A behind-the-scenes look at a recent assignment for The Atlantic, where I had the privilege of contributing to Sally Jenkins’ story on the legacy of veteran firefighter Kevin Dowdell and the family he left behind.

Here’s the premise: On September 11, 2001, FDNY lieutenant Kevin Dowdell led his unit into the South Tower and never returned. His sons—then 18 and 17 years old—spent the following seven months working alongside their father’s unit at Ground Zero, searching for him in the rubble while helping recover other victims. Twenty-five years later, the story looks at how Kevin’s wife RoseEllen and his sons Patrick and James continue to carry his legacy forward.

I was 11 years old on September 11, sitting in a classroom in California. I remember my teacher looking unusually somber that morning. “Something terrible has happened,” she said.

She wheeled a bulky television into the classroom, and we watched replay footage of the planes striking the Twin Towers and the buildings collapsing. I remember fixating on the way the towers rippled downward as they fell; I could not yet comprehend the scale of the destruction.

After watching the news, the school day continued as scheduled. For me, September 11 existed largely as a montage of grainy televised images: the planes, the towers, the collapse, seen from 3,000 miles away.

On the other side of the country, the Dowdells were experiencing the same morning very differently.

Patrick had just started his freshman year at Iona University in New Rochelle, while James was beginning his senior year at Xavier High School in Manhattan. Two days earlier, the family had gathered for James’ birthday, and Kevin had spent part of that afternoon helping Patrick work on his West Point reapplication before driving him back to Iona. He then reported to Rescue 4 for a 24-hour shift and led his men into the South Tower the next morning.

Whenever something from his work made the news, Kevin made sure to call RoseEllen to tell her he was safe. But this time, the call never came. She stayed awake throughout the night watching the television and the front door. A week after the attacks, search crews recovered Kevin’s Halligan tool from the wreckage, marked KD, R4. It would be the only identifiable object of his recovered from the rubble.

Two weeks after September 11, RoseEllen made a difficult decision: the family would resume some semblance of normal life. She returned to teaching and sent Patrick and James back to school. But Patrick could barely concentrate at Iona. He and James soon joined Rescue 4’s recovery effort at Ground Zero, where they spent the next seven months searching for their father while helping recover other victims. They never found Kevin.

Since then, Patrick went on to graduate from West Point and serve in Iraq; he later made captain in the Army. James followed in his father’s footsteps, joining the FDNY and earning the rank of lieutenant on what would have been his father’s 70th birthday. They carried with them something their father used to say in earnest: “Don’t sit on the sidelines. Make things happen. Do things.”

I was given the monumental task of documenting Kevin’s legacy, 25 years later. But we quickly hit some roadblocks.

We had originally hoped to photograph James at his firehouse, but we were unable to gain access. We had also hoped to spend some time with the Dowdells at their family home, but our time with them was limited. Without many opportunities to photograph how the Dowdells’ present lives trace back to Kevin, we returned to the objects and photographs they had preserved: his FDNY badge, his Halligan tool, and a vast archive of family photos.

At first, relying so heavily on the family archive felt like low-hanging fruit—cheating, even. Old photographs are sentimental by nature; they require little skill from the photographer to pull their emotional weight. I worried that by leaning too hard on the archive, I was failing to make photos that could stand on their own.

But as we spent time with the Dowdells, I began to see the archive differently. In the 25 years since September 11, the firefighters who died that day have become symbols of sacrifice: men in uniform often remembered for how they died rather than how they lived.

The family archive did the opposite. It showed Kevin in uniform, yes, but also as a proud husband standing on a deck he had built for the family home. A man marching in a kilt with a pipe and drum band. A grinning father holding his two sons close, donning matching sweaters.

The Kevin I came to know through the archive was no longer an emblem of a national tragedy I first encountered 3,000 miles away in a classroom. He was a firefighter as much as he was a father, a husband, a friend—a man whose ways and words continued through the lives of those around him.

In the end, the archive felt truer to that legacy: not a neatly packaged hero narrative, but a life remembered through ordinary moments, carefully pieced together over time.

I am grateful to RoseEllen, Patrick, and James Dowdell for their time and trust, and to Sally Jenkins for the depth and humanity of her reporting. Endless thanks to Lucy Murray Willis for her thoughtful support and guidance throughout this assignment.

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A behind-the-scenes look at a recent assignment for The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, where I had the privilege of contributing to Han Zhang’s story on the labor shortage threatening Japan’s animation industry.

Here’s the premise: Anime has never been more popular. The global market has nearly tripled over the past decade. Multiple anime films have topped the American box office. Yet behind this success lies a growing crisis: decades of cost-cutting measures have eroded the apprenticeship systems that once trained new animators. The result is a severe labor shortage and a growing concern that the hand-drawn tradition at the heart of anime may be disappearing.

I grew up watching Studio Ghibli films on VHS tapes that my parents brought back from Japan. What stayed with me over the years was not necessarily the plot, but rather, the meticulous world-building. In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the underground sanctuary Nausicaä tended in secret beneath the toxic jungle, with its shallow water moat and glowing spores, became my earliest mental image of the word “sanctuary.”

In Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi's ironworks colony and its encroachment on the surrounding forest was my first introduction to environmental degradation—a heady concept for a seven year old. And yet, imaginative characters like the kodama, the playful tree spirits that inhabited the forest, made those weighty ideas accessible to children like me.

What I didn’t fully understand back then was how much labor went into creating these worlds. Every leaf, every spore, every rattle of a kodama’s head—drawn by hand, frame by frame, by animators who have trained for decades to master the tegaki tradition, or the craft of hand-drawing that gives anime its distinctive texture.

As a child, I was shaped by these worlds without ever thinking about the people who made them. When photo editor Hannah Bishop invited me to work on this story, I said yes without hesitation.

I arrived at Sasayuri Academy in Tokyo, where Hitomi Tateno, a 27-year veteran of Studio Ghibli, runs an animation boot camp out of a former café she once operated. She founded the academy in 2020, hoping to recreate the hands-on apprenticeship that had largely disappeared from Japan’s animation industry due to cost-cutting measures beginning in the 1970s, when studios began replacing salaried animators with contract workers.

The space had not entirely shed its previous life as a café. A hand-painted sign near the entrance still advertised lunch specials. Victorian lamps dotted the space. An industrial kitchen occupied the back of the room. Rather than erase these traces of the past, Tateno-sensei folded them into the academy's new purpose. Stone-topped bistro tables were now outfitted with mechanical pencil sharpeners and backlit drawing boards.

The space struck me as a metaphor for the state of the industry itself. A Victorian-style café hastily transformed into a Japanese animation boot camp, a visual reminder that a local art form that was once passed down from generation to generation now requires a sweeping intervention to survive.

Tateno-sensei taught and critiqued for three hours non-stop, moving between students with a steady cadence. She flipped through sketches, corrected lines, and offered detailed feedback while students listened intently. At one point, I noticed a curtain drawn across an alcove; I was told that it was Tateno-sensei’s nap space for the 1-hour break between her boot camp sessions.

Teaching the tegaki tradition demands an extraordinary investment of time and patience, along with hundreds of hours of individualized instruction. Spending the day at Sasayuri Academy, it was clear that the survival of this craft depends on the grit, determination, and personal sacrifice of individual mentors.

