The Conventioneers

I love people who lounge in the gutters of a marginalized America. My work is straight photography in a crooked world. People who interest me grasp at the skirts of eccentricity. Subjects mirror Abe Lincoln at the Abe Lincoln lookalike convention. They hear the cry of hucksters and hustlers and adorn themselves with ostentatious outfits of $20,000 mink coats and gold-encrusted chalices at the Pimp and Prostitutes "Players Ball." They tell me intimate stories. What it's like to be "Swing Mom" at the Everything to Do With Love Show. Proudly off to the side, Swing Mom’s husband dutifully holds up a shirt with a number emblazoned on the side stating her numerous amorous suiters: sixty one. They enhance my life with bizarre encounters. People speak to me with stuffed animal puppets at the Fur Fest for people who like to dress as stuffed animals. I breathe heavily in this life like the irresistible sucking in on a helium balloon. I answer with the high-pitched babble of a world gone mad on plastic emulsion. My photographs show the radical yet some how familiar differences Americans share with those whom most of society deem ‘to weird to be true.’