A pair of onlies

2011 - ongoing

When I was a few months pregnant with my son Del in 2011, I reconnected with an acquaintance from an old book club. She had just had her first baby, and I was considering using the same birth center. Her name was Ann, and her newborn daughter Violet cooed through our first coffee, and our second… and our fifth… And when Del arrived in December of that year, Ann and Violet were among his first visitors.

I left my job when Del was born to pursue my goal of being a photographer full-time. Countless days passed at Ann’s kitchen table crafting my business, while our babies played on the floor or toddled around her backyard. As they grew, we took them to the park, to get ice cream, to the museums. They were only children, but we did our best to let them work out their play and their fights as siblings would. We loved the idea of “1970s parenting” - putting them outside all day and doing our best to ignore everything except outright violence or blood. We’ve giggled through their shouting matches, applauded through their “mama watch this” stages, approved their various moneymaking schemes, fed them so many goldfish and popsicles, tried our best to keep them on the path of being a good person while simultaneously letting them be. We’ve only lost them once, that we know of.

And through it all, they ignore my camera for the most part. This work is partly for them, for some future day when they care to look back at the summers spent in Violet’s backyard. It is largely for me, a diary of gratitude for my friend and my son’s friend and a reminder of how swift and delightful childhood is.

For Better, For Worse: a love story in queens

(2018 - ongoing)

When I began my work with Kim and Mat, a gay couple in Queens, NY, I thought I was telling their love story. Mat lives with severe bipolar disorder, and Kim was facing an difficult medical diagnosis. In the time I've been working with them, the deep threads of their lives have enmeshed and interweaved around the story I am making. From facing eviction, to living with HIV/AIDS, to navigating a difficult and demoralizing bureaucracy meant to help people but often falling short – life is always more complicated than what we first perceive. Though their love story ended when Mat left in July, I continue my work with Kim because I feel it's important to bear witness to a life experience that many live – pushed close to the edge and acutely aware of the frailty of the safety net.

Save our Souls: a broken recovery

In January 2018, photographers Katie Jett Walls (Washington DC) and Aniya Emtage Legnaro (Barbados) travelled to Puerto Rico to document the on-going affects of post-hurricane devastation on the lives of puertorriqueños living in marginal areas.

En enero de 2018, los fotógrafos Katie Jett Walls (Washington DC) y Aniya Emtage Legnaro (Barbados) viajaron a Puerto Rico para documentar los efectos en curso de la devastación posterior al huracán en la vida de los puertorriqueños que viven en áreas marginales.

To see more from this project in detail, visit https://www.saveoursouls-pr.com

Meridian Hill Park Drum Circle

You can’t live in the DC neighborhood of Columbia Heights for long without knowing about the Drum Circle that gathers for several hours of intense and irresistible African and Native American drumming. Since the 1950s, African Americans have been meeting together in Meridian Hill Park, in northwest Washington DC, to share the tradition of music making and dance. Crowds gather to watch, listen and participate. Whether you’re there for a connection to your heritage, for a spiritual experience, for the bliss of the exertion of freeform dance and group music, or simply to take in the vibes, it’s a good place to let your creative self take the lead. I photographed this series in the midst of the dancers and drummers, using a technique called free-lensing which produces dramatic focal shifts. This unexpected and varying focal effect gives me a visual interpretation of the ordered cacophony of the drum circle experience.