portraits

empowerHER for Yankee Magazine

in

I was really pleased to be noticed by Yankee Magazine earlier this year because of the ongoing work I’ve been doing on women in Nicaragua. They asked me to photograph a story on women a little closer to home. Cara Belvin, a local of Scituate, MA, runs empowerHER, a nonprofit which works with girls who have lost their mothers. I got to spend the afternoon with Cara and some of the girls at a house in Beverly. You can read the full story here.

Broad Institute Portraits

in

This spring I was back at the Broad Institute again for another round of portraits, this time to photograph a group of new research fellows. I always enjoy working here as it’s a fun challenge to take a standard lab or office setting and try to do something different with it each time.

Cancer Doctor for Discover Magazine

in

This past December, I was sent on a bit of an unusual assignment to photograph a doctor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Tracy Balboni works in end of life care at Dana-Farber as well as the Harvard Medical School. What makes her unusual is how her religious faith ties into her practice as a doctor. This lead to an assignment where I not only photographed the doctor at the hospital, but also spent time with her in her home while she and her family and friends gathered for an intimate prayer meeting. You can read the full story here.

Another Women's Worth Trip

in ,

This spring I headed down to Nicaragua for another trip to work with Women’s Worth, a nonprofit organization a friend and I founded in 2017 to teach business skills to low-income women. The trip was shorter than usual, I was only in the country for a week, but it was, as always, a whirlwind of wonderful experiences as I got to meet, photograph and interview many of the women we’ve been working with and see how our programs have helped them begin to transform their lives.

2017 Year in Review

in , , , , , , , , , , ,

Happy New Year! The past year feels like it's been a bit of a whirlwind and all gone by so quickly. Here are a few highlights from my year.

I began the year by heading down to Nicaragua for three weeks to put together the photo/video material we would need to launch our newly founded nonprofit Women's Worth. This organization is based in Matagalpa, Nicaragua and teaches business skills to low-income women. We were planning on running a fundraiser in the spring and so we needed photography for the website, video footage for our fundraising video, plus portraits and food photography for a cookbook we were creating as a giveaway. You can see more images as well as our fundraiser video here.

Meeting all of the women we worked with, learning about their lives and and their businesses was a really inspiring experience and I'm looking forward to continuing to work more on this organization in the years to come.

After spending only a few days back in the States from the Nicaragua trip, I was off on another three week trip, this time to India. The trip was more of a personal one than for work, though I did manage to fit in a video project on a tribal woman who creates traditional floor paintings (more on that to come). For the rest of the time though, I relied on my iPhone for a lot of my photography, something I've come to really enjoy doing in recent years.

photo by Varsha Yeshwant Kumar

When I returned from India in the spring, I was really pleased to finally have a photo story from Nicaragua that I had been working on published in the Christian Science Monitor. The story was on Jairo Blanchard, a former gang member who had turned his life around and started an organization which works with at-risk youth. You can read the full story here and see the full set of pictures here.

Later on in the spring, I had the opportunity to work with Boston University's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department to produce a video on their program. It was really fascinating to see the different types of technology students are working with these days.

Throughout a lot of the rest of the year, I did a number of editorial shoots and picked up a few new clients along the way. I really enjoy editorial work as it's a great opportunity to be creative while trying to have a person's personality come through in the image. Subjects ranged from a computational biologist, to the Fenway organist to everything in between.

photo-1-23.jpg
photo-1-20.jpg
photo-1-19.jpg

One of these editorial shoots lead to a new client, and I ended up doing a number of portraits of the Broad Institute's executive leadership along with some images of one of their new core members and his lab.

And as always, every year I enjoys spending my summers working with Boston After School & Beyond to document their summer learning programs.

I'll be starting off 2018 with a trip to Oregon for some winter hiking/camping excursions. After that, who knows where I'll end up... You can follow my travels on my Instagram where I hope to have lots of new images to share with you soon. Have a great new year!

photo-1.jpg

Micro-lending Portraits

in ,

While traveling in Nicaragua recently, I was fortunate to be able to do some work for a micro-lending non-profit there called People Helping People Global. They provide loans to small business owners in both Granada and Matagalpa and many of their borrowers are women. We traveled around to visit several borrowers in their homes and workplaces.