I’ve always been drawn to people — to the small, unguarded moments that tell you who someone really is. Long before I picked up a camera, I was the one at the party gravitating toward the quiet corner, more interested in someone’s real story than the polished version they show strangers. That hasn’t changed. It’s just found its purpose and taken me a long way from where I started.

These days, I bring that curiosity to every person I photograph. The way a mother’s hand rests on her daughter’s shoulder without either of them noticing. The private joke between siblings who’ve shared a lifetime of them. The pride in a business owner’s face as they share a dream that’s come to fruition. These are the things I’m hunting for in every session — not the posed smile, but the genuine one that lies just underneath it.

Many years ago I left my hometown of Wellington and headed to Egypt.  Something in me came alive — not just in the new landscapes, but in the people I met along the way, and in trying to capture what made each of them unmistakably themselves. Somewhere in that year, photography stopped being a hobby and became the thing I actually wanted to do with my life.

I trained at the National College of Photography in South Africa, and since then I’ve photographed people across Singapore, Russia, Germany, Hungary and Australia. Every one of those places left something behind in the way I see — an eye for movement, for light that adds another dimension, for the kind of beauty that lives just slightly outside the ordinary frame.

Wherever I’ve been, the thing that’s stayed constant is this: I don’t believe there’s such a thing as an ordinary family, or an ordinary life. You’ve already lived a whole story before I arrive. I’m just there to really notice it, and to help you see it as beautiful.