In 2023, I celebrated my 50th birthday and realized I had spent half a century in a community I deeply loved. A community that saw me, like the shore of the nearby ocean, through every wave of my life and, like that same ocean, is rich with history and evolution.

As my own history is rife with personal challenge, I am inspired by the stories of resilience, determination, adaptation, and compassion shared by fellow Ventura residents. Despite devastating fires, systemic obstacles, and changing times, they exemplify strength and manage to thrive within adversity.

For me, creativity has been an anchor that has helped me alchemize the past into a more beautiful life. Photography became pain’s pursuit and gift. As a result, I wanted to use it to illuminate and preserve the evidence of a community reflecting this same, ineffable quality of art.

Although I have been conducting a business in commercial photography and video for over a decade, the magnitude of this project was something I had not yet experienced. Between having no budget and single handedly managing all aspects of filming, it required that I embrace the aforementioned resilience to build an intangible passion into the picture you see here.

Like the old documents and artifacts, we found while filming in a myriad of underground bunkers, history has a way of being forgotten. Sometimes this is necessary, sometimes this robs us of the hope that was the helm of those who came before us. This was my mission- to preserve the loving qualities of the human condition so we can pour them into the present and the future. So that the ever-changing tides of the ocean may become richer with grace and evolved by togetherness.

We are storytellers. The stories we choose to tell and how we tell them create the foundation for the home we continue to make with the planet. In times where we face the continual threat of disconnection, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to be a conduit for connectivity and continuity.