Aurora, Illinois, a mid-American town

Here, surrounded by new millennium affluence and ever-growing suburban sprawl, exists a town of diversity, a town that demands a lot of its community members, including its journalists. The challenge of working in such a tight knit population is that you have to stand next to your work everyday, look your subjects in the eye and promise honesty. If you don’t, you are lost. I never know when I am going to meet my toughest and most important critic in line at the grocery store. There is no toleration for gimmicks.

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This portfolio is completely made up of images from what is referred to as the Fox Valley of Illinois. Here you can find the complete range of Midwestern living, from the daily battles of big-city problems such as poverty, and the violence it breeds, to children sledding in the rich suburbs of Oakhurst without worldly needs. The challenge for me is to communicate to the readers of the Beacon-News all of those different ways of living.

I feel that we all have something we can do for each other to enrich our lives. Some of us are doctors, some of us are teachers, and some of us are journalists. Through my work my goal is to make positive changes for people. That does not mean that I expect to change the world with one fell click of my mighty shutter, but I hope that my meeting people, talking to them, and portraying them with the dignity that they deserve makes their lives slightly better. Journalism can really affect people, and we owe it to our community to act accordingly, to understand our power to help and to hurt. My pictures reflect my life, and the choices I have made in it. I hope that viewers will see the community I live in as a special place, which I care about very deeply.