In July 2011, I was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where I saw a selection of Zanele Muholi's works from her project Faces & Phases, a series of portraits of black lesbians and transgender women in South Africa, a marginalized group within the already marginalized LGBTQ population of South Africa. I was transfixed by the project, and ruminated on it for months. Around the same time, I had read about Gary Gates, a UCLA demographer, and the findings of the Williams Institute regarding same-sex couple led families as recorded in the latest census. Basically, same-sex couples, as they self-reported in the 2010 census, has become much more geographically scattered than ever before, and this population is vastly more diverse on ethnic and socioeconomic lines than is generally percieved.
My goal became to document non-heteronormative families, shedding some light on a subsection of our society that is underrepresented in our national consciousness. As a photographer, I firmly believe that modern societies are shaped by our visual language and that, in turn, our visual output should be an honest reflection of our society. Visually speaking, I think that the diversity of the modern family is poorly represented, and that there is an opportunity in that to create images that will contribute to a more honest visual consciousness within our city, state and country.