"Jam" Starting in 2002, with help from the Weisman Foundation and Columbia College Chicago, I began photographing people in the Jam Band subculture in America. This Jam Band subculture is made up of the people who follow bands like the Dead, Phish, Widespread Panic, and many others. This subculture is based off the 1960's hippie counter-culture and strives to keep the ideals of that time alive. My first experience with this subculture was in 1998, and I was truly in awe of the kinship and kindness I experienced that day. In these images I hope to share the gentle kindness and simplicity of these people in their lives outside the concert arena in hopes of looking beyond a stereotype.

"Lady" At the age of nineteen, my mother was married with her first daughter; by twenty-six she had four more daughters, and by twenty-nine, she was on her own again. We were a family of mid-western, tough as nails, working class women. My mom grew our food in a small garden at the end of the driveway, and she made nearly all of our clothes. From her, I learned what a lady could be, and I was able to learn strength from and see beauty through the hardships in our lives. Today, I am able to see these characteristics in the women around me. These women in my photographs act as surrogate self-portraits as their gaze through the camera lens acts as a mirror of a part of myself. Although these women each inspired me through something within themselves, I have controlled everything in the images from the women’s clothes (taken from their own closets) to their stance and hair. In them, I see those idealized things that I have taken from my mother and those other resilient women I have known in my life as well as the time and place where they made their impact on me.

"Cottage Home" My great grandfather built it in a weekend, and that is what we always used it for, the weekends. Nothing was ever touched. The cottage was stuck in time. Phonebooks from the 1950's still sit on the coffee table, and the baby blue paint is slowly chipping from the walls. These images are from my childhood, they are the memories of a time and people who have since passed. They capture that moment in time.