I've taken photographs since I was eight years old. But it took decades before a morning in the Colorado mountains helped me discover why.

I wander without agenda, without preconception, without knowing what I'm looking for. My mind is empty. Something reveals itself, and I recognize it. That's the whole practice.

What reveals itself is usually ordinary, the things most people walk past. But ordinary is a surface. Beneath it lives extraordinary beauty, mystery, and strangeness, hiding in plain sight.

The image doesn't fully arrive at the shutter. It arrives later, at the screen, the way a sculptor finds the figure waiting inside the stone. I ask myself: what might this be? And something emerges. What you see was all there. Nothing added. Adjustments only. Reality filtered through my imagination.

My titles are my interpretation, one of an infinite number of possible interpretations. Not correct. Just the opening line of a dialog. What matters more is what the image becomes for you. The conversations that emerge from that are the most rewarding part of this practice.

Some photographs return from a place where the subject has dissolved completely, displaced so far from context that it exists as pure presence, an artifact from somewhere else. Others keep the subject visible but offer it a different name: a title that opens a door the image alone leaves closed. Both ask the same question. What is this world, really, when we stop assuming we already know?

When I try to describe my connection with photography, I find it easier to tell a story.