photography
The six years I spent as a newspaper photographer in the U.S. was invaluable to my development as a visual journalist. Though most of my published work is in the medium of video, I like to exercise my still-photography muscle through Instagram. Below is a selection of those photos.
Single Images – This is a collection of photos taken from 2004, when I transferred to the University of Iowa and began working at The Daily Iowan, the student-run newspaper, to 2008, when I left my job as a staff photographer at The Dispatch/Rock Island Argus in the Illinois Quad City area to go to graduate school in New York City.
Subsidized Housing – This is a project I worked on while at the University of Iowa on the growing number of Iowa City residents living in subsidized housing. In this long-term project, which appeared in a two-part series in The Daily Iowan, a reporter and I attempted to show the face of this often stigmatized and marginalized community.
Israel/West Bank – In March of 2005 I was given the opportunity to follow a fact-finding delegation through Israel and the West Bank for The Daily Iowan. The trip was my first foray into international correspondence, and it was as humbling as it was exciting. Though the resulting work is by no means groundbreaking, it was a good first step in learning how to understand complex situations and relay them to a foreign audience – a lesson I am applying today.
Andalusia, Ill. – This is a personal project I did for a documentary photography class at the University of Iowa on Andalusia, Illinois – where my grandparents owned and operated a harbor on the Mississippi River and where I spent summer weekends for many years. Since the death of my grandfather, it has been in a state of declining use for boaters and increasing use for local kids trying to escape parental supervision. Though it began as a personal effort to preserve vignettes from a place in flux, the project became a broader statement about small communities in the U.S. and what happens to them between generations.
I shot this with black and white film using a 35mm SLR and a plastic medium format camera. I scanned the images, arranged them on a Photoshop canvas, and printed it on a 15-foot piece of roll paper. Below is a miniature version of the final product.
[scroll over to move image]