I am much more than a string of facts about where I got started in photography, more than an ordinary headshot against a brick wall, camera in hand.

I am more the months I spent living in the Moab hostel, clambering canyons. I am more two drinks in and dancing at a dive bar in a town nobody knows.

I am more travel than tourist, more handwritten than typeface, more grit than gathered.

The years I spent teaching myself photography are not as important as the years I followed people’s stories in the jungle of Hawaii, what made them light up, made them weep. This was never about making a whole bunch of money as it was living within my means and curating a life that felt important to me. I wanted travel and gardens and coffee dates that lingered. I wanted winters off to spend hiking the West and sticky summers shooting Pennsylvania weddings and swimming in my favorite creek.

I wanted, mostly, to keep showing up over and over again to the heart of the story. Even if it wasn’t pretty. Even if I wanted to look away.

Because it’s people that I love at the heart of this, not cameras. It’s people in all the fumbly, messy, beautiful ways they show up in this hard world. And what I think sets me so far apart both as a business and as a human, is I have always been relentlessly passionate about showing up not only when people are happy, or married, or birthing, but when they are hurt and grieving and struggling to find the light. When they feel a crowning of another kind, a rebirth, a loss of who they once were. Simply put, I don’t shy away from the shameful; I keep showing up.

And maybe it’s because I have been there, too. I know loss and grief and pain, and I know the importance of getting up and finding whatever shard of beauty you can conjure, because it’s always there. Even if it feels impossible to see it.

I am a photographer, yes, but I am first a human. I am first a storyteller. I am first your friend on the midnight kitchen floor who understands that kind of joy, that deep pain. I understand the importance of freezing whatever that is, of finding the light within it, if only to prove that we were here.

And we loved.

And that, above all, we survived.

I AM NOT AN ORDINARY PERSON, AND BECAUSE OF THAT I AM NOT AN ORDINARY PHOTOGRAPHER. I ATTRACT EMPATHS AND KINDNESS, ANIMAL LOVERS AND ADVENTURERS. IF I AM NOT FOR YOU, THAT IS WONDERFUL NEWS. THERE ARE PLENTY OF PEOPLE, I GUARANTEE, FOR YOU. IF VULNERABILITY DOES NOT SCARE YOU, IF YOU ARE READY TO UNCORK THE WINE AND TELL ME YOUR STORY, I PROMISE YOU MY INBOX IS WAITING FOR PEOPLE JUST LIKE YOU.

THE CONNECTIONS I CREATE ARE NEAR AND DEAR TO ME, AND I AM SO DEEPLY EXCITED TO HUG YOU.

“All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”

MIRANDA JULY