I grew up believing I didn’t belong – feeling alone, disconnected, cut off. My approach to photography is to strive to find the opposite, connection.

Just to walk with a camera at my side, with no thought of raising it to take a picture, is to feel part of the world instead of apart. I can walk for hours, searching, scanning, watching, waiting. Then, turning a corner, comes the aha moment - the joy of recognizing that someone or some scene might make a meaningful photograph.

I started as a street photographer, seeking to capture people unawares in moments of unselfconscious authenticity. More recently I’ve begun to work openly with subjects in the places where I find them. These encounters, captured in my ongoing series, Meetiings with Strangers, can be alchemic. The more genuine my interest in someone, the more real, even vulnerable the connection and the better the image. My favourite photographs of these meetings are as much portraits of connection as of individuals. Through the encounters documented in this series I advocate for the power and importance – especially in this fractious virtual age – of truly seeing each other.

Theatre of War, 2014 to 2018, was my first foray into environmental portraiture. Why, I wondered, do we have an urge to play … at war? I explored the popular mock-warfare game of paintball through player portraits and photographs of field structures. Uniforms, weapons and buildings are splattered with exploded ammunition, and everything in the game is designed to capture a grim battlefield verisimilitude. We are left to wonder about this blurring of distinction between war and recreation.

Gathering Place examines our need for physical connection with nature as well as with each other at a time of environmental decline and virtual relationships. These photos were taken over a number of years at a local fast-food restaurant on the shores of the Gatineau River, close to Ottawa, Canada. The property is mostly paved, often littered and denuded of vegetation. The view, however, is of largely unspoiled wilderness, the river pouring pristinely out of the north. In the warmer weather people come and linger and I take pictures: parents with children, friends gathering, couples showing affection, bikers stopping for a coffee and a smoke, employees at the drive-thru window. This series unites my conceptual and environmental interests with my approach to street photography.

In general, my photographic practice explores what it means to feel connected. I strive to capture moments that speak to the things that bring us together and allow us to consider what might drive people apart. I feel my images are most successful when the moments I’ve recorded open viewers to these questions.