By choosing what to shoot and how to shoot it, a photographer can use the camera to present an idealized scene or apply it as a tool to capture reality. For this reason, the editorial power of photography fascinates me. My images tend have two distinct styles; photojournalistic-inspired portraits of people going about their daily lives, and ideal-inspired work that omits the “noise” of the world.

In this particular set of portraits, I selected a series of images depicting marginalized people in Brazil. These are not the popular, often widely seen images of Carnival or the beach beauties in bikinis -- instead, I chose to focus on the harsh influences of poverty, and the innocence of children living within these conditions.

My portraits include shots of schoolgirls in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, a brother and sister who live on the banks of the Amazon, and a child I met in a seaside town in the state of Bahia.

The second set of images includes an experiment with both wide and cropped interpretations of votive candles burning in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

The final set of images consists of landscapes that I took while visiting New Zealand and Eastham, MA. I was drawn to both the light and texture of the terrain.