MY FIRST TIME PICKING UP A CAMERA
“I had always been a creative kid. My mom owned a daycare, so I would cut out paper and make these huge murals when it was Thanksgiving. I had these grand ideas of how I wanted to see the world from a very young age. I’m a first-generation kid, so it was very much ‘go to school, get good grades, do this and that.’ But I saw that my parents were two creative people who never really honed their creative skills. My dad has boxes and boxes of photos in our basement. And one day I remember looking through them and I was like, ‘These are incredible. This is something that I want to capture, and I don’t know if I’m doing a good job documenting my life at this point.’
“I didn’t pick up a camera until 2012... I just started practicing on everybody. I was drawn to portraiture immediately because I’m very interested in the human experience and I’ve always been an observant person. And that led to a trip that I was going to take anyway, in 2013. My mother’s from Cambodia, so we were going to head back to her country. I was going to meet my grandparents for the first time during that trip. I was able to actually photograph my family [during that trip], and that’s what led to a love affair with this medium because I was able to capture them and the eternal, in a sense, with this tool.”