The Sitting
Most portraits are made in a hurry. The photographer sets up, the subject finds a face to wear, and it's done in twenty minutes. What I do is different in almost every way.
When you sit with me, most of our time together will be spent talking. About your life. About the things that have shaped you. About whatever rises to the surface when two people sit in a room and actually pay attention to each other. The camera comes out when it feels right — sometimes near the end of an hour, sometimes later. I work on large format and medium format black and white film, which means I'm not firing off hundreds of frames. I'm making deliberate choices, slowly, after we've had time to get somewhere real together.
That conversation is not a warmup for the photography. It is the photography. The frames that come out of this process look different from portraits made in a hurry, because they are different. Your face at the end of a real conversation is not the same as your face at the beginning of one.
The Film and the Darkroom
I shoot exclusively on black and white film — large format sheet film and medium format roll film. I develop the film myself, in the darkroom at Palomar College, where I run the facility. After development, I make high-resolution scans of the negatives and send them to you as proofs. You choose which images you want made into prints.
The prints are made by hand. In a darkroom. On fiber-base paper, in chemistry, with care and time. There is no printer, no algorithm, no automated correction deciding what a shadow should look like. Each print is a physical object — one I made myself — that will outlast a digital file by a century, and that cannot be reproduced exactly. Two prints from the same negative will be very close, but not identical. In the same way that two performances of the same piece of music are not identical.
This is not nostalgia for an older process. It is a commitment to one that produces images with a depth and permanence I have never seen matched by any other means.
Who This Is For
This kind of portrait is not for everyone, and I am not trying to make it for everyone.
It is for people who want to be seen rather than photographed. Who can sit in a room with a relative stranger and be honest about something. Who understand that the thing they are leaving with is not a USB drive full of files — it is a handmade object that will hang on a wall and matter to someone long after both of us are gone.
If you are unsure whether this is right for you, reach out and ask. That conversation costs nothing and carries no obligation.
Pricing
A sitting fee of $200 is required to reserve your session. This covers film, chemistry, scanning, and darkroom work through proofing. It is the fee for the sitting itself — separate from the cost of prints.
Prints are priced by size. Each one is made by hand in the darkroom on fiber-base silver gelatin paper, produced to order from your session negatives.
8×10 — $400
11×14 — $500
16×20 — $700
After your session you will receive a set of scans to review. Once you have made your selections, I will send you an invoice for the prints you want. There is no obligation to order a specific number, and there is no deadline for deciding.
Begin the Conversation
Use the contact form to introduce yourself and tell me a little about what's bringing you here. I read everything and respond personally.