fortunate enough to fly through Reno a few times while it was up. Quietly watching people stop and look at the work was pretty damn fun.
Airports are usually stressful places. People are delayed. Distracted. Looking at their phones... hopefully reading this blog post. Just generally trying to get somewhere. Seeing someone pause, even briefly, in front of my photography and lean in closer was pretty dope. I think the images brought a little joy into a space that normally… kind of sucks.
The number of eyeballs that must have seen that work over those months is difficult to wrap my head around. I will never know who those people were or where they were headed. But getting to be a fly on the wall and watch strangers experience something I created was powerful in a way I did not expect. In an interesting and unexpected way, it felt like a scaled-up Polaroid moment.
Instead of gifting one print at a time in the desert, the work was just quietly there, available, for anyone walking by inside the airport to look at.
Since then, two more shows have gone up. One at the Truckee Airport and another at UNR. Both are currently up through April 2026. They are smaller installations building toward a much larger art show happening in the San Francisco Bay Area that will be installed in mid April.
That upcoming show is centered around elevation...or altitude. I am still deciding on the title.
The idea is simple. Every image is tied to where it was captured in terms of elevation. Some near sea level. Some deep in the High Sierra, at or above 12k feet. Small alpine flowers that only grow at that height. Macro mushrooms that push up just below a melting snowpack. That kind of thing.
Everything is shot and edited cohesively so when you walk into the room it (hopefully) feels like one body of work. You may not immediately notice how physically different high mountain terrain is from lower elevations. But if you spend time with it, the pattern reveals itself.
Prints from these bodies of work are always available. But seeing them in person, large, printed on aluminum, in a physical space is the way they were meant to be experienced. And when those shows are in public spaces like airports or universities, that experience is free for anyone to see. If you make it out to the opening, there might even be some free wine or beer.
I never set out to have my work hanging inside the Reno Airport or a San Francisco gallery. But looking back, it feels like a natural extension of why I picked up a camera in the first place.