The piece raises an important question: do you protect tegaki at the risk of the industry’s survival, or do you incorporate new technology to keep up with global demand?

Some animators see CGI and AI as necessary tools. Others worry that these technologies may dilute the human touch: the feathery lines and subtle imperfections that have long defined the medium. Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli, famously described an AI-generated animation of a humanoid as “an insult to life itself.”

Although the future remains uncertain, there are young animators who are finding their footing in the industry. One such animator is Mizuki Endo. After years of teaching himself animation through YouTube tutorials while working shifts at a grocery store, he secured a paid apprenticeship at Bandai Namco Filmworks, the studio behind his favorite anime, Love Live! Superstar!! He honed his technique while surviving on a diet of pasta with ready-made sauce in a cheap Tokyo studio apartment on a monthly stipend of $600. Upon finishing the apprenticeship, he was hired full-time.

Talking with Mizuki about how Love Live! changed his life—almost every inch of his desk is covered in Love Live! memorabilia—I thought about how much my own life had been shaped by Studio Ghibli’s Nausicaä and Princess Mononoke. While many of my American peers grew up with Disney princesses whose stories often culminated in falling in love or being rescued by a prince, I had the immense privilege of growing up with Ghibli princesses like Nausicaä and San: strong, self-possessed women willing to risk everything to protect the worlds they live in.

I left the assignment hopeful that young artists like Mizuki will find a way to carry the craft forward. Not unchanged, perhaps, but still capable of giving future viewers what anime once gave me: worlds so searingly vivid, so painstakingly crafted, and so emotionally expansive that they continue to introduce us to new ways of seeing.

Endless thanks to Hitomi Tateno and Mizuki Endo for their time and presence, to Han Zhang for the depth and care of her reporting, and to Hannah Bishop for her support and guidance throughout this assignment.

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I learned about Japanese American incarceration in the fourth grade.

The section comprised a scant paragraph in our textbook, accompanied by a black and white Ansel Adams photo of Manzanar. In the photo, the Sierra Nevadas loomed majestically over a grid of barracks: barely an afterthought in this sweeping image of The Great American Landscape. The photograph felt quiet, orderly, and—dare I say it—even beautiful.

During the brief lesson, we learned that Japanese Americans were sent away to “internment” camps after Pearl Harbor for up to four years during the war. There was a brief mention of subpar food and frequent dust storms, and that some incarcerees resorted to playing baseball to pass the time.

Then, we moved on.

As a Japanese immigrant with no family connection to the camps, that was the most exposure I had to this history.

Cut to: two decades later. I found myself standing at the edge of a vast landscape, reminiscent of Ansel Adams’ Manzanar.

Except this time, I was no longer a student; I was pursuing a career in photojournalism. I had just secured a grant from National Geographic Society to work on The Camps America Built. And instead of Manzanar, I was standing in Minidoka, another camp where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II.

It was there that I met Mary Abo, a surviving incarceree of Minidoka. When I introduced myself and the project, she generously agreed to participate.

After we made a portrait of her at the camp where she grew up, Mary shared that she is a retired teacher. I told her about my encounter with the Manzanar photo in the fourth grade, and we lamented over how little this history is taught in our classrooms. We continued to keep in touch over the years.

A few years later, I was accepted into the National Geographic Explorer-Educator Exchange Program, which pairs National Geographic Explorers with educators to develop a curriculum based on their work.

I was matched with the inimitable Amy King, a veteran high school history teacher at Chatham Central High School in Bear Creek, NC, who has dedicated her career to teaching “hard history” over the past two decades. Within minutes of our first Zoom call, I knew that this was going to be a meaningful collaboration. When we were given the opportunity to expand our team, it was an easy decision to invite Mary to join us as a contributing educator to help ground the curriculum in lived experience.

What I brought to the collaboration was a scrappy two-day lesson plan I’d cobbled together from The Camps America Built project website with zero education experience. What Amy did with it was astounding: she expanded the curriculum into a robust four-day program, weaving together historical inquiry, creative practice, research, and public speaking.

Meanwhile, Mary brought something no curriculum designer could supply: the weight of firsthand experience. As a former incarceree and retired educator, she understood instinctively how to make this history land for students who had no prior connection to it. She suggested that we center the origami crane, a symbol of peace and prayer in Japan, as the curriculum’s creative practice.

Amy invited Joanna Bolding, her school’s art teacher, to lead an origami workshop prior to her two-day history curriculum. Each student wrote the name of a former incarceree on a sheet of paper and folded it into a crane, transforming a craft exercise into a gesture of remembrance.

And when it became clear the curriculum could serve younger students, Amy invited Alisha Galloway, a local middle school teacher, to adapt the curriculum for a middle school audience.

Central to Amy’s teaching philosophy is the belief that students should share what they’ve learned with an authentic audience. So she organized a student presentation at a local school board meeting and brought in her father, Julian Smith, a veteran teacher of 45 years, to train her students in public speaking in the weeks leading up to it.

This January, I had the opportunity to visit Bear Creek to witness this presentation. What I encountered that evening moved me to tears.

Amy’s students stood at the front of the board room, and they each presented their research with confidence and specificity, describing the families they had studied on The Camps website. They talked about the loyalty questionnaire, the “no-no” boys, the tradition of pilgrimage. They shared, with care and conviction, how the incarceration of Japanese Americans is not Japanese American history, but American history.

At the end of the presentation, every speaker stood up and walked into the audience to distribute the origami cranes they had made. Watching a room full of young adults in rural North Carolina place cranes into the hands of their school board members, it dawned on me: these students didn't just learn the history. They became stewards of it.

I've spent years trying to make photographs that do what Ansel Adams’ photo of Manzanar didn't: center the human experience.

What I didn't realize was that the most powerful corrective to that photograph wasn’t another photograph. Instead, it was a young student handing their neighbor an origami crane.

You can now explore the full StoryMap documenting our collaboration, including downloadable lesson plans for both middle and high school classrooms here.

Explore

It has been one of my life’s greatest privileges to work with Amy King and Mary Abo, who brought this curriculum to life through their dedication, expertise and creativity.

Special thanks to the students and staff of Chatham Central High School, including Principal Mary Margaret Dark, and the students and staff of Bennett School, including Principal Dr. Carla Neal. We are grateful to Chatham County Schools for supporting this project and documenting this collaboration through this moving short film directed by Emily Emrick with support from Gladys Alvarez.

And last but not least, thank you to Anastasia Cronin, Kip Hoffman, and Brynn Johnson of National Geographic Society for bringing us together through this program. You can explore the rest of the cohort’s work here.

When I was first starting out, I called myself a “natural light photographer.” It made me sound like a serious artist making a dignified choice, staunchly committed to the integrity of the image.

But the reality was, er, less dignified. To put it bluntly, I was terrified of lighting equipment. Strobes, modifiers, power packs—the technical vocabulary alone was enough to make me break out into a cold sweat.

So I desperately worked around it. I scheduled shoots at the crack of dawn to catch the soft ambient light before the sun creeped over the horizon. I planned entire sessions around the twenty or so minutes of golden hour.

On the one hand, I became very good at reading available light, which is a genuinely useful skill to have. But on the other, I knew that asking people to wake up at 6am to accommodate my limitations was neither fair nor sustainable. Begrudgingly, I saved up for a strobe light and began experimenting.

