People look at my work and get a little confused.
One week it's a dancer frozen mid-turn under a hard key light, hair still moving, the whole frame built around three seconds that took three years to earn. The next week it's a cyclist grinding at 7am, jaw set, sweat coming through a jersey, nobody around but the climb.
So the question comes up, usually with a laugh: "Which one are you? Dance or cycling? Pick a lane."
It's a fair joke. On paper the two have nothing to do with each other. One is indoor, expressive, rhythmic, over in a few minutes. The other is outdoor, ugly, hours of suffering into a headwind. If you laid my portfolio out on a table, it would look like two photographers accidentally shared a hard drive.
But here's the thing I usually don't say out loud at the party: I didn't put dance and cycling next to each other because they look good together. I put them next to each other because, to me, they're the same thing.
That thing is dedication. And it's the only thing I've ever actually been drawn to.
I danced for six years, four of them deep in the Orlando community. Here's what six years of dance actually is: it's running the same eight-count two hundred times, alone, in front of a mirror, until your body stops thinking about it. It's sore feet. It's counting under your breath in the grocery store. It's the Tuesday night when you finally nail a weight transfer you've been botching for a month, and there is no one there to see it, no applause, just you and the fact that it's a little less wrong than it was yesterday.
Cycling is the same story in a different costume. A year now riding with the Florida Freewheelers, and the sport is mostly this: a 5am alarm, Florida heat that doesn't care about your training plan, the same climb again and again, a set of GP5000s worn down to the casing. It's the solo effort where your legs are on fire and there is no crowd, no finish banner, just you and the very small, very private decision to keep turning the pedals.
Neither of those moments makes it onto anyone's feed. The feed gets the clean turn. The feed gets the podium. The audience sees the performance and the finish line, and it never, ever sees the cost.
And the cost, the behind-the-scenes version, the tears and the sweat and the hundred boring reps, is the only part I find beautiful.
So when I raise a camera at a dancer or a cyclist, I'm not photographing dance or cycling. I'm photographing dedication.
I'm after the look on a person's face when they've poured everything into a thing that will never love them back the way they love it. The half-second where the effort shows through the composure. That expression is identical whether the person is in pointe shoes or bib shorts, on a studio cyc wall or halfway up a hill in Central Florida. It's the same photo. I just keep finding it in different rooms.
Once you see it that way, the "all over the place" portfolio stops being scattered. It gets embarrassingly focused. Every frame is one subject, shot over and over.
I think I'm drawn to it because I've lived it in more places than the two I photograph.
Before any of this, I spent years as a chemist. And research, it turns out, runs on the exact same fuel: a long, unglamorous grind of experiments that fail, quietly, one after another, for a long time before one of them works. Nobody watches that either. Nobody claps for reaction number forty. You just show up, run it again, and change one variable.
Dance, cycling, the lab, the camera. The surface keeps changing. The thing underneath has never changed once. Show up when no one is looking. Do the boring rep. Pay the cost that doesn't photograph. Trust that it's building something even on the days it clearly isn't.
That's the whole operating system. It's why the portfolio looks like a mess and isn't.
Neither. And both.
I'm not the dance guy or the cycling guy. I'm the guy who can't look away from people in the middle of the invisible part, the tears and sweat nobody sees, and who decided the most honest thing I could do with a camera is point it right at that.
The mess is the message. Dedication just happens to wear a lot of outfits.
