It was never my intention to become a photographer, I just wanted to remain creative while my theatre work was taking a turn for the worst.. my survival technique if you will.
It all started by capturing my daughter and some self-portraits, but slowly I realised a hidden dream. I had created a mini-theatre space in my own front room: 5 feet by 5 feet, to be exact, but its space grew in diameter as my vision became clear. That was space of truly independent work where play, not product, was central to all collaborations. What kept me coming back to the simple portraits was the hidden stories; people would offer their deepest thoughts and feelings while I was taking pictures of them, they opened up in front of my camera as if it were some type of Truth Machine. In time, I’ve come to understand that there is an intrinsic link between my work in theatre and photography, where the personal biography meets the magical and turns into a visual representation of something deeper. I have found that my sitters want to surrender/give themselves, they want to find a safe space to tell their stories.
Many of my earlier work depicted artists screaming and crying. They mirrored my inner turmoil. It was all part of the process I just had to go through. So today what you see below is not so much our pain, but our beauty, our defiance, our existence. Each portrait is taken as if it was a piece of choreography, studied with the heart of a director, the soul of a dancer, and the eye of an image maker. This is where the name Choreo-photolist grew out of.
