I was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada and have lived here my whole life. The lights, glitter, fireworks, that’s been my surrounding area for the last twenty-three years and—as anyone born here will tell you—it gets old. The cruel nature of a city rooted in the commercialization of art actively incentivizes artists to commodify themselves, to be easily digestible and unoffensive. I have many heroes in the world of photography and the most important thing that I have learned doing this so far is that I don’t want to be like them, I want to be like me.