I must have picked up my first semi-professional camera around 15, though photography had been part of my environment long before I understood it as a medium.

I grew up in west Webster, about 15 minutes outside Rochester, in a region where photography was not simply an art form but part of the local industrial and cultural history. I didn’t grow up around photography in any formal sense, but I grew up among its remnants: boxes of old negatives, abandoned Kodaks in the basement, the residue of an industry that had helped shape the identity of the place itself.

My dad worked at Kodak and later Xerox. He survived the Y2K panic and worked hard to provide for three kids, though he died when I was 12. One of his favorite songs was Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome.” He was as technically minded as he was humanitarian: someone who could fix almost anything, help almost anyone and tell a great story while doing it.

I went to the George Eastman Museum a few times as a child, though I had no real understanding then of photography’s history or Rochester’s significance within it. Photography was simply part of the landscape. It preceded my conscious interest in it.

By 15, that interest had become more deliberate. Around the same time I began taking photography more seriously, I also became interested in broadcasting. We grew up in a fairly traditional family, with old-school dinner-table values and a strict no-phones environment. School came easily and sometimes bored us. My siblings would eventually become engineers and software developers. I would not.

At 6:30 p.m., David Muir would come on with ABC World News Tonight, and I liked being in the know. What fascinated me was not television itself so much as the construction of a story: the way reporting could collapse distance, introduce you to people you would never meet and make events elsewhere feel immediate. I was less interested in appearing on television than in everything behind it — writing, editing, photography, graphics, questions, context. I became interested in the mechanics of attention: why one story penetrates and another disappears.

Around that same period, my dad and I talked about the Obama presidential campaign, and I was beginning to understand that narrative was not merely descriptive. It could shape identity, organize collective feeling and move people toward action. By 2013, when the Boston Marathon bombing happened, my interest in news had become almost compulsive. I stayed up through the night watching the coverage until the suspects were captured. I could not disengage from the story before it had reached some kind of conclusion.

I later attended SUNY Oswego, where I majored in broadcasting and minored in photography. College was the point at which photography shifted from something instinctive into something I was expected to analyze. Our program leaned heavily toward fine art: still lifes, old quartz lights, darkroom processes and deliberately constructed compositions. I found the darkroom tedious and overly procedural. At the time, I assumed good photography was largely a matter of intuition, timing and proximity—that the decisive element was simply being present when something happened.

I underestimated how much a photograph is also an act of interpretation.

What interested me most was outside the studio: athletics, street photography, unconventional portraiture, architecture, movement, color and the visual oddities embedded in ordinary life. I was drawn to graffiti, tattoos, alternative fashion, skate culture and people who seemed to resist conventional forms of presentation. I have never been especially interested in technical purity for its own sake. I barely shoot film, have never rented studio space and still work primarily in digital because that is the medium in which I think most naturally.

What I was learning, perhaps without realizing it, was that photography is fundamentally selective. A frame does not simply record what is there. It excludes, emphasizes, organizes and assigns significance. Light changes emotional register. Distance changes intimacy. Perspective changes power. The same ordinary scene can become comic, threatening, beautiful or uncanny depending on where the photographer stands and what is left outside the frame.

That understanding followed me into journalism. After college, I worked in newsrooms and eventually became a newsroom manager. Much of my time was spent behind a computer paginating the paper, but I remained most interested in the field: disasters, human-interest features and complicated stories about imperfect people in imperfect places. I covered protests, people failed by institutions, parentification, mental health and the effects of COVID-19 on adolescence. Again and again, I gravitated toward subjects that revealed something easily missed.

I also developed a strange tendency to encounter residential fires. I would turn a corner on the way home from work and suddenly find myself looking at a house engulfed in flames. Eventually, I began listening to the police scanner every day.

Then, in March 2022, the distance between observer and subject collapsed.

My own apartment complex caught fire on a freezing night. It became a four-alarm fire, and 18 families lost their homes. Somewhere in the confusion, I took a photograph.

It was not an exceptional photograph. It was the image of someone standing in the cold watching her own home burn. I also wrote a long, somewhat traumatic op-ed and sent the photograph to the editor-in-chief of the local paper. What has stayed with me is not the image itself so much as the reflex behind it. Even when the event was no longer someone else’s tragedy, I still reached for the camera.

That complicated one of my earlier assumptions about photography. Sometimes it really is about being there — but presence is not passive. Photography begins in attention: recognizing that something is happening, deciding that it matters and making a choice about how it will be seen.

In the years that followed, I left traditional journalism and moved into nonprofit marketing and development in Auburn. On paper, it was a career change. In practice, it felt more like a change in application. I remained interested in the same fundamental problem: how people encounter stories, and what causes them to stop, look and care.

Fundraising is not entirely different from journalism or photography. All three depend, to some degree, on the ethics and mechanics of attention. You are asking someone to look beyond the immediate boundaries of their own life, recognize the significance of another person’s experience and decide whether that recognition requires a response.

Photography makes that request visually. A frame is not neutral. It says: this, rather than everything else around it, deserves your attention.

Today, I’m drawn to Gregory Crewdson’s cinematic and slightly unsettling constructions; Tekla Severin’s relationship between architecture and color; Matthieu Venot’s ability to find formal geometry in ordinary urban spaces; and Elisa Miller’s intimacy with people and place. Their work is aesthetically very different, but each heightens reality without entirely detaching from it. They make the familiar feel newly visible.

That is increasingly what I look for in my own work. I like detail, lifted shadows, color, movement and images that retain some sense of contingency rather than appearing completely controlled. I am interested in the moment when something ordinary becomes slightly strange or cinematic simply because of where the frame begins and ends.

I am also increasingly interested in the distinction between an image that is beautiful and one that is worth looking at. Beauty can be immediate. Attention is more complicated.

More than a decade after I first picked up a serious camera, I still do not have a perfectly consistent editing process, a rigid methodology or what I would call a fully resolved photographic voice. I used to interpret that as a deficiency. Now I think a visual voice may be less something one discovers than something that accumulates.

It emerges through repetition: the colors you continue to notice, the subjects you approach, the distances you instinctively keep, the moments that interrupt you, the visual relationships your eye returns to before you fully understand why.

Looking back, the chronology feels clearer than it did while I was living it. Photography existed in the basement before I understood its history. At 15, I began using a camera while becoming interested in journalism and narrative. In college, I learned that seeing is not the same thing as looking. In journalism, I learned to pay attention to what might otherwise be overlooked. In 2022, standing outside my own burning apartment, I learned how deeply the instinct to document had become embedded in me. In nonprofit work, I came to understand that visual storytelling, reporting and fundraising all depend on a similar proposition: attention can precede empathy, and empathy can precede action.

I did not decide one day to become a visual storyteller. I kept picking up cameras, writing stories, making things, noticing things and asking questions.

I am still figuring out exactly what my photographs are trying to say.

But I think I understand what they are trying to do:

make someone look again.