A beautiful family photograph can make me want the life it appears to prove. It promises that people belong to one another, that a room is safe, that love has a shape, that the pose can hold. My work begins with suspicion of that promise. The photograph is evidence, fiction, and contract: a record of real people, a cover story, and an agreement about who belongs, who is protected, who is seen, and whose version of the room is allowed to stand.

For more than two decades, I have photographed the white, middle-American family I was born into, and the families I have entered and made. Evidence & Fiction brings these relations together. They do not cancel or correct one another; they alter the terms of belonging. One I was given: a belonging assigned, not asked — an inheritance of role, silence, and respectability, where whiteness works by disappearing into the room, into taste, order, safety, and the belief that this family picture can stand for family itself. Another I entered through my partner — where I belong fully, but at one remove, and only as long as the relationship holds. Others I have made through desire, recognition, collaboration, and choice. They do not undo the contract. They reauthor it.

I manufacture the ideal American family, drawing from family portraiture, domestic ritual, advertising, and cinema. In some pictures, I give people a wide frame to take up space; they remain rigid and confined. Gesture, posture, clothing, and architecture reveal the roles people are asked to inhabit — and how little room those arrangements leave for refusal.

As a gender-nonconforming butch dyke, I am implicated in the families I picture but never fully absorbed by them: inside the room, outside the script. Beneath the surface are recognitions that arrive before language. I hold the camera, and I am caught in the frame.

My process is slow and material. I stage each scene through different degrees of control, negotiation, and trust; photograph multiple versions using medium- and large-format film and digital capture; and piece the frames into cohesive but unstable compositions. I return to earlier frames as relationships change, sometimes rebuilding a picture years after the sitting. These different moments share one persuasive surface in the large prints.

I am seduced by the images I construct — by their beauty, symmetry, and promise of coherence — even as I expose the pressure required to maintain them. I do not imagine these families as clean chapters: I want them to contaminate one another. A pose that seems inevitable in one room can become strange, erotic, or absurd in the next. In that instability, family becomes less a fact than a structure being performed.