I found photography when I was fifteen, not long after moving to a new country and getting my first phone. I was discovering a lot about myself then, so everything around me felt new, and somewhere in the middle of figuring out who I was, I found photography. There wasn’t one big moment where I decided this was what I was going to do. If anything, it felt like photography chose me.

I remember going to a park near my house and taking pictures of the landscape, and something about it just made sense. I knew what I wanted to focus on, how I wanted to frame it, and what I wanted the photograph to feel like before I really knew what any of those things meant.

In high school, I was lucky enough to learn film photography, work in a darkroom, and develop my own photographs. Later, I received a scholarship to attend a pre-college summer program at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, where I got to go even deeper into that world, but the path after that wasn’t exactly straightforward.

There were years when photography was part of my life, and years when it almost disappeared from it. I walked away from it for a long time. But I bought a camera, started experimenting again, and slowly found my way back to the part of myself that photography had always understood so well, and now, somehow, I get to do this for a living.

That still feels a little unreal to me.