Thankfully, over the years, I’ve become not only comfortable with but energized by both available and strobe lighting. More importantly, whenever I choose to photograph with available lighting, it’s because it serves the story—not because it’s the only tool I have to work with.

In this subscribers-only Studio Hours three-part series, I’m sharing what I’ve learned about lighting portraits over the past decade, and the tools and techniques I use to shape light to better serve the story.

1. Determine the source

Whenever I’m deciding on a light source, I ask myself: color or contour?

Some stories depend on color to be understood. My New Yorker coverage of Angel Indian Restaurant below is a good example: the warmth of the space, the bold hues, the visual abundance of a kitchen in full swing. Strip the color out and you lose the story. For assignments like this one, strobe lighting is essential because it gives you the accuracy and consistency that available light can’t:

Other stories live in contour. For my New York Times Magazine portrait of former Congressman Andy Levin below, the color of his shirt didn’t matter so much as the pained expression on his face, the weight behind his eyes. For assignments like this one, I typically ask the sitter to sit near a window and use reflectors and flags to shape the available light. In my opinion, the deep, sculptural contrast of window light is genuinely difficult to replicate with strobes:

If color and contour are both indispensable, a single strobe with a large softbox or shoot-through diffusion panel can produce accurate, consistent color while still wrapping around the face with enough falloff to create dimension. Think of it as recreating window light with the ability to control falloff.

📍 Try this: Before your next shoot, ask yourself: which is essential to the story, color or contour? Your answer will usually guide you toward the right light source.

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I am excited to share that I will be screening my short film Loyal American at the Japanese American National Museum on Saturday, June 6 from 2-3:30pm alongside my dear friend and collaborator Henry Kaku.

The film follows Henry, a descendant of America’s concentration camps, on a pilgrimage to the former camp where his father was incarcerated during WWII.

Labeled a “no-no” after refusing to answer the government’s so-called “loyalty” questionnaire, Henry’s father carried the weight of that designation for the rest of his life. In the film, Henry reflects on the moral and existential dilemmas his father faced and contemplates the question: What does it mean to be a “loyal” American?

Following the screening, Henry and I will be in conversation about the making of the film and how the history of wartime incarceration continues to shape who we are today.

Click here to learn more and purchase tickets. Hope to see you there!

Get Tickets

This program would not have been possible without the generous support and collaboration of Joy Yamaguchi, Elizabeth Morikawa, and the entire team at the Japanese American National Museum, as well as Juliette Richey and the team at Picture Motion.

A behind-the-scenes look at a recent assignment for The Guardian, where I had the privilege of contributing to Madeleine Aggeler's story on Rachel Waters: a woman who gave her dying mother morphine in her final hours and was subsequently charged with murder.

Here’s the premise: Rachel Waters held power of attorney for her mother, Marsha, who was dying of advanced Alzheimer's disease and multiple myeloma in an assisted living facility. In her mother’s final hours, Rachel gave Marsha morphine from a prescribed comfort-care kit, following guidance from a hospice hotline after on-site staff declined to administer it. She was later charged with felony and malice murder. The charges were eventually dropped, but not before the case upended her life.

Many of the people I’ve photographed in the past have had decades to live with—and make sense of—what happened to them. The families I’ve photographed for The Camps America Built, for example, were contending with their wartime incarceration over 80 years ago. Many had spent years processing what they’ve lost before I ever arrived on the scene.

Rachel’s situation was different.

When I met her in her apartment in Queens, the two-year legal battle had only just ended. The charges had been dropped months earlier, but their effects were still immediate and ongoing.

Years of legal fees had left Rachel in significant debt. The charges, even after dismissal, had made it difficult for her to find employment. Days before our photo shoot, Rachel had returned from a trip to her hometown to settle her mother’s estate, a task that had been stalled for nearly two years while the investigation dragged on.

And underneath all of it—largely unaddressed—was the profound loss that started it all. In the midst of the grueling legal battle, Rachel had had little time to grieve her mother's death.

What made this assignment particularly challenging was that Rachel had already been photographed under circumstances she had no control over. On the advice of her attorney, she drove from New York to Georgia and turned herself in at a Columbia County jail. In the months that followed, her case spread widely across local news sites and tabloids, and her booking photo became one of the primary images associated with her name.

Our priority was to create a counter-narrative.

We opted for soft, available light. We asked her to dress as she wished to be seen. We photographed her not against a sterile backdrop, but in the textured reality of her daily life: her apartment, her neighborhood, with the people who supported her as she spent two years fighting a case she never expected to face.

Rachel had learned, the hard way, how quickly a single image could be stripped of context and turned into evidence. As we worked, I found myself navigating a tension that surfaces in almost every portrait session: what reads as powerful through a viewfinder doesn't always feel that way to the person being photographed. With Rachel, that gap was a painful chasm. Getting it right meant working slowly and deliberately. It meant listening more than photographing.

For years, Rachel had watched media outlets reduce her name to a murder charge. While that could frighten most people into silence, Rachel chose to come forward: not to re-litigate the case, but to advocate for the people who might come after her. Her proposed legislation, Marsha’s Law, aims to protect caregivers who administer legally prescribed comfort medications to their loved ones at the end of life.

Rachel’s story asks a question that many of us will eventually face: how we show up for our loved ones in their final moments. I hope the images reflect the person I met in that apartment: a clear-eyed daughter determined to turn her private grief into public protection.

Endless thanks to Rachel Waters for her time and generosity, to Gail Fletcher for her trust with this sensitive story, and to Madeleine Aggeler for her reporting.

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I have spent the better part of a decade perfecting the art of invisibility.

As a photographer, my job is to disappear: to move quietly, to work stealthily, to make the people I photograph forget that I am in the room. I revel in the comfort of anonymity, of being behind the camera—which means that, not unlike many photographers, I hate being photographed, and any form of public recognition sends me into a mild panic attack.

So when the International Center of Photography notified me that I had been selected for the 2026 Infinity Award for Documentary and Visual Journalism, my first instinct was gratitude, followed by a dark spiral:

Is this a scam?
A clerical error?
Also, what does one wear to a gala?

The following months were a whirlwind: shooting a short film about my documentary practice with Henry Kaku and the SandenWolff team, developing an exhibition in the ICP Incubator Space, giving interviews and artist walkthroughs of the installation, and organizing a public program about The Camps America Built. As my calendar filled up, I slowly got over my reflexive need to stay behind the scenes and rolled up my sleeves.

The Infinity Awards were held on April 28, 2026 at The Shed in New York City. I was honored alongside Joel Meyerowitz, Collier Schorr, Tarrah Krajnak, and Betty Catroux—artists whose work I have admired for years.

Being recognized at this particular moment felt like an important window: a chance to say something meaningful in a room that was listening. As I prepared my acceptance speech, I thought about late-night conversations with frustrated colleagues, photojournalists I've long admired who have left the field, and those still fighting to make it more sustainable. I felt a responsibility to say something about where we are as an industry: no small topic to tackle during the two minutes I was allotted onstage.

I had also recently finished reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which argues that Homo sapiens outlasted every other human species not because we were stronger or faster, but because of an unlikely advantage: we could tell stories.

