Hi, I'm Steph.

That is nearly three decades of being obsessed with light. I started at twelve and almost immediately began begging my mom to send me to summer photography workshops. In high school I got special permission to take photography classes a year before I was supposed to, because I simply could not wait. I went on to major in photography, and somewhere along the way it stopped being something I did and became something I am.

I am someone who is always seeing photos, always noticing light. I am completely obsessed with the way natural light moves through the world, especially here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the way it filters through rhododendron, catches the edge of a face, settles into that quiet moment right before it disappears. When I find that moment and someone is in it, something in me just clicks. I mean that in every sense of the word.

Before Asheville, I spent years shooting in New York City and the Hamptons, working as the personal photographer for one of the Rockefeller families and shooting behind the scenes at New York Fashion Week. It was a remarkable chapter. But there is something about the deep greens of Western North Carolina that pulled me somewhere truer. I have called Asheville home since 2022, and I feel more connected to my work, to the earth, and to the people I photograph than I ever have.

Shooting outside is not really a style choice for me. It is where I am most myself. The mountains have been healing in a way I did not expect when I moved here, and I feel it most on the days I am out in them with a camera in my hand. My friends say I come alive around water, and they are right. Creeks, rivers, the ocean, I will wade into any of it. That is why so much of my work happens on trails and overlooks and ankle deep in a creek at the end of the day. Something happens to people when they are outside in a place that is alive. They stop performing. The landscape does half the work of settling them, and I get to photograph what is left, which is just them.

While I'm based in Asheville now, I previously lived in Mexico for four years, and I still travel there for a few months out of the year, which is why you'll see a lot of palm trees tucked into my galleries.

I give specific, warm direction, but a lot of it is instinct. Some days I know what a session is going to feel like before it happens, the location, the timing, the light, all of it arrives in pieces a few days ahead of time, and I just trust it. The same thing happens with posing. I could not fully explain how I know where to put someone's hand or how to tilt their chin, it just comes to me, and it works. I genuinely believe that being seen, really seen, in a photograph is one of the most quietly beautiful things a person can experience.

"I genuinely believe that being seen, really seen, in a photograph is one of the most quietly beautiful things a person can experience."

Nearly three decades in, that experience shows up in every session I shoot.