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The idea that one photo can – or should, as the case allows – tell a person’s story has been the underlying theme in many of my photographs. In the streets of India, I’ve captured women in gorgeous sarees with browned skin and locks that go on forever. And while Japan will tell you a story of discipline on quiet faces of order and peacefulness, the Filipinos will forever grace your photos with smiles that go from ear to ear. There a thousand stories, and a thousand photos with which to tell them with. Without meaning to do so, I’ve found my little corner of the world in portrait photography. While I will forever be photographing other things – landscape, texture, and the like – there is no doubt that I have found comfort in capturing the faces of the old and the young. Kids, in particular.
Kids are awesome, let’s just get it out there. They make a photographer’s job easy, and I say this even when they’re crying and bawling their eyes out and calling for attention. Their ability to forget that a camera is a camera is by far the best part of being behind the lens while they are in front. I say this with the experience of someone who has been through tantrums, energy, and smiles from children the past four years that I have had my camera. Kids will be kids, they will laugh and cry without a care in the world that you are out there to take the perfect shot. Their honesty provides a particular vulnerability to every shot, a genuine moment of life captured.
Which brings me back to my first point about capturing life stories in a shot. You ask, what’s a kid to tell about his or her lifestory when it hasn’t even begun? Therein lies the interesting thing: at the end of the day, a shot may not be about what story you have to tell, but what story lies within the subject – the potential of a story, so to speak. And every kid, I tell you, will have a story to tell. I guarantee you that. I should know. My entire childhood is captured in photographs taken by a father engulfed by the very hobby I have now. As a child it was a fact of life that I would have a camera following me around, capturing my childhood in single shots. The tables have turned and behind the lens, I try to now capture other childhoods in single shots. 