Neanderthals, for instance, were significantly more powerful than us, with upper body strength that far exceeded our own. And yet it was Homo sapiens—the scrappy storytellers—who prevailed. By constructing shared myths and collective beliefs, we learned to cooperate with each other in ways no other species could. It is what allowed us to survive as a species. I kept returning to this idea as I wrote my remarks.

I am not a natural public speaker, and I told the audience as much: that I entered this field because I am good at being an invisible fly on the wall, and that standing at a podium was, frankly, a little nerve-wracking. But I wanted to say something that felt true:

There is a theory that the human species survived not because we were the strongest or the fastest, but because we were the best storytellers. We could pass down knowledge, share warnings, build trust, and imagine futures together. Long before institutions or archives, storytelling is what allowed us to endure.

Photography is an extension of that practice. And like any human practice, it carries its own contradictions:

It speaks the language of justice, yet stems from a colonial past.
It claims objectivity, yet is shaped by profound subjectivity.
And today, it’s an increasingly difficult field to sustain, with shrinking newsrooms, limited protections, and diminishing pay.

So why do we keep doing this?

We continue because we have seen what happens in the absence of accountability. We continue because we know what it feels like to be rendered invisible. And we continue, even when it feels unsustainable, because storytelling is not a luxury: our survival depends on it.

Supporting long-term photography projects at a moment when advertising logic and dopamine dependency dictate what stories get told is an act of faith.

I am grateful to ICP for continuing to champion this profoundly human medium, and to the many people who made this work possible in the first place:

To my mentors David Y. Lee and Elizabeth Krist: their guidance shaped how I see, how I listen, and how I approach this work.

To Kaitlin Yarnall and the rest of the team at National Geographic Society, whose support made The Camps America Built possible.

To Vincent J. Musi, who invited me on stage at my first National Geographic Storytellers Summit three years ago, a moment that gave me more confidence than he probably knows.

To my partner Fred, who has been there through the highs and lows of a career that is as unpredictable as it is life-giving.

And of course, to the entire ICP team, who brought The Camps America Built to life through so many thoughtful iterations over the past several months.

Here’s to continuing to tell stories—not because it’s easy, or stable, or certain—but because it’s how we’ve survived, and it’s how we’ll continue to find our way forward.

When I first started photographing, I avoided people entirely. I told myself I was a still life photographer, spending hours thinking about the placement of a fork in a styled flat lay or finding moody vignettes around my Brooklyn neighborhood.

But the truth was simpler: I was terrified of talking to strangers. As a dyed-in-the-wool introvert, it felt much easier to photograph inanimate objects in a controlled setting, tinkering around with lighting equipment for hours on end without talking to a single person.

After several years of building out a rather lifeless portfolio of places and things, I decided to change course. I felt deep in my bones that, despite my social awkwardness, I wanted to photograph people.

I spent the next few years sheepishly asking friends and friends of friends to sit for a portrait. I invited myself into their homes to learn how to pose people in various situations. Seeing their eyes light up as I showed them the playback was a joy I’d never felt before.

Now, a decade later, most of my commissions are portrait work. I spend my days meeting strangers in unfamiliar spaces, asking people I’ve just met to share intimate details about their life, and working under pressure to photograph a publication-ready portrait in a matter of minutes. It’s the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done.

In this subscribers-only Studio Hours three-part series, I’m sharing what I’ve learned about photographing portraits over the past decade, and how I went from fork whisperer to a photographer who makes portraits for a living.

1. Pay attention to their resting pose

“One-size-fits-all” posing advice rarely works because it contorts the body into something it’s not. The more you push someone away from their natural tendencies, the more rigid and self-conscious they become.

Instead, pay attention to their default body language:

Do they tend to shift their weight onto one hip when they stand?
Do they tend to cross their legs when they sit?
Do they tend to adjust their hair or touch their face mid-conversation?

These are resting poses: the way the body settles back into itself to feel safe again. Leaning into these instincts often produces a more compelling and honest portrait.

📍 Try this: Next time you walk into a shoot, notice how someone is standing or sitting when you enter the room. If time allows, start with a conversation and observe their behavior. Take note of their natural tendencies and ask them to replicate it. You may be surprised to find how quickly you can make someone comfortable by simply asking them to cross their legs.

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It started three years ago, when Sara Ickow, Associate Director of Exhibitions at ICP, invited me to meet for coffee at the ICP café.

At the time, I was still in the early stages of working on The Camps America Built. I had only interviewed a handful of people. I was trying (and failing) to teach myself audio production for the project. I was twisting myself in knots trying to fund my travels to all ten camps.

I sheepishly shared a selection of portraits with Sara on a small laptop screen. She assured me the concept was strong and to keep going. Hearing that gave me the confidence to continue, even though the road ahead felt winding to say the least.

Fast forward: three years later. I completed the project with support from the National Geographic Society and was honored with the 2026 Infinity Award for Documentary and Visual Journalism. Not long after, Sara invited me to exhibit the work in the very space where we first met—now called the Incubator Space, a gallery dedicated to photographers pushing the boundaries of the documentary tradition.

Unlike past exhibitions that I have been a part of, the Incubator Space gave me a rare opportunity to design and test an exhibition concept with the support of a professional team of curators and fabricators. The space is also free and open to the public, which aligned with the project’s premise: to shift the narrative of Japanese American incarceration from a community-specific history to one that belongs to the broader American public.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted to incorporate an interactive component centered on the “loyalty questionnaire”: a controversial document distributed to Japanese Americans in the camps.

For context: Less than a year after the mass removal, the U.S. government decided to reduce the camp population due to overcrowding, wartime labor shortages, and the mounting costs of feeding and incarcerating thousands of Japanese Americans in remote areas across the country. They distributed a questionnaire to the camp population to determine which incarcerees were “loyal” to the U.S. and therefore eligible for early release and potential military recruitment.

Two questions were used to determine the incarcerees’ loyalty. Those who answered “yes” were deemed “loyal,” while those who answered “no” or refused to answer were deemed “disloyal” and sent to a maximum security camp. Some were later pressured to renounce their U.S. citizenship or deported to Japan. I wanted visitors to contend with these questions themselves.

My initial idea was a “voting booth” of sorts: visitors would read the questions and submit a slip of paper indicating how they would answer the two questions.

I was pretty pleased with the idea. But Sara’s response stopped me in my tracks:

Does this convey the duress incarcerees were under, being forced to answer these questions while imprisoned in a camp?

Visitors today—especially in a liberal city like New York—can answer freely without consequence. Responding “no” wouldn’t separate them from their families or send them off to another camp. This luxury, of course, did not exist for Japanese Americans.

In trying to make the history accessible, I had flattened a critical nuance. I scrapped the concept entirely.

We shifted the focus from participation to consequence. Instead of asking visitors what they would do, we focused on showing them what happened.

I began thinking a lot about multiverses: the way a single decision can splinter into entirely different futures. How an incarceree’s response didn’t just determine their own path during the war; it also impacted where their children and grandchildren ended up for generations after the war.

The concept eventually evolved into a series of doors labeled “yes,” “no,” and “refuse to answer.” Visitors would peer inside each door to see archival photographs depicting the outcomes tied to each response.

