My story

France isn't just a destination for me — it's where part of my heart has always lived.

My mother grew up in France and moved to the United States at nineteen, but her family never left. Growing up, France was this faraway, luminous place that existed in stories, in phone calls, in the French my parents would slip into when they didn't want my siblings and I catching wind of Christmas secrets. It captivated me long before I ever set foot there.

But the real pull happened when I was eighteen, on my second visit. I wasn't a tourist that trip. I was a granddaughter. I sat with my grandmother in her garden snapping peas, fished alongside my Pépé one beautiful afternoon, and I watched him dance through the kitchen holding his Evian bottle, filled not with water but with the soup he made every Sunday, portioning it out in a small cup each night with dinner like a quiet ritual. I walked along the Loire River while he stopped to gather wildflowers for my Mémé and I. I listened to him tell jokes in a language I still couldn't fully follow, laughing anyway because his joy was contagious. I watched my grandmother pull out her genealogy books just long enough to show me, urging me to copy down any names or details I wanted to keep for myself, then leaving me alone in her room to do it. And what a room it was. Every corner filled with storage boxes and tubs of special things she couldn't bring herself to part with, each one holding some quiet piece of a life well lived. A room full of wonders. And through all of it, she insisted I wear slippers and a sweater so I wouldn't catch a chill.

Those memories are sacred to me.

I vowed I would come back soon. Life moved the way life does, and before I made it back, my Pépé was gone, passing away on a Sunday evening at the dinner table, the way he had sat a thousand times before. The day after, I flew in to be with my MéMé and for dinner was offered a cup of soup from his last bottle. I didn't know then how much I would carry that moment with me.

Each time I return to France, it reaches into my chest and reminds me why I fell in love with it in the first place. The slow living. The beauty that doesn't ask for your attention. It simply has it. I think it was all of those moments, the peas, the wildflowers, the soup, the room full of wonders, that first made me understand what it means to witness a life worth preserving. To really see someone. And once I understood that, I couldn't stop chasing it through a lens.

What kept me in my early days was something specific.  I wanted to create portraits that looked like paintings. The kind that hang in grand rooms in châteaux, commanding attention, radiating dignity, whispering that the person captured there mattered.

Because they do.

Most people move through life being photographed like an afterthought, shuffled through a school photo line, rushed through an obligatory Christmas card session where the clock matters more than they do, or captured in thousands of cell phone shots left on a hard drive and forgotten.  And somewhere in all of that, the message received is that the image is the obligation, not the person.

I refuse that.

You don't need a title or a milestone or a reason beyond the simple fact that you exist, and that your existence has extraordinary value. You deserve a portrait that stops someone in the doorway of a room. One that hangs on your wall the way a royal's oil painting hangs in a château, not as decoration but as a declaration. This is who I am. This is what I looked like when I was here. And I was worth capturing beautifully.

That is why I do this work. France, a country that has always known how to honor beauty, is simply one of the most extraordinary places in the world to do it.

I invite you to take the leap and join me on my next trip. Camera, lights, and styling in tow, to create something as extraordinary as you are.