from the beginning I wanted to tell
stories I wanted to get an emotional
response from audience I wanted there to
be a play on ideas building my own
worlds but then also to have that layer
of artifice sitting right on top of
something very real that's where the
interesting line is
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I love shooting in Los Angeles it's like
a blank canvas and it needs artists the
city needs to be molded people come here
to find their own identity and they can
make the city into whatever they want it
to be for themselves with every tragedy
there needs to be a balance of comedy
there always needs to be that level of
playfulness for it to work for me
street photography is a huge influence
in my work for the first six months when
I became a photographer I started with
you know printing my own black-and-white
street photographs there's been so much
work done in street photography that's
been so good and at such a high level
and there was something that I felt like
I couldn't really contribute to street
photography because it was already so
perfect when I started fabricating
worlds whole worlds and building props
and starting to play with scale and
distorting reality more on a practical
level a tangible level that all kind of
started around this serious compulsion
my work has always been about perception
the reality versus reality it's a way
for me to be able to experience it and
to actually have a conversation about it
to speak on any subject matter no matter
how dark no matter how up the
idea of one moment captured that just
has all of these layers to it you know
all of these things are still really
important to me and if it's if if I can
capture it in a fictional story for a
film or if I can capture it as one image
it's still really interesting to me but
I have to check myself to make sure I
don't start repeating myself with with
photography now that I've got film as a
medium
growing up in Los Angeles I could have
chosen to be a filmmaker at any point I
guess but it was kind of by accident
I was getting a little bit disinterested
in photography already and then 2008 I
went to London showed this series called
the Big Valley and people were coming up
to me asking me what was happening and
with the girl in the photo what happened
to her just before what happened just
after and so people were kind of asking
for a narrative and so that's what led
me to shooting my first short film to
spare I shot it with Bryce Dallas Howard
and I approached it in that exact way I
had an emotion in mind one moment in
mind that's happened is in the very
middle of the film and I show in this
kind of surreal playful way what happens
before and after that frame and when I
finished despair
I came back to photography totally
reinvigorated
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when I did lager and sortie we were
seeing through the dancers eyes on the
stage the crowd can be a sea of
anonymous faces that are out to get you
or they can be individuals that have
interesting lives and different
experience
tracks I think the whole point of film
is emotion emotion has always been the
through line for my work and it's always
the most important thing for me if
there's no emotional impact when I watch
something that I've shot or looking at a
picture that I made if I don't feel some
kind of emotion from it then for me it's
not really worth they got into the world
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