At its heart, my work is about seeing people as they are — stripped of artifice and performance.

When someone sits for me, I want them to feel recognised. The portraits I make aren’t about perfection; they’re about honesty, and the strange beauty that appears when someone forgets to pose.

What draws me back to portraiture is that quiet in-between moment: the pause mid-sentence when someone drops their guard and simply is. That’s what I chase — the freeze-frame where they almost forget the camera yet remain aware of being seen. It becomes a conversation without words, a shared curiosity about what’s real between us.

the masks we wear, the ways we perform ourselves.

My earlier work explored costume and identity. Those images were about expression and transformation. These days I’m drawn to the opposite: to simplicity, stillness, and a kind of candour that leaves nothing to hide behind. I still want people to look good, but in a way that feels natural rather than staged — less fashion show, more essence of the person.

I’m less concerned now with superfice — beauty, youth, performance — and more with presence: how we inhabit our bodies and how self-image shifts over time. A portrait, to me, is both mirror and lens. It shows the person, but it also shows our connection — that fleeting recognition between two people seeing each other clearly.

When someone comes to work with me, I welcome them as a friend.

The sessions are relaxed, sometimes playful. We talk, we experiment, we find a rhythm. The studio — just a rearranged room in my home — becomes a small cocoon where trust matters as much as technique. I guide; they respond; and somewhere in that exchange a portrait appears that feels inevitable, as if it was always there waiting to be seen.

This curiosity feeds into my long-term project on Generation-X queer lives: those of us who grew up through Section 28, the AIDS crisis, and the slow move toward equality. We’re middle-aged now, a generation that moved from silence to visibility. I want to show what that history looks like on our faces — ordinary people carrying extraordinary stories.

The archive has become a living thing, and I often share older images because they still speak to what I’m exploring now. Looking back shows continuity more than change — the same pull toward presence, just seen through different eyes. As this anniversary approaches, I’m curating a series that pairs early and recent work: a dialogue across time, both with my collaborators and with myself.

I don’t spend much energy deciding whether what I do is art or documentation. I’m not chasing grand statements — just honest ones. Each session is built on trust, a shared moment that says: this is how it felt to be here, now.

If you spend time with these portraits, I hope you sense that pause — the breath, the small stillness — and feel a trace of what keeps me returning: that moment where two people meet, see each other clearly, and something genuine stays behind.