My goal was for visitors to grasp the moral weight of these questions for incarcerated Japanese Americans. I also wanted to emphasize that no matter how one responded, it was a lose-lose situation: answering “yes” could mean military service with family members left behind in the camps, while answering “no” or refusing to answer could mean transfer to a maximum-security camp or possible deportation.

Working in editorial, I’ve rarely imagined my work on anything larger than a newspaper or magazine. I’ve spent most of my time thinking about how a photograph lives on a page—not how it inhabits a space. But seeing the opening panoramic image of Manzanar reminded me why I fell in love with this medium in the first place.

I realized that over the past decade, the childlike awe I once felt making photographs had given way to something more poised and controlled, likely shaped by journalism ethics and responsibility. But photography offers more than visual testimony: at its core, it has the remarkable ability to bring us into spaces we may never inhabit in our lifetimes.

Right now, a former American concentration camp in the Sierra Nevada—one our nation has long sought to forget—occupies a 24-foot wall in New York City.

And that feels significant enough.

The exhibition is on view at the International Center of Photography until May 25, 2026. It’s open and free to the public. Learn more here.

I’ll be joined in conversation with Professor Mika Kennedy and Julie Abo—whom I had the privilege of photographing for The Camps America Built—for the opening reception on Saturday, April 25, 2026. For more information and tickets, please click here.

This exhibition and program would not have been possible without Sara Ickow, Logan Bellew, the Full Point Graphics team, Jacque D. Bailey, Marley Trigg Stewart, Pasinee Pramunwong, Ruth Aravena, and the hard work and dedication of the rest of the ICP team.

After months of planning, I am thrilled to announce that The Camps America Built is now on view at the International Center of Photography’s Incubator Space through May 25, 2026.

To celebrate, I will be in conversation with Julie Abo, a public historian and educator whose family I had the privilege of photographing for this project, and Mika Kennedy, Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at Ithaca College, at the ICP Library on April 25, 2026, from 2-3pm, followed by an opening reception from 3-4pm.

Contemporary immigration policies and national security rhetoric echo the same logics of suspicion, exclusion, and collective punishment once used to justify the incarceration of Japanese Americans. Join us for a conversation on what this history asks of us today, and what it means to carry it forward.

Click here to learn more and purchase tickets. Hope to see you there!

Get Tickets

This exhibition and program would not have been possible without Sara Ickow, Logan Bellew, the Full Point Graphics team, Jacque D. Bailey, Marley Trigg Stewart, Pasinee Pramunwong, and the hard work and dedication of the rest of the ICP team.

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A few weeks ago, I was given a rare opportunity: to stand in front of a room full of photo editors, introduce myself to the publication, and pitch my story ideas in under 30 minutes.

Thirty minutes sounds like a lot of time until you realize that within that timeframe, you have to:

Summarize your entire body of work
Establish your credibility as a photographer
Present coherent story ideas

And somehow do all of this in a way that feels like a ~breezy~ conversation.

For an anxious type-A like me who compensates for her introversion with frantic over-preparation and a word-for-word script, this sounds like a fresh type of hell.

So I did what I typically do when I’m out of my element: I begged my friends for help. I ran drafts by colleagues, sought advice from mentors, and rehearsed until I could recite the pitch backwards.

In this subscribers-only Studio Hours post, I’m sharing what I learned while preparing for this pitch meeting, what to prioritize when time is limited, and how to get someone to care about your next project.

1. Start with your “why now”

Editorial pitches often boil down to three questions:

• Why me, or why you are the right person to work on this story

• Why you, or why the story belongs in this publication

• Why now, or why the story is relevant now

For years, I focused almost entirely on the first question.

I spent the majority of the pitch explaining my background, my credibility, my involvement with the community. This was likely a habit I picked up during the early days of my career, when I frequently found myself in rooms where I felt the need to prove myself.

But when editors are presented with a story, the first question often isn’t: “Is this the right photographer for this story?” It’s “Why does this story need to exist now?”

In an age of shrinking editorial budgets, editors are often balancing multiple constraints and need to quickly assess what can move forward. If a story doesn’t feel timely, it’s easy to pass on—no matter how strong the reporting or how qualified the photographer. A clear why now gives the idea urgency and makes it easier to move it up the editorial pipeline.

📍 Takeaway: When preparing your pitch, start with your why now. Identify why this story is relevant today. Not a year from now, not “eventually.” Anchor it with a specific hook, whether it’s an anniversary date, a recent news headline, or a related story that’s gained traction.

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Today is Day of Remembrance, when we mark the signing of Executive Order 9066, which forcibly displaced and incarcerated over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps during World War II.

In recent decades, Day of Remembrance has often been associated with collective reflection: panel discussions, interfaith gatherings, moments of silence. But as writer and filmmaker Frank Abe documents in his 2018 article on the first Day of Remembrance in Seattle, it did not begin as a commemorative ceremony.

It began as a confrontation.

Far from a quiet gathering, the inaugural Day of Remembrance was a community action organized in 1978 involving a sprawling caravan from Seattle to the Puyallup Fairgrounds, where many Seattle-area Japanese Americans were first detained before they were transferred to larger camps during the war.

It was a bold and strategic act of resistance demanding accountability in the midst of political pushback and historical erasure.

Here’s what happened: In 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act, allowing formerly incarcerated Japanese Americans to seek compensation for property losses during wartime incarceration.

However, the process was deeply flawed. Claimants were required to provide detailed documentation—”receipts,” if you will—something very few possessed after the chaos of forced removal, when families were told they could bring only what they could carry. The Act also excluded compensation for lost wages and personal injury.

In total, the government paid out approximately $38 million, only a fraction of the roughly $132 million in filed claims, and far below the estimated $400 million in actual losses. Many families paid more in legal fees than they received in compensation.

By the late 1960s, frustration with the Claims Act helped inspire a broader movement. Former incarcerees Raymond Okamura and Edison Uno were among those who launched a grassroots campaign calling for redress for all who had been unjustly incarcerated, not just those who filed property claims.

In 1978, delegates at a Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) National Convention in Salt Lake City passed a resolution calling for $25,000 in individual redress—not for property losses, but for violations of constitutional rights.

The backlash was immediate.

Senator S.I. Hayakawa dismissed reparations as “absurd and ridiculous.” Journalist Bill Hosokawa argued that asking for monetary compensation “cheapened the sacrifice of the ordeal we went through.” An editorial in the Wall Street Journal claimed that “racial prejudice against [Japanese Americans] is almost dead” and accused the JACL of “snapping at compensation for ancient wrongs under the guise of ‘human rights.”

Organizers in Seattle decided to take a stand.

Playwright Frank Chin, writer and filmmaker Frank Abe, and artist Frank Fujii worked alongside the Seattle JACL’s Evacuation Redress Committee to organize a large-scale public intervention—what Abe later described as “street theater to engage the imagination of the public.”

The idea was to design posters modeled after the Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) exclusion orders that had once directed families to report for “evacuation” in 1942. The posters would invite Japanese Americans in Seattle to gather at a vacant lot and form a caravan to the Puyallup Fairgrounds, retracing the route families were forced to take to the Puyallup Assembly Center, where many were first detained.

The event drew thousands of people. In Frank Abe’s words:

We had a sense people were interested by the number of phone calls we were getting … but nothing prepared us for the crowd of 2,000 that flooded the parking lot of Sicks Stadium. It felt like the entire community poured out to remember the camps and stand for redress with their families.

