Before the proliferation of camera phones there were still worlds where cameras were not allowed to go. I spent much of my early career, 2003-2009, taking a camera into those places.

I never really considered much of my work to be “street photography”. In art school the professors often described street-photography as something intentional, you took your camera everywhere because you were seeking something to photograph, patiently fishing for that decisive moment. Often I would just happen to have my camera on me while the madness of my young at-risk life was unfolding before me. In hindsight, even though I went on to work in the field for some years, I was kind of just pretending to be a photojournalist, with a heavy emphasis on the “journalist” part. Journalism requires a certain amount of distance between the subject and the notetaker, I was rarely able to achieve that, and that lack of distance is how I had access in the first place. At times, I was even a participant, and that is not journalism to me, at least not the ethical kind. When I had these photos up on my tumblr they were categorized, but I rather like them scattered, like a diary of what Hip-Hop, DC, Art, Gangs, Drugs, Graffiti, Housing Projects, War Protests, Crime and Sex looked like at this particular moment in time through my eyes, documented as best I could with the cameras I could afford.