Stories From the Vine

My Photo scholarship 2011 entry

Worldwide | Saturday, November 5, 2011 | 5 photos

I am a 23-year old recent college graduate with a joint degree in Communications/Television Production. After graduating in 2010, as masses of graduates flooded an already over-satiated job market, I took a teaching position in China excited for the opportunity to live abroad. I now fit into the clique of “it was the best and the hardest experience of my life.” After that year, I have a firmer foundation as to who I am and have returned to the passion I held in college. I love film. I love pictures. I love the way an image can say a thousand words, words that I have trouble putting together.

In China, I fell into photography almost by accident. I began snapping pictures with my Nikon Coolpix as the only way to exercise what I had learned in university. Photography quickly became a needed friend to this lonely western soul. I found in photographs a brand new way of seeing, capturing, and conveying the beautiful moments and the austere landscapes of the places I found myself. From the sub-40 ice-encased Siberian tundra’s of Harbin, to the scorching arid sands of the Taklamakan desert in Xinjiang, these images represented what my words could not. The following series of photographs were taken during my travels in Xinjiang, China.

On September 9th, 2011 I moved to Kolkata India to finish a documentary I began my senior year of college. At this time, I also dedicate myself, with a dogged determination to the long journey of becoming a photographer; of learning how to represent travel, the wrinkles on faces that carry with them a lifetime of memories, the textures and grit of a nations culture, and the stories that make up the daily fabric of life, through the art of snapping a single frame.