He also recounts how, as families caravanned to the Puyallup Fairgrounds, parents began telling their children what they had experienced in the camps—many for the first time.

The inaugural Day of Remembrance did more than galvanize the redress movement. It reinforced a tradition of holding the U.S. government accountable—not only for the past, but in the present.

After the 2017 travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries, Japanese American organizations filed amicus briefs drawing direct parallels to Executive Order 9066. When family separations unfolded at the U.S.-Mexico border, survivors and descendants spoke publicly about the lasting trauma of state-sanctioned detention. The JACL has endorsed H.R. 40, the federal bill to establish a commission to study reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans, citing the redress movement as precedent for federal accountability. Tsuru for Solidarity, a Japanese American-led grassroots group, has organized delegations and direct-action protests at immigration detention centers under the banner “Stop Repeating History.”

As we enter yet another period of political upheaval and historical erasure, I think about the early organizers of the inaugural Day of Remembrance and how fiercely they fought against euphemistic terms like “relocation,” accusations of “guilt mongering,” and the common refrain of those who benefit from silence: “Can’t we just move on?”

I sometimes wonder whether long-form documentary projects like The Camps America Built can meet the urgency of this moment. But the organizers of the inaugural Day of Remembrance offer an important lesson: that remembrance, especially during times of upheaval, can be an act of resistance.

A behind-the-scenes look at a ​recent assignment​ for The New York Times Magazine, where I had the privilege of contributing to Maggie Jones’ story on what it’s like to live with dissociative identity disorder, or D.I.D.

Here’s the premise: Dr. Milissa Kaufman is a psychiatrist who lived with dissociative identity disorder (D.I.D.), a widely misunderstood condition once known as multiple personality disorder. After years of therapy, she recovered and dedicated her career to studying D.I.D. while keeping her own history private due to stigma. The piece weaves Dr. Kaufman’s story with clinical research and patient experiences, reframing D.I.D. not as a spectacle of “multiple personalities,” but as a survival response to trauma.

When I first received the call from editor Hannah Whitaker to work on this story, I didn’t know anyone who lived with dissociation. Admittedly, my understanding of the condition was shaped by sensationalized pop culture portrayals like the 2016 thriller Split.

In the film, the protagonist is said to have 23 distinct personalities, each with different voices, mannerisms, and even physical traits. The story culminates in the emergence of “The Beast,” a final alter with superhuman strength and animal-like instincts, reinforcing the stereotype that dissociation is dramatic, violent, and almost supernatural.

American media has long had an appetite for portraying psychiatric diagnoses as spectacle, often reducing complex human experiences to helpless characters controlled by invisible forces they cannot understand.

These sensationalized narratives offer a psychological buffer, allowing audiences to see mental illness as an anomaly—something that happens to other people—rather than a deeply human response to distress or trauma.

But growing up in close proximity to mental illness, I learned early on that life with a psychiatric disorder looks very different. It is shaped less by dramatic turning points and more by a slow, intricate process of adaptation.

There were manic episodes followed by long stretches of calm. Role reversals between child and caregiver that were quietly normalized over time. “Good days” that were tenderly enshrined in memory to help us endure the longer periods of estrangement.

Trying to excavate the “disorder” itself—what many books and films attempt to do—felt like a hollow pursuit. Instead, we built a survival infrastructure: deciding what could be carried in public vs. what remained private, learning how to set boundaries around one another, and redefining recovery not as a return to “before,” but as a way to keep moving forward—however imperfectly.

I was struck when I read an early draft of Maggie Jones’ piece, which framed dissociation in a similar way: not as a fracturing of the self, but as a survival response to trauma. Dissociation wasn’t described as “brokenness,” but as a protective configuration of multiple self-states to carry what would otherwise be unbearable. Though the circumstances were not the same, the mechanism of survival felt familiar.

This also shaped how I thought about photographing Dr. Kaufman. When I arrived at her home, I was met by a curious and gentle person who asked me generous questions about my life and work—some that I had never even considered before. Her home felt like a physical expression of her graceful presence: awash in light from airy windows, elegantly arranged furniture and earthen walls that gently shifted in color as the light moved through the day. The space set the tone for the portrait.

In researching how psychiatric conditions have been photographed in the past, I noticed recurring aesthetic choices that reinforce the idea of fragmentation: mirror reflections, punchy lighting, heavy-handed distortion. I wanted to move in the opposite direction.

We worked in a quiet corner of her dining room, using available light and soft falloff to create a composed, dignified portrait. The aim was not to dramatize, but to reflect the complexity of her upbringing, the introspection that guided her recovery, and the integrity of her research. To keep the focus on her eyes and facial expression, I asked her to wear darker clothing.

Publicly disclosing a psychiatric diagnosis can be profoundly destabilizing, even long after recovery. While I cannot claim to know the experience of living with dissociation, I felt the gravity of Dr. Kaufman’s decision to speak after years of silence—a choice that carries real professional and personal risk. I hope the images honor Dr. Kaufman’s decision to come forward, and the quieter, daily acts of survival that often go unseen.

Endless thanks to Dr. Milissa Kaufman for welcoming me into her home, and to Hannah Whitaker for trusting me with this story.

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Read the article here.

There are few things more terrifying to me than receiving a licensing request for an image made before 2016.

Every time, I feel a rush of panic as I picture the graveyard of old external hard drives stuffed into a shoebox in the back of my closet: the closest thing I had to an “archive” before I began shooting professionally.

Thankfully, I’ve cleaned up my act since then.

Not because I suddenly morphed into a Responsible Adult—I wish—but because as my assignments grew more logistically demanding and operationally complex, I was relentlessly tormented by an endless carousel of stress dreams: losing my hard drives in a house fire, my laptop combusting mid-download, or a memory card mysteriously formatting itself in the middle of an assignment. Over the years, I’ve developed a system that ensures that, short of spontaneously combusting laptops, my photos will be preserved safely and securely.

In this subscribers-only Studio Hours post, I share my own step-by-step process to archive my life’s work.

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It’s hard to believe that it’s almost been a year since I released The Camps America Built—a multi-year grant project about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II—with support from National Geographic Society this February.

Our premiere at Oakland Asian Cultural Center fell just weeks after Trump’s inauguration. We had a full house of 250 in-person attendees and more than 700 attendees joining virtually. I was flushed with adrenaline: buoyed by the head rush of releasing a years-long project into the wild while bracing for the difficult road ahead under the new administration. I remember the heat behind my eyes as I closed my remarks with a reminder to the audience: “the antidote to despair isn’t silence—it’s remembrance.”

Since then, we’ve witnessed a year fraught with fear and state violence: ICE raids sweeping across the country, deportations tearing families apart, and familiar rhetoric portraying immigrants as “foreign invaders.”

The parallels to Japanese American incarceration are as unsettling as they are undeniable. The “despair” I warned against nearly pulled me under more times than I care to admit.

As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary next year, the stories at the heart of this project feel more urgent than ever. In an effort to follow my own advice of practicing remembrance during times of despair, I wanted to share a few highlights from the project’s first year that I’m grateful for as I close out this newsletter for 2025:

📌 Loyal American Screened Across the Nation

Loyal American—a short film that centers Henry Kaku, one of the individuals featured in The Camps America Built—was an official selection at five film festivals and screened at dozens of universities and institutions across the country, including National Geographic Headquarters, Japanese American National Museum, Japanese American Citizens League, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Columbia University. It was also screened at Tsuru for Solidarity’s Healing Circles for Change, a talking circle for former incarcerees and their descendants.

