For the past year I have been photographing friends, lovers, classmates, bandmates, neighbors, married couples, and colleagues, surrounded by the artifacts of their world. The result is an ongoing project about human relationships and the physical spaces in which they flourish. It is also an effort to resist the essentializing gaze of projects like Humans of New York, in which single human subjects are photographed in shallow focus, usually in vast and impersonal public places. I’m more interested in what we do with our hands and eyes, how we hold ourselves and where we stand, when we are in places and with people we know well. In each picture I look for the best possible encapsulation of this feeling, some natural and uncontrived moment of peace, or humor, or comfort. Along the way I was continually inspired by the deeply moving photographs of other artists who have worked in a similar context — in particular Judith Joy Ross, Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Struth, and Dawoud Bey.

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