AWARDS & EXHIBITIONS

THE IMAGES & THEIR STORIES

Every recognized image has a story beyond the final photograph.
Here are the ideas, people and creative process behind mine.

BRINGING HIM TO LIFE

The character needed someone to bring him to life, so naturally, I recruited my husband, Steve.

Steve is my go-to guy whenever I say, “I have an idea…” He’s willing to dress up, step outside his comfort zone and become whatever strange character I happen to have imagined.

Underneath his jacket is his old lucky white T-shirt, worn out, stretched, wrinkled and torn. It's the kind of shirt he should probably have thrown away years ago, but he never will. It's comfortable, familiar and part of him.

Over it, he wears his nice jacket. Because even this rough old fisherman has something he likes to put on when he wants to look the part.

Then there's his captain's hat. It's bent, buckled and definitely not sitting perfectly straight, because neither is he. It's worn and imperfect, and that's exactly why it belongs to him.

Add the long unruly hair, scruffy beard and his pipe with smoke billowing around his face, and the character I'd been imagining finally started looking back at me.

YES, THE FISH WAS REAL

And yes, Steve really did have a fish pressed against his face.

It came from the grocery store and had already been cut open, which created another challenge. I photographed it and then reconstructed it by hand in Photoshop, taking pieces from different areas of the fish, reshaping and blending them together until I had the fish I needed for the finished image.

Near the end of the session, Steve informed me:

“This has to be the last shot. I’m going to smell like fish.”

It was. 😂

THAT EYE...

Or so Steve thought we were finished.

Halfway through editing, I realized his visible eye wasn't giving me the look I had imagined. Steve naturally has very squinty eyes, but I wanted this character to have one big, almost comical eye staring straight back at you.

So... back to the studio we went.

I told Steve we needed another photograph of his eye and that he might actually have to pull it open for me. I photographed the eye separately and then composited it into the finished portrait in Photoshop.

Every element of Eye’s Da Bye was photographed, manipulated and composited by me. No generative AI was used to create this image.

CREATING HIS WORLD

The world surrounding him was just as important to me as the character himself.

The cool blues and turquoise tones represent the ocean, mystery and the unknown. The warm oranges and golds bring warmth and familiarity into the scene. The clouds create the feeling of a dramatic sky hanging over the ocean, while the circular ripple-like patterns in the background represent water.

I wanted all of those elements to come together so that the photograph felt less like a studio portrait and more like a still pulled from an old cinematic story.

AND THEN CAME THE NAME...

Our fisherman proudly holds up his catch, presses it against his face, looks straight at you and delivers his terrible little joke:

“EYE’S DA BYE!”

And that was it.

Eye’s Da Bye was born from an old movie I loved, a character in my imagination, a very patient husband, a grocery-store fish, a second trip to photograph one eyeball, and a really bad pun.

It brings together so much of what I love about creating: photography, characters, humour, storytelling and building worlds that didn't exist until I imagined them.

This is the kind of photographic storytelling I want to create more of, images inspired by the old movies and cinematic worlds I grew up loving.

CREATING THE CROWD

To create the image, I photographed my husband, Steve, in the studio wearing a suit, white shirt and blue tie. Then I brought out one of the mannequins I keep in the back room of my studio and photographed it separately. I combined those elements and began repeating the figures over and over until I had this enormous crowd that seemed to continue far beyond the edges of the image.

I added fog and mist throughout the scene so some of the figures and blue ties are clear while others fade into the atmosphere. I wanted it to feel as though there were thousands of them, all becoming part of the same endless world.

LOSING OURSELVES

The faceless figures represent something I think can happen to all of us. We get jobs, join groups, take on responsibilities and learn what is expected of us. We try to fit in, and sometimes without even realizing it, we begin doing what everyone else is doing simply because that's what we're supposed to do. Little pieces of our individuality can slowly disappear. We conform, we follow, and sometimes we lose a little bit of ourselves along the way.

But among all those blue ties is one yellow tie. That person wasn't always different; he's slowly becoming different. He's beginning to recognize himself again and discover his own voice, his own words, his own thoughts and his own personality. He's still wearing the same suit and standing among everyone else, but something inside him has started to change. In a crowd of thousands, that little flash of yellow makes him visible.

WHY BLUE AND YELLOW?

Colour is a huge part of the way I tell stories in my work. Blue represents the unknown to me, mystery, uncertainty and the darker side of not knowing exactly what is happening around you. The fog adds to that feeling and causes some of the blue ties to become muted or almost disappear.

Yellow represents something completely different. It's warmth, light, energy and change. I wanted that one small piece of yellow to break through all that blue and make you notice the person who is beginning to become himself.

THERE'S A LITTLE OF ME IN ANOMALY

Growing up, I was often the person who didn't necessarily do what everybody else was doing. If everyone was standing on a stage singing, I might have been the girl over there dancing while everyone looked at me thinking, “Oh, there she goes again.” I've always had that part of me that doesn't want to follow something simply because everybody else is following it.

But I also think that as we go through life, sometimes we lose some of that person. We become comfortable, we conform and we fall into the patterns that life creates for us. Then maybe one morning we wake up, shake some of it off and say, “No. This isn't who I am.” We remember our own voice and the person we used to be before we became so concerned with fitting into the crowd.

That's Anomaly to me. It's not about being a rebel just for the sake of being different. It's about that moment when you begin recognizing yourself again and realize you don't have to disappear into the crowd.

Sometimes all it takes is one little change — one yellow tie — to remember who you are.