📌 The Camps America Built Featured in National Geographic Education

The Camps America Built was showcased in National Geographic’s Education Hub—the first resource on Japanese American incarceration to be included. Designed for grades 9-12, it offers tools for integrating the project into U.S. History, Social Studies, and English Language Arts classrooms.

📌 The Camps America Built Received the CENTER Socially Engaged Award

The Camps America Built was honored with the 2025 Socially Engaged Award from CENTER. Juror Andrea Wise of ProPublica called the project “a prescient reminder of a dark chapter in American history that echoes loudly today.”

📌 Loyal American Received the Buzzies Award

Loyal American was honored with a Buzzies Award by the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers. The Buzzies honors outstanding international storytelling in science, history, and factual media.

📌 Loyal American Featured in Le Monde

Loyal American was profiled in Le Monde. Many thanks to photo editor Allison Ferrera, who adapted stills from the film into a photo essay that introduced the project to an international audience.

📌 National Geographic Explorer-Educator Exchange

Minidoka survivor Mary Abo and I partnered with educator Amy King at Chatham Central High School to develop a comprehensive lesson plan for The Camps America Built. We piloted our lesson plan with Amy’s students in November followed by a virtual panel alongside her daughter Julie Abo and grand-daughter Maya Abo Dominguez. The full curriculum will be available next year.

So, what’s next?

We will kick off next year with a visit to Chatham Central High School in Bear Creek, NC to see Amy King and her students in January, a film shoot for an exciting project with my collaborator Henry Kaku in Petaluma, CA in February, and an exhibition in New York City in the spring. More on that soon.

I am currently looking for potential publication partners for this project. If you are a photo editor interested in working together, I’d love to hear from you.

Many thanks to the National Geographic Society for their continued support, my mentors and collaborators who helped this project reach so many audiences this year—and most of all, to the former incarcerees and descendants who continue to entrust me with their stories. I look forward to continuing this work together.

Wishing you all a restful holiday season.

Freelance photojournalism is a bizarre industry.

In what other line of work is it considered normal for someone to travel alone regularly, with little liability protections, with little more than an editor’s phone number and a shoot location?

Unlike staff correspondents, freelancers are hired as independent contractors: often without health coverage, legal protection, or institutional trauma care. As they work independently, they’re often left out of industry surveys and newsroom wellness programs.

The result is a kind of Wild West: a largely unregulated industry already gutted by shrinking editorial budgets, where individual photographers shoulder risks to their physical and emotional safety just to stay competitive in an oversaturated market.

Thankfully, there are a number of organizations like the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma and the International Women’s Media Foundation that offer workshops and mental‐health resources aimed at freelancers and visual journalists. Last month, the W. Eugene Smith Foundation and Eddie Adams Workshop hosted an insightful safety workshop led by Lauren Walsh and Marcus Yam.

Still, from personal experience, I can say it’s not always easy to recognize when you need help—until it’s too late. In this subscribers-only Studio Hours post, I share actionable wellness advice from trauma-informed professionals that have helped ground me in my photographic practice over the years.

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As a first-generation Japanese immigrant raised in the United States, I often experienced America not as a home, but as a cultural experiment—one I participated in willingly, but never fully understood. I longed to embody “Americanness,” but I quietly observed from the margins instead.

During the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, my then-partner and I set out on a four-month road trip across the country in a 1978 Ford Econoline. I believed that spending time with multigenerational Americans outside the coastal city where I grew up would somehow bring me closer to understanding what it means to be American. In hindsight, the bulk of my photography education came from awkwardly approaching strangers for portraits during this period.

I’ve hesitated to draw attention to this body of work because it felt painfully contrived—gritty, sun-bleached Joel Sternfeld derivatives of Americana that many would roll their eyes at. But in recent years, I’ve come to view it more tenderly. I can now see the visual threads I was grasping for as an outsider: profound, distinctly American tropes that I hoped might help me inhabit this country more fully.

Today, these images feel less like clichés and more like longing.

We began our trip in Seattle, WA and headed straight for Mt. Rainier National Park, eager to embrace the freedom that came with living in a van. After spending years of weekday mornings pressed up against strangers on an hour-long subway commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan, waking up in a birch forest at the base of an active volcano felt impossibly luxurious.

We spent our first few days acclimating to life in the van: learning how to empty the cassette toilet, preparing meals on a single propane stove, and calibrating our daily mileage with our solar power usage. Once we felt settled, we headed east to the high desert, where we camped off-grid near Palouse Falls: a 200-foot waterfall in a gorge sculpted by ancient floodwaters. Taking my first “shower” beneath volcanic bluffs as the sun dipped below the horizon is an experience I will never forget.

I spent the early days of the trip racked with guilt, aware of how profoundly privileged I was to take four months off after voluntarily leaving a full-time job at 26. I thought about my immigrant parents and how perplexed they were by my decision to leave a stable job in New York City to live in a 60-square-foot van.

But with each passing day, the guilt gave way to awe.

Awe that the same mountain face could look entirely different depending on the time of day. Awe that sagebrush in this part of the country smelled juicier, more herbaceous than back home. Awe that the American landscape—once too vast and grandiose for my comfort—now lulled me to sleep every night and pulled me awake with the sunrise every morning.

After spending a week in the wilderness, we craved human connection. So we drove to Hot Springs, MT and ducked into a roadside motel to catch some live music. The drummer caught my eye immediately: a petite woman with long braided pigtails. I wondered if she might be Japanese. No way, I thought. Not in rural Montana. But when she introduced herself as Keiko, I lit up. After the show, I went over to say hello, and she invited us to her trailer the next morning.

We spent the rest of the day with Keiko. Despite having arrived in the U.S. well into adulthood, she was deeply embedded in her community. She played regular gigs at the motel. She lived in a trailer in her bandmate’s backyard. She cooked most of her meals on a family-size grill and shared leftovers with her neighbors.

When I asked Keiko what brought her to this country, she shared that she is the daughter of a hibakusha from Hiroshima, and had left Japan because of the discrimination she faced in her country. In her home town, she said, everyone understood that their lives were shaped by the bomb—but in other parts of Japan, she often felt defined by a narrative she couldn’t control. Keiko was the catalyst behind my project, 1945.

Befriending a Japanese woman during the first week of my Great American Roadtrip felt painfully ironic, yes—but in hindsight, it was strangely apropos. Spending time with Keiko reminded me how much growing up in the U.S. had hardened me: witnessing my parents struggle with everything from paying a bill over the phone to resolving neighbor disputes to being told to “go back to where you came from” had made me weary and defensive.

I learned early on that my Japanese identity was something to fiercely protect against ridicule and condescension. My family and I spent decades carving out a small corner in our predominantly white suburb where we could feel safe and understood. The idea of trust-falling into the arms of a community felt like a luxury and liability.

But watching Keiko move through her world so freely and openly unsettled that belief. I wondered whether my relationship to this country would have been different if I had arrived a little later in life—perhaps after I had a more fully formed understanding of myself.

