Something changes when you decide to stop just taking pictures and start making photographs. You switch from passive observation to self-aware editorializing. It is a decision you make in your process, in the way you are looking, in what you decide to document. It might sound pedantic, but it can make a profound psychological difference.

For a casual photographer this doesn’t necessarily matter. For a war photographer, it matters immensely—their editorial decisions can impact how millions of people interpret a situation. For someone like myself—who invested a lot of energy in a photographic education only to walk off and do something else professionally—it is an ongoing exercise. An exercise in understanding, seeing, decision making, and communication. I am training for a main event that is under my control, while continually enjoying the work with no outside force imposing any compromises. All of the limits that I deal with are of my own making.

This site shows the process of a broad yet specific body of work that comes from that place of creative freedom. The only limit I have given myself is geographic. These are photographs and stories from Denver and The West, which barely seems to qualify as a limit at all.

I don’t want to speak much toward my goals, but I can say that I imagine there will be images from the plains states, up and down the divide, and of the cities and towns and people that populate that land and the things that possess those people.

If nothing else, I will do my best to be thoughtful, aware, and talk about this place in my own voice.