threshold

I Get the Aisle

Walking on Broken Glass

Having a birthday on Christmas Day has never felt like getting shortchanged, though people always ask when they find out. My parents were great at making sure we celebrated both. Christmas in the morning. My birthday in the afternoon. Rather than feeling gypped, I loved it. It felt quietly significant... a day that belongs to many but somehow still feels like it’s just mine. It's the rarest birth date after February 29th - a statistical anomaly that's always made the day feel a little more set apart.

As a kid, the buildup to Christmas held meaning that had nothing and everything to do with me. The anticipation that everyone seemed to feel made me feel connected to the whole world, even though few knew of the coincidence. My grandmother and I also shared this premiere date, which adds another layer of meaning. And I love that Annie Lennox is a Christmas baby as well.

This year feels different. At 63, this is likely my last birthday in Portland before moving to Portugal. I've been working on something new, a Venice project exploring temporal collapse and memory, and that resonates today. Everything exists in layers—past birthdays, my grandmother's presence, the history of an ancient city, the anticipation of reinvention.

For the past few years, photography has been, for me, about capturing feeling over facts, the residue of presence rather than sharp documentation. Birthdays work the same way. They're markers that we’re forced to return to annually, but each time we experience them differently, filtered through everything that's happened since the last lap.

This birthday represents a threshold. Behind me: 45 years of work and several decades in a city I used to love. Ahead: Viana do Castelo, new light along the Portuguese coast, a practice focused entirely on emotional landscapes and atmospheric intimacy.

It still feels special, just like it always has. But now it marks the beginning of a significant transformation - one I'm walking toward deliberately, camera in hand, on broken glass.