The following day, we said our goodbyes to Keiko and made our way down a stormy stretch of I-287 toward Butte, MT.

To be continued in Photographing the American West While Living in a Van (Pt. 2). Learn more about the project here.

Last month, I traveled to Santa Fe, NM for my first portfolio review in nearly a decade. After receiving the 2025 Socially Engaged Award from CENTER earlier this year, they generously invited me to participate in Review Santa Fe: a three-day-long weekend intensive with editors, curators, and industry leaders from all over the world.

For the uninitiated: a portfolio review is essentially speed-dating for photographers. You enter a room filled with reviewers, locate the person on your schedule, and have exactly 20 minutes to build a connection, share your work, and make a case for future collaboration before moving on to the next conversation.

Despite having worked in this field for almost ten years, this was my second ever portfolio review. When I received the invitation, I realized I was way out of my element. So I did what most of us do when the stakes feel high: I prepared like hell.

I relied on generous friends to help me make photo prints (thank you, Jake!), refined my pitch (again and again), sought insight from trusted mentors (thank you, David and Elizabeth!), and roped unsuspecting friends into letting me practice on them. By the time I stepped into the review, I could recite my project statement backwards in my sleep.

In this subscribers-only Studio Hours post, I’m sharing what I learned during these weeks of rigorous fine-tuning and research: what to do before, during and after a portfolio review, and how to make the most of a decisive moment with someone who might shape the next stage of your career.

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A behind-the-scenes look at a ​recent assignment​ for Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, where I had the privilege of contributing to Amonte Josefine Schröder-Jürss and Madeleine Londene’s story on Andrea Skinner, daughter of the late Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, who came forward to share her experience of childhood sexual abuse by her stepfather.

Here’s the premise: Andrea Skinner is the daughter of the late Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro. As a child, she was sexually abused by her stepfather—something her mother knew about but never publicly acknowledged, even as she conjured characters in similar situations in her own work. The story explores the quiet dissonance between an author’s fiction and her daughter’s reality.

When I first received the call from my editor Jakob Feigl to work on this story, I hesitated. In the past, I’ve been comfortable divulging my struggles with depression or details about my upbringing. Throughout my career, I’ve learned to dissect my own history with a kind of forensic precision to understand whether I have the context or emotional capacity to tell a story responsibly. But sexual violence was a subject I’d approached with trepidation.

Like many others in this industry, I metabolized trauma by turning it into something that felt purposeful: prose, art, or work. But when it came to this, I could never muster up the will to do so, partly because I was still processing the shame of my own experience. For years, I avoided even reading stories about sexual violence because they served as a reminder that I was one of the “lucky” ones: that my assault happened only once, that I could remember it only in fragments, that the assailant was a stranger I never had to see again. But the aftermath, somehow, felt anything but “lucky.”

This assignment arrived two decades after that experience. Although I hesitated at first, what drew me in was how different it felt: it wasn’t another caustic headline about Andrea or her mother’s behavior, nor a sordid retelling of trauma or literary scandal. Instead, it centered on Andrea’s healing, and how a fractured family found its way back to one another after decades of silence.

My conviction deepened when the writers, Amonte and Madeleine, video-called me from a small bed and breakfast during their weeks-long reporting trip in Port Hope, Ontario, a small town of 17,000 residents. They were exhausted but buoyed after a day with Andrea. Through the screen, I could already sense the care and tenderness behind the story.

A few days later, I joined Amonte and Madeleine in Port Hope and met Andrea at a horse ranch where she hosts meditation circles for survivors of sexual abuse. When my assistant Chloë Ellingson and I pulled up to the ranch, Andrea greeted us, open and welcoming, with the ranch dog Olive trailing close behind. She told us she lived nearby and often came to care for her six-year-old mare, Maia.

Her warm demeanor was a stark contrast to the numerous articles I’d read about her leading up to this moment: unflinching accounts of the years-long abuse, the debilitating migraines and eating disorder that followed, the conspiracy of silence that lingered for decades. A black-and-white portrait of her published in The New Yorker had been etched in my mind: Andrea, hair matted and unkempt, scowling into the camera. In person, her features were much softer. She was playful and quick to laugh.

What I thought about most while photographing this story was how to center not Andrea’s past, but the healing she has cultivated since. She could have easily let her silence calcify into anger. Instead, she turned it into something profound: a space of belonging. Four times a year, survivors of sexual abuse from across Ontario gather at the ranch to sit with her and the horses.

Throughout our time at the ranch, I noticed how settled I felt in my own body. I’m often inclined to fill silence with banter, but here, we sat in long stretches of restorative silence.

As day turned to dusk, a black mare named Ana followed me around incessantly. Andrea gently pointed out that she was a therapy horse, trained to work with survivors of sexual trauma.

As Ana nestled her head against my shoulder, I realized that healing doesn’t always have to feel grandiose or purposeful. In fact, it often surfaces quietly—through the simple act of being seen and allowed to stay.

Endless thanks to Andrea Skinner for welcoming us into her life and home, to Jakob Feigl for trusting me with this sensitive story, to Amonte Josefine Schröder-Jürss and Madeleine Londene for their dedicated reporting, and to Chloë Ellingson for her steady hand and energy on set.

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Read the article here.

Takeaways 📝

• Connection or conflict? Journalism ethics call for transparency when something can materially affect your reporting or compromise accuracy, like covering a protest organized by a friend or reporting on a former employer. Before taking on this assignment, I considered whether my own experiences could potentially shape the story in ways that distorted Andrea’s. While personal connection doesn’t necessarily constitute a conflict of interest, I made sure to provide detailed shot lists and set clear visual expectations with my editor to keep myself accountable and to ensure the photos served Andrea’s story—not my own.

• Look beyond “the event.” While Andrea’s meditation circles were a visible marker of her recovery, we decided not to photograph them to respect the participants’ privacy. Without the anchor of an event, we challenged ourselves to look for quieter symbols of healing: childhood photos, archival documents, and small gestures of care between Andrea and the horses. In the end, the absence of spectacle led to more nuanced storytelling.

• Collaboration shapes trust. Working alongside Amonte, Madeleine, and Chloë reaffirmed how essential mutual trust is—not only between the photographer and the protagonist, but across the entire team. As a photographer, I was incredibly fortunate to step into the circle of trust that Amonte and Madeleine had carefully cultivated in the months leading up to my arrival. Often, the tone of a photograph is defined by the trust established off frame.

Since 2016, I’ve conducted interviews with a range of communities, including atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, native New Yorkers affected by gentrification, and survivors and descendants of America’s concentration camps.

While photography was something I could pick up intuitively, interviewing was an art form that I learned through one cringey misstep after another. I made every mistake in the book: crying during an interview, butchering audio by “mhmm”-ing my way through an interview, and bulldozing through silences that should have been left to breathe.

It took me a year to learn how not to let my emotions bleed into an interview.
It took me three years to conduct interviews that felt guided yet conversational.
It took me five years to feel comfortable enough to conduct impromptu interviews in public.

Case in point: the audio for this video was recorded in an off-the-cuff one-hour interview inside my rental car parked off the side of a windswept road:

In this subscribers-only Studio Hours post, I share a practical guide on how to conduct interviews with care and integrity, plus strategies for asking meaningful questions that elicit rich, compelling stories.

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