DON’T PUSH ME (CAUSE I’M CLOSE TO THE EDGE) 2010 - 2024

A long-term photographic project examining the weight of pressure across fifteen years and multiple continents.`

Don't Push Me… is a long-term photographic project examining the forces that shape, constrain, and test human experience across different geographies, communities, and conditions of life.

The title borrows from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's 1982 track The Message — a song that mapped the psychological geography of lives lived under structural pressure, and described the point at which endurance becomes something else entirely. That threshold — not the moment of collapse, but the accumulated weight of everything that precedes it — is where this project begins.

Developed over fifteen years and across multiple continents, the work does not follow a single subject or location. Instead it moves — between countries, cultures, and contexts — attending to the recurring pressures that structure lives lived at the margins of power: institutional authority, urban inequality, racial fear, mortality, faith, and the persistent human drive to survive and find a way through.

The photographs do not document crisis or spectacle. They attend to something more continuous — the weight of pressure as an everyday condition, and the different ways individuals carry, resist, absorb, or seek escape from the forces that bear down on them.

Taken together, the series forms a sustained meditation on endurance: what it costs, what it produces, and what remains when it is tested to its limits.

Life Expectancy

Explores the fragile continuity of life through the body and the act of birth. The images reflect on survival and the persistence of life — its insistence on continuing even where conditions are hardest.

R.R.E.A.M

Examines the intersection of faith, aspiration, and belief systems that promise structure in uncertain environments. The images reflect how spiritual and symbolic rituals can emerge where life feels most precarious.

A Soldier's Story

Examines the tension between individual identity and institutional authority. By obscuring the soldiers' faces, the images reflect how systems of power can absorb the individual, reducing the body to a role within a larger structure.

Inner City Blues

A visual meditation on urban life shaped by social inequality and structural pressure. The title echoes Marvin Gaye's song of the same name, capturing the emotional landscape of lives lived under constraint.

We People Who Are Darker Than Blue

Large-scale images of crowds confronting the fears and prejudices that shape racial perception. The photographs explore how collective presence becomes both a site of solidarity and tension.

Scared to Look Scared to Death

Reflects on violence, masculinity, and the fragile line between fear and defiance. The images capture moments where vulnerability and confrontation coexist.

Control

Control explores environments where intimacy, authority, and vulnerability intersect. Drawing from encounters within the worlds of sex work and BDSM, the images examine how power is negotiated through the body and through the rituals, objects, and transactions that structure these encounters. Gestures of domination, exposure, anonymity, and spectatorship reveal how control can be asserted, exchanged, or quietly dissolve once performance ends.

Through the Wire / Grief

Two connected bodies of work exploring mortality and the communal rituals surrounding loss. The photographs move between sudden rupture and the quiet ways individuals confront the presence of death.

Emergency Exit

Images reflecting on movement, escape, and the search for pathways beyond constraining environments. The photographs capture moments where individuals confront the possibility — or illusion — of leaving the pressure behind