Throughout my practice in portrait photography, certain questions have arisen about the relationship between artist, subject, and viewer, and how eye contact, gesture, and environment might reveal certain aspects of an individual’s character. My use of long exposures and studio lighting results in portraits imbued with a sense of self-awareness in relation to the camera. My recent work, “We Come Here all the Time:” Dog Walkers of Echo Park, documents the current demographic of my neighborhood in Los Angeles by photographing people with their dogs around historic Echo Park Lake. This series is a rewarding evolution of previous works about companionship, care, and mutual identity.