The Art of Networking

I meet a lot of people. I think it's because I just like to talk to people. They fascinate me. I love hearing stories and gaining experiences through the eyes of other people. It's just plain fun for me.

I also travel a lot. I love to dance, and I travel all over the country to meet up with other swing dancers and party all night long. It's a great time.

So of course, I've managed to put these two things together. Because of my dance obsession, I find myself in airports or on airplanes quite frequently. And since I hate the awkward silence, I always attempt to strike up a conversation. Sometimes people just want to engage in small talk for the first five minutes of the flight, before they go back to pretending I don't exist. Others just ignore me because they think I'm a lot younger and inexperienced than I actually am. But the best moments take place when the person I'm sitting next to is just as lonely as me; and we talk for the entire duration of the flight. I get to learn all about them. And then as soon as the conversation starts, the flight is over and we land. And we both know that we will never see each other again. I wanted to document these interactions with people and photograph them while we got to know each other. It made for a really interesting book, and I'm glad I finally got started on the project.

I ended up using my iSight camera that's built into my computer to take the photographs. That way, my models could see what they looked like, and knew when the picture was going to be taken (I often let them hit the shutter, and then we could count down from 3 before the picture was taken). Therefore the images are very lo quality, but their significance is what's important to the project. The fact that they are strangers and I don't get a detailed view of their life... it's just for a second... a snapshot conversation if you will.